LEAKED AUDIO: OBAMA WANTED ISIS
TO GROW, Kerry also admitted U.S. helped arm
jihadists, 1/2/17, WND
As President Obama reflects on his legacy, a recording of Secretary of State John Kerry conversing with leaders of Syrian opposition groups is casting more light on his approach to ISIS, indicating his administration believed that allowing the Islamic State to grow would serve the White House’s objective of ousting Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The recording was leaked
to the New York Times and reported Sept. 30,
but the Conservative
Tree House blog this week featured portions of Kerry’s statements that were virtually ignored at the time.
Regime change was Obama’s only
objective in Syria, Kerry indicates, and the administration not only hoped ISIS
would carry out the task, it gave arms to the jihadist army and its allies,
confirming WND’s
reporting.
Kerry admits the U.S. didn’t
calculate that Assad would turn to Russia for help. “And we know that this was
growing, we were watching, we saw that DAESH (ISIS) was growing in strength,
and we thought Assad was threatened,” Kerry told the Syrians. “(We) thought,
however,” he continued, “we could probably manage that Assad might then
negotiate, but instead of negotiating he got Putin to support him.”
Kerry’s off-record, 40-minute
discussion with two dozen Syrians who worked with nongovernmental organizations
took place during the U.N. General Assembly. It confirms WND’s reporting since
2011 of evidence that Clinton’s State Department engineered the clandestine
transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria that ended up in the hands of terrorist
groups aligned with ISIS and al-Qaida.
The Conservative Tree House noted
that in August 2014, President Obama gave a press conference in which he stated
he “did not have a strategy” against ISIS. Then two months, later, his chief
spokesman, Josh Earnest, stated: “Our ISIS strategy is dependent on something
that does not yet exist.”
Benghazi
tie: In May 2015, WND
reported evidence that U.S. Ambassador Christopher
Stevens was involved in shipping weapons from Benghazi to support the
al-Qaida-affiliated militias fighting the Assad regime, effectively arming the
Sunni jihadists who morphed into ISIS.
Judicial Watch, which obtained much
of the evidence, noted an August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report,
written at time the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria, said
“the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (Al-Qaida in Iraq) are the major
forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”
In
an Aug. 17, 2014, email released by WikiLeaks,
Clinton, after her service as secretary of state, suggested to adviser John
Podesta: “At the same time, we should return to plans to provide the FSA [Free
Syria Army], with some group of moderate forces, with equipment that will allow
them to deal with a weakened ISIL, and stepped up operations against the Syrian
regime.”
In September 2013, WND
reported Kerry and Sen. John McCain,
R-Ariz., had relied on the work of Elizabeth O’Bagy, a 26-year-old graduate
student, to argue in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
that the Obama administration should send weapons to arm the “moderate” Free
Syria Army to oppose the Assad government in Syria.
WND detailed the extensive lobbying
efforts conducted in Washington to advance the FSA as a “moderate group,”
despite clear evidence the al-Nusra Front operating under the FSA umbrella had
been declared a terrorist organization by the State Department; has pledged
allegiance to al-Qaida’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri; and was the group of
choice for foreign jihadis pouring into Syria.
In September 2014, WND
reported O’Bagy, who had been fired
from her job with a Washington think-tank after her exposure by WND as a source
for Kerry’s argument that the FSA is a “moderate” rebel force in Syria, had
also arranged for McCain a trip to Syria in May 2013 during which senator met
with Abdul Hakim Belhaj, who was then represented as a leader of the FSA.
In November 2013, WND
reported trusted Libyan expatriates had claimed Belhaj was at large in
Libya. The expatriates identified Belhaj as an al-Qaida operative, noting he
was at the top of a list of Libyan terrorists banned by the European Union from
obtaining entrance visas and was the principal organizer of the terrorist attack
in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2011, in which Ambassador Stevens was murdered.
A weapons shipment from Benghazi to
Syria that occurred just days before the Benghazi attack was
coordinated by Belhaj. The shipment been arranged by Marc
Turi, a professional arms dealer who had been indicted by federal prosecutors
for supplying arms to Libyan “rebels.” But the Obama administration dropped the
criminal case one day before a court-ordered deadline to disclose information
about its efforts to arm Muslim rebels.
The DOJ was forced to drop the Turi
prosecution because federal prosecutors were convinced his defense would expose
Clinton’s secret arms running to the radical al-Qaida-affiliated militia in
Libya, contends
Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano.
WND
also published visual evidence Clinton’s
State Department secretly provided weapons to Islamic jihadists in Libya.
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