CounterCurrentNews.com  September 22, 2014

Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s back on May 16, 2013, regarding the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. Then, last October of the same year, senior Obama officials anonymously revealed to the Washington Post that their new “disposition matrix” computer system will be used “indefinitely.”
The “disposition matrix” will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect is to be “disposed of” by the United States. This might include indefinite detention, or prosecution in a real court. In some cases it can and will include assassination-by-drone, or by the CIA. In any case, this “disposition matrix” was said to be needed a full 12 years after the attacks on 9/11 which were used as the original justification for this endless “War on Terror.”

“Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

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The former reporter for Wired, Spencer Ackerman, now the Guardian US’s national security editor, said “asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, ‘At least 10 to 20 years.’ . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today – atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War.”
Military historian Andrew Bacevich has warned for years that US policy planners now have an explicit doctrine of what he calls “endless war.”
In spite of delivering what they brag are permanently crippling blows to al-Qaeda, the administration is now admitting that the War on Terror will not end any time soon. In fact, as criticism began to mount to this end, the convenient enemy of ISIS almost instantly rose to prominence, and the U.S. made its way back into Iraq.
Former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson delivered a speech back in January denounced this state of affairs, suggesting that “‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’”
The Bush Timetable set for withdraw from Iraq said that U.S. forces would leave the war-torn country by 2014. Although President Barack Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq War by no later than March 31, 2009, American troops were essentially drug from the oil rich nation, kicking and screaming, earlier this year… That is, until ISIS – the so-called “Islamic State” in Syria and Iraq – gave us the justification to return, no sooner than we “left.”
Emerging from the shadows, after having been one of a handful to know the Taliban’s “Mullah Omar” face-to-face, the so-called “Caliph Ibrahim” or Al-Baghdadi, led the group to rapidly dominate Iraq in the absence of U.S. military forces.
It was almost too good to be true for the United States. It was as if ISIS had said, “See! This is what happens when American is not running Iraq.”
U.S. troops were forced to leave on the Bush Timetable, set for 2014 after we were asked to keep our end of the deal and leave once this year rolled around.
Whoever this Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai formerly known as Dr Ibrahim and Abu Du’a, now most commonly known by the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, actually is, one thing is for certain: many Muslims throughout the world do not believe he is an organic, Islamic leader. It is now a common accusation that the so-called “Caliph” was at one time a CIA agent.
While it is impossible to confirm such suspicions and accusations, the actions of Al-Baghdadi clearly play right into the hands of the American Military Industrial Complex.
Prince Tahseen Said, the leader of the Yazidi minority in Iraq, issued a call on Monday, asking all world leaders for assistance.
“I ask for aid and to lend a hand and help the people of Sinjar areas and its affiliates and villages and complexes which are home to the people of the Yazidi religion,” Said pleaded in a statement.
“I invite them to assume their humanitarian and nationalistic responsibilities towards them and help them in their plight and the difficult conditions in which they live today. Citizens of this religion are peaceful people who acknowledge all principles and humanitarian values and respect all religions, and never had enmity against any of their countrymen, and in the near past they even had a major humanitarian stand with their fellow residence of Mosul and Tal Afar, and today they desperately need their brethren’s help.”
ISIS was certainly moving to expand their power in Mosul. Their move towards Iraq’s largest hydroelectric dam, just north of the city has moved U.S. President Obama to authorize new air strikes in Iraq under the pretext of stopping ISIS from taking on the Kurdish capital of Erbil.
None of this is to suggest that ISIS fighters are not in fact who they claim to be. The people of Syria and Iraq know all too well how brutal and psychotic the religious orientation of these terrorists is. It certainly seems that a large number of them hail from Afghanistan, where Al-Baghdadi was known to have resided and trained for years. The pakol hats worn by members of the Pashtun community are frequent sights amongst ISIS fighters.
The people of Iraq clearly need help fighting off ISIS. But why does this supposed “Islamic Caliphate” seem to only be making moves that play into the interests of the American Military Industrial Complex. Many within the Muslim world are asking whether it might be more than coincidence that ISIS has not made any moves for the Saudi Kingdom, nor against Israel? That is not to say that ISIS is a creation of either nation, but instead that both are “off limits” for the terror group for some reason.
(Article by M.A. Hussein; image via Ha’Aretz)