This makes absolutely no sense to me. Assad obviously doesn't have any REAL support from 90% of his people. Those who do support him are only doing so because they're afraid he's going to kill them or their family. Once enough soldiers defect from the military, the country is going to topple. But yet Mr. Assad is persistent on staying in power. Does this guy have a death wish or something? Or is he too stupid to see what's really happening? Something tells me he's going to meet the same faith as Gadaffi - maybe even worse. And when his victims have a gun up in his face, he's going to beg for mercy like a 2 year old child. He deserves what's coming to him.
Like khadafi, the rest of the arab world hates him - and the only place that he and his family/cronies can escape to would be russia, which would be a huge political black mark for both assad and putin as it would expose the russians as complicit in supporting assad's murder of his own people. Since he has no one and no where to run to, the syrian people are going to have to kill him and his cronies off - which they eventually, inevitably will - and the fascist dictatorship of iran will be completely isolated. My concern is that when he is about to be killed, iran and its terrorist tool hezbollah will launch a major attack on israel to try and stave off assad's overthrow. It wouldn't work, but may kill a lot of israelis and start a regional war. It remains unclear how far russia and china are willing to allow syria to become a free nation. Their behind the scene dealings might have them insert another dictator willing to sell oil to the chinese and buy lots of russian weapons as part of a grand bargain with the West to replace assad. They'd only give up assad if they could replace him with someone who'd also be in their orbit, as they do not want what happened in Libya, where the people who overthrew Khadafi wouldn't buy a pencil from russia or china after they were exposed late in the game supporting khadaffi.
Russia proppin' up Assad... Why Russia is standing by Syria's Assad 15 June 2012 - Russia is not motivated to support Bashar al-Assad by arms sales alone See also: Russia says no talk on Syria's post-Assad future 15 June`12 — Russia's foreign minister said Friday that Moscow isn't discussing Syria's future without President Bashar Assad as Washington has claimed, in the latest volley in a contentious back-and-forth on how to end the bloody conflict. Related: US believes Russia has ship with weapons, troops en route to Syria June 15th, 2012 - The United States says it is tracking a Russian military cargo ship as it makes its way to Syria carrying weapons, ammunition and a small number of Russian troops.
Oh my... Maybe because a LOT of Syrians support him. What do any of you ********s really know about the Syrian situations other than what The Big Six feeds your brain?
According to Syria's new constitution that Assad supported the Syrian president is limited to two terms in office of seven years duration each. Assad's second seven year term expires in two years time then someone else will be the president of Syria so what makes you think Assad believes he has crimes that he needs to get away with by staying in power?
Mebbe because he is... ... mebbe because of the common defense pact with Russia and Iran... ... which would cause them to come in should a coalition force try to help the opposition... ... which was once a thread here... ... but has mysteriously disappeared.
well one thing is clear Saudi Qatar and USA have set up Al Qaeda in Syria now and are arming and funding them through Iraq and Lebanon
As subsequent events and revelations have made clear, the Saudis had reason to fear the inquiries of the Clinton administration. There was a lot to hide. In the eighties, the House of Saud had encouraged donations to charities that funneled tens of millions of dollars to bin Laden's Afghan Arabs during the Afghanistan War. But over the years, as Al Qaeda evolved from Afghan Arab freedom fighters into sophisticated anti-American terrorists, Osama bin Laden had effectively hijacked countless millions to fund terrorism. As a report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations later put it, "These widely unregulated, seldom audited, and generally undocumented practices have allowed unscrupulous actors such as al-Qaeda to access huge sums of money over the years." The funds regularly flowed through Saudi Arabia's biggest bank, Khalid bin Mahfouz's National Commercial Bank. According to court documents filed in a $1-trillion lawsuit by more than four thousand relatives of the victims of 9/11 against hundreds of wealthy Saudis and others who had allegedly aided bin Laden, "A bank audit of NCB in 1998 showed that over a ten year period, $74 million was funneled by its Zakat Committee to the International Islamic Relief Organization, a Muslim charity headed by Osama bin Laden's brother in law." Congressional testimony by Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which was also cited in the court case, adds that much of "the money is paid as 'protection' to avoid having the enterprises run by these men attacked" by Al Qaeda terrorists. Money transfers through NCB were allegedly used to finance a number of bin Laden's terrorist acts, including the attempted assassination of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 1995. Mubarak was constantly at war with Islamic militants in his own country and in Sudan. The National Commercial Bank was not the only institution tied to the bin Mahfouz family alleged to have aided terrorist funding. In 1991, Khalid bin Mahfouz had created the Muwafaq (Blessed Relief) Foundation, hoping, according to a spokesman, "to establish an endowment like the Rockefeller Foundation to give grants for disaster relief, education, and health." His son, Abdulrahman bin Mahfouz, had become a director of it. However, the U.S. Treasury Department later concluded that Muwafaq transferred "millions of dollars from wealthy Saudi businessmen to bin Laden." Even though the bin Laden family claimed to have cut off ties with their errant terrorist sibling, that was not clearly the case for the entire extended family. According to Carmen bin Laden, an estranged sister-in-law of Osama's, several members of the family may have continued to give money to Osama. At least one member of the family, Osama's brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, was a central figure in Al Qaeda and was widely reported to be linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and was alleged to have funded a Philippine terrorist group. Two other relatives were key figures in a charitable foundation linked to Osama. The American branch of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) was directed by Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in Falls Church, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. His brother Omar bin Laden was also on WAMY's board. WAMY members have denied that the organization has been involved in terrorist activities. But the charity, which published writings by Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, one of bin Laden's intellectual influences, was cited by Indian officials and the Philippine military for funding terrorism in Kashmir and the Philippines. "WAMY was involved in terrorist support activity," says a security official who served under George W. Bush. "There's no doubt about it." FBI documents marked "Secret" and coded "199," indicating a national security case, show that Abdullah bin Laden and Omar bin Laden were under investigation by the FBI for nine months in 1996 and that the file was reopened on September 19, 2001, eight days after the 9/11 attacks. Then there was the Saudi royal family itself. According to court documents in the 9/11 families' lawsuit, after the Gulf War in 1991, Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan, the father of Prince Bandar, supported and funded several Islamic charities, including the International Islamic Relief Organization, that allegedly provided funds to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda totaling at least $6 million. Sultan's attorneys acknowledge that for sixteen consecutive years he approved annual payments of about $266,000 to the International Islamic Relief Organization, a Saudi charity whose U.S. offices were raided by federal agents. Finally, there was Prince Bandar. Saudi royalty, including Bandar and his wife, frequently came to the aid of Saudis who had financial trouble when they were abroad. As first reported by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, in 1998 when Osama Basnan, a Saudi living in California, pleaded for financial assistance from the Saudi embassy in Washington because his wife was suffering from a thyroid condition, Prince Bandar wrote a check for $15,000. In addition, his wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal, began sending the couple a stipend of roughly $2,000 a month. According to the Baltimore Sun, over a four-year period the sum given by Bandar and his wife came to roughly $130,000. As it turned out, Basnan was said to be an Al Qaeda sympathizer and signed the money over to another Saudi who had moved to the United States, Omar al-Bayoumi. Al- Bayoumi also had Al Qaeda connections -- and he had other things in mind for Bandar's funds. In turn, al-Bayoumi subsidized two other newly arrived Saudis, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar, two of the men who helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon in the September 11 plot. What had happened was undeniable: Funds from Prince Bandar's wife had indirectly ended up in the hands of the hijackers. To date the Al Saud have kept the Khobar and Riyadh file securely locked up and away from any investigation. Many Americans died in the bombing but Al Saud will not allow any investigation into it by USA.
What goes around comes around, after this conflict is over ALQ will use those weapons against the west and Americans will make their corporate people happy by hiring Blackwaters and the likes for protection . Talk about moving the market here !
In fact, whenever the United States tried to investigate these charitable donations or looked at financial institutions such as the National Commercial Bank, the House of Saud performed a well-rehearsed rendition of Captain Renault in Casablanca proclaiming himself "Shocked! Shocked!" that funds were flowing to terrorists. According to counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, when U.S. counterterrorism officials tried to trace terrorist funding through Islamic charities, the Saudis inevitably came back with one of two answers. "They said we need more information from you, or that they had looked and hadn't found anything. " Clarke suggests that the lack of cooperation from the Saudis occurs because they have responded to Al Qaeda in different ways. Some actively support the terrorists while some cooperate with Al Qaeda in the hope that the group will leave them alone. Others merely resent American interference in what they see as their own domestic issues. "Some of them were clearly sympathetic to Al Qaeda," Clarke says. But the larger point is that the complex, impenetrable, and unregulated system of Islamic charities actually enabled the House of Saud to have it both ways. Through their generous charitable donations, they could both establish their bona fides as good Muslims and even buy "protection" from militants. And thanks to the unregulated nature of the charities, they could do so in a way that gave them plausible deniability to the West. In addition, many things suggest that the House of Saud was not nearly so naive as it professed to be. Despite its pronouncement that the 1995 Riyadh attack was not the work of dissidents, the Saudis clearly knew better. Privately, Minister of Intelligence Prince Turki had even told Egyptian authorities that bin Laden's Afghan Arabs were behind the attack, probably with the help of accomplices who had infiltrated the Saudi National Guard. In fact, a few days after the bombing, threatening letters had been faxed to the private fax numbers of several high-level Saudi officials, including Prince Turki and Interior Minister Prince Nayef. The implications were staggering. The fax numbers were for the exclusive use of the highest-ranking members of the royal family. The National Guard's sole mission was to protect the House of Saud. Terrorists had penetrated the House of Saud's last line of defense -- and the royal family clearly knew it. Moreover, there were thousands of princes in the family, and many of them were said to be privately delighted by the bombings: "A lot of the royal princes remained sympathetic to bin Laden, even after his citizenship was stripped," says Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and the author of Sleeping with The Devil. "Quite a few of the junior princes hate the U.S." Some of the senior royalty may have felt the same way. According to Yossef Bodansky's Bin Laden; The Man Who Declared War on America, it was widely speculated that no less a figure than Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the powerful governor of Riyadh, had advance knowledge of the 1995 bombing and allowed it to take place to solidify his political position. A brother of King Fahd and Prince Sultan's, and a member of the Sudairi Seven, Prince Salman may have hoped to use the growing Islamist violence and his putative ability to control it to advance his fortunes -- perhaps even all the way to the throne. When it came to dealing with the West, of course, the House of Saud revealed none of this internecine complexity, preferring to project the image of a stable monarchy that ruled a patriotic populace that honored its legitimacy and authority. Despite pressure from Clinton, in the end the Saudis simply declined to press any charges whatsoever against bin Laden for the 1995 Riyadh bombing and the Khobar Towers bombing on 1996. On November 5, 1998, Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz said, "It has been reported that the two explosions in Riyadh and Khobar were planned by Osama bin Laden. This is not true." Nayef went further, asserting, with astonishing logic, that because the kingdom had revoked his citizenship, bin Laden was no longer a Saudi and therefore the Saudis no longer had any interest in the activities masterminded by the world's most wanted terrorist. "He does not constitute any security problem to us and has no activity in the kingdom," said Nayef. "Regarding his external activity, we are not concerned because he is not a Saudi citizen." The House of Saud failed to have bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan, where he was a guest of the Taliban, and declined to prosecute him legally. And so, the double game continued -- though by now, through his repeated bombings, bin Laden had upped the ante. Through the late nineties, cash flowed virtually unrestricted into bin Laden's and Al Qaeda's coffers as they escalated their jihad against the West.
That jinni that the US created cannot be put back into the lamp and now they are using it in the nest way they can. To control the entire ME
At the end of the day we all know who makes the $$$$$$$$$$$ Carlisle Group and who own that and has stakes in that..........?
CIA steering aid to Syrian rebels http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/w...ring-arms-to-syrian-rebels.html?smid=tw-share Now didn't the UN and Annan Peace Plan say ALL SIDES were to STOP arming rebels? USA as usual is the conductor in this latest orchestra of war
