The Snowden-ISIS-NSA Hoax: Viewed through Four Divergent Analyses
Sukla Sen
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/aug/19/blog-posting/edward-snowden-leaked-nsa-documents-show-us-israel/
Documents released by Edward Snowden reveal that American, British and Israeli intelligence agencies worked together to create the Islamic State.
Bloggers on Tuesday, August 19th, 2014 in stories
Bloggers: Edward Snowden leaked NSA documents show U.S., Israel created Islamic State
Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of classified NSA documents is perfect fodder for conspiracy theorists -- it has intrigue, still-unreleased documents, and the NSA as "Big Brother."
So it’s no surprise to see Snowden’s name attached to the increasingly popular idea that America and Israel created ISIS. On July 16, Bahrain’s Gulf Daily News reported that "Edward Snowden has revealed that the British and American intelligence and the Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency) worked together to create the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)." This operation, they said, was codenamed "Hornet’s Nest."
And as recently as Aug. 18, the Palestinian Authority insisted that the Islamic State is a Zionist plot by the United States and Israel. The United States, though, has been bombing the Islamic State in Iraq for more than a week; not quite ally behavior.
It would have been easy to dismiss this theory off-hand as another hoax emerging from the general lack of information about the Islamic State -- like the allegations that President Barack Obama released Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in 2009, which we rated False.
But we wanted to trace this conspiracy theory to its source to see whether or not it has legs.
The taxonomy of a hoax
In their refutation of the Hornet’s Nest story, Time points out that as early as June, Iranian sources have been accusing America of creating the Islamic State. On June 18, the Iranian Fars News Agency quoted Iran’s top commander, Hassan Firouzabadi, blaming the Islamic State on the West.
"The (Islamic State) is a move by Israel and the U.S. to create a safe margin for the Zionists against the resistance forces in the region," Firouzabadi said. The U.S. and Israel, he continued, are reacting to "the recent victories of President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria" and "in Iraq."
Time -- along with major American news sources, Al Jazeera, Daily News Egypt, the UN, and several other Middle Eastern countries -- say that the Islamic State is an offshoot of al-Qaida. In fact, we wrote last week about how al-Qaida rejected the Islamic State in part because of ideological differences and disputes over authority.
That’s not to say America is completely blameless when it comes to the Islamic State -- the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the weapons deals it struck to try to bring down Assad may have all played a part in ISIS’s rise. But there’s no evidence of an American, British and Israeli plot to create ISIS.
Yes, this is a conspiracy theory
The only lucid defense of the idea that Western intelligence agencies created the Islamic State intentionally comes from the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG), a Canadian website that bills itself as an alternative news source, but has advanced specious conspiracy theories on topics like 9/11, vaccines and global warming.
Kurt Nimmo, writing for the CRG through InfoWars, had four points defending the plausibility of the idea that America and Israel helped create the Islamic State.
First, he claims that Baghdadi was radicalized at a U.S. military detention facility from 2005 to 2009. Baghdadi may have been radicalized by his earlier detainment by the United States and his subsequent detainment by the Iraqi government, but the Defense Department says Baghdadi was not a U.S. prisoner during the period that Nimmo mentions.
Second, Nimmo quotes a Jordanian official claiming that "the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi." But that’s a mischaracterization -- the article Nimmo links to clarifies that the fighters "became members of the ISIS after their training," meaning they weren’t trained expressly to be members of the Islamic State.
Third, Nimmo quotes an article depicting Baghdadi as the latest in a decades-long CIA program of successful mind control, including Rev. Jim Jones, the founder and leader of Peoples Temple. That article actually acknowledges that there’s no record that Baghdadi was "held and treated by a secret CIA mind-control unit at Camp Bucca from 2004 until 2009," but argues that, obviously, those records would have been destroyed. That counts as a conspiracy theory in our book.
Fourth and finally, Nimmo quotes an Islamic State member who claims that all current al-Qaida affiliates "work for the CIA," with no evidence besides his word.
So where does Snowden come in?
If there were documents revealing Operation Hornet’s Nest, they’d probably be in Snowden’s NSA cache -- but they aren’t.
Two weeks ago, blogger Alan Kurtz went in-depth on the genesis of the Snowden-Islamic State hoax, tracing it to a July 6 post in Arabic on the German domain shababek.de. From there, the claim spread across Middle Eastern papers, including the Fars News Authority and the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), and eventually made it across the Atlantic to the CRG and InfoWars.
Most of these articles referenced other articles that didn’t name sources, but the IRNA, in response to Time’s critique, pointed toward a story in The Intercept, a startup by journalist Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald’s First Look Media is one of three holders of Snowden’s NSA files, along with The Guardian and Washington Post writer Barton Gellman.
But, Kurtz points out, there’s no mention of Operation Hornet’s Nest on The Intercept. Greenwald himself tweeted that he’s "never heard him (Snowden) say any such thing, nor have I ever heard any credible source quoting him saying anything like that."
WikiLeaks and Snowden’s ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner also tweeted refutations of the hoax -- for us, the final nails in the coffin.
Our ruling
Middle Eastern publications have been circulating a rumor that Snowden’s NSA leak reveals "Operation Hornet’s Nest," an American, British and Israeli plot to create the Islamic State to destabilize the Middle East.
This isn’t the first time Iranian publications have mischaracterized the Islamic State as an American creation, but it is the first time Snowden’s name has been attached. Sources with access to Snowden’s documents have directly refuted the hoax. The Islamic State started as an al-Qaida offshoot, and there’s no reason to believe otherwise.
We rate this claim Pants on Fire!
Establishment Media Moves to Debunk ISIS CIA Asset Story – Dismissed as “Snowden Hoax”
Infowars
Last month Time Magazine posted an article refuting the claim ISIS — now the fully militarized Islamic State — is an intelligence operation.
The article by war propagandist Aryn Baker states “conspiracy theories are nothing new in the Middle East.” Baker squarely places responsibility for the declared conspiracy theory on Iran. According to Baker, the Iranians claim the ISIS offensive currently underway in Iraq is “part of a U.S.-backed plot to destabilize the region and protect Israel.”
Baker reports IRNA and the Tehran Times believe NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was responsible for uncovering details about operation Beehive, also translated as Hornet’s Nest, which is described as a joint U.S., British and Israeli effort to “create a terrorist organization capable of centralizing all extremist actions across the world.”
Baker concludes there is no evidence within the Snowden trove of any such plot. She chalks the accusation up to another baseless internet rumor. “Yet Iranian government officials and independent analysts in Iran alike cited IRNA’s report as definitive proof of ISIS’s American and Israeli origins,” she writes.
Evidence of IRNA and the Tehran Times, however, making the claim is suspiciously absent. “Regrettably, not knowing the date of IRNA’s scoop, or being able to view its text online, complicates investigation,” writes Alan Kurtz.
Kurtz traces responsibility for the “Snowden Hoax” to a German website, www.shababek.de, and Kareem al-Baidani. A photo of al-Baidani is used on the Facebook page of Abosamir Albaidani, identified by Kurtz as “an Iraqi Shiite writer based in Munich, Germany” who may or may not be associated with an al-Alam television show, Iraq Today. Al-Alam is an Arabic news channel broadcasting from Iran by the state-owned media corporation Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.
The story was picked up by Iran’s Fars New Agency (FNA) and subsequently posted across the internet. It was also cited in a story posted by Infowars.com.
Glenn Greenwald and others state there is no evidence in the Snowden cache that ISIS is linked to the CIA, Mossad or any other intelligence agency.
Greenwald posted the following on his Twitter account today:
Greenwald points to Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the ACLU, who retweets spy novelist Jeremy Duns. Duns provides a link to the Kurtz blog post claiming to document the “Snowden Hoax” and a lack of definitive evidence connecting ISIS to the CIA or Mossad and pointing back to Iranian propaganda.
“The validity of the document,” we wrote on July 19, “cannot be verified due to the exclusivity of the Snowden cache. Cryptome sent a letter to various sources in possession of the documents, including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Barton Gellman, Laura Poitrias, Glenn Greenwald, ACLU, EFF and others demanding an accounting. The allegation about ISIS and al-Baghdadi, however, pairs up with other information demonstrating ISIS is an intelligence asset.”
The remainder of our July 19 article lays out broad strokes demonstrating that ISIS is indeed a military and intelligence asset.
The putative (and mercurial) leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was reportedly a “civilian internee” at Camp Bucca, a U.S. military detention facility near Umm Qasr, Iraq. James Skylar Gerrond, a former U.S. Air Force security forces officer and a compound commander at Camp Bucca in 2006 and 2007, said the camp “created a pressure cooker for extremism.”
“Circumstantial evidence suggests that al-Baghdadi may have been mind-controlled while held prisoner by the US military in Iraq,” writes Dr. Kevin Barrett.
In July Nabil Na’eem, the founder of the Islamic Democratic Jihad Party and former top al-Qaeda commander, told the Beirut-based pan-Arab TV station al-Maydeen all current al-Qaeda affiliates, including ISIS, work for the CIA.
In June a Jordanian official told Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily ISIS members were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan. In 2012 it was reported the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi.
“Key members of ISIS it now emerges were trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian officials,” writes William Engdahl. “The US, Turkish and Jordanian intelligence were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.”
A scripted “geopolitical struggle between the US and Russia” is “the objective of leading neo-conservatives in the CIA, Pentagon and State Department all along,” Engdahl continues. “The CIA transported hundreds of Mujahideen Saudis and other foreign veterans of the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan into Chechnya to disrupt the struggling Russia in the early 1990s, particularly to sabotage the Russian oil pipeline running directly from Baku on the Caspian Sea into Russia. James Baker III and his friends in Anglo-American Big Oil had other plans. It was called the BTC pipeline, owned by a BP-US oil consortium and running through Tbilisi into NATO-member Turkey, free of Russian territory.”
The history of the CIA’s involvement in terrorist activities — in Bosnia as well as Chechnya and other former Soviet states — is well-known to historians. It is however ignored by Time Magazine and its groomed propagandists. The Snowden cache may indeed not contain a reference to the CIA, Mossad and ISIS. On the other hand, because the documents are closely held, as Cryptome argues, we will not know this for sure until they are made public.
Simply attributing the linkage to perennial enemy Iran and media pariah Infowars.com — and dismissing a possible linkage out of hand as a hoax — will not hide the fact the CIA, Mossad, British intelligence, et al, have all specialized in creating terror groups and have used these to gain geopolitical advantage, as they are now attempting to do with a putative ISIS domestic terror threat and renewed military activity in Iraq.
http://time.com/2992269/isis-is-an-american-plot-says-iran/
Why Iran Believes the Militant Group ISIS Is an American Plot
Conspiracy theories are nothing new in the Middle East, but the latest to come from Tehran is a self-protecting mechanism that could ultimately backfire
Iran’s English-language daily newspaper, the Tehran Times, recently ran a front-page story describing the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria’s (ISIS) June offensive in Iraq as part of a U.S.-backed plot to destabilize the region and protect Israel. The story was an English translation of a scoop by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), which cited a purported interview with National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden.
According to the article, Snowden had described a joint U.S., British and Israeli effort to “create a terrorist organization capable of centralizing all extremist actions across the world.” The plan, according to IRNA, was code-named Beehive — or in other translations, Hornet’s Nest — and it was devised to protect Israel from security threats by diverting attention to the newly manufactured regional enemy: ISIS.
The IRNA story appears to build on, or may have even started, an Internet rumor that has assumed truthlike proportions through multiple reposts and links. No mention of a “hornet’s nest” plot can be found in Snowden’s leaked trove of U.S. intelligence documents, and even though Snowden has not publicly refuted the claim, it is safe to assume that the quoted interview never took place. (IRNA has been known to report stories from the satirical Onion newspaper as fact.) Yet Iranian government officials and independent analysts in Iran alike cited IRNA’s report as definitive proof of ISIS’s American and Israeli origins.
Back when former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in power, it was not unusual to see IRNA echoing specious wild theories dreamed up by the leadership, but since the more moderate Hassan Rouhani assumed the presidency in August 2013, the security establishment’s nuttier fantasies of deranged plots against Iran have been largely reined in. That is, until ISIS spilled out of Syria and started setting up camp next door in Iraq, where Iran has tight ties with the Shi‘ite-dominated government in Baghdad.
Even before the Snowden scoop made the rounds of Iran’s media, military commanders, citing their own sources of intelligence, struck a similar theme. On June 18, Fars News Agency quoted Major General Hassan Firoozabadi, Chief of Staff of Iran’s armed forces, saying that ISIS “is an Israel[i] and America[n] movement for the creation of a secure border for the Zionists against the forces of resistance in the region.” That Iran’s media, along with its leaders, is focusing on ISIS’s supposed external backers — as opposed to its origins in local terrorist groups, al-Qaeda and popular discontent in both Syria and Iraq — demonstrates a concerted effort to streamline the national narrative in order to project power and preserve stability. As an example of another Western plot against Iran, ISIS can be managed — so goes Iran’s thinking. But as a new, potentially more destabilizing threat on Iran’s borders, ISIS poses challenges that the leadership is still struggling to understand and respond to. The only problem is that dismissing ISIS as a Zionist conspiracy could end up undermining Iran far more than any supposed American plot.
In its previous incarnation as an Iraqi al-Qaeda affiliate, ISIS has been responsible for thousands of Shi‘ite deaths in terrorist attacks since its formation in 2003. The group’s current success in Iraq — by some estimates it now controls a third of Iraq’s territory, including the city of Mosul — has as much to do with its considerable funding and military prowess as it does the weaknesses of the Iraqi state, led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an Iranian-backed Shi‘ite who has alienated Iraq’s large Sunni minority. Now that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has declared himself the emir of a caliphate spanning the Syrian-Iraqi border, he continues to advocate violence against members of the Shi‘ite sect, whom he calls apostates, and has threatened to destroy Shi‘ite holy sites in an attempt to ignite an Islamic sectarian civil war. That would likely cause the Iranian-backed government in Baghdad to collapse, forcing Iran to send in troops and sparking a region-wide conflagration.
Yet Iranian government officials refuse to accept that there is a sectarian root to ISIS’s agenda, or that ISIS was able to advance in part because of Sunni discontent. When American leaders suggested that al-Maliki’s Shi‘ite chauvinism may have played a role in rallying Sunni support for the ISIS advance into Iraq, and suggested he step down, Iranians saw it as a direct threat to their influence. “When ISIS started advancing into Iraq, the first thing the Americans said was that Maliki should be changed,” says Hossein Shariatmadari, editor in chief of the government-owned conservative daily Kayhan. “Maliki was democratically elected, so what does he have to do with it? Nothing. The Americans wanted to cut the ties between Iran and Iraq.”
Instead Iran has declared the group a region-wide terrorist threat that funded and peopled by outsiders, including the U.S., Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. So far Iran says it has not gotten directly involved in Iraq, though it is prepared to do so if necessary. (Official statements aside, there is significant evidence of Iranian support in the form of military weaponry, assistance and training, if not troops on the ground.) But if Iran does take a hand in the battle against ISIS, it will do so in the name of fighting terrorism — and not for the cause of supporting its Shi‘ite ally in government.
That’s a canny move that could explain, in part, the government line, says a Western diplomat in Tehran. To go in with an overtly sectarian agenda would invite a regional backlash that could harm Iranian interests and threaten the state. “It is in the best interest of Iran to present this group as terrorists, because that way no one can accuse Iran of backing Shi‘ites against a Sunni movement,” says the diplomat.
But if Iran continues to back Maliki against the will of a disgruntled, powerful and armed Sunni minority in Iraq, it could still invoke a backlash all the same. Which might explain why the government line also plays up the American and Mossad angle a familiar trope. If it all collapses, Iran can still blame the West for the debacle, says the diplomat. “If Iran can convince its people that there is a plot against the country that must be countered, while at the same time providing a narrative of counterterror to the world, they are protecting their interests and hedging their bets at the same time.”
Why IRNA had to concoct something so obviously fictional as a fake Snowden interview to bolster the narrative is still unclear. Even Shariatmadari, editor of Kayhan, is mystified. “I thought this interview was strange too, because all this happened after Snowden had access to those documents,” he tells TIME. Nonetheless, he ran the story on his front page as well.
— With reporting by Kay Armin Serjoie / Tehran
[A video clip.]
ISIS Leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi Trained by Israeli Mossad, NSA Documents Reveal
The former employee at US National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden, has revealed that the British and American intelligence and the Mossad worked together to create the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Snowden said intelligence services of three countries created a terrorist organisation that is able to attract all extremists of the world to one place, using a strategy called “the hornet’s nest”.
NSA documents refer to recent implementation of the hornet’s nest to protect the Zionist entity by creating religious and Islamic slogans.
According to documents released by Snowden, “The only solution for the protection of the Jewish state “is to create an enemy near its borders”.
Leaks revealed that ISIS leader and cleric Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi took intensive military training for a whole year in the hands of Mossad, besides courses in theology and the art of speech.
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