Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 18, 2011

Following the false flag attack on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration announced it planned to go after the so-called “axis of evil,” specifically Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Following Bush’s January 2002 speech, United Nations ambassador John Bolton quietly added three countries to the list – Syria, Libya and Cuba.

CIA, State Department organized demonstrations grow in Syria.

For a time, Libya was removed from the hit list after Muammar Gaddafi agreed to abandon his WMD program. Gaddafi’s announcement was treated with much fanfare and touted as an accomplishment in the bogus war on manufactured terror. The Libyan dictator has wanted diplomatic relations with the United States since U.N. sanctions were imposed on the country in 1992. In fact, Libya has struggled for international legitimacy since 1986 when transnational oil corporations began abandoning the country, at least publicly.

Syria cooperated with the United States following the September attacks, but this did not prevent a propaganda campaign against the country, including the assertion (cooked up by the Israelis) that Iraq’s missing WMD were moved to Syria.

The Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 was part of the effort to demonize the country and its leader, Bashar al-Assad.

In 2006, while speaking in Alabama, Gen. Wesley Clark recounted his conversation with a general at the Pentagon in November, 2001.

Gary Leupp quotes Clark:

I said, “Are we still going to invade Iraq?” “Yes, Sir,” he said, “but it’s worse than that.” I said, “How do you mean?” He held up this piece of paper. He said, “I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It’s a, it’s a five-year plan. We’re going to take down seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we’re going to come back and get Iran in five years. I said, “Is that classified, that paper?” He said, “Yes Sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about it.”

The Bush neocon clique considered the overthrow of Syria an important element in its war against Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East.

In late 2005, Richard Perle, at the time described as the Prince of Darkness, attended a meeting at the home of Farid Ghadry, the head of the Syrian Reform Party. Ghadry had met with Dick Cheney to strategize about regime change in Syria. He told the Wall Street Journal that Perle’s pal Ahmad Chalabi “paved the way in Iraq for what we want to do in Syria.” Ghadry was close to major players in the neocon think-tanks and foundations.

Or put more frankly, the Bush neocons and their “thinkers” (as Bush called them), envisioned the same sort of widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, social support sytems and staggering loss of human life in Syria as they had successfully inflicted on Iraq.

Now we learn that this concerted effort to violate Syria’s national sovereignty and meddle in its internal affairs was passed on from the Bush neocons to apparatchiks in the Obama administration.

“The State Department has secretly funded Syrian opposition groups, according to diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks,” the Washington Post reports today.

The cables reveal the State Department has funneled around $6 million since 2006 to a group of Syrian exiles to operate a London-based satellite channel, Barada TV, and finance activities inside Syria, according to the newspaper.

Syria is the next piece on the geopolitical chessboard.

Barada TV began broadcasting in April, 2009, and ramped up operations to cover the mass protests in Syria that began last month as part of a campaign by intelligence agencies to overthrow regimes in the Middle East. These color revolutions are supported by establishment NGOs and the CIA through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and Freedom House. NED and NGOs are now used by the CIA as the preferred way to overthrow governments. Others claim Freedom House is a tool for the CIA and terrorists.

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“What happened in Georgia with the Rose Revolution and Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2003-2004 was part of a long-term strategy orchestrated by the Pentagon, the State Department and various US-financed NGOs like Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy to create pro-NATO regime change in those former Soviet Union areas and to literally encircle Russia,” author and researcher William Engdahl told RT in January.

”What is going on in the Middle East with the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that we saw a few days ago, and now in Egypt with Mubarak in his 80s, and obviously a regime that is not exactly the most stable one, we have a food crisis taking place as a backdrop and the IMF coming and telling these countries to eliminate their state food subsidies so you have, of course, the explosive background for popular unrest. Within that you have these NGOs, like Freedom House, training activists and trade unions and various other organizations to demand democracy, demand human rights and so forth,” he added.

The Wikileaks cables reveal an intimate relationship between several Syrian exile groups and the State Department through a program called the Middle East Partnership Initiative. The State Department funneled money through the Democracy Council, a Los Angeles-based NGO. The group is praised by folks associated with the United Nations and RAND corporation.

According to the cables, the Democracy Council received $6.3 million from the State Department to run a Syria-related program called the “Civil Society Strengthening Initiative.” That program is described as “a discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners” to produce, among other things, “various broadcast concepts.” Other cables make clear that one of those concepts was Barada TV, according to the Post.

In late March, Secretary of Defense Gates instructed the Syrian military to depose leader Bashar al-Assad and “empower a revolution.”

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“I’ve just come from Egypt, where the Egyptian army stood on the sidelines and allowed people to demonstrate and in fact empowered a revolution. The Syrians might take a lesson from that,” Gates added.

A CNN Arabic poll conducted in 2009 revealed that Syrian leader Assad is one of the most popular leaders in the Arab world.

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