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Key Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, leave no doubt that endless war is official U.S. doctrine

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Photo: Reuters

Photo: Reuters

– by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

Long before Americans were introduced to the new 9/11 era super-villains called ISIS and Khorasan, senior Obama officials were openly and explicitly stating that America’s “war on terror,” already 12 years old, would last at least another decade. At first, they injected these decrees only anonymously; in late 2012, The Washington Post – disclosing the administration’s secret creation of a “disposition matrix” to decide who should be killed, imprisoned without charges, or otherwise “disposed” of – reported these remarkable facts:

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.”

In May, 2013, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether it should revise the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). A committee member asked a senior Pentagon official, Assistant Secretary Michael Sheehan, how long the war on terror would last; his reply: “At least 10 to 20 years.” At least. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed afterward “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.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War,” one which – by the Obama administration’s own reasoning – has “no geographic limit.”

Listening to all this, Maine’s independent Sen. Angus King said: “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.” Former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith – himself an ardent advocate of broad presidential powers – was at the hearing and noted that nobody even knows against whom this endless war is being waged: “Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

All of that received remarkably little attention given its obvious significance. But any doubts about whether Endless War – literally – is official American doctrine should be permanently erased by this week’s comments from two leading Democrats, both former top national security officials in the Obama administration, one of whom is likely to be the next American president.

Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.

It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).

Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?

I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that the U.S. has been waging this war for its stated reasons and that it hopes to vanquish The Enemy and end the war.

But that is not, and never was, the purpose of the War on Terror. It was designed from the start to be endless. Both Bush and Obama officials have explicitly said that the war will last at least a generation. The nature of the “war,” and the theories that have accompanied it, is that it has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits. More significantly, this “war” fuels itself, provides its own inexhaustible purpose, as it is precisely the policies justified in the name of Stopping Terrorism that actually ensure its spread (note how Panetta said the new U.S. war would have to include Libya, presumably to fight against those empowered by the last U.S. war there just 3 years ago).

This war – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace.They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war. 

The last thing the Washington political class and the economic elites who control it want is for this war to end. Anyone who doubts that should just look at the express statements from these leading Democrats, who wasted no time at all seizing on the latest Bad Guys to justify literally decades more of this profiteering and war-making.

Syria: How the U.S lost its war within hours

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Barack Obama, Oslo, Norway Photo: Sandy Young/Getty Images

Barack Obama, Oslo, Norway Photo: Sandy Young/Getty Images

– by Scott Lucas, EA WorldView

Wednesday morning’s statement from US Central Command was — unsurprisingly — buoyant. The US and allies from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Jordan had launched attacks the previous day inside Syria, with 14 airstrikes and 47 Tomahawk missiles. Multiple targets of the Islamic State had been hit in northern and eastern Syria, including “fighters, training compounds, headquarters and command and control facilities, storage facilities, a finance center, supply trucks, and armed vehicles”.

Central Command promised, “The U.S. military will continue to conduct targeted airstrikes against ISIL in Syria and Iraq as local forces go on the offensive against this terrorist group.”

Behind the confident assessment, Central Command did not point to — and presumably did not recognize — reality: with those initial strikes, the US had probably already lost its belated intervention in the 42-month Syrian conflict.

The military did not mention that the greatest casualties of the first night’s attacks had not been suffered by the Islamic State, which had moved most of its forces before the arrival of the warplanes. Instead, the US had struck hardest on two locations of the Islamist insurgents Jabhat al-Nusra, killing more than 70 fighters and civilians in Idlib and Aleppo Provinces.

Central Command cloaked those attacks in the final two paragraphs of its statement:

Separately, the United States has also taken action to disrupt the imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests conducted by a network of seasoned al-Qa’ida veterans — sometimes referred to as the Khorasan Group — who have established a safe haven in Syria to develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations. These strikes were undertaken only by U.S. assets.

In total, U.S. Central Command conducted eight strikes against Khorasan Group targets west of Aleppo to include training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communication building and command and control facilities.

Many in the US media eagerly ran with this presentation of a necessary attack on evil plotters — who had only surfaced a week earlier in headline declaration by American intelligence services — planning a toothpaste-tube bomb on an airliner.

But inside Syria, that declaration carried little weight with many civilians, as well as the opposition and insurgency. Already angered that the US — which had stepped away from intervention a year earlier after the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attacks — was again sparing the President and his military, these groups reacted with bitter statements and large protests on Friday.

The suspicion is that if the US is serious about confronting the Islamic State, it is also — without any acknowledgement, and possibly through deception — attacking a faction which has part of the Syrian insurgency for more than two years. The sentiment was summarized in posters and chants that, while Washington had stayed away, the fighters of Jabhat al-Nusra had defended those facing the ground and aerial assaults of the Assad regime.

And even if that sentiment could be set aside, the question remained: what exactly was the strategy behind the US assault on the Islamic State? Insurgent commanders and opposition leaders said the US — which had told Israel, Syria’s ally Iran, and the Assad regime of the imminent strikes — had seen no reason to coordinate operations with the “moderate” insurgents whom it is supposedly supporting. So the Islamic State could move freely on the ground, not only evading the aerial assault but pressing its own offensives such as the attack on the Kurdish center of Kobane in northern Syria.

Attacks on Jabhat al-Nusra and the Mysterious “Khorasan Group”

There was a strange disconnect on Tuesday between the headline news of US airstrikes and claims seeping through social media. Videos and photographs showed that the greatest damage had been suffered in the village of Kafar Daryan in Idlib Province in northwest Syria. There were images of slain civilians, with others in the rubble of demolished buildings.

The mystery was that, while Jabhat al-Nusra members were killed by the US missiles, there were no Islamic State fighters in the village. Indeed, there have been no ISIS units in Idlib Province since they were pushed out by insurgents early year.

And Kafar Daryan was not the only target beyond the Americans’ official cause of hitting the Islamic State. Even deadlier — though almost unnoticed, because there was no video — was an attack on the Aleppo suburb of al-Muhandiseen. The Local Coordination Committee said more than 50 Jabhat al-Nusra fighters died.

None of this was noted in Central Command’s statement that it hit eight targets “west of Aleppo”. So what was the US doing with attacks beyond its initial declared aim of hitting the Islamic State?

As the US military’s PR strategy made clear, the answer was the “Khorasan Group”. Unnamed US officials primed the media even before Central Command issued its statement:

Administration officials said Tuesday they have been watching the Khorasan Group, an al-Qaida cell in Syria, for years….Intelligence showed that the Khorasan Group was in the final stages of plotting attacks against the U.S. and Europe, most likely an attempt to blow up an airplane in flight.

“An intelligence source with knowledge of the matter told CNN” that plots against the US had been discovered over the past week, including “a bomb made of a non-metallic device like a toothpaste container or clothes dipped in explosive material”.

Indeed, the set-up for the US attack had been made more than a week earlier. On September 13, the Associated Press ran a story fed by “American officials”:

While the Islamic State group is getting the most attention now, another band of extremists in Syria — a mix of hardened jihadis from Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Europe — poses a more direct and imminent threat to the United States, working with Yemeni bomb-makers to target U.S. aviation.

Five days later, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, told a conference, “There is potentially yet another threat to the homeland,” similar to that posed by the Islamic State.

If you read past the mainstream media, there was a curiosity about the US campaign as its first missiles were fired: leading experts on Al Qa’eda and jihadists were questioning the US Government’s timing and presentation. Washington, they said, had merely slapped a label on some fighters who had professed allegiance to Al Qa’eda and had come from Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight with Jabhat al-Nusra.

One of the few public mentions of the “Khorasan Group” before last week backs up Zelin’s remarks. Peter Bergen, writing for CNN, briefly said:

According to both British counterterrorism officials and U.S. intelligence officials, senior al Qaeda members based in Pakistan have traveled to Syria to direct operations there. They are known as the Khorasan group. Khorasan is an ancient term for an Islamic empire that once incorporated what is now Afghanistan.

Unnamed US officials only fuelled the scepticism as they pressed their case through the week. One official said the threat from the Khorasan Group was “imminent”, but another denied this as “there were no known targets or attacks expected in the next few weeks”.

The officials said that the Group was led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, a Kuwaiti who was “Al Qa’eda’s senior leader in Iran” before he moved to Syria in 2013 to fight with Jabhat al-Nusra. The State Department’s designation of al-Fadhli says he was “among the few trusted Al Qa’eda operatives who received advance notification” of the attacks of September 11, 2001 — even though he was only 20 at the time. Now, the US sources said, “Al Qa’eda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri dispatched this deputy to recruit those Western fighters, who have a better chance of escaping scrutiny at airports and could place bombs onto planes”.

For someone who is supposedly a high-level Al Qa’eda operative in Syria, there is little public information on al-Fadhli. One of the lengthiest reports is in the Arab Times in March, based on “informed sources”. The Yemeni supposedly played a role in the decision of Al Qa’eda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s decision to support Jabhat al-Nusra in 2013 when the Islamic State challenged it for leadership of the jihadist movement. Yet does this establish that al-Fadhli was planning a terror attack on the US? The Arab Times offers no evidence and makes the bizarre assertion that the Yemeni and Al Qa’eda were acting on behalf of Iran: 

The most important objective is to use Al Qa’eda’s world terror cells to target Western nations particularly the United States of America, in case [Iran’s] nuclear facilities face any kind of military strikes from the US or Israel. [The sources] revealed that Iran believes Al-Qa’eda’s terror cells are the most important asset that can be used in either secret or open negotiations with the United States. Iran offered to train al-Qaeda elements on how to use bombs, and provided some financial support and safe refuge as part of an agreement that was reached in 2009, which resulted in the execution of the related agendas.

The report is further shaken by its assertion that al-Fadhli was directing activities not only against the Islamic State and the Assad regime, but also against the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front — both of whom were fighting alongside Jabhat al-Nusra against Syrian forces.

The stories, beginning with the Associated Press “Al-Qaida’s Syrian Cell Alarms US” on September 13, also invoked the name of Ibrahim al-Asiri, “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s master bomb-maker” — but without establishing that al-Asiri had ever stepped foot inside Syria or had been in contact with al-Fadhli.

Whether or not al-Fadhli and a “Khorasan Group” were planning terror attacks, what matters is the perception — and the perception of many inside Syria is that the claim was just a pretext for the Americans to strike their real target: Jabhat al-Nusra.

So What’s Wrong With Hitting Jabhat al-Nusra?

One might claim that, even if the US was being deceptive in refusing to declare its real intention, the attack on Jabhat al-Nusra makes sense. After all, the group has been listed as a terrorist organization by the US since late 2012. Its leadership is linked to Al Qa’eda, even if it has pursued a local fight against the Assad regime, working with Syrian organizations and communities. Before spring 2013, it was connected with the Islamic State.

The problem is that this case was not made effectively inside Syria. A series of opposition and insurgent groups — from the “moderates” whom the US has said it wants to promote to the Islamic Front to independent brigades — castigated the US airstrikes as counter-productive. Rallies on the day after the attack bluntly set out the sentiment of some Syrians: “Jabhat al-Nusra came to support us, when the whole world abandoned us.”

See Syria Daily, Sept 24: US Missiles Hit Insurgents, Kill Civilians, Upset the Opposition The US might have the simple formula of “moderates” v. “extremists”, but the reality is that Jabhat al-Nusra is part of the insurgency, even if it is formally kept as some distance because of Washington’s position.

So that means the attack on the group is considered an attack on the insurgents. The point was made, directly or indirectly, by the US-backed Supreme Military Council, the General Staff of the US-backed Free Syrian Army, the US-backed Harakat Hazm Brigade, the faction Jaish al-Mujahideen, and the Islamic Front, as well as Jabhat al-Nusra.

A “moderate” insurgent source inside Syria summarized, “The US strategy? How about turning possible coalition partners on the ground into sceptics, if not enemies, with the first wave of missiles?” Firing from the Air, Losing on the Ground The anger at the US airstrikes was compounded by Washington’s failure — whether deliberate policy or an oversight — to connect its operations with the situation on the ground. The US informed Israel, Syria’s ally Iran, and the Assad regime of the impending attacks, but did not see fit to mention them to insurgents. That meant that even those US attacks which hit the Islamic State struck far from the key frontlines. An article by McClatchy News gave one example:

There are now 10 groups fighting [the Islamic State] north of Aleppo, near the town of Mare, but the U.S. and its allies “offered very little ammunition support, no information, no air cover, and no collaboration in military plans and tactics – nothing,” said Colonel Hassan Hamadi.

Far from being crippled by the airstrikes, the Islamic State simply took their fighters and their offensives elsewhere. While the US-led coalition hit Raqqa, the largest city held by the jihadists, they moved more forces to the assault on the Kurdish center of Kobane near the Turkish center — where there were no coalition attacks until last weekend.

So, far from being a coherent operation to “degrade” the Islamic State, the opposition saw no connection between the aerial campaign and the declared Obama Administration effort for $500 million to arm and train “moderate” insurgents. Indeed, even as the planes flew, that effort receded: the head of the American military, General Martin Dempsey, said it would be many months before even 5,000 insurgents — a fraction of the fighters inside Syria — were completely trained and equipped.

An Alternate US Strategy?

Given the shredding of any US strategy — if there was one to work with insurgents, one can only search for alternatives.

Perhaps the US believes it can “contain” the Islamic State with airstrikes alone?

If so, the approach flies in the face of the experience in Iraq next door, where the jihadists are only being pushed back when aerial operations support ground attacks. Washington has not set out how the Islamic State can be held back from further advances, such as the possible takeover of Kobane, let alone be removed from bases of powers such as Raqqa and Deir Ez Zor — two of the seven largest cities in Syria.

Perhaps the Obama Administration envisage a refashioned “moderate” insurgency as the ground component of the strategy?

Washington’s rhetoric, as it pressed for the $500 million from Congress, set out this line; however, it was quickly erased by Dempsey’s “clarification” on what armament and training meant in practice.

President Obama’s interview on Sunday night was an effective admission that the strategy is a non-starter: “There is a moderate Syrian opposition, but right now, it doesn’t control much territory. They are being squeezed between [the Islamic State] on the one hand and the Assad regime on the other.”

That leaves one other option: could the US see the Syrian military as the ground force to check the Islamic State?

Publicly the Administration is not pointing to any consideration of the option. Obama continued to tag Damascus as a “barbaric regime” in his speech last week at the UN, and he repeated the formula last night that President Assad would have to step aside in a political transition.

Still, the biggest cheerleader for the US-led airstrikes is the Assad regime. Damascus switched within 48 hours from opposition to intervention to a welcoming of the attacks, and its caution is being replaced with an acceptance of operations not only by the US but also Gulf States and Europeans — provided, of course, they are strictly focused on the Islamic State.

In practice, the Assad regime is indicating that there does not have to be a formal commitment for an alternate US strategy. It is quite happy to accept an American approach which takes on its recent enemy of the Islamic State, as well as its longer-term foe of the insurgency — or, at least, parts of it.

Bolstering Extremists?

That welcome from Damascus does not constitute a US “victory”, of course, but it is as good as Washington can get after a week of its campaign.

And even that will not be much in the weeks to come. For Washington, far from containing the “extremists”, may have bolstered the threat that it has been generating in the media as well as facing on the ground.

The declaration of the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, Abu Mohammad al-Joulani, is not a declaration of war on the US. It is not close to a renewed “alliance” with the Islamic State, despite the misguided headlines in some media outlets. As an EA analyst framed al-Joulani’s message this morning, “Well, brother Barack, if you rethink your approach and consider the possible backfiring from it, then you’re safe from that backfire.”

However, an insurgency which has been alienated by the US attacks gives significant relief to the Islamic State, which can rest assured that it will not face a coordinated challenge as it does in Iraq. It may even give them more recruits: even if al-Joulani stands aside from reconciliation, individual Jabhat al-Nusra units and fighters — and indeed those of other elements in the insurgency — may join the jihadists out of anger against America.

And while most insurgents will not pursue that option, they are likely to conclude that there is no prospect of working with the US against the Islamic State, let alone the Assad regime.

As a leader of the Islamic Front said this weekend:

We have been calling for these sorts of attacks for three years and when they finally come they don’t help us. People have lost faith.

The Fake terror threat used to justify bombing Syria

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khorasan

– by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept

As the Obama Administration prepared to bomb Syria without congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat — too radical even for Al Qaeda! — administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

The unveiling of this new group was performed in a September 13 article by the Associated Press, who cited unnamed U.S. officials to warn of this new shadowy, worse-than-ISIS terror group:

While the Islamic State group [ISIS] is getting the most attention now, another band of extremists in Syria — a mix of hardened jihadis from Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Europe — poses a more direct and imminent threat to the United States, working with Yemeni bomb-makers to target U.S. aviation, American officials say.

At the center is a cell known as the Khorasan group, a cadre of veteran al-Qaida fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan who traveled to Syria to link up with the al-Qaida affiliate there, the Nusra Front.

But the Khorasan militants did not go to Syria principally to fight the government of President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials say. Instead, they were sent by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to recruit Europeans and Americans whose passports allow them to board a U.S.-bound airliner with less scrutiny from security officials.

AP warned Americans that “the fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights.” It explained that although ISIS has received most of the attention, the Khorasan Group “is considered the more immediate threat.”

The genesis of the name was itself scary: “Khorasan refers to a province under the Islamic caliphate, or religious empire, of old that included parts of Afghanistan.” AP depicted the U.S. officials who were feeding them the narrative as engaging in some sort of act of brave, unauthorized truth-telling: “Many U.S. officials interviewed for this story would not be quoted by name talking about what they said was highly classified intelligence.”

On the morning of September 18, CBS News broadcast a segment that is as pure war propaganda as it gets: directly linking the soon-to-arrive U.S. bombing campaign in Syria to the need to protect Americans from being exploded in civilian jets by Khorasan. With ominous voice tones, the host narrated:

This morning we are learning of a new and growing terror threat coming out of Syria. It’s an Al Qaeda cell you probably never heard of. Nearly everything about them is classified. Bob Orr is in Washington with new information on a group some consider more  dangerous than ISIS.

Orr then announced that while ISIS is “dominating headlines and terrorist propaganda,” Orr’s “sources” warn of “a more immediate threat to the U.S. Homeland.” As Orr spoke, CBS flashed alternating video showing scary Muslims in Syria and innocent westerners waiting in line at airports, as he intoned that U.S. officials have ordered “enhanced screening” for “hidden explosives.” This is all coming, Orr explained, from  ”an emerging threat in Syria” where “hardened terrorists” are building “hard to detect bombs.”

The U.S. government, Orr explained, is trying to keep this all a secret; they won’t even mention the group’s name in public out of security concerns! But Orr was there to reveal the truth, as his “sources confirm the Al Qaeda cell goes by the name Khorasan.” And they’re “developing fresh plots to attack U.S. aviation.”

Later that day, Obama administration officials began publicly touting the group, when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned starkly: “In terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State.” Then followed an avalanche of uncritical media reports detailing this Supreme Threat, excitingly citing anonymous officials as though they had uncovered a big secret the government was trying to conceal.

On September 20, The New York Times devoted a long article to strongly hyping the Khorasan Group. Headlined “U.S. Suspects More Direct Threats Beyond ISIS,” the article began by announcing that U.S. officials believe a different group other than ISIS “posed a more direct threat to America and Europe.” Specifically:

American officials said that the group called Khorasan had emerged in the past year as the cell in Syria that may be the most intent on hitting the United States or its installations overseas with a terror attack. The officials said that the group is led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, a senior Qaeda operative who, according to the State Department, was so close to Bin Laden that he was among a small group of people who knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks before they were launched.

Again, the threat they posed reached all the way to the U.S.: “Members of the cell are said to be particularly interested in devising terror plots using concealed explosives.”

This Khorasan-attacking-Americans alarm spread quickly and explosively in the landscape of U.S. national security reporting. The Daily Beast‘s Eli Lake warned on September 23 — the day after the first U.S. bombs fell in Syria — that “American analysts had pieced together detailed information on a pending attack from an outfit that informally called itself ‘the Khorasan Group’ to use hard-to-detect explosives on American and European airliners.” He added even more ominously: “The planning from the Khorasan Group … suggests at least an aspiration to launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001″ (days later, Lake, along with Josh Rogin, actually claimed that“Iran has long been harboring senior al Qaeda, al Nusra, and so-called Khorasan Group leaders as part of its complicated strategy to influence the region”).

On the day of the bombing campaign, NBC News’ Richard Engel tweeted this:

That tweet linked to an NBC Nightly News report in which anchor Brian Williams introduced Khorasan with a graphic declaring it “The New Enemy,” and Engel went on to explain that the group is “considered a threat to the U.S. because, U.S. intelligence officials say, it wants to bring down airplanes with explosives.”

Once the bombing campaign was underway, ISIS — the original theme of the attack — largely faded into the background, as Obama officials and media allies aggressively touted attacks on Khorasan leaders and the disruption of its American-targeting plots. On the first day of the bombing, The Washington Post announced that “the United States also pounded a little-known but well-resourced al-Qaeda cell that some American officials fear could pose a direct threat to the United States.” It explained:

The Pentagon said in a statement early Tuesday that the United States conducted eight strikes west of Aleppo against the cell, called the Khorasan Group, targeting its “training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communications building and command and control facilities.”

The same day, CNN claimed that “among the targets of U.S. strikes across Syria early Tuesday was the Khorasan Group.” The bombing campaign in Syria was thus magically transformed into an act of pure self-defense, given that ”the group was actively plotting against a U.S. homeland target and Western targets, a senior U.S. official told CNN on Tuesday.” The bevy of anonymous sources cited by CNN had a hard time keep their stories straight:

The official said the group posed an “imminent” threat. Another U.S. official later said the threat was not imminent in the sense that there were no known targets or attacks expected in the next few weeks.

The plots were believed to be in an advanced stage, the second U.S. official said. There were indications that the militants had obtained materials and were working on new improvised explosive devices that would be hard to detect, including common hand-held electronic devices and airplane carry-on items such as toiletries.

Nonetheless, what was clear was that this group had to be bombed in Syria to save American lives, as the terrorist group even planned to conceal explosive devices in toothpaste or flammable clothing as a means to target U.S. airliners. The day following the first bombings, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed: “We hit them last night out of a concern that they were getting close to an execution date of some of the plans that we have seen.”

CNN’s supremely stenographic Pentagon reporter, Barbara Starr, went on air as videos of shiny new American fighter jets and the Syria bombing were shown and explained that this was all necessary to stop a Khorasan attack very close to being carried out against the west:

What we are hearing from a senior US official is the reason they struck Khorasan right now is they had intelligence that the group — of Al Qaeda veterans — was in the stages of planning an attack against the US homeland and/or an attack against a target in Europe, and the information indicated Khorasan was well on its way — perhaps in its final stages — of planning that attack.

All of that laid the fear-producing groundwork for President Obama to claim self-defense when he announced the bombing campaign on September 23 with this boast: “Once again, it must be clear to anyone who would plot against America and try to do Americans harm that we will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people.”

The very next day, a Pentagon official claimed a U.S. airstrike killed “the Khorasan leader,” and just a few days after that, U.S. media outlets celebrated what they said was the admission by jihadi social media accounts that “the leader of the al Qaeda-linked Khorasan group was killed in a U.S. air strike in Syria.”

But once it served its purpose of justifying the start of the bombing campaign in Syria, the Khorasan narrative simply evaporated as quickly as it materialized. Foreign Policy‘s Shane Harris, with two other writers, was one of the first to question whether the “threat” was anywhere near what it had been depicted to be:

But according to the top U.S. counterterrorism official, as well as Obama himself, there is “no credible information” that the militants of the Islamic State were planning to attack inside the United States. Although the group could pose a domestic terrorism threat if left unchecked, any plot it tried launching today would be “limited in scope” and “nothing like a 9/11-scale attack,” Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in remarks at the Brookings Institution earlier this month. That would suggest that Khorasan doesn’t have the capability either, even if it’s working to develop it.

“Khorasan has the desire to attack, though we’re not sure their capabilities match their desire,” a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told Foreign Policy.

On September 25, The New York Times — just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland — wrote that “the group’s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.” And the paper of record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland:

American officials have given differing accounts about just how close the group was to mounting an attack, and about what chance any plot had of success. One senior American official on Wednesday described the Khorasan plotting as “aspirational” and said that there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works.

Literally within a matter of days, we went from “perhaps in its final stages of planning its attack” (CNN) to “plotting as ‘aspirational’” and “there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works” (NYT).

Late last week, Associated Press’ Ken Dilanian — the first to unveil the new Khorasan Product in mid-September — published a new story explaining that just days after bombing “Khorasan” targets in Syria, high-ranking U.S. officials seemingly backed off all their previous claims of an “imminent” threat from the group. Headlined “U.S. Officials Offer More Nuanced Take on Khorasan Threat,” it noted that “several U.S. officials told reporters this week that the group was in the final stages of planning an attack on the West, leaving the impression that such an attack was about to happen.” But now:

Senior U.S. officials offered a more nuanced picture Thursday of the threat they believe is posed by an al-Qaida cell in Syria targeted in military strikes this week, even as they defended the decision to attack the militants.

James Comey, the FBI director, and Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, each acknowledged that the U.S. did not have precise intelligence about where or when the cell, known as the Khorasan Group, would attempt to strike a Western target. . . .

Kirby, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said, “I don’t know that we can pin that down to a day or month or week or six months….We can have this debate about whether it was valid to hit them or not, or whether it was too soon or too late…We hit them. And I don’t think we need to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes.”

Regarding claims that an attack was “imminent,” Comey said: “I don’t know exactly what that word means…’imminent’” — a rather consequential admission given that said imminence was used as the justification for launching military action in the first place.

Even more remarkable, it turns out the very existence of an actual “Khorasan Group” was to some degree an invention of the American government. NBC’s Engel, the day after he reported on the U.S. government’s claims about the group for Nightly News, seemed to have serious second thoughts about the group’s existence, tweeting:

Indeed, a Nexis search for the group found almost no mentions of its name prior to the September 13 AP article based on anonymous officials. There was one oblique reference to it in a July 31 CNN op-ed by Peter Bergen. The other mention was an article in the LA Times from two weeks earlier about Pakistan which mentioned the group’s name as something quite different than how it’s being used now: as “the intelligence wing of the powerful Pakistani Taliban faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur.” Tim Shorrock noted that the name appears in a 2011 hacked Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks, referencing a Dawn article that depicts them as a Pakistan-based group which was fighting against and “expelled by” (not “led by”) Bahadur.

There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, told Time: “I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,” while Obama’s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: ”We used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don’t know where it came from….All I know is that they don’t call themselves that.” As The Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that the group was a scam: “You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”

What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””

As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets — eager, as always, to justify American wars — spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. government was trying not to talk about all of this — too secret! — but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerges only when it’s impotent.

How imminent is an 'imminent' attack threat?

by

 

Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville, Jr., Director of Operations J3, speaks about the operations in Syria, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, during a news conference at the Pentagon. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville, Jr., Director of Operations J3, speaks about the operations in Syria, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, during a news conference at the Pentagon. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

– by Nancy Benac, AP

Washigton: Smart people in the administration have spent the last two days telling the American people that U.S. strikes against the Khorasan Group were necessary to disrupt “imminent attack plotting” against U.S. and Western interests.

They warned that members of the shadowy Khorasan Group, an al-Qaida offshoot, were “nearing the execution phase” of an attack in the U.S. or Europe.

They spoke of “active plotting that posed an imminent threat.”

People may have come away with the impression that the terror group was on the brink of pulling off something awful.

Perhaps not.

In government-speak, “imminent attack plotting” doesn’t necessarily mean an attack is imminent.

Careful parsing of the language reveals a distinction between imminent plotting and an imminent attack.

Likewise, an imminent threat doesn’t necessarily mean an imminent attack.

And, in the view of the government, there’s more than one meaning for imminent, it turns out.

Dictionary.com defines imminent as “likely to occur at any moment.”

But a Justice Department white paper released in February 2013 gives a more nuanced view.

“An ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo reads.

That’s because U.S. officials say they can’t wait until preparations for a terrorist act are completed before they take action to defend U.S. interests.

So their idea of taking action against an “imminent threat” involves a more elastic time frame.

In the case of the Khorasan Group, two U.S. officials told the AP that U.S. officials aren’t aware of the terrorists identifying any particular location or target for an attack in the near future. But intelligence officials have known for months that Khorasan group extremists were scheming with bomb-makers from al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate to find new ways to get explosives onto planes, the officials said.

The plans were far enough along that the Transportation Security Administration over the summer banned uncharged mobile phones and laptops from flights to the U.S. that originate in Europe and the Middle East.

Despite persistent questioning after the airstrikes, U.S. officials have not explained whether something changed in recent weeks to compel them to launch cruise missiles.

Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday on CNN that, although the U.S. had been tracking the group’s plots for some time, “the moment actually was ripe,” for military strikes.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the imminent threat of the al Qaida-linked Khorasan group this way Wednesday at a defense writer’s breakfast:

“The briefings we had indicated that there was a growing ability, near ability to put together an explosive device which could get through the security at airports and that’s all I can tell you. And they were at a point, at a critical point in being able to develop that capability.”

Two American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal decision-making, told the AP that the government was concerned that the group could go underground after the AP reported that it was a top U.S. concern.

A bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued Tuesday said U.S. officials had “no indicators of advanced al-Qaida or ISIL plotting in the homeland.” But that memo, which used ISIL as an acronym for the militant Islamic State group, doesn’t rule out terror plotting afoot elsewhere that could be focused on U.S. targets.

AP Intelligence Writer Ken Dilanian and AP writer Donna Cassata contributed to this report.

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