{"id":211817,"date":"2015-12-26T02:59:18","date_gmt":"2015-12-26T02:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=211817"},"modified":"2015-12-26T02:59:18","modified_gmt":"2015-12-26T02:59:18","slug":"russia-counts-12000-turkey-bound-oil-trucks-from-iraq-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/russia-counts-12000-turkey-bound-oil-trucks-from-iraq-syria\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia Counts 12,000 Turkey-Bound Oil Trucks from Iraq & Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Requests U.S. Assistance to Bomb Them; U.S. Again Says No.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

How the Public Get Suckered by \u2018News\u2019 Media Ignoring Reality<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

According to\u00a0Russian Television on December 25th<\/span><\/a>, Russian intelligence has counted \u201cup to 12,000\u201d tanker trucks filled with oil \u201con the Turkish-Iraqi border,\u201d and \u201cthe final destination remains to be Turkey.\u201d In addition, some of those trucks are still heading into Turkey from Syria, but their number is \u201cdecreased\u201d because Russia\u2019s Syrian bombing campaign, which started on September 30th, has, ever since they began bombing the oil trucks on November 18th, destroyed \u201cup to 2,000\u201d of those trucks, that were in Syria heading into Turkey.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the news report, Russia is requesting help from the U.S. coalition to bomb the \u201cup to 12,000\u201d trucks that are in Iraq carrying ISIS oil into Turkey. ISIS drives them there so that ISIS can become self-sustaining by the oil-sales. ISIS, which had long been supported by America\u2019s allies the Arab oil potentates \u2013 all of whom are fundamentalist Sunnis \u2013 aims to be self-sustaining now on the sales of this stolen oil through Turkey, which is operating the black market in ISIS\u2019s stolen oil. That\u2019s why Russia wants to stamp out this market. \u201cHowever, so far, Washington says that it is not ready for such a move,\u201d the report says. <\/span><\/p>\n

Whereas Russia had begun on November 18th to bomb those trucks en-route into Turkey, and eliminated around 500 of them at that time, the U.S. coalition hadn\u2019t bombed any such trucks until later that day, November 18th, in order to pretend to be competitive with what Russia had been doing since it started on 30 September 2015, to bomb in Syria. Before the U.S. bombed the 116 trucks it destroyed<\/span><\/a>, it warned the drivers 45 minutes in advance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here was the shocking admission that was made by the\u00a0U.S. Defense Department\u2019s press-spokesman at his 18 November 2015 presentation,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in which he voluntarily acknowledged that, throughout all of the 14 months<\/span><\/a> during which the U.S. had been bombing in Syria and in Iraq, the U.S. hadn\u2019t previously destroyed any<\/i> <\/span>of the tens of thousands of oil tank-trucks that had been transporting ISIS’s stolen oil out from Iraq and from Syria \u2013 the stolen-oil sales that bring $2B per year into ISIS coffers \u2013 and that the U.S. had warned 45-minutes in advance:<\/span><\/p>\n

This is our first strike against tanker trucks, and to minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike. We did a show of force, by \u2013 we had aircraft essentially buzz the trucks at low altitude.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

So, I do have copy of the leaflet, and I have got some videos, so why don’t you pull the leaflet up. Let me take a look at it so I can talk about it.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

As you can see, it’s a fairly simple leaflet, it says, “Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them.” A very simple message.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

And then, also, “Warning: airstrikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

And so, these are the leaflets that we dropped \u2013 about 45 minutes before the airstrikes actually began. Again, we combine these leaflet drops with very low altitude passes of some of our attack aviation, which sends a very powerful message.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

So: not only had the U.S. previously avoided destroying ISIS\u2019s main current source of income (besides the multimillion-dollar donations made by members of the royal families of Saudi Arabia<\/span><\/a>, Qatar<\/span><\/a>, UAE, and Kuwait \u2013 all of whom are protected by the U.S.) (and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had urged all of them on 30 December 2009 please to stop funding their terrorists<\/span><\/a>), but, when the U.S. now started to bomb those tank-trucks filled with stolen oil, the U.S. warned in advance the drivers, who were also assets to the jihadist cause the U.S. pretended to oppose, and thus were enemies of the public (and were participants in the evils of ISIS)<\/i>. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) wanted to protect them \u2013 not<\/i> to kill them. That was done \u201cto minimize risks to civilians.\u201d Wow!! After the U.S. history of slaughtering millions of civilians in wars, and torturing many, including complete innocents in Iraq and elsewhere, we\u2019re now protecting ISIS\u2019s drivers? Can any hypocrisy exceed this? If the United States were a democracy, its press would have been focusing on this issue for a week. The U.S. protecting ISIS\u2019s financial base, and assets, has mind-boggling implications. On what side are \u2018we\u2019 \u2013 and who are \u201cwe,\u201d and who are \u201cthem\u201d? We are not the aristocracy. The aristocracy are them. It includes the top stockholders in firms such as Lockheed Martin. Warren Buffett said in 2006 \u201cThere\u2019s class warfare, all right, but it\u2019s my class, the rich class, that\u2019s making war, and we\u2019re winning.\u201d<\/span><\/a> That\u2019s shocking honesty.<\/span><\/p>\n

Did any of the major U.S. news media, all of which have reporters attending those press conferences, report the U.S. Government\u2019s open admission<\/i> <\/span>there, that the U.S. Government had protected ISIS all along, not bombed any<\/i> <\/span>of ISIS\u2019s oil tank-trucks (until Russia did)? Those trucks providing $2B per year to ISIS terrorists? None<\/i> <\/span>of them reported it. None of them conveyed to their audience this astounding information \u2013 essentially, that the U.S. was protecting the money-flow to the jihadists in Syria, and was even protecting their truckers, and its \u2018press\u2019 were protecting them<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another major revelation at this same press conference was that “we right now have no plans to conduct coordinated operations with the Russians\u201d in Syria. And this was reconfirmed on December 25th from the Russian side, as being still the U.S. policy. In other words: the U.S. President is so hostile toward Russia, that, even months after Russia\u2019s request to Washington on September 30th to cooperate in killing all jihadists in Syria, Obama still refuses to work together with Russia, or even just to \u201ccoordinate operations with the Russians,\u201d to kill the jihadists<\/i>. (And, in the Democratic debate on 19 December 2015<\/span><\/a>, Hillary Clinton insisted that eliminating the jihadists in Syria mustn\u2019t have higher priority than, nor occur before, Bashar al-Assad is permanently removed from Syria\u2019s leadership. Her position is at least as anti-Russian as Obama\u2019s.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The jihadists had flocked into Syria to oust the non-sectarian leader of that country, Assad, and to replace him with an Islamist leader, a Sharia-law Sunni, whom the U.S. Government, and the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait, approve of as being better than the non<\/i>-sectarian Assad (who is personally a Shiite, but runs a decidedly unsectarian, secular, government). The jihadists work for the American alliance. <\/span><\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s position on the matter is that no foreign power possesses the right to determine whom the President of Syria will or won\u2019t be; only the Syrian people do, in an election. Russia insists that it be determined in internationally monitored and overseen elections. However, polls taken by Western polling firms indicate that Assad would overwhelmingly win any such election<\/span><\/a>; so, U.S. President Barack Obama has rejected democracy for Syria<\/span><\/a>. And yet, the U.S. accuses Putin of being dictatorial, and claims itself to be \u2018democratic.\u2019 And the U.S. President demands that Syria\u2019s legal President be removed from power and excluded from any possibility of ever again becoming that nation\u2019s President. This is America\u2019s version of \u2018democracy\u2019 in Syria.<\/span><\/p>\n

The DOD spokesperson, Steve Warren, spoke contemptuously of Russia. He said that in Russia\u2019s war against jihadists in Syria, “the Russians are using dumb bombs.\u00a0Their history has been both reckless and irresponsible.\u201d This statement was being made by a military spokesman for the same Government that in the most \u201creckless and irresponsible\u201d manner had invaded and destroyed Iraq in 2003. However, his statement here was also, itself, simply false. Russia\u2019s bombings have been with both precision-guided weapons and unguided munitions that are under no control after being fired.<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

Warren there was reaffirming a reporter\u2019s question which had asserted: \u201cGetting back to Raqqa, as we all know, the Russians\u00a0are not using precision munitions.\u00a0Any sense of any increased civilian\u00a0casualties in Raqqa as a result of that?\u201d So, Warren was here reaffirming a reporter\u2019s (or actually, a press-appointed government stenographer\u2019s) falsehood \u2013 reaffirming an assertion that was either unprofessionally ignorant, or else a knowing lie. On September 30th, when Russia had started its air strikes, the U.S. had said that they were\u00a0\u201cdoomed to failure.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0That, too, seems increasingly likely to have been false (that it was \u201cdoomed to failure\u201d). (And any such pretended foresight is also a lie when it comes from an official source such as a government. It was mere propaganda.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of the mainstream U.S. press reporting that the U.S. Government lied there (and this Government does it routinely, because the \u2018press\u2019 never report that a lie by the President is<\/i> <\/span>a lie), only a small number of only non-mainstream sites, all online-only<\/i>, picked up anything from this stunning press conference, regarding any of the important and much-discussed issues that it addressed; and the first such site to do so was a fundamentalist Christian one, which is obsessively pro-Israel, and generally hard-rightwing Republican. Bridget Johnson at PJ Media headlined, on the same day as the press conference (the only site to report at all upon it that day, November 18th),\u00a0\u201cISIS Oil Tankers Hit for First Time \u2014 With 45-Minute Warning.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0This was an admirable reporting coup (though it wasn\u2019t really \u201cfor First Time,\u201d since Russian bombers<\/i> <\/span>had already done it), because it covered all of the main points, including the shocking admissions by Mr. Warren. Her news coup had over 1,400 reader-comments.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paul Joseph Watson, at the generally conservative Republican site InfoWars, bannered on November 23rd,\u00a0“WHITE HOUSE GAVE ISIS 45 MINUTE WARNING BEFORE BOMBING OIL TANKERS,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and he placed these matters honestly into their geostrategic context, of the Obama Administration\u2019s placing a higher priority upon defeating Russia than defeating jihadism. As is so often the case with the terrific journalist Watson, he penetrated deeply into these matters, and was not at all shy to acknowledge, for example, the following stark contrast, which U.S. \u2018news\u2019 media hide:<\/span><\/p>\n

Compare the Obama White House\u2019s approach to fighting ISIS to that of Russia.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

While it took the U.S. fifteen months to even begin targeting ISIS\u2019 oil refineries and tankers,\u00a0air strikes by Moscow\u00a0destroyed more than 1,000 tankers in a period of just five days.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

In comparison, Col. Steve Warren said that the U.S. had taken out only 116 tanker trucks, the\u00a0\u201cfirst strike\u201d to target ISIS\u2019 lucrative black market oil business, which funds over 50 per cent of\u00a0the terror group\u2019s activities.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

So: this, too, like Bridget Johnson\u2019s report, was honest and first-rate news-reporting, from another non-mainstream Republican site. (Note, however, that the mainstream<\/i> <\/span>Republican news-sites, such as Fox News, Wall Street Journal<\/i>, and Rush Limbaugh, were no more forthcoming on this matter than all of the Democratic Party sites were.) <\/span><\/p>\n

The aristocracy\u2019s control over all the mainstream \u2018news\u2019 is ironclad \u2013 and this includes the political magazines, such as National Review<\/i>, and The Nation;<\/i> <\/span>as well as \u2018intellectual\u2019 magazines, such as Harpers <\/span><\/i>and The Atlantic<\/i>. <\/span>American \u2018news\u2019 media stifle democracy in America; they\u2019re not part of<\/i> <\/span>democracy, in America. They\u2019re like poison that\u2019s presented as being \u2018medicine\u2019 instead. Suckers don\u2019t just swallow it; they come back for more of that propaganda.<\/span><\/p>\n

The next day, November 23rd, \u201cTyler Durden,\u201d the pseudonymous genius behind his own Zero Hedge blog, headlined\u00a0“‘Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away’: US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil\u00a0Tanker Strikes,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and he reported using some of the same sources as the others, but supplementing it with additional good sources. He had around 400 reader-comments.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, there were some trashy news-reports at far-right Republican sites, such as one, on November 19th, crediting Bridget Johnson\u2019s news report the day before as its source,\u00a0“The Obamization of the military, pt. 243.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0This was by J.R. Dunn, at the fundamentalist Republican, American Thinker, blog. He pretended that Obama was being bad here because Obama was too concerned to avoid bloodshed: \u201cYou see, the important thing isn\u2019t hurting ISIS. No\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the\u00a0important thing is not hurting civilians.\u201d Picking up from the standard Republican meme that torture should be used against \u2018bad people\u2019 in order for \u2018good people\u2019 to be kept safe, and that civilians in \u2018enemy\u2019 nations are okay to be victims of American military attacks, Dunn took Bridget Johnson\u2019s news-report merely as confirmation of his own bigotries and hatreds. He had about 150 reader-comments. Typical was this one: “The Left in America has known that in order to succeed with their\u00a0agenda\u00a0the US military had to be infiltrated, compromised, and\u00a0weakened.\u201d For such suckers, the \u2018source\u2019 of America\u2019s problems wasn\u2019t America\u2019s aristocracy; it was America\u2019s Democrats.<\/span><\/p>\n

On November 24th, Michael Morell, Obama\u2019s CIA Director during 2011-2013, said on the trashy PBS Charlie Rose show (hosted by Mr. Rose, who is such an incompetent interviewer that he\u2019s beloved by aristocrats for his reliably softball interviews),\u00a0\u201cWe didn\u2019t go after oil wells, actually hitting oil wells that\u00a0ISIS controls, because we didn\u2019t want to do\u00a0environmental damage, and we didn\u2019t want to destroy\u00a0that infrastructure.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Of course, Mr. Rose avoided drilling down there to find out why the U.S. Government treats jihadists as being such a minor matter \u2013 especially after all of the environmental damage the U.S. routinely does in its invasions, such as the depleted uranium that contaminates today\u2019s Iraq, from the U.S. attacks. And, of course, almost all of the news-media that picked up on that stunning admission from Obama\u2019s former CIA Director, were Republican sites, such as Daily Caller, Washington Times, Breitbart, Real Clear Politics, and American Thinker. In addition, there were a few high quality journalistic sites reporting it, such as Zero Hedge, The Hill,\u00a0The Economic Collapse<\/span><\/a>, and Moon of Alabama. In other words: only very few Americans came to know about this jaw-dropping stunning admission from an Obama official \u2013 and most who did were people who hate Obama for his being such things as \u2018against torture\u2019 (in other words: Republican stooges of the aristocracy).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Basically, in America, only marginal, and mainly right-wing, audiences were being informed even badly, regarding the sensational things that were revealed \u2013 and in some instances proudly<\/i> <\/span>revealed \u2013 at the November 18th DOD press conference, and also in the November 24th TV interview of Morell. What is traditionally viewed as being America\u2019s \u201cnews media\u201d were entirely absent from their job of reporting even one of these two important statements by U.S. Government officials. And none of the news-reports on that astounding DOD press conference, and of that Morell interview, reached Democratic Party voters at all<\/i>. Republicans hate Obama because he\u2019s a communist Islamic Kenyan, while Democrats love Obama because the wacko Republican Party lies about him constantly and because Obama is to the left of those blithering wackos.<\/span><\/p>\n

A press like this makes it impossible for there to be intelligent, informed, rather than misinformed and\/or stupid, voting in national political elections in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps the biggest scandal in America is its rigid aristocratically controlled \u2018press,\u2019 which is really nothing more than a whored propaganda-operation that\u2019s run by and for the nation\u2019s aristocracy. The owners of America\u2019s \u2018news\u2019 media know that the way for the press to make money in this type of dictatorship<\/span><\/a> is to sell to the aristocrats\u2019 corporations access to the public, and to \u2018report\u2019 only \u2018news\u2019 that the corporate sponsors don\u2019t mind the public\u2019s knowing about.<\/span><\/p>\n

So: this is how the public get suckered, in America.<\/span><\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t be so bad if the American Government didn\u2019t hypocritically claim to be a \u2018democracy.\u2019<\/span><\/a> That\u2019s just piling it on, with a shovel.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Requests U.S. Assistance to Bomb Them; U.S. Again Says No. How the Public Get Suckered by \u2018News\u2019 Media Ignoring Reality Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org According to\u00a0Russian Television on December 25th, Russian intelligence has counted \u201cup to 12,000\u201d tanker trucks filled with oil \u201con the Turkish-Iraqi border,\u201d and \u201cthe final destination remains to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":196529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[115,30,96,1035,535,38,907,59,1017,1023,524,754,92,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-211817","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-barack-obama","9":"tag-big-brother","10":"tag-cover-up","11":"tag-daily-news","12":"tag-global-news","13":"tag-iraq","14":"tag-isis","15":"tag-military","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-nuclear","18":"tag-russia","19":"tag-syria","20":"tag-terrorism","21":"tag-usa-news","22":"tag-warfare","23":"tag-white-house","24":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}