SCHILLER INSTITUTE CONFERENCE
Building A World Land-Bridge:
Realizing Mankind's True Humanity
Thursday, April 7, 2016, 9:00am - 9:30pm
NEW YORK CITY
Video Presentation by State Senator Richard Black
Conference Program and videos
Invitation
SENATOR RICHARD BLACK: I'm Sen. Dick Black, State Senator of Virginia. I have a long military history, I fought with the First Marine Regiment in Vietnam and also flew helicopters on quite a number of missions, so I'm very pro-military, but at the same time I have very deep reservations about what we're doing in Syria.
So, I'd like to talk with you; welcome to the Schiller conference, and I'd like to just give you a rundown on where we stand today and kind of how we got there. Syria is the essential nation in the Middle East, because everything revolves around Syria, and this is a brief countdown to the Syrian war; and there are things that preceded it, obviously. But I want to just start with 2001.
In 2001, the Pentagon started war-planning to topple the Syrian government. Wesley Clark said that after the 9/11 attacks he was in the Pentagon, visited with the Secretary of Defense, and then he went and he spoke with a friend of his who was a general and the general said, “Boss, you got to look at this.” He said, “What is it?”
He said, “We're going to attack Iraq!” And General Clark said, “Why? Have we found something on weapons of mass destruction?” The general said, “No”; he said, “It looks like we just figured we got a great military and we got a problem and we're going to do something with it.”
About a month later, General Clark goes back in and he looks up this same general. He says, “Is it still on? Are we still going to attack Iraq?” And the general said, “Hey, it's worse than that,” and he pulled up a sheet of paper; he says, “we've got plans now to topple seven governments in the Middle East.” Now, one of them was Syria; one of them was also Libya, which ties in with Syria, so I want to discuss both. But in any event, the war-planning had clearly begun in 2001.
Now, what's important about 2001? Well, the Syrian war did not begin until 10 years later. There were no uprisings in Syria; the Syrians were prosperous, it was one of the most prosperous nations in the Middle East, one of the most advanced. Syria had the greatest women's rights and the greatest religious freedom of any of the Arab nations. Think about that: Here, we've demonized Syria, and yet, they were the nation that had genuine freedom relative to all of the other Arab nations.
So we begin war-planning in 2001. WikiLeaks did a tremendous service, I think, to all of us, when they released some of the diplomatic communiqués out of the Syrian Embassy. A communiqué from the U.S. Embassy in 2006 described a detailed plan for destabilizing and undermining the Syrian government.
The year 2011 becomes a very terrible year in Mideast history: This is when the so-called “Arab Spring” starts in Tunisia and then, all of a sudden, unrest spontaneously occurs in so many countries, as it often does when covert operatives go to work. The United States, Britain, France, took the lead, working together with Turkey, and with Qatar, and we promoted the Libyan uprising. Now, why did we do this? Colonel Qaddafi had become the principal ally of the United States in the war on terror in North Africa; we had had our problems with him, to be sure, but they had been settled, we had normalized relations.
We went in there, and with the great help of Sen. John McCain, we declared that there would be a “no fly zone.” No, a “no fly zone” is a strange name for a “free fire zone” but that's what it is: it's a free fire zone, where you go in and you literally bomb everything to smithereens. That's what we did. By the time that we were finished in Libya, there essentially was no government, there was no culture, there was nothing. Everything was destroyed -- except for the Libyan arms supplies. Colonel Qaddafi had a vast supply of modern arms.
The purpose in overthrowing Libya was to be able to take these advanced weapons from Libya, send them through Turkey, into Syria, to overthrow Syria. And this was their way of getting around having to go to Congress for appropriations; and just say, “Hey, look, Congress: Let's go in and let's attack an allied nation, a neutral, non-belligerent country, and murder its leader -- what d'ya think?” I don't think they'd have gotten very far. It's much easier to simply stage a covert operation, and so that's what happened there.
This is the outline of where we were, how we got there. So, the Syrian war is often presented as a domestic uprising, an uprising of people who wanted freedom and democracy. A Defense Intelligence Agency study that was commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff determined that this is essentially a myth, this idea of “moderate rebels.” It has always been a myth. The Syrian rebels were heavily infiltrated and controlled by the terrorists from the very beginning.
Now, what I'd like to do is go beyond that. If you go back to early in 2015, what had happened is the Turks and the Saudis had teamed up and they had formed something called the Army of Conquest. The Army of Conquest was based and centered around Al Nusra. Al Nusra is al-Qaeda in Syria, and al-Qaeda, you'll recall, is the group that killed 3,000 Americans when they attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11. So Turkey and Saudi Arabia put together this Army of Conquest, based on the very paper who carried out the greatest attack ever on the American homeland.
Turkey runs along the northern border of both Syria and Iraq; now what this map shows you here, the green portions are now controlled by the Kurds. You recall the heroic battle at Kobane? Now, I have spoken to Kurds who were present on the Turkish side of the border; the Turkish army had protected the border with tanks, they put 50 tanks. During the battle of Kobane, the Turks brought convoys of Red Crescent ambulances, which is like the Red Cross in the Middle East, and they loaded them with ISIS jihadis and they used the ambulances, which the Kurds obviously would not fire on, and they used them to carry ammunition and fresh troops into battle for ISIS. So this was going on.
Well, what happened was the Kurds finally managed to get the best of ISIS, they conquered ISIS and rather than simple securing Kobane, they began to attack and they began to move all the way across the border, and they began to seal it and to cut off access to Turkey.
Now, what this did, is, it threatened to totally block access from ISIS. Now, the number-one ally of ISIS is Turkey; Turkey provides them with all of the arms, with all the ammunition, with hospitals to treat their wounded. They have regular routes where jihadists come in from all over the world, who are recruited; they pay various rebels both in al-Qaeda and ISIS. Now, Turkey supplies the Army of Conquest, which is al-Qaeda based, through this gap over here, which they have opened up. But this Kobane gap is where ISIS is supplied.
Now, if you look at the gray area, the gray area is held by ISIS. ISIS has, or they did have, 1200 oil tankers that were running oil through the Kobane gap, 44,000 barrels of oil a day were transitting through there, and unlike the typical border controls that Turkey has over things flowing through, they wave the oil through. They knew what that was, and they knew where it was going. And it was going on the market and they paid good money to ISIS -- this was probably the major single source of financing for ISIS. But it wasn't the only one.
The ISIS terrorists captured, the wonderful, beautiful city of Palmyra, which was one of the architectural treasures of the world. They began to loot, and the looted material was sent up through the Kobane gap and marketed in Turkey. Additionally, in Mosul in Iraq, where the ISIS troops had seized -- this is a city of a million and so they had seized major hospitals and they forced the doctors to do live removal of human body parts, and they would be packed in ice and shipped again through the Kobane gap and sold on the market through Turkey and also through Saudi Arabia. Tremendous amount of money in live body parts, because they could literally select the size: If you have a child, you could get a child's organs. There were various reports of Iraqi doctors who were beheaded for refusing -- they simply refused to open up live children and extract their organs.
But this is the type of trade that our good allies, our NATO allies, Turkey. Turkey is essentially an organized criminal enterprise. This is how they function, this is how they fund themselves. The President of Turkey, President Erdogan he has now won total control of the Parliament and they're going to re-write the Constitution; he has declared that he wants power similar to those of Adolf Hitler. We are now fighting alongside, in a coalition with a man who says that he wants the powers of Adolf Hitler.
And so, as we negotiate for peace in Syria today, we have a spider on one side and a scorpion on the other, and those are Turkey and Saudi Arabia, two of the most vile dictatorships in the world. The Turks have a long history of murdering Christians -- in the Armenian genocide; they're now killing off Kurds within Turkey. The Kurds are about 20% of the Turkish population. We have Saudi Arabia, which has absolutely no freedom whatsoever; women are viewed as total property, and there still is slavery that goes on. They officially abolished slavery in 1962, but it still goes on to some extent even to this day.
So those are our grand allies, the ones that we think we should rely on to improve Syria. The Russians, in what can only be described as an absolutely heroic act on the part of President Putin, moved in with a relatively modest military force: They attacked the oil supply, they began driving back the Army of Conquest and shrinking them in this area. They began bombing around Aleppo, the major industrial center of Syria. Everywhere the rebels, ISIS and al-Qaeda are falling back on every single front throughout the country.
So, in summary, I would simply say, what would end this war? If we want this war to end, and it is essential to American vital interests in the Middle East, that Syria survive and that the terrorists be defeated, the way to do it, is to cut off the TOW anti-tank missiles that we're continuing to send in and we're allowing the Saudi Arabians and the Turks to send in. We must restore peace to the Middle East: Syria is the key to doing it. When this war ends, this tremendous wave of jihadist activity across the globe will begin to subside.
And it's going to be essential, that as it does, we start putting the thumb on Saudi Arabia, which is exporting this Wahhabist poisonous breed of Islamic radicalism which is causes, literally thousands of attacks across the globe monthly -- on a monthly basis! It's a remarkable number! And so, we've got to stop the terrorism and the place to start is in Syria.
So, thank you very much for listening, and we hope that you enjoy the Schiller conference.
