Trump's new Syrian envoy is the same Neocon that lied us into Iraq
Were you under the impression that America's days of poorly-planned, unprovoked, regime change wars were over? Did you not vote for Hillary because Donald seemed like less of a neocon?
Well, think again!
The Donald Trump administration is expected to name John Hannah as the next US Syria envoy...
Hannah, who served as the top national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, currently is a senior counselor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Before serving as Cheney’s deputy national security adviser for the Middle East (2001-2004) and then national security adviser (2005-2009)...
Did you just get a cold chill down your spine? There's a very good reason for that.
John Hannah didn't just serve in the Vice President's office while it lied us into invading Iraq. Hannah led the effort to trick us into war.
On June 26, 2002, the INC wrote a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee staff identifying Hannah as the White House recipient of information gathered by the group through a U.S.-funded effort called the Information Collection Program. Knight Ridder obtained a copy of the letter and previously reported on it.
The letter, written by Entifadh Qanbar, then the director of the INC’s Washington office, identified 108 articles in leading Western news media to which it said the INC had funneled the same information that it fed to Hannah, as well as a senior Pentagon official.
The information included a claim by an INC-supplied defector, Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, that he had visited 20 secret nuclear, biological and chemical warfare facilities in Iraq.
Haideri’s claim first appeared in a Dec. 20, 2001, article in The New York Times and then in a White House background paper, “A Decade of Deception and Defiance,” released in conjunction with a Sept. 12, 2002, speech to the U.N. General Assembly by Bush.
Hannah was one of the architects of the infamous speech then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations.
Hannah was the guy that defended the material in the speech when Powell’s chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, challenged it's veracity.
Hannah was also at that time a supporter of an eccentric academic named Laurie Mylroie who had developed the bizarre conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein, not Islamic extremists such as Al Qaeda, was responsible for most of the world’s anti-United States terrorism. This was a notion discredited by the US intelligence community but embraced by neocons searching for reasons to go to war against the Iraqi dictator.
But wait, it gets better! Hannah was one of the members of Cheney's staff involved in outing Valerie Plame.
If you think lying us into a catastrophic war might change Hannah's tune, you don't know neocons. Failure never gets in the way of their agenda.
Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney's national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 "the year of Iran" and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility.
OK. So the guy is a real dirt-bag, but what does that got to do with Syria?
I'm glad you asked.
I would like to direct the attention of the court to this WashPost article from March 26, 2005, with the title Bush Administration Probes Syria's Future With Assad's Opposition.
About halfway down the article you will find:
A meeting Thursday, hosted by new State Department "democracy czar" Elizabeth Cheney, brought together senior administration officials from Vice President Cheney's office, the National Security Council and the Pentagon and about a dozen prominent Syrian Americans, including political activists, community leaders, academics and an opposition group, a senior State Department official said...
U.S. officials, however, yesterday denied that the meeting was intended to coordinate efforts to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad's government....
Ghadry said the Syrian opposition was encouraged by the "open and constructive" meeting, which was attended by key players in the administration's democracy policy such as John Hannah from Cheney's office, Robert Danin from the National Security Council and the Pentagon's David Schenker.
In 2009-2010 Hannah was co-authoring reports calling for regime change in Syria with names like “Which Path to Persia?”, “Paths to Persia”, and “Towards a Post-Assad Syria”.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence just released a report that states the armed opposition groups and Sunni fighters in Syria are “probably no longer capable of overthrowing President Bashar Al-Assad or overcoming a growing military advantage”.
Given that fact, it sort of makes sense that our forces have began killing Syrian government troops.
I'm sure Hannah would agree that if you want to do something really f'd up, you've got to do it yourself.

Comments
I thought The Donald
would be who he's turned out to be. Didn't and doesn't matter. No way I could vote for Her Highness. I didn't - and still don't - see any way of recovering from that. She would have gone on Her six month victory tour and any memory of Her Resistors - progressives - would have been relegated to the history books. If there. And Kos et.al. drinking champagne celebrating how smart they all were, pointing at progressives, "See! I TOLD you bastids!"
Nope. I couldn't pull the lever for Her Highness. "We" (progressives) wouldn't have had a chance to restore sanity. And while our chances even now are slim and none, at least there is a chance "we" can pull off the upset.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
@Wink
The Mad Bomber was eager to get Bibi in for consultation as soon as she was in office, get that illegal Syrian no-Fly Zone established as an excuse to shoot down Russian planes - no point in continuing from there, since it's doubtful that any of us would have continued long past that point. At least Trump gave us a little breathing space we would not otherwise have had.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
I think you have it surrounded.
Direct attacks on Assad forces by US jets. Israel bombing Syria in search for the elusive Iranians. Chemical weapons scares. ISIS and Al Queda could not overthrow Assad.
Don't have clue where Turkey fits into basically an invasion of Syria by US and Israel.
You know, I am not sure Trump knows what is going on. Russiagate has succeeded in that Trump totally conceded control of foreign and war policy to the neocons.
What next? Nuland the new ambassador to Russia or the Ukraine? Dick Cheney appointed to head the Pentagon?
I just want to say,
if you're not seeing a lot of comments right away, it may have to do with the horror of it, which I think you eluded to. At least in my case it does. How is it possible that someone with zero, rather, less than zero, credibility has such power in our government? It must be that he is doing what our government wants.
This essay was an actual piece of journalism
All I saw was an announcement of the appointment.
I thought, "that name is familiar."
Then I looked around, and every search result that got a hit was worse than the last, until I finally said, "Fuck! Basta!"
Good on you for this work. Thanks.
Love to see his appointment stopped.
FWIW interesting Twitter thread
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
One thing for sure.
They will never tell the truth about the real motivations for US involvement in Syria (which is probably why Hannah is involved, to come up with a 'believable' cover story).
I'm still a subscriber to the theory of the war in Syria being a "pipeline war," fought to ensure that the natural gas from Qatar would go to Europe through Syria and would weaken Europe's dependence on Russia for its energy.
Some say this has been 'debunked' because such a pipeline would have to go through Saudi-held territory, something the Saudis have not agreed to because Assad has also agreed to let Iran in on the deal to furnish gas to Europe.
But a lot of this theoretical incompetence at the top (the profit-motives of involved/affected nation states) kinda matches the unexplainable alliances on the ground.
It looks like Assad (who is trying to protect Russian interests) is at war with a mixed up 'coalition' (which includes the US) that wants to cut off Russia's gas exports to Europe, but they can't quite agree on which way to go about it (i.e. which countries would profit the most by cutting off Russia's gas exports to Europe).
None of this could be accurate, but what we know for sure is that we'll never be told the truth, so a guess is better than a known fictitious cover story.
Mike Taylor
Did you happen to see this?
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
I'm not sure we were tricked into war.
We were, after all, voted into war.
Not a single person I knew then believed Bushco. On every message board on which I have posted since then (except this one), I've asked whether the posters had believed Bushco. Everyone says no. Susan Sarandon spent her own money to buy a TV ad to say, among other things, "Before we go to war against Iraq, I'd like to know what Iraq has done to us. Wouldn't you?" Why would D.C. politicians who had access to more information than my RL friends and acqaintances, message board posters and an actress had be more fooled than wll of us were?
I don't think it is a coincidence that every Democrat in Congress then who sought the Democratic nomination for President in 2004 or 2008 was "fooled" into voting for the Iraq War, including Biden, who portrayed himself as a foreign policy expert. The sole exception was Kucinich, who knew he would not be getting the Democratic nomination for POTUS.