It's not making sense guys
by digby
So, last night I noted that the array of friends and enemies in our bombing campaign in Syria is ... complicated. It's even more complicated than the fact that our close friend Saudi Prince Bandar (aka Bandar Bush) is implicated in creating ISIS as a way to defeat Assad. Today we're seeing more reports about the shadowy group called Khorasan which is allegedly even worse than ISIS which is worse than al-Qaeda which is actually the group behind Khorasan. (I wrote about Khorasan last week when it first bubbled up in the press.)
Well, we're bombing all of them now so hopefully everyone can relax and enjoy the carnage. Just don't try to understand the various relationships here because they are keeping tons of information classified and trickling out whatever they need to trickle out for their own reasons.
The U.S. has said that Khorasan, an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group said to be led by an operative named Muhsin al-Fadhli — who the Department of State has said was based in Iran —was a direct threat to the U.S homeland. But hardly any public information was available about the group before this and some are suggesting the Khorasan group is simply a renaming of already-known Al-Qaeda operatives in Syria.
That started to change in the last week, as stories about Khorasan began appearing in the media. U.S. officials have described the group as being part of Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria fighting both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces as well as ISIS.
According to a source familiar with the situation, U.S. officials have been familiar with Khorasan for months. And Rep. Peter King, the former Homeland Security Committee chair, said that members of Congress have “known about it for several months.”
“I’m surprised it [the name] even came out,” King said. “It was supposed to be top secret, classified, and it wasn’t until last week that an AP story had it in there. But we weren’t supposed to talk about it.”
“The intelligence community has known about it … [Khorasan] are extremely lethal and dangerous,” King said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democratic member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said “we have been briefed on the Khorasan group for some time.”
“I knew about the group a year ago from the media but didn’t know the name or personalities until the past few days—again from the media,” said Will McCants, a terrorism analyst and fellow at the Brookings Institution.
An Amnesty International report on drones in Pakistan from October 2013 refers to an “al-Qa’ida-linked outfit” called Mujahideen Khorasan, but is unclear if it’s the same Khorasan.
Read the whole thing because it's fascinating and informative, but take a couple of Excedrin first because sorting out the truth from the propaganda is impossible.
I don't know why they have inflated the threat of ISIS over this other group which some are saying is the real threat to the west, being al Qaeda and all, but they have. (According to the article, some people doubt that this group is actually more dangerous than either ISIS or al Qaeda ... oy.) Certainly it makes little sense when you consider they have used the 2001 AUMF as their legal rationale for acting --- it specifically requires an al Qaeda connection, which they are saying is closely linked to Khorasan while the connection to ISIS is much more vague. (Remember all the blather about how al Qaeda kicked ISIS out of the clubhouse because it was too brutal?)
Anyway, when you see this kind of contradictory and confusing rationalizing after the bombing campaign has begun, it's probably a good idea to be skeptical that it's all on the up and up. It's happening, whether we like it or not, and the American people seem to be on board. Those videos were a master stroke. But we really have no idea what's really going on.
Oh, and it's nice to know that congress, the alleged overseer that's going to check the president's war making powers, was kept informed about all this for months. I feel so confident now that if we only have a debate everything will properly fall into place.
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