For the second time this year, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh has delivered a deadly blow to Obama in a nearly 7,000-word article published Sunday in the London Review of Books (LRB) (issue date, January 7, 2016) called “Military to Military.” Or—how the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) saved the United States from a confrontation with Russia that would have installed the British-Saudi-created ISIS in power in Syria. Key to the war avoidance operations was Gen. Martin Dempsey, then head of the JCS, who retired in September 2013.  But, since Dempsey’s retirement, the “military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared,” and now Obama has “a more compliant Pentagon.” However, the British, Saudi, Turkish help for the jihadi killers still continues, Hersh says.

Hersh’s information could finish off Obama—if the Congress had the guts to open the file beginning with the 28 pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry of the 9/11 attacks that show the Saudi hand behind the attack, and to continue with the full public investigation of Obama’s crimes of illegal wars, extra-judicial killings, and creating terrorist armies. The first Hersh article earlier this year got the White House howling because it showed that Obama’s story of the killing Osama Bin Laden was a complete fabrication.

In the latest article, Hersh delivers a devastating dossier on the how the U.S. military circles prevented Obama, the Saudis, Erdogan’s Turkey, and the British from handing Syria over to ISIS.

“Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office—and that there are moderate rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him—has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff,” the article begins. “Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin.” Hersh cites a highly classified document from the summer of 2013, produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and JCS; interviews a former adviser to the JCS, and reports extensive comments from interviews with an adviser to the Kremlin on the Middle East.

“The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite, and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to ship guns and goods—to be used for the overthrow of Assad—from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria…. The document showed, the adviser said, `The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: There was no viable moderate opposition to Assad, and the U.S. was arming extremists.”

Hersh interviewed former DIA director, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who confirmed that the DIA “had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad.”

Flynn told him, “If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic…. We understood ISIS’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria. The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’”

As the U.S. intelligence reports mounted, showing the U.S. and its “allies” were arming the jihadis, the U.S. military acted on its own, using military-to-military channels, to provide hard intelligence on jihadi operations to Germany, Russia, and Israel. The military believed that these nations, known to have open channels to Syria, could indirectly ensure delivery of crucial intelligence to defeat the jihadis.  The White House, the military believed, would have blocked any intelligence sharing that would interfere with the regime change agenda, Hersh writes.

Another key source for Hersh’s article is a Kremlin adviser on the Middle East.

Read the full article here.

Although it is hardly a torrent, there is growing coverage of the imminent blowout of the financial system, on a scale much greater than 2007-2008.

*  The Daily Telegraph‘s Jeremy Warner, citing the collapse of the junk debt-saddled Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund, warned in a Dec. 16 column that the system is headed for a bigger crash than 2008.  “Are we about to see history repeat itself?  That’s been the question on everybody’s lips since the closure last week—or ‘shuttering,’ to use the technical term—of the Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund, one of a number of funds set up to chase yields in a world of poor to non-existent rates of return. Two other smaller U.S. funds have also since taken action to prevent investors from removing their money.  It’s all eerily reminiscent of the events leading up to the credit crunch of seven years ago. Did we learn nothing from the greatest financial crisis in history; and by treating its symptoms with vast quantities of central bank money printing, did we not merely set ourselves up for the next one?”

Warner cited the concentration of junk debt in the shale oil and gas sector, and cited a recent Standard & Poors forecast of a 50 percent bankruptcy rate for all energy related junk bonds, as evidence that the situation is nearing blowout.  Warner quoted Carl Icahn warning that the corporate distressed debt market is a “keg of dynamite that sooner or later will blow up.”  Warner concluded that “the world economy has never been more awash with debt.  In this sense, the high yield squall may well be a harbinger of much worse to come.”

*  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard warned on Dec. 19 that the global coal sector is also headed for a major crash, as was recently warned of, in a report by the International Energy Agency.  While some of the decline in coal output is driven by China’s energy modernization program, the impact on the financial bubble behind the coal sector is nearing a danger point.

*  Edward Lotterman, a columnist for the Pioneer Press in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, warned in a Dec. 20 column that the incoming President of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, Neel Kashkari, is facing a new too-big-to-fail crash.  He ended his analysis by warning, “So despite pious promises from presidential candidates eschewing all future bailouts, we are even more vulnerable to a financial crisis than we were in 2007. We are rim of the abyss on which we teetered just seven years ago.  Few if any politicians are talking about it.”