ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

WhoWhatWhy WhoWhatWhy exists in good part to serve as a kind of reality check. Its goal is to step outside the echo chamber, in which, no matter how improbable the “official” story, the media and the public reflexively accept it. WhoWhatWhy exists to remind us that the powerful — whether corporations or presidents or national security agencies — often exaggerate, cherry-pick facts, and even construct total falsehoods in service of their agenda. We see that again and again, with Vietnam, with Watergate, with Iraq, with the claimed reasons for invading Afghanistan , Libya and, through surrogates, Syria . The examples are legion. Each time the propaganda machine comes up with a new story, our society’s default response is to accept it. And the bigger the story, the harder it is for people to imagine they are being lied to. And the more discomfort it causes, the more cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we rally around the flag — and lash out at the skeptics. Most recently, we encounte...

A journalist who infiltrated a cell of Isis supporters as they planned a terror attack in France said he found “lost, frustrated, suicidal, easily manipulated youths”. The man, who is using the pseudonym Said Ramzi to protect his identity, said he “easily” contacted the group who called themselves the Soldiers of Allah on Facebook. Embedded with the extremists for six months between summer 2015 and January, he filmed their meetings with a hidden camera as they plotted an attack on a nightclub. The footage was broadcast by French network Canal + in a documentary called Allah’s Soldiers on Monday. A Canal + reporter secretly filmed Isis supporters planning a terror attack (Canal +) The network consisted of 10 members led by a 20-year-old man called Ossama, who had been refused by the French army and been a Satanist and alcoholic before discovering radical Islam online, the broadcaster said. Having being caught attempting to join Isis, he was jailed for five months in France but set up...

Syrian army, backed by the Syrian army air force, on Sunday have carried out wide-scale military operations against the Takfiri terrorist organizations across in different areas including Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Daraa. Units of the army and the armed forces, backed by the Syrian army air force, on Sunday carried out wide-scale military operations against the Takfiri terrorist organizations across the country, destroying their dens and positions and inflicting heavy losses upon them in the personnel and the equipment. Homs Syrian Army Air Force destroyed ISIS terrorists’ gatherings and vehicles north and east of Palmyra city and Jabal al-Khanzeir in Homs Countryside. According to a military source, the air strikes targeted ISIS gatherings and cars fitted with various machineguns in Khneifis and and Jabal-al Khanzeir . The army, in cooperation with popular defense groups established control over southern plains of Jabal a-Mkeita’a and the western plateaus of Jabal Antar after inflicting ...

Numerous orphans who lost their parents due to foreign anti-terror intervention in Syria are becoming thirsty for revenge, a new ISIS propaganda video claims, showing a squad of well-equipped child soldiers preparing for battle. The footage created by the terrorist group’s media arm, Alhayat Center, starts off with a child walking across the ruins of a city destroyed during the Syrian conflict. Amid the scenes of destruction, the faces of Western leaders and politicians blend in with carefully drafted propaganda messages, accompanied by the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) nasheed tune sung in French. The terror group vowed payback for the “massacre” perpetrated by the West against the self-proclaimed caliphate in the name of “so-called precious freedoms,” the inserts read, reassuring followers that the extremist organization has enough means by which to defend their cause. US President Barack Obama, Russian and French leaders Vladimir Putin and François Hollande, alongside Syr...

By Gilbert Doctorow A new French documentary depicts a long-denied truth that Ukraine is in the grip of extreme right-wing nationalists who seek to impose what the British scholar Richard Sakwa has called a monist view of nationhood, one which does not accept minorities or heterogeneity. Rainbow politics is not what the Maidan uprising was all about. Like the Communism which held power in Ukraine before 1992, this new extreme nationalism can impose its will only by violence or the threat of violence. It is by definition the antithesis of European values of tolerance and multiculturalism. Sen. John McCain appearing with Ukrainian rightists of the Svoboda party at a pre-coup rally in Kiev. This intimidation is what Paul Moreira’s Canal+ documentary, “Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution,” shows us graphically, frame by frame. That this repression happens to take place under an ideology that incorporates elements of fascism if not Nazism is incidental but not decisive to the power of the docu...

Egypt’s military regime is suppressing political opposition even more ferociously than the longtime Mubarak dictatorship while also collaborating in the strangulation of Gaza, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar. By Paul R. Pillar With U.S. attention toward the Middle East being recently focused on such matters as warfare in Syria and Iraq and on the relationship with Saudi Arabia, little attention span is left over for the relationship with the most populous Arab nation. But developments in Egypt have, in multiple respects, significant capacity for creating attention-grabbing problems for Washington in addition to problems to which Egypt already is contributing in significant though less salient ways. Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi The regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has become increasingly harsh, illiberal, and downright brutal—much more so than the last previous Egyptian general-turned-president, Hosni Mubarak. The State Department’s official human rights report on Egypt say...

Exclusive eye witness reports and documents, abandoned by retreating jihadists and found by RT Documentary crew members in a region liberated by Syrian Kurds, point to a commercial scale oil smuggling operations and the terror group’s cozy relations with Turkey. Exclusive and unprecedented footage, along with witness accounts, was filmed by the RT Documentary crew only ten days after the town of Shaddadi in Syrian Kurdistan was liberated from Islamic State terrorists. The area surrounding the town is well known for its vast oil reserves and extraction activity that for months was reaped by ISIS command to generate revenue. Following Kurdish soldiers around the destroyed and abandoned homes, RT Documentary found documents which showed a direct link between Turkey and Islamic State fighters operating in Syria. The jihadi paperwork included an entire pile of foreign passports with Turkish entry stamps, and booklets encouraging jihad against the the Syrian government, printed in Turkey. Bu...

by PETER LEE I’m expecting tactical nuclear weapons to reappear overtly in the US military equation for Asia… …but only after the US Navy gets its chance to feast at the pivot trough for its long-for but perhaps strategically less-than-vital conventional forces buildout in Asia. I have an article up exclusively on Asia Times, The Case of the Missing Nukes …and a Disappearing US Mission in Asia, concerning an interesting and, I fear, transitory lack of tactical nuclear weapons in theater in Asia. US land based tactical nukes for the army and air force were pulled out of Asia at the end of the Cold War and it would require major political and diplomatic handwringing to put them back. The US Navy got out of the tactical nuke business for surface vessels worldwide at the same time. The Pentagon then stripped the Navy of its submarine tactical nuke, the nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missile, the TLAM-N, formally and irrevocably retiring it in 2013 over the objections of Japan and a certain...