The Strip: ISIS militants skimming hundreds of millions of dollars of US funds: "A Dilemma for US & Bagdhad"

The only two installments of my “weekly column” The Strip appeared almost a year ago! I guess I’ll call it an annual column and consider myself ahead of the game! In any case, The Strip is about getting to the meat of the matter and stripping out the propaganda from a particularly egregious mainstream media story. Yesterday, such an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal, begging me to give it The Strip. Here it is…

The Propaganda

The article titled, Militants in Iraq Siphon State Pay: Islamic State skims funds headed for government employees in occupied areas, creating a dilemma for U.S. and Baghdad, reports that the US is giving hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Iraq government and one of the things the Iraq government is spending its money on is cash payments to government employees operating in captive ISIS territory. One or two thousand ISIS militants holding the city of Mosul in Iraq are forcing government workers there to remit 30% of their pay to the Islamic State. The White House is not comfortable directing the Iraq government to stop this flow of funds because “people can’t starve.”

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The Strip: ISIS militants skimming hundreds of millions of dollars of US funds: “A Dilemma for US & Bagdhad”

The only two installments of my “weekly column” The Strip appeared almost a year ago! I guess I’ll call it an annual column and consider myself ahead of the game! In any case, The Strip is about getting to the meat of the matter and stripping out the propaganda from a particularly egregious mainstream media story. Yesterday, such an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal, begging me to give it The Strip. Here it is…

The Propaganda

The article titled, Militants in Iraq Siphon State Pay: Islamic State skims funds headed for government employees in occupied areas, creating a dilemma for U.S. and Baghdad, reports that the US is giving hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Iraq government and one of the things the Iraq government is spending its money on is cash payments to government employees operating in captive ISIS territory. One or two thousand ISIS militants holding the city of Mosul in Iraq are forcing government workers there to remit 30% of their pay to the Islamic State. The White House is not comfortable directing the Iraq government to stop this flow of funds because “people can’t starve.”

Read more

Now what do you think about Brian Williams' Snowden Interview?

Last year when Brian Williams interviewed Edward Snowden, I called it as a put-up job. The interview seemed scripted, not to mention how strange it was that Brian Williams copped a chat in Moscow with America’s Most Wanted. The number one argument I got against this was, “That would mean Brian Williams is lying!” Either … Read more

Now what do you think about Brian Williams’ Snowden Interview?

Last year when Brian Williams interviewed Edward Snowden, I called it as a put-up job. The interview seemed scripted, not to mention how strange it was that Brian Williams copped a chat in Moscow with America’s Most Wanted. The number one argument I got against this was, “That would mean Brian Williams is lying!” Either … Read more

Question: How Many Islamic Terrorists Marry into Skull & Bones Families?

Answer: One. Or none, if you don’t think Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a jihadist and think instead that he was a patsy as his dead friend Ibragim Todashev did.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the dead Boston Marathon Bombing “Suspect #1,” was married to Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, daughter of Yale graduate, Dr. Warren King Russell II. Knowing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s CIA connections and that Yale has deep links to the CIA, I wondered if Katherine’s family had any CIA connections itself. I thought perhaps Katherine and Tamerlan’s meeting was not as random as the nightclub story that is part of the official narrative. (How many radical Islamists pick up their future wives at nightclubs?)
Ends up, Katherine’s grandfather, Richard Warren Russell, was not only a Yale graduate as her father was, but was a member of Skull & Bones, the paradoxically well-known secret society. I happen to be reading a book I found through my research into tax exempt foundations following the recent IRS scandal, called America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, by Antony Sutton, a Stanford Hoover Institution fellow. In that book, Richard Warren Russell is listed as one of the 15 annual Skull & Bones initiates for the year 1951. In addition, Richard Warren Russell’s obituary lists him as being a member of counter-intelligence for the US Army after graduating from Yale, which is not unlikely given that the connections between Yale and the intelligence community are particularly strong within Skull & Bones. (The Robert DeNiro movie The Good Shepherd highlights these connections.)

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Tsarnaev's CIA Connections

The Wall Street Journal published an article last week reporting that Tamerlan Tsaranaev, the dead “Suspect Number 1” in the Boston Marathon Bombing, was in the Caucasus last year unsuccessfully trying to infiltrate an extreme Islamist mosque and attempting to forge a relationship with a rebel group by offering “to act as a financial go-between … Read more