Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Everyone Has Forgotten That President Obama Wanted To Share Intelligence With Russia Over Syria


WNU Editor: The nice thing about doing this blog is that I keep a record of everything .... and I can search for any article that I want .... and when I want it. Also .... having 82,000 posts .... I do have a large database to sift through. So when I remembered this Washington Post story from last year .... U.S. Offers to share Syrian intelligence on terrorist with Russia (June 30, 2016) .... I decided to do some digging. Here is a brief collection of what I found:

A Commentary On US Intelligence Sharing In The Syrian War (December 21, 2015)

U.S. Military And The Intelligence Community Do Not Want To Coordinate With Russia On Syria (July 13, 2016)

Top Pentagon Officials: Proposed Russian Deal In Syria Is ‘Not Based On Trust’ (July 25, 2016)

Top U.S. General Tells Congress That It Would Be Unwise To Share Intelligence With Russia On Syria (September 22, 2016)

In the end .... this deal to cooperate unraveled when U.S. coalition aircraft bombed a Syrian Army base killing scores of Syrian soldiers .... U.S.-Led Coalition Air Strikes Kill 62 Syrian Soldiers (September 17, 2017).

So what we know is that after objecting to Russia's intervention into Syria, President Obama changed course and wanted to cooperate with the Russians over Syria. An understanding was made over the objections of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community .... but soon after a Syrian base was bombed by U.S.-backed coalition bombers while pleas from the Russian Ministry of Defense to stop the attack were ignored. A few days later the deal collapsed when the U.S. explanation for this attack did not match what happened on the ground (the Pentagon eventually apologized later) .... effectively ending President Obama's strategy of working with the Russians.

Flash forward to today .... President Obama and John Kerry's desire to work with Russia to combat these extremist groups in Syria was the right policy then .... as bad as the Syrian government was/is, the other side was/is worse. Unfortunately .... everything unraveled but kudos to President Obama for at least trying. President Trump's policy to work with Russia is also the right one .... but unlike President Obama where the press acquiesce to his outreach, they are anything but that with President Trump today. Is there a double standard at play right now .... it looks like it.

On a side note .... the U.S. is not the only one who has been interested in sharing intelligence with the Russians over Syria .... President Obama must have gotten his cue from the Germans who have been doing it for a long time .... Report: German Intelligence Is Working With Syrian Intelligence (December 18, 2015).

8 comments:

Jay Farquharson said...

US Intelligence Community asked CNN, the NYT, WaPo and others to strip out the details from the story that would compromise Sources and Methods, and they did,

Meanwhile TASS is publishing the full details in Russian,

http://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/4254477

After all, it's not like all those Chechen's that make up the hard core of ISIS can read Russian,

And what's a few dead deep cover Isreali agents between friends, right?

Anonymous said...

can you read russian jay?

fred said...

Did obama give Russians highly classified intel froman ally and then say he had not?

Jay Farquharson said...

Yup, but slowly. I can speak it too, but I'm rusty.

Havn't had to use it daily since '78.

Anonymous said...

what are they saying

Jay Farquharson said...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_-PWDHUIAAdj1y.jpg

fred said...

he classified information concerned Israel’s capabilities for intercepting operational communications and signals. This branch is one of the most sensitive and secret in the field of military intelligence. Possession of this advanced capability makes it possible to monitor the most clandestine military operations, without leaving any clue to the tracker. This interception technology is also capable of seriously disrupting the military operations of an enemy.

Until President Trump shared this information with Lavrov, the Russian military and intelligence services were not aware that Israel possessed this intelligence technology, or that it was operational. Neither were the Russians aware that Israel had let the Americans know about it. The learned all this for the first time when Lavrov and Kislyak talked to the president in the White House last Wednesday.

fazman said...

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-putin-idUSKCN18D1EA