Alan Dershowitz (Anderson Cooper 360, 5/17/17) denounces Trump whistleblower as “a felon [and] a criminal.”
I have no problem with the Washington Post publishing it or the [New York] Times publishing it. I do have problems with the people who work for the national security agencies leaking confidential information that may cost lives, may make it much more difficult to detect laptops. Remember, the only way ISIS got this information is through the leak.
Anderson Cooper suggested that Russia would give secret intelligence to ISIS, which boasted of blowing up a Russian civilian airliner in 2015, killing 224 people.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper took issue with this last claim. “You can’t say definitively what Russia would have done with the information,” he insisted. To which Dershowitz replied, accurately enough: “They’re not giving it to ISIS. They’re not on talking terms.”
Axelrod chimed in: “What about Iran? Professor, what about Iran?” Cooper attempted to back up this claim:
Bashar al-Assad has certainly done things which are actually helpful to ISIS in Syria. It’s not as if Bashar al-Assad is fighting a war against ISIS.
Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin attempted to clarify: “David is saying he’s allied with Iran”—though it’s not clear whether the “he” in question was Syrian President Assad or Russian President Vladimir Putin. Leading to this finale of the discussion:
DERSHOWITZ: That’s very speculative.
COOPER: Oh, we just don’t know.
DERSHOWITZ: We know the first public disclosure of it came from the leaks from within the National Security Agencies and those leaks should be plugged.
Mass videotaped executions of Syrian soldiers by ISIS (Reuters, 8/28/14) did not persuade Anderson Cooper that ISIS and the Syrian government were really at war.
Well, we do know, contrary to Cooper’s assertion, that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is fighting a war against ISIS, along with a variety of other rebel factions. As Newsweek (5/5/17) reported earlier this month:
With support from Russia, Iran and pro-government militias, the Syrian military has secured most of the country’s population centers taken over by insurgents and ISIS earlier throughout the nation’s six-year war. After retaking the former rebel bastion of Aleppo in December, Syrian troops and their allies ousted ISIS from the historic city of Palmyra earlier this year. Representing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the forces pushed further Thursday, capturing four areas from the jihadists in Palmyra’s southeastern countryside, according to pro-government Al Masdar News. The Syrian military is aiming to relieve an enclave of fellow soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians under ISIS siege in the eastern city of Deir al-Zour since 2014.
Furthermore, Axelrod’s suggestion that Iran might be sharing intelligence with ISIS is absurd. ISIS’s stance toward Shia Islam, the kind practiced by most Iranians, is openly genocidal: “Shia have no medicine but the sword,” an ISIS video proclaimed, showcasing Shiites decapitated by ISIS’s militants (Independent, 3/20/14).
The Iranian government is predictably hostile toward a movement that would exterminate 90 percent of its citizens. Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds special forces unit, called ISIS “a plague and a grave catastrophe in the world” in explaining why Iran was supporting the government in Syria’s civil war (Al-Monitor, 3/8/15): “We need to quarantine our borders and aid our neighbors so this cancer does not spread to our country.”
Donald Trump was rightly scorned when he gave a foreign policy speech which seemed to not understand the Shia/Sunni division in the Muslim world. The New York Times editorial board (8/16/16) lectured him:
Lumping Iran, which is a Shiite nation, with the Sunni militants of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda makes no sense. In fact, Iran and the Sunni groups are enemies.
Indeed, it’s the kind of thing you’d want a presidential candidate to know. But it’s also something you’d hope that hosts and leading analysts on national cable news networks would understand as well. Dershowitz’s proposal to put journalists’ sources in prison deserves a better retort than this geopolitical nonsense.
h/t Sam Husseini
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This is the moral equivalent of Louise Mensch’s “The Russians Did 9/11” kind of stuff. It’s complete garbage – but worse it is extraordinarily dangerous. It toys with the lives of millions.
This country is going to find itself up to its eyeballs in sh*t all for a bunch of lies.
Again.
People should never forget that lies, being the world’s cheapest weapon, are also its most often deployed.
It’s worse, it’s propaganda for ISIS. The fake news stresses me out, I hate the thought of people receiving such sick lies.
A 360 degree turn of the facts
180 Doug…… 180*
Dear Donald Trump
Sunni/ Shiite, it’s like Henry the 8th and the Pope, Lots of the same beliefs, but also lots more about POWER, which had Henry diss the Catholic and form his own religion with himself as the head. Even today, lots of Protestants/ Catholics don’t get along, or Irish. English, When Mohammad died, 2 power factions broke apart right away———-the down side of human nature.. and we have Sunni/ Shiite.
The other sad thing is that Trump supposedly let out classified info. i don’t think so. Remember when Russia tried to tell American spies about Chechens and the plan to blow up the Boston Marathon? Well, people died in America because the spy people didn’t believe. I think it was good that info was shared about laptops……sometimes keeping deathly secrets is only profitable for the morturary business.
This dumb-ass doesn’t understand the Sunni/ Shiite conflict. The Sunni fundamentalists are thirsty for Shitte blood. ISIS an AL Qaeda are Sunnies. Iran is Shitte. Iran has been fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda longer than US has been funding terrorists.
Great article. Clearly, prettiness is much more important in the cable news world than having a hint of knowledge. Btw, since the redesign, I cannot see comments- am posting this in part to see if it will change anything. Is this just me? Why haven’t they fixed it if not, has been like this since the change.
You’re absolutely right .. Beauty’s much more important in the cable news network than having an iota of knowledge. But, since the redesign, I, too, can’t see any comments. Commie News Network hasn’t had comments in quite a while .. It must be that the network’s directors and producers are afraid of negative comments appearing on the website. That’s quite a shame that elimination of the comment section prevents people from posting any comment, positive or negative.
Click on “Show Comments” link below the article.
No Big Lie is too Big for Dershowitz and CNN in their promotion of Israel’s wars of expansion.
This is way past lame.
I hope you learned how to detect lies.
We have officially entered the Twilight Zone.
You can be sure that the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN are intent to press the Israeli goal of dominating the Middle East political scene forever. I read neither paper nor watch any CNN news since they are intent to project only the pro-Israeli viewpoint. A careful study might show that 10 trillion dollars of the US 20 trillion dollar debt has been incurred by ventures related to satisfying Israeli territorial demands. I, for one taxpayer, am fed up with such nonsense. I did not get a chance to vote my preference. I do not want any more of my tax dollars to pay for such ventures. Let’s begin to help Iran as it tries to emerge as a true democracy in the Middle East. Stop the support of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt (our law clearly states that we should never support a military coup of an elected government). If we have to purge the State Department of the Israeli-leaning management, so be it.
OMG! I feel soo bad for the people who have never studied the Middle East, get their information from outlets like CNN where again the more you watch the less you know.