Relevant pieces by Sibel include this, this, this, this, this, and this. Here is a summary of her story. Col Riad al-Assad, head of the Free Syria Army, has been working since May 2011 with the US & NATO from inside the USAF base at Incirlik, smuggling US weapons into Syria, participating in US psychological and information warfare inside Syria as the middle-man whom Syrian protesters tend to trust, and helping to funnel intelligence and military operators across the border and organise night-time drop-offs by air. The joint US/NATO secret training camp in the USAF base at Incirlik began operations in Apr-May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. Since then, in addition to Col Riad al-Assad, several other high-ranking Syrian military and intelligence officials have been added to operations HQ in the USAF base. Weekly weapons-smuggling operations have been carried out with full US/NATO participation since last May. The HQ also includes an information warfare division where US-NATO crafted communications are directed to dissidents in Syria via the core group of Syrian military and Intelligence defectors.
There are significant differences betwen Sibel’s information and Phil Giraldi’s. I listened to Giraldi’s Dec 9 interview with AntiWar.com’s Scott Horton, and I read the associated Dec 7 Giraldi AntiWar.com article, “Washington’s Secret Wars”. I noticed that Scott pushed Syria into the last two and a half minutes of the twenty minute interview, though Giraldi had three times previously in the interview mentioned Syria with some emphasis. Giraldi when he finally gets to say what he thinks says “We don’t know what is going on in Syria.” It’s not clear whether he means that we the investigative public don’t know, or that the US policy-makers don’t know, or both. But Giraldi’s AmConMag piece “NATO vs. Syria” appeared on Dec 19, ten days after the Horton interview and twelve days after “Washington’s Secret Wars”. Giraldi says in “Washington’s Secret Wars” that the Free Syria Army are based at Iskenderun. Sibel says they are inside the USAF Incirlik base. Another important difference is that the NATO planes Giraldi talks about are bringing arms and volunteers from Libya to Turkey; Sibel’s planes are going over the Turkish border into Syria doing “night-time drop-offs”. So Giraldi is not as hard-line as Sibel, but there is a perceptible hardening in Giraldi’s line between Dec 9 and Dec 19.
Here by the way is Giraldi on Russia Today, yesterday Jan 18 2012, talking about Iran again. Giraldi doesn’t even bother to mention the claims made by unnamed CIA officers written up by Mark Perry in Foreign Policy.com last week, such as that “We don’t do bang and boom. And we don’t do political assassinations.”
Niqnaq 