Escobar provides more evidence that the Empire's "war on terror" is a fraud. Escobar provides links that I seldom pass up, and one link led me to a fascinating 40:42m audio interview (with transcript) conducted by German journalist Lars Schall with the former head of the U.S. State Department's visa bureau from 1987 and 1989 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, J. Michael Springmann. If you have the time, I urge you to listen to it.
In the interview he provides details of his experience as a consular office who issued visas in Saudi Arabia and the conflicts he had with his bosses over his refusal to issue visas to many people who clearly didn't qualify. He was eventually fired for this. Since then Springmann's research has produced substantial evidence that this consular office gave these questionable visas to thousands of people who ended up fighting in various terrorist outfits from Bosnia to Syria.
Toward the end of the video Schall asks him "Is al Qaeda some kind of useful idiot in a greater geopolitical scheme? .... ...is the whole “War on Terror” a fraud?" The following is most of Springmann's answer:
...it’s these guys are there and they are America’s creatures, they may not be under direct control but they are controlled and they are useful to American purposes, which is essentially to keep the Middle East totally out of control to eliminate any kind of threat in Israel by splitting Iraq into pieces, they haven’t quite succeeded yet, but it’s only a matter of time I think, until they get the north away and then I think the whole country will come to unravel but Iraq no longer is a functional viable country, it’s a failed state.
They have done the same thing to Afghanistan and they have done it to Syria. Syria still has a functioning government of sorts, but the country is so ravaged, I am always sorry when I was in Syria, that I didn’t see more of the country than I did because other than, maybe, downtown Damascus, the rest of the country has been destroyed by the Americans and these people they recruited, like the al-Nusra Front, which the State Department lists as a terrorist organization, yet the American government supports and trains and arms them. So, yes, I mean they are useful, they are not idiots, these are the same guys that fought in the Muslim republics on the other side of the Amu Darya River and they fought in Yugoslavia, they fought in Libya, they fought in Iraq and they are fighting in Syria.