But, as the US government has just informed us, Al Qaeda are actually totally cool (at least in Syria), so why are you upset about Uncle Sam lifting a few sanctions on them, you obsessed weirdos, you?!

Yes, if you were Normie Q. Normieson and you swallowed the Al Qaeda lie as every patriotic, tax-paying, government-trusting citizen has done for a quarter of a century, you might be tempted to cynically observe that this is Al Qaeda's "mission accomplished" moment. After all, they pulled off 9/11, caused havoc in Afghanistan and Iraq, menaced the world for decades, and now they're being normalized and rehabilitated on the international stage.

"Don't you see?" says Normie, frothing at the mouth and gesturing frantically at hijab-wearing governors and 9/11 pens. "Al Qaeda won!"

As you might suspect, however, I have a slightly different take...

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY...?

As you'll know from the most recent episode of New World Next Week, the latest twist in the highly unlikely tale of the Al Qaeda bogeymen is the Trump administration's recent decision to remove the al-Nusrah Front, aka "Al Qaeda in Syria," from the US Treasury's Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) organization list.

The decision comes as part of the US government's overall program to tie up the loose ends left by its decades-long regime change operation in Syria. That program has culminated in Uncle Sam removing Syria from its list of officially designated State Sponsors of Terrorism.

To put that in plain English: when Syria was ruled as a secular state by the London-trained ophthalmologist Bashar al-Assad...

...it was a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

But now that Syria has been taken over by the literal child-beheaders and heart-eaters of the US-backed Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist insurgents who tore that country to pieces...

...it's a US-approved legitimate nation state!

The Grayzone notes in their article on the move that the US Treasury has just lifted sanctions on Abdullah Muhaysini, a "Salafi-jihadi cleric from Saudi Arabia who participated in videotaped massacres of captive soldiers and recruited droves of foreign youth to carry out suicide bombings throughout Syria over the past decade," on "Abu Sulayman al-Muhajir, a top Al Qaeda recruiter in Australia who fled to Syria; Shafi Sultan Mohammed al-Ajmi, a major Kuwaiti financier of Al-Nusra; and Abdul Samrez Jashari, an Albanian foreign fighter who has taken on a senior role in Syria's military under Al-Sharaa."

For the hard of thinking, it needs to be stressed that no one is praising Bashar al-Assad or the prior Syrian government as some exemplar of virtue and beneficence. No, Syria under Assad was not a pleasant place. That's precisely why the Bush administration used Syria in the first half of its War of Terror as a destination for its "extraordinary rendition" program. Remember Robert Baer's quip: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt."