The Arrangement - Terrorist Tuesday (Part3/8)

0:00 Same man, different Tuesday, different word. His name is Ahmad Al Sharah Roger. Charlie were in Iraq. In 2003, he joined Al Qaeda following the American invasion of Iraq. He fought U.S. forces on the ground. He was captured. He spent time in Avulgari prison, the American detention facility that became internationally known for torture and prisoner abuse.

0:33 The following moments may contain explicit language.

0:39 In 2012, he created Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda, Syrian affiliate, with the explicit goal of toppling the Assad regime. the United States designated him a global terrorist. They put a $10 million bounty on his head. In January 2025, rebel groups appointed him Syria's interim president. Oh. My God.

1:06 Like, comment and subscribe. In May 2025, Donald Trump shook his hand in Riyadh and announced he would lift crippling U.S. sanctions on Syria. What the hell are you talking about? By June 2025, the United States had lifted most Syria sanctions and removed Al Nusra Front Al Shara's organization from its Foreign Terrorist Organization list. Same man, different Tuesday, different word. Unusual practice. Rethink what you think you know. Welcome back to the arrangement I am Charlie, and this is episode 3 entitled Terrorist Tuesday.

2:03 This episode is about one word, how it is assigned, how it is removed, and what that tells you. Not about the people it's applied to, but about the people applying it when the games. Begin under our feet and I'll say we love long and this.

2:25 Life. Will listen. On September 11th, 2001, the word terrorist acquired a weight it had never had before. Overnight, it became not just a description of an act of violence, it became a legal category, a foreign policy tool, a justification for war, and a mechanism for suspending international law. the US Patriot Act past six weeks after 911. The authorization for use of military force, a blank check for war signed three days after the attacks that is still technically in effect today. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

3:17 The establishment of the specially designated Global Terrorist List, a designation that freezes assets, prohibits financial transactions, bars entry to the United States, and authorizes military action. The entire legal and military architecture of the post 911 world was built on that word. 2 wars launched with it, hundreds of thousands killed under it, and trillions of dollars spent because of it. And the word was never a neutral description. It was always, from the very first day, a designation assigned by the powerful, applied to the inconvenient and removed from the useful.

4:09 Ahmad Al Sharra proves it, but he is not the first. He is the most recent in a pattern that goes back decades. And the pattern always follows the same logic. Who serves the current strategic interest? That person is never the terrorist everyone else is. You say freak. Like it's a bad thing to understand Syria, you have to start in Afghanistan because Afghanistan is where the template was first built and it is the template that has been used every time since 1979. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, the United States under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan begins funding and arming the Afghan resistance, the Mujahideen.

5:01 The CIA operation is called Operation Cyclone. At its peak, it is the largest covert operation in CIA history, channelling billions of dollars and weapons, including shoulder fired anti craft missiles into Afghanistan. The Mujahideen are celebrated. Ronald Reagan calls them freedom fighters. They are photographed at the White House. They receive American training, American weapons, and American money. The Soviets leave in 1989. The Americans thus lose interest. The funding stops. The weapons remain.

5:40 Those freedom fighters become the Taliban, their network become Al Qaeda, and the weapons America left behind armed the training camps that produced the hijackers of September 11th. I'm sorry, what? America spends 20 years and $2 trillion going back to fight what it created in August 2021. America withdraws from Afghanistan. The Taliban take control within days. The country America spent 20 years and $2 trillion trying to stabilize returns to exactly where it was before any of it began. Freedom fighters, terrorists, freedom fighters again.

6:32 2 trillion dollars, 241,000 lives lost and then back to the starting point. Google it. Google it. Iraq is where the template becomes undeniable. Because in Iraq, America armed the same men it later spent decades and billions trying to remove. And the record is completely clear. The 1980s Saddam Hussein is at war with Iran. America backs Saddam weapons, intelligence, diplomatic cover Classified documents declassified in 2003 and reported by Newsweek confirmed that Reagan administration provided Saddam with battlefield intelligence, knowing it would be used to direct chemical weapons attacks against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians.

7:28 Saddam is useful. He is fighting Iran. He is not a terrorist. But then he invades Kuwait in 1990. He becomes inconvenient. The Gulf War removes him from Kuwait but leaves him in power. Then comes 2003. The weapons of mass destruction that were never found. The war that was never authorized by the United Nations. The invasion that toppled Saddam and created a power vacuum so complete that a new organization filled it. Within a decade, that organization was ISIS. And here is a detail that closes the circle.

8:14 When America toppled Saddam Hussein, who had run Iraq as a Sunni dominated state, it handed political power to Iraq's Shia majority. Iraq's Shia majority has deep historical and cultural ties to Iran. America invaded Iraq, spent $1 trillion doing so, and handed the country into Iran's sphere of influence, the same Iran it is now bombing. So this is not really incompetence. Incompetence would be kind of random. This has a consistent direction. Destabilize, remove, empower whoever is currently useful, and repeat.

9:00 The instability is not the failure of the policy. The instability is actually the product. Most people are watching the war, a few are trying to understand it. This series is for the second group, 8 episodes. Every thread connected all sourced the arrangement only on unusual practice. Now let's fly over to Libya. It is 2011. Moammar Gaddafi, brutal dictator, documented human rights violator, and by that point a man who had spent years cooperating with Western intelligence agencies on counterterrorism.

9:43 He is targeted by NATO airstrikes following a popular uprising. The United Nations Security Council authorizes a no fly zone to protect civilians. NATO interprets that authorization as permission to conduct an air campaign that directly enables the rebel forces fighting Gaddafi. Gaddafi is captured and killed. Nobody fills the vacuum. The rebel factions fight each other. The weapons flood the region into Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan. The state collapses by 2017. the United Nations documented open slave markets operating in Libya.

10:31 Human beings, primarily sub-saharan African migrants, sold publicly for as little as $400.00 slave markets in 2017, documented by the United Nations after a NATO military intervention that was sold to the world as a humanitarian mission to protect civilians. It was not reported as the lead story. It was not the subject of sanctions. It was not the basis for military intervention because Libya had already served its purpose. We request that everybody stays calm at the current moment, for there is a zombie apocalypse currently happening on the West Coast.

11:18 Now we come back to Ahmed Dusshera, because his story contains every element of the template in one place, and it happened in the last 12 months. When rebel forces swept into Damascus in December 2024 and Assad fled, Western governments faced a dilemma. The most effective fighting force that had taken the Syrian capital was HTS Hayat Tahrir Ashram Al Shara's organization, the one on the terrorist list, the one with the $10 million bounty. The dilemma resolved itself when Al Sharah made one specific commitment.

12:03 He told reporters that his administration would continue to uphold the 1974 disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel and that he had no interest in a conflict with Israel. That was the transaction, one sentence Syria's northern border with Israel neutralized in exchange international legitimacy, sanctions lifted and a presidential handshake in Riyadh and the Syrian people? Well. Within two months of taking power, Al Sharah had filled his cabinet with HDS loyalists and family members, his brother as health minister, a relative of his wife running customs, another relative managing the presidential palace.

12:54 The structures of the authoritarian rule reconstructed immediately with new names. Researchers who studied the transition put it precisely. What changed was not his ideology. It was how international institutions talked about him. Legitimacy was constructed through language, not through reform. That sentence explains not just Syria, It explains every name change in this entire episode. The freedom fighters who became terrorists, the terrorists who became presidents, the dictators who were useful and then became threats.

13:36 What changes is never the person. It is always the language constructed around them. And the people who control that language are the people who decide who gets bombed and who gets handshakes. So here's the question this episode has been building toward Who decides who is a terrorist? There is no international court. There is no independent tribunal. There is no agreed global definition that carries legal force across borders. There is the United Nations Security Council, which can designate terrorist organizations, but those designations require consensus among five permanent members, each of whom has veto power, and each of whom uses that power to protect their own allies from designation.

14:31 In practice, the United States designates, and the world largely follows, because the designation triggers financial sanctions, travel bans, and asset freezes that any country doing business in U.S. dollars cannot ignore. Which means the most powerful foreign policy tool in the world, a tool that can destroy governments, collapse economies and justify military strikes, is controlled by 1 country, applied according to that country's strategic interest, and with no independent oversight, no appeal mechanism, and absolutely no obligation to consistency.

15:15 Al Charer proved the absence of consistency in real time on the specially designated global terrorist list, with a bounty on his head on one Tuesday running Syria with American diplomatic support, his terrorist designation removed. And what about the people who die under these designations before they become useful? The drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, carried out against targets designated as terrorists. They don't get a handshake. They don't get their designation reviewed. They don't get a Tuesday.

15:54 The word terrorist was never a description. It was always a designation assigned by the powerful, applied to the inconvenient and removed from the useful, and paid for in blood by the people who had no power to question it.

16:20 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, four countries, 4 variations of the very same template arm, destabilize, designate, remove, install whoever is currently useful. Call it something that sounds like a principle and Mosey on.

16:44 Every source in this episode is documented, and LinkedIn, the description, the declassified documents, the academic research on how Al Shadow's legitimacy was constructed through language. Read them yourself. Now. In episode 4, we go to the water, 34 miles wide. 1/5 of the world's oil passes through it, and when someone decided to make it a war zone, the gas bills in Germany doubled. The stock market in Seoul crashed and Russia counted its profits without firing a single shot. America went to war over a waterway it barely needs to protect a country that contributes nothing to its energy security while its own allies absorbed the economic damage.

17:43 Who benefits from that arrangement?

17:47 Like, comment and subscribe. This was unusual practice. Stay curious, stay bold, stay aware.

18:05 Remember to share this with a friend of yours and do leave your comments. I do respond and remember to answer the polls. See you on the following episode. Mom, somebody just followed. Me and we say bye bye.