Category: Middle East

Yes, this is the Very Epitome of Terrorizing the Populace

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Peter Schaapveld, a forensic psychologist, has surveyed people Yemenis who live in areas target by drones, and has determined that 92% of the populace is suffering from PTSD:

The people of Yemen can hear destruction before it arrives. In cities, towns and villages across this country, which hangs off the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, the air buzzes with the sound of American drones flying overhead. The sound is a constant and terrible reminder: a robot plane, acting on secret intelligence, may calculate that the man across from you at the coffee shop, or the acquaintance with whom you’ve shared a passing word on the street, is an Al Qaeda operative. This intelligence may be accurate or it may not, but it doesn’t matter. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaotic buzzing above sharpens into the death-herald of an incoming missile.

Such quite literal existential uncertainty is coming at a deep psychological cost for the Yemeni people. For Americans, this military campaign is an abstraction. The drone strikes don’t require U.S. troops on the ground, and thus are easy to keep out of sight and out of mind. Over half of Yemen’s 24.8 million citizens – militants and civilians alike – are impacted every day. A war is happening, and one of the unforeseen casualties is the Yemeni mind.

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and anxiety are becoming rampant in the different corners of the country where drones are active. “Drones hover over an area for hours, sometimes days and weeks,” said Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American anti-drone activist and cofounder of Support Yemen, a media collective raising awareness about issues afflicting the country. Yemenis widely describe suffering from constant sleeplessness, anxiety, short-tempers, an inability to concentrate and, unsurprisingly, paranoia.

Alwazir recalled a Yemeni villager telling her that the drones “are looking inside our homes and even at our women.'” She says that, “this feeling of infringement of privacy, combined with civilian casualties and constant fear and anxiety has a profound long time psychological effect on those living under drones.”

Last year, London-based forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld presented research he’d conducted on the psychological impact of drone strikes in Yemen to a British parliamentary sub-committee. He reported that 92 percent of the population sample he examined was found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – with children being the demographic most significantly affected. Women, he found, claimed to be miscarrying from their fear of drones. “This is a population that by any figure is hugely suffering,” Schaapveld said. The fear of drones, he added, “is traumatizing an entire generation.”

Throughout Yemen, it seems, the endless blue heaven above has become a bad omen.

So, do you think that these folks will learn to hate the United States, and revisit violence with violence?

We are damaging a whole generation, and these damaged people will become tomorrow’s warriors determined to get vengeance.

This is the Wrong Way to Do this

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We now have a report that the US is having discussions with Israel about having Jonathan Pollard released as a way to move along the Middle East peace process:

The United States is talking with Israel about the possibility of releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard early from his life sentence as an incentive in the troubled Mideast peace negotiations, a person familiar with the situation said Monday. Such an extraordinary step would show the urgency of U.S. efforts to keep negotiations alive.

The person cautioned that a Pollard release — which would be a dramatic turnaround from previous refusals — was far from certain and that discussions with Israel on the matter were continuing. The person spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the negotiations on the record.

In return for such a release, Israel would have to undertake significant concessions to the Palestinians. Such concessions could include some kind of freeze on Israeli settlements in disputed territory, the release of Palestinian prisoners beyond those Israel has already agreed to and a guarantee that Israel would stay at the negotiating table beyond an end-of-April deadline.

First, this is stupid on the part of the US.

Netanyahu really does not care about Pollard beyond the political benefits he can derive from securing his releases.

More importantly, there is a protocol to such things.

Even among those most opposed to his release, there is acceptance of his release as a part of a spy swap, as this is the socially acceptable way to do this within the intelligence community.

Not Enough Bullets………

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The hedge fund vultures have outdone themselves, the first example are the pukes who are buying shares in the in the 1983 Marine Corpse bombing in Beirut:

Iran is still a pariah in the international community, but one hedge fund thinks it will eventually pay $1.8 billion as ordered by a U.S. court.

RD Legal Capital hopes to raise up to $100 million to buy the rights to payments from families of the 241 U.S. Marines killed in a terrorist attack in Lebanon in 1983. A federal court in 2007 found Iran liable for the truck-bomb attack, which led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from war-torn Lebanon.

Iran, of course, is not on the best of terms with the U.S., and the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. Still, Iran’s central bank is appealing the $1.8 billion verdict against it.

Victims’ families agreed to allow RD to buy stakes in the judgment. The firm will not buy out any of the beneficiaries, instead investing only in pieces of each of the 151 claims. The Iran fund is RD’s first ever focused on a single case, The Wall Street Journal reports.

And then there are the vulture funds who are buying into the abject misery and death that the banksters (and the Germans) have caused in Greece and Portugal:

Yield-hungry investors are flocking back to Greek and Portuguese markets, shunned by international buyers for four years, as the outlook for the bailed-out countries improves and alternatives look more expensive or increasingly risky.

Portuguese and Greek shares and bonds have been the best performers in Europe in 2014, and funds invested in them are making a killing, Thomson Reuters data shows.

Investors say they are driven by economic improvement, which provides fresh impetus to an initial bounce triggered by the European Central Bank’s pledge in 2012 to save the euro.

Potential investment alternatives are also less tempting. Tensions between the West and Russia and global growth concerns cloud the outlook for similar-yielding emerging markets, while a 1-1/2 year rally has shrunk returns elsewhere in euro zone debt.

“It’s not so much an interest-rate-driven rally but much more a structural shift and a perception that the euro crisis is behind us,” said Franz Wenzel, chief strategist at AXA Investment Managers, which manages assets worth about 550 billion euros ($760 billion).

After nearly crashing out of the euro zone in 2012, Greece’s recession is easing, while the Portuguese economy is already rebounding. Lisbon is due to exit its international bailout in about two months.

As much as Timothy Geithner might disagree, there has to be well defined limits to what is a legal financial speculative instrument.

These people are F%$#ing ghouls.

Do You Think that the Qataris Might Have an Agenda?

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A study funded by the government of Qatar has determined that the Assad regime is guilty to “industrial-scale killing”.

I’m not surprised by the conclusion, and I’m inclined to agree that it is generally accurate, but it is clear that its provenance is highly suspect.

The Sunni monarchs of the Gulf have long had an agenda of both attacking secular Arab regimes, as well as pushing for Sunni dominance in the Arab world.

And it comes out just as negotiations between the two sides begins.

The people who wrote this report have stellar reputations in the human rights area, one is a former chief prosecutor for Sierra Leone, but the source of the data might, or might not, be akin to “Curveball“, whose false testimony was invoked by the Bush administration in their push for the Iraq war:

The defector, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, was a photographer with the Syrian military police. He smuggled the images out of the country on memory sticks to a contact in the Syrian National Movement, which is supported by the Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar, which has financed and armed rebel groups, has called for the overthrow of Assad and demanded his prosecution.

Needless to say, I am dubious of the report and the timing.

This is Unbelievably F%$#ing Stupid

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Iran was just disinvited from the Syria peace talks:

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon withdrew a last-minute invitation to Iran to attend peace talks on Syria on Monday after the Syrian opposition threatened to boycott this week’s conference if President Bashar al-Assad’s main sponsor took part.

Ending nearly 24 hours of confusion that dismayed diplomats who have spent months cajoling Assad’s opponents to negotiate, Ban’s spokesman said Iran was no longer welcome at the initial day of talks at Montreux, Switzerland on Wednesday.

The opposition immediately withdrew its threat to stay away from the conference known as Geneva-2. But the uproar over Iran, which has provided Assad with money, arms and men, underlined the difficulties of negotiating an end to a bloody, three-year civil war that has divided the Middle East and world powers.

Ban, his spokesman said, made the invitation to Iran after Iranian officials assured him they supported the conclusion of a U.N. conference in 2012, known as Geneva-1, which called for a transitional administration to take over power in Syria – something neither Assad nor Tehran have been willing to embrace.

Throughout Monday Iranian officials made clear that they were not endorsing that conclusion as a basis for the talks.

I would also note that US Secretary of State John Kerry was also having a hissy fit over Iran showing up.

This is all about the United States, and the Syrian exiles, supporting the House of Saud’s agenda of both hostility toward secular Arab regimes, and support toward Sunni hegemony in the region.

Doing the Saudi’s bidding might be unavoidable for the Syrian National Council, they are clearly clients of Riyadh, but for the US, intervening in a 1400 year old sectarian dispute is a losing proposition.

Doing the bidding of Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saudr is not in America’s best interest.

New York Times Walks Back Its Breathless Endorsement of Obama’s Dodgy Sarin Claims

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I missed it, but the Times has published a remarkably circuitous retraction of its early reporting on the so called “slam dunk” fingering the Assad regime for the Sarin attack:

A new analysis of rockets linked to the nerve-agent attack on Damascus, Syria, in August has concluded that the rockets were most likely fired by multiple launchers and had a range of about three kilometers, according to the two authors of the analysis.

 The authors said that their findings could help pinpoint accountability for the most lethal chemical warfare attack in decades, but that they also raised questions about the American government’s claims about the locations of launching points, and the technical intelligence behind them.

………

 The authors of the new analysis —Theodore A. Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories — evaluated the exteriors of the implicated rockets, visible in videos and photographs. The analysis suggested that they were propelled by motors taken from a common family of 122-millimeter conventional artillery rockets known as the BM-21, the authors said.

 The BM-21 line is a globally abundant system of ground-to-ground rockets, colloquially called Grads, that originated in the Soviet Union but have been reproduced and updated by many countries, including post-Soviet Russia, China, Egypt and Iran. Both the Syrian army and the rebels possess them.

………

 “It is clear that if the U.S. government’s claims that the allegedly observed launches came from ‘the heart’ of Syrian government controlled areas, there is a serious discrepancy between the meaning of this claim, the technical intelligence it relies on, and the technical properties of this munition,” he wrote.

Using published data about characteristics of motors in various Grad rockets and derivatives, Dr. Postol and Mr. Lloyd calculated potential maximum ranges for the sarin-filled rockets, with an emphasis on a common Grad variant’s motor.

 “The dimensions of the inserted rocket motor very closely match the dimensions in the 9M22-U artillery rocket,” Dr. Postol wrote in an email on Thursday. “If the inserted motor is the same as the standard 9M22-U motor, then the maximum range of the munition would be no more than three kilometers, and likely less.”

That would be less than the ranges of more than nine kilometers calculated separately by The New York Times and Human Rights Watch in mid-September, after the United States had dropped its push for a military strike. Those estimates had been based in part on connecting reported compass headings for two rockets cited in the United Nations’ initial report on the attacks.

 The published range for a 9M22-U rocket is about 20 kilometers, or 12.4 miles. But the Syrian rockets carried a bulky and apparently flat-nosed warhead — Dr. Postol called it “a soup can” — whose range would have been undermined by its large mass and by drag, the authors said.

 Depending on the motors propelling different Grad models, the projected maximum ranges can vary from 2.5 to 3.5 kilometers, or 1.5 to 2.2 miles, Dr. Postol and Mr. Lloyd said.

 The longer estimates seem unlikely, Dr. Postol said, because as a sarin-filled rocket was pushed to greater air speeds by a more powerful motor, the stresses created by its non-aerodynamic shape could cause it to tumble or break apart.

As Robert Parry noted on Consortiumnews, the Times buried the story:

The New York Times has, kind of, admitted that it messed up its big front-page story that used a “vector analysis” to pin the blame for the Aug. 21 Sarin attack on the Syrian government, an assertion that was treated by Official Washington as the slam-dunk proof that President Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people.

 But you’d be forgiven if you missed the Times’ embarrassing confession, since it was buried on page 8, below the fold, 18 paragraphs into a story under the not-so-eye-catching title, “New Study Refines View Of Sarin Attack in Syria.”

Also, Seymour Hersh thoroughly documented the manipulation of the intelligence data, noting that, “A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening.”

This official noted the similarities to the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Let’s see, we now have:

  • Obama attempting to lie us into a war.
  • Protecting Wall Street fat cats from meaningful consequences for their acts.
  • Get out of jail free cards for tortures in the US state security apparatus.
  • What looks increasingly like a full throated endorsement of the all encompassing security state.

This is going somewhere, but I cannot quite put my finger on it.

Mon dieu, pas de polonium. Qui a été foutu avec nous*

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Well, the French Doctors have finished their autopsy of Yassir Arafat, no Polonium, cause of death inconclusive, so I guess the next question is how did that exotic radioactive element end up in his personal effects, if it did at all:

French investigators studying the remains of Yasir Arafat have concluded that the Palestinian leader most likely did not die of radiation poisoning, Mr. Arafat’s widow, Suha, said here Tuesday. She noted, however, that the investigators did find unusually elevated levels of radioactivity in and around his body.

The results partly contradict and partly confirm those of Swiss scientists who last month reported finding abnormal levels of radioactive polonium-210 in Mr. Arafat’s remains. In contrast to the French, however, they concluded that their findings “moderately support the proposition” that Mr. Arafat, who was 75 at his death in 2004, died of radiation poisoning.

The French investigators concluded that the remains had been irradiated post-mortem by the air and soil surrounding his body and “dismiss the hypothesis of poisoning by polonium-210,” Ms. Arafat said.

………

Mr. Arafat’s body was exhumed in Ramallah, in the West Bank, last year. Body, air and soil samples were taken by French judicial investigators and by the Swiss scientists, who were commissioned by Ms. Arafat, her lawyers said, and by Russian scientists contracted by the Palestinian Authority, whose relations with Ms. Arafat are known to be hostile.

The French report was delivered on Tuesday but has not been made public, as it is part of a continuing judicial inquiry. As a complainant in the case, however, Ms. Arafat is legally authorized to describe its contents.

In contrast with French and Swiss scientists, the Russians have reported finding no abnormal levels of radioactive polonium in Mr. Arafat’s remains, said Saad Djebbar, a lawyer who represents Ms. Arafat. But Mr. Djebbar characterized those findings as unserious and incomplete.

I’m beginning to think that someone is trying to ratf%$# (frame) someone here.

The only question now is who is trying to ratf%$# whom.

Wheels within wheels.

*I last took French in 1979, and got a “C”, so cut me some slack.

Machiavelli Explains Syria

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It now appears that rebels in Syria have found the “leadership” in exile to be incompetent self-serving leeches:

With empty pockets and clothes smudged with dirt, the Syrian rebel fighter smuggled himself across the border and traveled 18 hours by bus to plead with Syrian opposition leaders meeting in a luxury hotel here to send help back home.

The fighter, Hassan Tabanja, a former electrician, needed money to provide food, weapons and ammunition for dozens of men fighting alongside him against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But after two days of scant results at the main opposition coalition’s meeting here last weekend, Mr. Tabanja sat on the patio glaring at the men in suits all around him.

What they had provided, he said, “will barely get me back to Syria.”

For Mr. Tabanja and many other government opponents inside Syria, the leaders of the coalition who claim to represent them abroad have long seemed detached from their suffering, and frugal or mysterious with the money they have raised. As the leaders have shuttled among world capitals and bickered in fancy hotels, they have appeared increasingly powerless to affect the course of Syria’s war: more than 100,000 people have died, millions have been displaced, and extremist groups are gaining ground.

The leaders complain that their efforts to win recognition and support have been thwarted by the world’s indifference and the competing agendas of their own tightfisted patrons, but their words have failed to assuage many of the people relying on them for help.

“It’s a political game,” said Mr. Tabanja, after he was shooed away by guards surrounding Ahmad al-Jarba, the leader of the main opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition. “They are like puppets in the hands of their enemies,” he said. “They are prolonging the presence of Assad.”

I will remind you what Nicolo Machiavelli said about exiles:

A prince should therefore be slow in undertaking any enterprise upon the representations of exiles, for he will generally gain nothing by it but shame and serious injury.

We could have learned this from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Or we could just have read Machiavelli, is one of the found figures of the study of governments.

Seriously, this sh%$ is literally governance 101.

Huh.

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It appears that when Muhammad Morsi became Egypt’s President, Hamas decided to ditch its Syrian and Iran, and hitch their wagon to the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood.

It has not worked out well for them:

The party-militia Hamas, a distant offshoot in Palestinian Gaza of the Muslim Brotherhood, has seldom been on the sunny side of the street. But a combination of difficult political choices has left it more isolated and more broke than ever before in its history, as China’s Xinhua wire service points out. Adding insult to injury, it faces a Tamarrud (Rebellion) youth movement of a strong secularist bent that is vowing to do to it what Tamarrud in Egypt did to former President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

 Israel imposed a blockade on the entirety of Gaza in 2007 after its attempt to dislodge the party from power there failed. The blockade was damaging but imperfect, creating deep unemployment and food insecurity. There were ways partially to circumvent it. Egypt winked at the construction of huge underground tunnels from Gaza to the Sinai desert, through which smugglers brought in millions of dollars worth of goods. Moreover, cash came in from Iran to reward Hamas (Sunni fundamentalists) for allying with secular Syria and the Shiite fundamentalist Hizbullah of south Lebanon.

These were not ideological allies but rather strange bedfellows, all of whom only had in common fear of Israeli expansionism. ………

 Palestinians have been among the least fundamentalist populations in the Muslim world, and the hard line religious temptation is one that only a minority felt. The party did win the January 2006 elections for the Palestine legislature, but that was a fluke and said more about the corruption and unpopularity of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) than about desire for religious rule. ………

Hamas was presented with a severe dilemma by the outbreak of the attempted popular revolution and then the civil war in Syria. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood enthusiastically joined the opposition to the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood had opposed the socialist, secular policies of the Baath Party and its land reform and large public sector. The Muslim Brotherhood represented urban shopkeepers and entrepreneurs and ideologically is not so far from the evangelical wing of the US Republican Party. Moreover, the Baath came to be dominated by Alawite Shiites, whom Muslim Brothers do not consider Muslims. The MB staged a revolt in Hama in 1982, which Bashar’s father brutally crushed, killing thousands.

 Not only was Hamas’s alliance with Bashar al-Assad increasingly uncomfortable, what with the Syrian Muslim Brothers denouncing them as traitors, but then in June of 2012 Muhammad Morsi of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood won the presidency. He opposed al-Assad and was a long-time warm supporter of Hamas.

 So most of the Hamas leadership (not all) abandoned al-Assad and Damascus, seeking to replace his patronage and support with that of Morsi in Cairo. ………

 But the Hamas abandonment of Syria angered Iran, which allegedly cut Hamas off without a further dime. (The US has to stop charging Iran with being a supporter of ‘terrorism’ if what it means is that it gives money to the government of Gaza.) That cut-off of Tehran support was all right with much of the Hamas leadership, though, because Morsi in Egypt was willing to become the movement’s patron instead.

 Then on July 3 of this year, Morsi was overthrown in a combination popular revolution and military coup. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was more or less declared a terrorist organization by the military, with 2000 of its leaders arrested and its sit-ins broken up in a bloody crackdown, killing hundreds.

 ………

 So the Egyptian military now has it in for Hamas, as well, which they suspect of links to Egyptian militants and rebellious Bedouin in the Sinai Peninsula, where Egyptian troops have lost their lives fighting al-Qaeda affiliates. So the officers have done what Mubarak never dared. They have definitively closed the tunnels. Apparently nothing is getting through. And they closed the Rafah crossing. The Palestinians in Gaza are complaining that Egypt’s Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has deeply harmed “tourism,” but surely that is a euphemism for smuggling.

 Just as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown in part by the militantly secularist Tamarrud or Rebellion movement, so Palestinian youth in Gaza have thrown up their own Rebellion group. They feed stories to the Egyptian press such as that Hamas keeps a secret string of secret prisons where they imprison their ideological (secular) enemies and where they practice the ugliest kinds of torture and interrogations. The Gaza Rebellion/ Tamarrud movement claims to have masses of supporters and to be considered a real threat by Hamas.

………

While it is true that guerrilla movements are difficult to simply starve out, Hamas does at the moment seem in real trouble. There have long been signs that Palestinian youth in Gaza are sick and tired of its extreme fundamentalism, so if change comes, it could have a local social base.

I cannot say that I am sad about this.

I hope that a movement that is both more secular than Hamas, and less corrupt than Fatah develops out of this, because neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are well served by what amounts to Palestinian leadership.

How About some F%$#ing Details

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OK, so now the Russians are denouncing the UN chemical weapons report, claiming that they have been given evidence that the rebels gassed the people in Ghouta:

Russia sharply criticized the new United Nations report on Syria’s chemical arms use on Wednesday as biased and incomplete, hardening the Kremlin’s defense of the Syrian government even while pressing ahead with a plan to disarm its arsenal of the internationally banned weapons.

The Russians also escalated their critiques of Western governments’ interpretations of the report, which offered the first independent confirmation of a large chemical weapons assault on Aug. 21 on the outskirts of Syria’s capital, Damascus, that asphyxiated hundreds of civilians.

………

Russian news reports quoted the country’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, as saying during a visit to Damascus that Syria’s government had provided additional information that showed insurgents used chemical weapons not only on Aug. 21 but also on other occasions.

The Syrians offered no such information to the United Nations chemical weapons inspectors before they left Syria with a trove of forensic samples on Aug. 31. The inspectors have said they will return to Syria to investigate other reported instances of chemical weapons use, but no dates have been announced.

I called off Obama and His Evil Minions™ about their profoundly disingenuous claims regarding poison gas use in Syria, where they said that they had incontrovertible evidence, and put out crap completely bereft of information, and I will call out Mr. Ryabkov as well.

If you have information release it.

I have been thinking about the implications of the UN Report (more in a later post) and it does appear to present a much stronger case for the Assad regime having agency in the gas attack than I have previously seen.

I am dubious of the Russian “evidence”.

Your Syria Update

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Let us start with the thought that maybe Binyamin Netanyahu should tell his political allies to shut the F%$# up:

‘Israel wanted Assad gone since start of Syria civil war’

 “Tehran-Damascus-Beirut arc is the greatest danger,” says outgoing Israeli envoy to US Michael Oren.

 “Bad guys” backed by Iran are worse for Israel than “bad guys” who are not supported by the Islamic Republic, Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US Michael Oren told The Jerusalem Post in a parting interview.

 Oren, in the interview that is to be published in full on Friday, traced the evolution of Israel’s message on Syria during the three weeks of the chemical weapons crisis.

 “The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” he said.

 This was the case, he said, even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated to al-Qaida.

Seriously. In one interview, he dissed the United States by saying that al Qaida is not that bad, and effectively endorses Bashir Assad, because if Israel is for it, then the Arab world is against it.

Oh, for f%$# sake, shut the f%$# up!

BTW, in the whole soft on terrorist sh%$, we have Obama waiving the rule against supplying weapons to terrorists:

President Obama, in order to arm Al-Qaeda linked Syrian rebels, has waived a provision of federal law designed to prevent the supply of arms to terrorist groups. Not surprisingly, federal law currently bans giving weapons to terrorists. Though it seems Obama does have the authority to bypass the restriction and he is choosing to do so by arming the Syrian rebels who have links to Al Qaeda, a group still listed as supporting terrorism.

The president, citing his authority under the Arms Export Control Act, announced today that he would “waive the prohibitions in sections 40 and 40A of the AECA related to such a transaction.”
Those two sections prohibit sending weaponry to countries described in section 40(d): “The prohibitions contained in this section apply with respect to a country if the Secretary of State determines that the government of that country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” Congress stated in the Arms Control Export Act.

The Syrian rebels not only include factions that are explicitly loyal to Al Qaeda but, according to US intelligence and experts analysts, those factions are now dominant within the opposition. So it is highly likely that some of the arms being shipped into Syria right now by the CIA will fall into the hands of Syrian rebels loyal to Al Qaeda.

This has epic fail written all over it.

As to the UN report it is not conclusive, but it does point toward the Syrian government as being the perps.  Note however though that some people disagree with this strongly.

I’ve looked at the UN report, I have a number of thoughts:
It’s 41 pages long, and pages 9-41 are appendices.  (I like this format, it allows you to take in the information quickly.)

  • It’s definitely Sarin.  The processes and technology are solid.
  • They were scrupulous in maintaining a chain of custody.
  • There are mentions of “interesting chemicals” in addition to decomposition products of Sarin.  

I would assume that this would be stabilizers and production impurities, but my knowledge of the chemistry of chemical weapons is limited.  (I’m sort of in the “biz”, but I just package detection methods, and so have a limited knowledge of the chemistry)

As such, the “interesting” chemicals that could present a clearer picture of how the agents were manufactured and stored.

This would probably give some better indications as to the who produced the agents.

In any case, it appears that my earlier assessment, where I fingered the rebels, now appears to be somewhat less likely.

Idiot of the Day

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David Ignatius:

You can think this new American caution is potentially dangerous (as I do), but there’s no arguing that it’s deeply felt and (given the immense cost and almost nonexistent benefits of war in Iraq and Afghanistan) understandable. The question is what a president should do about it.

It’s dangerous to avoid costly wars with no benefits.

Seriously, what the f%$# is the problem in Washington, DC?

There seems to be a conventional wisdom that in order for us to be “centrist”, we have to bomb the sh%$ out of people just because, or just because the President made a stupid, “Red Line,” comment at a news conference.

Just how small are their penises anyway?

H/t Atrios.

Just When You Thought that the House of Saud Could Not Get Any More Vile

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It turns out that they are sending death row inmates to fight in their war in Syria:

What is the role of Saudi Arabia in this proposal for a US military strike on Syria? It is not a question you will see asked much in the American media, but you should. Internationally there has been some coverage of the Saudi role, particularly the oceans of cash they’ve been lavishing on jihadist rebels for over a year. Rich Saudis like (now deceased) Osama Bin Laden and Saudi Intel Chief Prince Bandar are traditionally the biggest backers of radical Islamist groups in the world. President Assad continually noted in his interview with Charlie Rose that the Saudis were pouring their petro-dollars into Wahhabist Al-Qaeda linked rebels in Syria.

And now it is reported that the Saudi Arabian government is granting amnesty to death row inmates in exchange for them going to Syria to wage jihad.

Well, it seems some Saudi bureaucrats looked at the stalemate in Syria and came up with a way to think outside the box—and by “box” I mean “death row cell.” According to a story filed by A.I.N.A., an Iraqi Assyrian PR agency, the Saudi Ministry of Interior came up with a brand-new plague to inflict on Syria in 2012: “Let’s fly a bunch of death-row inmates over there and give them automatic weapons!” Seriously. Here’s the memo:

…we are in dialogue with the accused criminals who have been convicted with smuggling drugs, murder, rape, from the following nationalities: 110 Yemenis, 21 Palestinians, 212 Saudis, 96 Sudanese, 254 Syrians, 82 Jordanians, 68 Somalis, 32 Afghanis, 94 Egyptians, 203 Pakistanis, 23 Iraqis, and 44 Kuwaitis.

We have reached an agreement with them that they will be exempted from the death sentence and given a monthly salary to their families and loved ones, who will be prevented from traveling outside Saudi Arabia in return for rehabilitation of the accused and their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria.

Please accept my greetings.

[Signed]

Director of follow up in Ministry of Interior

Abdullah bin Ali al-Rmezan

And we are on their side.

They are sending murders, rapists, and other criminals to fight for their Islamist forces in Syria, and we are on their side.

Think about that:  We are on their side.

You think that these guys care about the rules of war of the well-being of the Syrian people.

You know that everything is f%$#ed up and sh%$ when Putin is on the side of the angels.

A reminder:  We are on these guy’s side.

What the F%##?!?!? Putin is the F%$#ing Voice of F%$#ing Reason on Syria

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I read this OP/ED that he wrote for the New York Times:

Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

He makes a number of trenchant points:

  • Syria is not a battle for democracy, it is a power struggle where much of the opposition are foreign fighters driven by sectarian triumphalism..
  • That much of the violence is fueled by foreign weapons supplies.
  • The evidence presented so far by the White House is thin.
  • Ignoring international law encourages nations to accumulates WMDs.
  • Surgical strikes don’t exist, you will kill innocents.
  • American exceptionalism is a dangerous myth.

The reactions of America’s chattering classes has been abject horror, particularly regarding the last point.

American exceptionalism does not exist, it’s just an excuse of a people who have not seen war on their shores for 150 years to bring war to other people’s shores.

I agree with them all, though I think that Charlie Pierce’s take on this, that Putin is embracing and his Pwn493 (ownage) of America’s needlessly bellicose foreign policy.

Read both Putin and Pierce.  (Pierce is way funnier, but Putin is a bit more substantive)

Remember that WSJ OP/ED Written by a Paid Agent of the Syrian Rebels?

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I posted a link to this a few days ago.

Well, she just got fired for a non-existent PhD on her resume:

A young researcher whose opinions on Syria were cited by both Senator McCain and Secretary of State John Kerry in congressional testimony last week has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for allegedly faking her academic credentials.

The institute issued a statement on its website concerning the researcher, Elizabeth O’Bagy:

The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University. ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.

O’Bagy and her op-ed drew scrutiny last week when the Wall Street Journal failed to disclose O’Bagy’s ties to an advocacy group backing the Syrian opposition and lobbying the U.S. government to intervene in Syria. The Journal was forced to post a clarification that “in addition to her role at the Institute for the Study of War, Ms. O’Bagy is affiliated with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit operating as a 501(c)(3) pending IRS approval that subcontracts with the U.S. and British governments to provide aid to the Syrian opposition.”

What a surprise.  Another right wing “expert” is a fraud.

I Did Not See This Coming………

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Something else I did not expect, MoveOn’s ad on this is not lame

I did not expect the Russians to announce that the Assad regime have come to a preliminary agreement to place their chemical arsenal under in the control of foreign monitors:

Russia opened up a possible diplomatic solution to the Syrian chemical weapons crisis on Monday with a pledge to persuade the Assad regime to hand over its chemical arsenal to international supervision to be destroyed.

Russia’s new initiative was announced by its foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, hours after the US secretary of state, John Kerry, suggested that the Syrian government could avert punitive US air strikes in retaliation for an alleged chemical attack on 21 August, if it surrendered “every single bit” of its arsenal by the end of the week.

However, Kerry added that Assad “isn’t about to do it”, and the state department hastily issued a clarification saying that apparent ultimatum was “rhetorical” rather than a concrete bargaining position.

But Lavrov appeared to seize on the idea as a means of averting US military intervention.

“If the establishment of international control over chemical weapons in that country would allow avoiding strikes, we will immediately start working with Damascus,” he said.

“We are calling on the Syrian leadership to not only agree on placing chemical weapons storage sites under international control, but also on its subsequent destruction and fully joining the treaty on prohibition of chemical weapons,” Lavrov said after a meeting with his Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem.

FWIW, the Syrians have appeared to welcome the proposal:

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s foreign minister on Monday said he welcomed Russia’s proposal that Damascus hand over control of its chemical weapons arsenal to international supervision to avoid US military action.

“I carefully listened to (Russian foreign minister) Sergei Lavrov’s statement about it. In connection with this, I note that Syria welcomes the Russian initiative based on the Syrian leadership’s concern about the lives of our nationals and the security of our country,” Walid al-Muallem said in comments carried by Russian state news agency ITAR-Tass.

I am not one to favor the “eleventy dimensional chess” bullsh%$ put forward by the Obamabots out there, but this is a welcome development.

I’m not sure if it is luck or design.

The tough part will be insuring that the rebels get rid of their poison gas.

The Assad regime cannot be comfortable with disarming without that.

Of course, that would unmask the House of Saud’s complicity in arming Jihadist rebels with chemical weapons, and I’m not sure that Prince Bandar bin Sultan would like to be labeled a war criminal.

Alan Grayson Calls Out the So Called “Classified Briefing” Given to Congress

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Alan Grayson writes an oblique, but blistering editorial in the New York Times:

The documentary record regarding an attack on Syria consists of just two papers: a four-page unclassified summary and a 12-page classified summary. The first enumerates only the evidence in favor of an attack. I’m not allowed to tell you what’s in the classified summary, but you can draw your own conclusion.

 On Thursday I asked the House Intelligence Committee staff whether there was any other documentation available, classified or unclassified. Their answer was “no.”

 The Syria chemical weapons summaries are based on several hundred underlying elements of intelligence information. The unclassified summary cites intercepted telephone calls, “social media” postings and the like, but not one of these is actually quoted or attached — not even clips from YouTube. (As to whether the classified summary is the same, I couldn’t possibly comment, but again, draw your own conclusion.)

………

 We have reached the point where the classified information system prevents even trusted members of Congress, who have security clearances, from learning essential facts, and then inhibits them from discussing and debating what they do know. And this extends to matters of war and peace, money and blood. The “security state” is drowning in its own phlegm.

 My position is simple: if the administration wants me to vote for war, on this occasion or on any other, then I need to know all the facts. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.

And then he follows this up with in interview with the Washington Post where he also says that he has been given no meaningful information, and adds to this the fact that he feels that Obama and his administration are not competent in managing their relationship with Congress:

When has the White House ever — ever — been able to turn around a vote? It hasn’t happened in the entire Obama administration; much less happened when the constituent mail is running 100-1 against. When nobody is paying attention, anything is possible. The president can offer you favors or employ moral suasion or enlist lobbies. But the public is watching and is extremely angry about the president’s position. In that kind of environment, the president doesn’t even have the tools.

BTW, the White House Chief of Staff has admitted as much, saying that this is not a court of law, but that it, “passes the common sense test.”

The White House asserted Sunday that a “common-sense test” dictates the Syrian government is responsible for a chemical weapons attack that President Barack Obama says demands a U.S. military response. But Obama’s top aide says the administration lacks “irrefutable, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence” that skeptical Americans, including lawmakers who will start voting on military action this week, are seeking.

 “This is not a court of law. And intelligence does not work that way,” White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said during his five-network public relations blitz Sunday to build support for limited strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

 “The common-sense test says he is responsible for this. He should be held to account,” McDonough said of the Syrian leader who for two years has resisted calls from inside and outside his country to step down.

So Obama’s Chief of Staff just said that Obama’s Secretary of State was exaggerating the case.

Roll tape.

Title Corrected, note bit in italics.

Mission Creep Already?

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Now we have Barack Obama saying that “limited and proportional strikes” will create Freedumb:

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that “limited, proportional” military strikes against Syria would degrade President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons capabilities and allow that nation to “free itself” from political conflict.

And we have John Kerry leaving an opening for boots on the ground:

Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday appeared to leave the door open to the U.S. deploying ground troops in Syria in the event the country “imploded, for instance.”

“In the event Syria imploded, for instance or in the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of somebody else and it was clearly in the interest of our allies — all of us, the British, the French, and others. I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to the President of the United States to secure our country,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, debating whether to authorize President Barack Obama’s punitive strike in response to a reported chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime.

Asked by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), the ranking Republican on the committee, whether the secretary of state truly believed combat troops could be an option, Kerry walked the comment back by saying he was only “thinking out loud.”

Yeah, like that is reassuring.

This is so going to turn into a complete cluster-f%$#.

Obama Asks for Congressional Authorization for an Attack on Syria

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This is something that I did not see coming.

Presidents Nixon have been outright hostile to the application of the war powers act, so I expected that his speech yesterday would be to announce the start of 2-3 days bombing.

Instead, he announced that he would be submitting a proposal for a war powers act authorization:

President Obama put on hold Saturday a plan to attack Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons, arguing that the United States had a moral responsibility to respond forcefully but would not do so until Congress has a chance to vote on the use of military force.

The announcement puts off a cruise missile strike that had appeared imminent, a prospect that had the region on edge and stoked intense debate in the United States, where many dread getting dragged into a new war.

Obama did not indicate what he would do if Congress rejects the measure.

Lawmakers are scheduled to return from recess on Sept. 9to begin what is sure to be a contentious debate about the risks of injecting the United States into a conflict in which it has few reliable allies and enemies on both sides of the front lines. The Senate will hold committee hearings on the proposed strike this week, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced Saturday.

The decision to seek congressional approval for what the administration has said would be a short, limited engagement was a remarkable turn one day after Secretary of State John F. Kerry delivered an almost-prosecutorial case for military intervention. Obama made the decision Friday night following days of agonizing deliberations with members of his Cabinet, according to administration officials.

I think that Obama is aware of the politics of the situation here, and felt a need to distinguish himself from Bush’s foreign policy.

I think that his calculus is that Congress won’t be willing to deny the request and will grant him the authorization of use of military force (AUMF), because of the political consequences of the vote.

I think that this is a miscalculation. On the Sunday shows, members of Congress expressed a lot of skepticism about the AUMF.

In particular, they complained that it:

Leading lawmakers dealt bipartisan rejection Sunday to President Obama’s request to strike Syrian military targets, saying the best hope for congressional approval would be to narrow the scope of the resolution.

From the Democratic dean of the Senate to tea party Republicans in their second terms, lawmakers said the White House’s initial request to use force against Syria will be rewritten in the coming days to try to shore up support in a skeptical Congress. But some veteran lawmakers expressed doubt that even the new use-of-force resolution would win approval, particularly in the House.

“I think it’s going to be a very tough sell,” said Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), who is often a key crossover Republican in compromises with the White House. For now, Cole said he is “leaning no” on approving any use of force against Syria.

His remarks came after a more than 2½-hour classified briefing that drew 83 lawmakers to the Capitol, GOP aides said. They flew in from across the country on 24 hours’ notice for a rare Labor Day weekend meeting. The briefing, run by five senior national security officials, began the administration’s all-out effort to win support for what Obama has said would be a limited strike against military targets to punish Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime for carrying out a chemical attack.

White House officials have less than two weeks to secure backing in the House and the Senate, which will not formally return from their regular end-of-summer break until Sept. 9. They are expected to then immediately begin debate on military authorization, with votes by mid-September.

………

Obama’s allies said the first order of business will be to work with the administration to redraft the resolution, which was sent to Capitol Hill on Saturday night and barely filled one page. It had no prescriptions for what type of military action could be carried out or its duration.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the dean of the Senate and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters that the resolution is “too open-ended” as written. “I know it will be amended in the Senate,” he said.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said, “That has to be rectified, and they simply said in answer to that they would work with the Congress and try to come back with a more prescribed resolution.”

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a former Senate staffer who inspected chemical weapons attacks by Saddam Hussein’s government against its own citizens in Iraq in the 1980s, said he will push to add language that would limit the length of the mission and prohibit putting U.S. troops on the ground in Syria.

I think that the old Clinton hands remember how the AUMF vote in 1991 largely cleared the way for Bill Clinton in 1992, because the Representatives and Senators who voted against it were ruled out as a Democratic Presidential nominee by the conventional wisdom of the time.

I think that this is wrong.

First, we won’t have the sort of conclusive military victory that we had in Kuwait

Second, this is a different time, and the political equation has changed.  The current resident of the White House got there largely on his credibility of his opposition to “stupid wars.”

Voting against the AUMF, or voting to narrow it, is likely to be a requirement for any Congressional Democrat who wants to run for President in 2016.

I thing that there is a significant possibility that Obama will be handed the same sort of defeat that David Cameron did in the UK.

(AUMF request after break)