Category: Middle East

Yes, Not Like Iraq at All………

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This just in, we have a news report that, the rebels were behind the gas attack in Ghouta.

Full disclosure, I know nothing of the news organization, MintPress News, though I am familiar with the work of one of the authors, Dale Gavlak, she’s done stuff for public radio, the AP, and Salon.

The assertion is that the Jabhat al-Nusra, received the weapons with the aid of Prince Bandar, the head of intelligence for the Saudi Arabia.

The connection between the House of Saud and Jabhat al-Nusra is well known, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that this could have happen.

Needless to say, I don’t think that this will delay the attack on Syria at all, because Obama is too concerned about his dick swinging over his “red line” comments, and so wants to maintain his “credibility.”

My guess is that it was Syrian government forces who did this, but I’ve yet to see anything that would justify us dropping missiles on them at this point.

The 4 page declassified report from the White House, which has basically no useful information in it at all, is after the break.

Your Syria War Drums Update

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First we have to note that British PM David Cameron just lost a parliamentary vote to authorize action, so we would have to do this without our poodle:

Invoking the specter of the Iraq war, British lawmakers on Thursday rejected military action in Syria, dealing a stunning blow to Prime Minister David Cameron and effectively ruling Washington’s staunchest military ally out of any U.S.-led strike.

 After a marathon eight-hour debate, Cameron lost a vote that was initially seen as a symbolic motion setting up a final vote in the days ahead authorizing force against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime for allegedly using chemical weapons. But the surprise loss of even the weaker piece of legislation — by a vote of 285 to 272, including a group of rebels from Cameron’s Conservative Party in opposition — appeared to cost the United States its centerpiece ally in a still-forming coalition. The rejection additionally signaled what analysts called the biggest rupture in the U.S.-British “special relationship” since the 1982 Falklands war.

 Technically, Cameron could still authorize military strikes over the objection of Parliament, but top government officials — including the prime minister himself — indicated that was not an option following Thursday’s defeat.

While a revolt of his own party doomed the vote, it appears that most of Cameron’s vitriol was directed at opposition leader Ed Miliband:

A Downing Street spokesperson said the letter to the cabinet secretary was “completely over the top”. The spokesperson said: “Labour’s reaction is completely over the top. The No 10 press people were asked if the lack of an international response could give succour to the regime and they agreed with that. They did not mention Ed Miliband by name.”

 Miliband was already angry after a government source used expletives overnight to criticise Miliband. A government source told the Times on Wednesday night: “No 10 and the Foreign Office think Miliband is a f%$#ing c%$# and a copper-bottomed sh%$.“

(emphasis, and “%$#” mine)

As an aside, I really appreciate the honesty of British politics over the dishonest civility of the our political tradition.

BTW, it now appears that sources in the administration are walking back from their initial claims that they have ironclad proof against the Assad regime:

The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack that killed at least 100 people is no “slam dunk,” with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria’s chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say.

 President Barack Obama declared unequivocally Wednesday that the Syrian government was responsible, while laying the groundwork for an expected U.S. military strike.

 “We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out,” Obama said in an interview with “NewsHour” on PBS. “And if that’s so, then there need to be international consequences.”

 However, multiple U.S. officials used the phrase “not a slam dunk” to describe the intelligence picture — a reference to then-CIA Director George Tenet’s insistence in 2002 that U.S. intelligence showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk” — intelligence that turned out to be wrong.

This might explain why the Obama administration has been trying to shut down the UN investigation of the attack, they are afraid that, after their unequivocal public statements, they will be shown up as fools:

After initially insisting that Syria give United Nations investigators unimpeded access to the site of an alleged nerve gas attack, the administration of President Barack Obama reversed its position on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get the U.N. to call off its investigation.

 The administration’s reversal, which came within hours of the deal reached between Syria and the U.N., was reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday and effectively confirmed by a State Department spokesperson later that day.

 In his press appearance Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who intervened with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to call off the investigation, dismissed the U.N. investigation as coming too late to obtain valid evidence on the attack that Syrian opposition sources claimed killed as many 1,300 people.

 The sudden reversal and overt hostility toward the U.N. investigation, which coincides with indications that the administration is planning a major military strike against Syria in the coming days, suggests that the administration sees the U.N. as hindering its plans for an attack.

 Kerry asserted Monday that he had warned Syrian Foreign Minister Moallem last Thursday that Syria had to give the U.N. team immediate access to the site and stop the shelling there, which he said was “systematically destroying evidence”. He called the Syria-U.N. deal to allow investigators unrestricted access “too late to be credible”.

 After the deal was announced on Sunday, however, Kerry pushed Ban in a phone call to call off the investigation completely.

BTW, the idea that it is “too late” to collect evidence is complete crap.

There should be evidence for months. Sarin decays quickly, but the decay products should remain in the environment for weeks, if not months, depending on the quality of its manufacture.

FWIW, even though Kerry could not get the inspectors stopped, they are ending their mission a day early, probably because they were told that if the didn’t, they would be in the path of cruise missile strikes.

BTW, even the state department admits that, even if the Syrian military initiated the attack, it may have been outside of the normal chain of command:

With the United States barreling toward a strike on Syria, U.S. officials say they are completely certain that Bashar al-Assad’s government is responsible for last week’s chemical weapons attack. They just don’t know who in the Syrian government is to blame.

 On Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf admitted as much. “The commander-in-chief of any military is ultimately responsible for decisions made under their leadership, even if … he’s not the one that pushes the button or said, ‘Go,’ on this,” Harf said. “I don’t know what the facts are here. I’m just, broadly speaking, saying that he is responsible for the actions of his regime. I’m not intimately familiar with the command and control structure of the Syrian military. I’m just not. But again, he is responsible ultimately for the decisions that are made.”

 On Tuesday, The Cable reported that U.S. officials are basing their assessment that the Assad regime bears responsibility for the strike largely on an intercepted phone call between a panicked Ministry of Defense official and a commander of a Syrian chemical weapons unit. But that intelligence does not resolve the question of who in the government ordered the strike or what kind of command and control structures are in place for the use of such weapons. “It’s unclear where control lies,” one U.S. intelligence official told The Cable Tuesday. “Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?”

BTW, THIS should scare the hell out of everyone.

Using chemical weapons is pretty bad, but losing control of your chemical weapons stockpile is terrifying.

I agree with Saleh Muslim, who is head of the primary Kurdish party in Syria, when he said, “The regime in Syria … has chemical weapons, but they wouldn’t use them around Damascus, 5 km from the (U.N.) committee which is investigating chemical weapons. Of course they are not so stupid as to do so.”

It Looks Like the Wheels are Coming off Our Little Syrian Adventure in Britain

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David Cameron was all ready go and bomb stuff, but he suffered a push-back from the opposition, and a revolt from within his own party:

Prime Minister David Cameron was forced on Wednesday to push back his plans for an imminent military strike against Syria in a humiliating climb-down for Britain’s leader after coming under fierce domestic and international pressure.

Just a day after recalling Britain’s parliament to vote on how to respond to Syria’s suspected use of chemical weapons, Cameron was ambushed when the opposition Labour party said it wanted greater parliamentary scrutiny and rebel lawmakers in his own ruling Conservative party said they would oppose him.

Earlier on Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had sought more time for inspectors to complete their work, Russia had said it was premature to table a U.N. resolution, and the Labour party had made it clear it wanted clear proof that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.

Cameron’s failure to execute his original plan of action could hamper efforts by the United States to deliver a swift cruise missile strike against Syria as early as this week, potentially harming London’s alliance with Washington.

Inspired by the legacy of public mistrust left behind by former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s contested decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, Labour leader Ed Miliband and some rebel Conservatives used the prospect of a government defeat in parliament to force Cameron to delay action.

After hours of impromptu negotiations between Cameron’s political managers and the opposition, his office agreed that the United Nations Security Council should see findings from chemical weapons inspectors before it responded militarily.

“The United Nations Security Council must have the opportunity immediately to consider that briefing (from inspectors) and … every effort should be made to secure a Security Council Resolution backing military action before any such action is taken,” a British government motion to be debated in parliament on Thursday said.

Britain had previously declined to say it would wait for a U.N. report before launching military action.

The United States has lost its poodle, for a while, at least.

Syria

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I don’t know what is going on there.

I find it improbable that the Syrians would engage in a massive chemical weapons attack, and while the videos appear to show the use of some sort of nerve agent, but if it was Sarin, the doctors treating the victims should have been exposed as well. 

It does seem to be some sort of appear to be the action of a cholinesterase inhibitor, probably an organophosphate, but it was odd.

The problem is that there a profound lack of transparency here.

It could be the Syrian army launching a massive Sarin attack.

It could be the rebels using Sarin that they are rumored to have gotten from Libyan stockpiles.

It could be some other sort of nerve agent, such as certain insecticides, which would explain why the doctors did not get dosed.  (The toxicity and the secondary contamination characteristics could be quite different, even if the symptoms are largely identical.)

I do hope that the UN team manages to get in and collect samples.

Just When You Thought that Obama’s Secrecy Fetish Could Not Get Any More Reprehensible………

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I present to you the case of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was imprisoned at the demand of the US government because he revealed that it was a US drone strike, and not a Yemeni army attack, that killed 41 civilians in al-Majalla in 2009.

His “trial” was condemned as a kangaroo court by numerous human rights group, and when the President of Yemen wanted to pardon him because of internal protests, Barack Obama personally called him to brow beat him into extending his detention.

Well, Shaye has now been released, but the official wheels in the Obama administration continue to try to grind him to dust:

News broke yesterday afternoon that, after a nearly three-year-long imprisonment, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye had been released by the Yemeni government. Shaye’s work drew international attention in 2009 when he reported on a U.S. airstrike in the Yemeni village of al-Majalla that killed 41 civilians. He also conducted multiple interviews with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

 U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, have told journalists that Shaye facilitated AQAP attacks, but his accounts of his arrest detail press intimidation by the Yemeni government, then still headed by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who resigned amid mass protests in November 2011. Shaye’s five-year prison sentence has drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Yemen-based Freedom Foundation.

 The U.S. government is still concerned about Shaye. Bernadette Meehan, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told FP this morning by email, “We are concerned and disappointed by the early release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who was sentenced by a Yemeni court to five years in prison for his involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Meehan did not comment on whether the United States advocated against his release.

This is so repulsive on so many levels.

Oh, Crap

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Have you heard about MERS?

I don’t mean the fraudulent legal figleaf known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System that is a plague upon home-owners, I am instead referring an actual plague to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a SARS like infectious disease with a 55% fatality rate centered in Saudi Arabia.

Discussions of this disease have been bouncing around the epidemiology world for a while, there have only been about 80 confirmed cases, but in a couple of months millions of pilgrims will be going to Saudi Arabia as a part of the Hajj:

When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.

Although the numbers — so far — are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia’s holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means “to visit a populated place,” and it’s the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent — a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.

All this is going on while a Dutch lab is claiming rights to the species genome, which is crippling research on the disease.

This has all the hallmarks of a public health catastrophe.

Epic Fail

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John Sidney McCain III goes to Syria. He takes a picture with the noble freedom fighters. One small problem: it turns out that two of the guys are terrorist who kidnapped religious pilgrims :

Everything was going relatively smoothly following John McCain’s surprise visit to hang out with Syrian rebels this week until Lebanon’s Daily Star reported that one of the “brave fighters” pictured on the senator’s Twitter is “a known affiliate of the rebel group responsible for the kidnapping of 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims one year ago.” If so, McCain’s office said, that would be “regrettable.”

 “According to families of the remaining captives and one of the released men, Anwar Ibrahim, one of the men standing alongside McCain in photographs released by the senator’s office, is Mohammad Nour, the chief spokesman and photographer for the Northern Storm kidnappers,” according to the Daily Star. “Ibrahim and other members of the kidnapped family said they recognized Nour, and another man affiliated with the group, also identified as ‘Abu Ibrahim,’ immediately after seeing the photos.”

So, John McCain thinks that he knows who the good guys are.

Here’s a thought, if you cannot tell who is the good guys are, it’s best not to choose sides.

Narcissistic Twaddle from “Liberal Hawks”

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The Washington Post published an article about how the Liberal Hawks are cowed because of their failures in Iraq and Libya:

For interests on both sides of Syria’s civil war, this has been the week to increase the pressure. Hezbollah sent reinforcements to the troops of President Bashar al-Assad, and Russia reiterated its intention to furnish the regime with weapons. At the same time, Republican Sen. John McCain secretly visited rebels and promised to push the Obama administration to arm the retreating forces. The European Union allowed its weapons embargo to lapse as nations such as Britain and France appear increasingly eager to aid the opposition fighters.

But amid the burst in outside engagement, one influential group seems noticeably silent. The liberal hawks, a cast of prominent left-leaning intellectuals, played high-profile roles in advocating for American military intervention on foreign soil — whether for regime change or to prevent humanitarian disasters. They pressured President Bill Clinton to intervene in Bosnia, provided intellectual cover on the left for President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and urged President Obama to engage in Libya. But even as the body count edges toward 100,000 in Syria and reports of apparent chemical-weapons use by Assad, liberal advocates for interceding have been rare, spooked perhaps by the traumatic experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and the clear reluctance of a Democratic president to get mired in the Middle East. Call them Syria’s mourning doves.

“Everybody has their own ghosts to deal with,” said Vali Nasr, a former Obama administration official and leading proponent of intervention in Syrian. “But those people understand that what is going on in Syria cannot go on indefinitely.”

Why the f%$# should we listen to these folks.

  • They were wrong about Iraq.
  • They were wrong about Libya (where Islamist rule, and ethnic cleansing of black Africans is the rule).
  • They have been agitating for a military strike against Iran, which would probably extend the rule of the mullahs by decades, as Saddam’s attack in the 1970s cemented their rule.

And now their feelings are hurt because people don’t take their push for military intervention seriously.

It’s just a no fly zone ……… Only a no fly zone is very clearly an act of war:

Kudos to Josh Rogin for breaking the news that “the White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for a no-fly zone inside Syria.” But wouldn’t it be a more powerful story without the euphemism?

Relying on the term “no-fly-zone” is typical in journalism. But that is a mistake. It obscures the gravity of the news.

Here’s how an alternative version of the story might look: “The White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for bombing multiple targets inside Syria, constantly surveilling Syrian airspace alongside U.S. allies, and shooting down Syrian war planes and helicopters that try to fly around, perhaps for months.”

The term “no-fly-zone” isn’t analytically useless. It’s just that folks using it as shorthand should make sure everyone reading understands that, as Daniel Larison put it right up in a headline, “Imposing a No-Fly-Zone in Syria Requires Starting a New War.” That becomes clearer some paragraphs later in Rogin’s article, when he discussed Senator John McCain’s advocacy for a “no-fly-zone.” “McCain said a realistic plan for a no-fly zone would include hundreds of planes, and would be most effective if it included destroying Syrian airplanes on runways, bombing those runways, and moving U.S. Patriot missile batteries in Turkey close to the border so they could protect airspace inside northern Syria,” he wrote.

(emphasis mine)

I would also note that anyone who thinks that this operation would be limited to air and air defense assets should look at the Libyan intervention, where it turned almost immediately into direct close air support for the rebels.

This has disaster written all over it.

There is a reason that “Liberal Hawks” were described as “Useful Idiots” by Tony Judt.

Why Stay Out of Syria, Reason Number 1325

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It appears that the UN peacekeepers on the Golan will have to pull out if weapons are sent to the rebels:

The future of the long-running UN peacekeeping mission on the strategic Golan Heights between Syria and Israel has been thrown into question as a result of Britain’s decision to defy most of the EU and force the lifting on the two-year arms embargo on Syria.

 The Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, and vice-chancellor, Michael Spindelegger, said on Tuesday they would probably pull out more than 300 peacekeepers if Britain helped arm the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

 A withdrawal would heighten the growing sense of greater Middle East crisis, creating a vacuum on the strategically vital heights which the Israelis would be tempted to fill quickly.

 Vienna stressed there was no need for haste as no weapons supplies were yet flowing. While declaring it had no intention of supplying arms immediately, Britain reserved the right to do so. Britain can start shipping guns and missiles to Syria on Saturday when the embargo lapses. But it has pledged to give negotiations another chance in Geneva next month while reserving the option of arming those in the fractious Syrian opposition it deems “moderate” from August.

And while we are at it, we should note that the EU move has prompted Russia to announce that it will be delivering advanced SAMs to Syria:

Russia said on Tuesday that it would supply one of its most advanced anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian government hours after the EU ended its arms embargo on the country’s rebels, raising the prospect of a rapidly escalating proxy war in the region if peace talks fail in Geneva next month.

 Israel quickly issued a thinly veiled warning that it would bomb the Russian S-300s if they were deployed in Syria as such a move would bring the advanced guided missiles within range of civilian and military planes in Israeli air space.

 “The shipments haven’t set out yet and I hope they won’t,” Moshe Ya’alon, the Israeli defence minister, said. “If they do arrive in Syria, God forbid, we’ll know what to do.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, argued that the delivery of the S-300 system had been previously agreed with the Syrian government in Damascus and would be a “stabilising factor” that could dissuade “some hotheads” from entering the conflict. That appeared to be a reference to the UK and France, who pushed through the lifting of the EU embargo on Monday night and are the only European countries currently considering arming the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Of course, the S-300 is useless against the rebels, but it would be pretty useful to deter NATO from acting against Syria.

BTW, I understand why the Israelis are freaking. Depending on model (the S-300 is a complete air defense system with a variety of interceptors), the range of the missile could be as much as 200 km, which would cover about 2/3 of Israeli air space from Quneitra.

In His House at R’lyeh, Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming*

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Archeologists have found a massive buried structure beneath Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee):

The massive circular structure appears to be an archaeologists dream: a recently discovered antiquity that could reveal secrets of ancient life in the Middle East and is just waiting to be excavated.

It’s thousands of years old — a conical, manmade behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored.

The problem is — it’s at the bottom of the biblical Sea of Galilee. For now, at least, Israeli researchers are left stranded on dry land, wondering what finds lurk below.

The monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet), emerged from a routine sonar scan in 2003. Now archaeologists are trying to raise money to allow them access to the submerged stones.

“It’s very enigmatic, it’s very interesting, but the bottom line is we don’t know when it’s from, we don’t know what it’s connected to, we don’t know its function,” said Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa who is one of several researchers studying the discovery. “We only know it is there, it is huge and it is unusual.”

A massive ancient structure underneath a body of water full of historical and mystical overtones.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

* Not exactly my line, Molly NYC made an abbreviated version of this in thee comments for the linked article.

Charlie Pierce Speaks

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He observes that ABC reporter Jonathan Karl’s entire report on “talking points” regarding Benghazi is completely bogus. His source lied to him, and there was no effort made to protect the State Department (and by extension, Hilary Clinton).

Karl’s “apology” is a typical non-apology apology. He says that the story still stands, but that quote was the whole story.

Pierce’s analysis on this is spot on:

………If Jonathan Karl doesn’t like being called a hack, then he should stop being a hack. Here’s one way to do it.

Blow the source who lied to you and, therefore, lied to us.

Do that. Or be a hack.

There’s no third alternative.

An interesting fact that Pierce cites is that Karl’s entrée into “journalism” was was through a right wing organization founded by William F. Buckley, and currently run by the infamous right wing liar publisher Alfred Regenry:

Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network, an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting right-leaning newspapers on college campuses (Extra!, 9-10/91)—such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous James O’Keefe (Political Correction, 1/27/10). The network, founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen conservative ideology on college campuses. William F. Buckley was the ISI’s first president, and the current board chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery. Several leading right-wing pundits came out of Collegiate-affiliated papers, including Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham (Washington Times, 11/28/04).

The Collegiate Network also provides paid internships and fellowships to place its members at corporate media outlets or influential Beltway publications; 2010-11 placements include the Hill, Roll Call, Dallas Morning News and USA Today. The program’s highest-profile alum is Karl, who was a Collegiate fellow at the neoliberal New Republic [TNR] magazine.

FAIR rightly calls him a right wing mole.  The Collegiate Network is not a journalist organization, it just plays one on TV.

I would also that between Glass, Shalit, Siegel, and now Karl, TNR under the ownership of Marty Peretz seems to be a petri dish for journalistic malfeasance.

Yet Another Reason Not to Be Involved in Syria

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In addition to the fact that the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is that the bad guys are the ones not literally eating human hearts, it now seems that just as the “Very Serious People” are demanding that we take down the Assad regime, the rest of the world is getting cold feet about the whole thing:

There is a change in the global political position towards Syria. Here are three recent indicators. Via FLC we learn of a significant position change in Tunisia:

Tunisia wants to reopen its embassy in Syria which has been closed for more than two years and has sent a request in this vein to the government in Damascus. Tunis is yet to receive a reply from Syria’s foreign ministry and a diplomatic source said that the letter has been sent to the foreign ministry since “last week.”

 …

 Tunisia quickly closed its embassy when the uprising against the Assad regime began in 2011. It will become the first country to reopen its diplomatic office in Syria if its request receives a positive response from the foreign ministry.

Tunisia is especially significant as it is part of the Arab League and its government is led by the Ennahda party which is ideological affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Tunisia is threatened by the Ansar al-Sharia Salafist movement, some of who’s supporters are fighting on the Syrian insurgency side, and the Ennahda government recently moved against that group.

Another sign that the international wind is changing was last weeks United Nation General Assembly vote on a nonbinding Qatari resolution against Syria. The resolution itself had to be rewritten some six times and while it gained the vote of 107 states a similar resolution last year was favored by 130 states.

A third sign is the seemingly changing position in Israel where a political mood is turning towards keeping the Syrian president Bashar Assad in power:

“Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there,” one senior Israeli intelligence officer was quoted as saying. A weakened, but intact Assad regime would be preferable for Syria and the Middle East, the Times reported intelligence sources as saying.

That view will likely later be reflected in Washington where the “Assad must go” crowd has yet to weaken its position.

This is what happens when you let your foreign policy be driven by the Gulf kingdoms desire to eliminate secular Arab regimes.

If the House of Saud and its ilk had the slightest desire to help the people of Syria (they don’t), there would be any number of ways for them to handle it without Islamicizing (Sunni-izing really) the conflict.

Yes, We Have to Get Deeply Involved in the Syrian Civil War

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One of the putative “good guys” in Syria has been caught on tape eating a dead soldier’s heart:

A video which appears to show a Syrian rebel taking a bite from the heart of a dead soldier has been widely condemned.

US-based Human Rights Watch identified the rebel as Abu Sakkar, a well-known insurgent from the city of Homs, and said his actions were a war crime.

The main Syrian opposition coalition said he would be put on trial.

The video, which cannot be independently authenticated, seems to show him cutting out the heart.


“I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog,” the man says, referring to President Bashar al-Assad as he stands over the soldier’s corpse.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Abu Sakkar is the leader of a group called the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade, an offshoot of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) Al-Farouq Brigades. He insults Alawites, the minority offshoot of Shia Islam to which Mr Assad belongs.

“The desecration and mutilation of a killed person is definitely a war crime,” Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, told the BBC. “This one particularly disturbing because of the sectarian nature of the language used by Abu Sakkar.

Seriously, does anyone now think that it’s a good idea to choose sides in this clusterf%$#?

Well,. anyone without a history of insanity, or members of the Senate with the last name of McCain, anyway? (But I repeat myself)

So Not a Surprise

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CNN’s Jake Tapper has discovered that the emails leaked to the press on Benghazi were altered to make the State Department (Hillary Clinton) look worse:

CNN has obtained an e-mail sent by a top aide to President Barack Obama about White House reaction to the deadly attack last September 11 on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that apparently differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.

 The actual e-mail from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House was primarily concerned with the State Department’s desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department.

 ………

 Whoever provided those accounts seemingly invented the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed. While Nuland, particularly, had expressed a desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and CIA warnings about the increasingly dangerous assignment, Rhodes put no emphasis at all in his e-mail on the State Department’s concerns.

 The context of the e-mail chain is important.

 Different officials from different agencies were going through iterations of talking points for Congress.

As the inestimable Marcy Wheeler notes, this has David Petreaus’ finger prints all over it:

It has taken three days for the bleating press corps in DC to wade through the roll-out of Benghazi talking point emails and realize that the tension behind the emails — as has been clear from just days after the attack — is that Benghazi was really a CIA, not a State, Mission, and therefore CIA bears responsibility for many of the security lapses. So State, in making changes to the emails, was making sure it didn’t get all the blame for CIA’s failures.

 ………

 They might have also said, “since February, people tied to CIA’s mission have twice been harassed by militia members, suggesting our OpSec was so bad they knew we were in Benghazi.”

 ………
They might also have said that the “trusted” militia, February 17 Brigade, trained by David Petraeus’ CIA, whose career legacy is based on false claims of successfully training locals, appears to have allowed the attack to happen (and, critically, delayed CIA guards from heading to the State mission to help).

 Note that Congressman Frank Wolf is just now showing some interest in why CIA’s vetting of the militia central to the mission’s defense was so bad. Maybe if CIA had included that detail in their self-serving initial talking points, Congress would have turned to this issue more quickly, particularly since we’re currently training more potentially suspect militias in Syria.

 In other words, the story CIA — which had f%$#ed up in big ways — wanted to tell was that it had warned State and State had done nothing in response (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is precisely the story Darrell Issa and Jason Chaffetz are trying to tell). The truthful story would have been (in part) that CIA had botched the militia scene in Benghazi, and that had gotten the Ambassador killed.

 ………

 David Petraeus, who tried and failed to get his preferred spin of the attack in Benghazi accepted by the Obama Administration, who subsequently got fired, purportedly for f%$#ing and possibly sharing classified information with his mistress, went to Dick Cheney’s propagandist to try to get his preferred spin adopted after the fact.

This is a classic example of why we should not give too much power and influence to our intelligence agencies: When they are the master, rather than the servant, their primary mission is covering up their own f%$#-ups, not providing good intelligence.

This is Seriously Weird

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Carla del Ponte, a former war crimes prosecutor, and a member of the UN commission investigating possible war crimes in the Syrian civil war, has given an interview stating that there was evidence that the Syrian rebels may have used chemical weapons.

Yes, you heard right, she has suggested that the rebels, not the government, might have been using chemical weapons:

A leading member of a United Nations investigatory commission says there are “strong concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof” that Syrian rebels have used the nerve agent sarin.

 Carla del Ponte, a former prosecutor for U.N. tribunals investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, made the comment in an interview Sunday with a Swiss television channel, the BBC reported.

 The U.N. panel, known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, emphasized in a statement Monday that it had reached no conclusions about the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.

“I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got … about the use of nerve gas by the opposition,” Del Ponte told Swiss Italian broadcaster RSI.

 She said the evidence emerged from interviews conducted by investigators with victims, physicians and others in neighboring countries.

Del Ponte did not rule out the possibility that President Bashar Assad’s government may also have used chemical agents on the battlefield.

The official response from the UN was to deny this:

U.N. war crimes investigators have reached no conclusions on whether any side in the Syrian war has used chemical weapons, the inquiry commission said on Monday, playing down a suggestion from one of the team that rebel forces had done so.

 Investigator Carla Del Ponte caught U.N. officials by surprise on Sunday when she said the commission had gathered testimony from casualties and medical staff indicating that rebel forces had used the banned nerve agent sarin.

 “The independent international Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic wishes to clarify that it has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties to the conflict,” it said in a statement.

It seems to me that something odd is going on.

Certainly, it is not outside of the realm of possibility for the rebels to have deployed Sarin, after all, a significant portion of their arsenal used to be the Syrian government’s arsenal.

Why someone like Carla del Ponte would make a public statement like this is not clear to me, particularly since since, by her own admission, the evidence is sketchy.

I’m wondering if this is push-back against pressure to make a definitive statement against the Assad government.

Certainly commiseration’s response to her statement would indicate that if there was any move to early judgement, there isn’t now.

Maybe it’s an honest mistake, but I sounds like some weird sort of wheels within wheels stuff.

Holy Crap!

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Israeli airstrikes in Syria.

It appears that they are targeting arms shipments to Hezbollah in Syria:

The United States believes Israel has conducted an airstrike into Syria, CNN reported on Friday, citing two unnamed U.S. officials.

CNN quoted the officials as saying Israel most likely conducted the strike “in the Thursday-Friday time frame” and that Israel’s warplanes did not enter Syrian air space.

It said the officials did not believe Israel had targeted a chemical weapons facility.

There was no immediate confirmation. A White House spokeswoman referred questions on the CNN report to the Israeli government.

The Israel Defense Forces had no comment on the officials’ remarks, but a source in the Israeli defense establishment told CNN: “We will do whatever is necessary to stop the transfer of weapons from Syria to terrorist organizations. We have done it in the past and we will do it if necessary the future.”

It is possible that the strikes were in Syria, but Israeli aircraft were operating from over the Golan or Lebanon, but that is just speculation on my part.

How Obama’s Drone War Is Hurting Us

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We are creating an entire generation who hates us and wants us dead:

Americans wouldn’t normally hear about how poor Yemeni villagers reacted to a drone strike. But Wessab is the home village of Farea al-Muslimi, a 22-year-old democracy activist who is among the most pro-American voices in Yemen. “I don’t know if there is anyone on earth that feels more thankful to America than me,” he said Tuesday in testimony before a Senate committee. “In my heart, I know I can only repay the opportunities, friendship, warmth, and exposure your country provided me by being their ambassadors to Yemenis for the rest of my life.”

………

Despite all his reporting, he never imagined his own village, which doesn’t even register on Google Maps, could be the site of an American drone strike. “In the past, most of Wessab’s villagers knew little about the United States,” he said. “My stories about my experiences in America, my American friends, and the American values that I saw for myself helped the villagers I talked to understand the America that I know and love. Now, however, when they think of America they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads ready to fire missiles at any time. I personally don’t even know if it is safe for me to go back to Wessab because I am someone who people in my village associate with America and its values.” What American policymakers need to understand, he added, is that “Wessab first experienced America through the terror of a drone strike. What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”

Unfortunately, most of our state security apparatus cannot conceive anything beyond eternal war, eternally overpriced weapons systems, and killing brown people.

Read the rest.

It’s Our War in Syria Now

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We may not be supplying arms directly, but United States has just plucked someone no one has heard of in order to have “their man” in charge of the insurgency:

Syria’s main exile opposition coalition elected a naturalized Syrian-born American citizen early Tuesday to be the first prime minister of an interim Syrian government, charged with funneling aid to rebels inside Syria and offering an alternative to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

By choosing Ghassan Hitto, 50, an information technology executive who lived in Texas until recently, the Syrian opposition coalition concluded months of contentious efforts to unite behind a leader, under pressure from the United States and its allies, which demanded that the opposition set up clear chains of command as a condition of increasing aid to the rebels.

Mr. Hitto, a relative unknown in opposition politics who rose to prominence recently through efforts to improve the delivery of humanitarian aid, was far from a unanimous choice. After a day of maneuvering and voting on Monday that lasted into early Tuesday, he won 35 votes, just three more than Assad Mustafa, a former agricultural minister under Mr. Assad’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad.

Mr. Hitto faces formidable challenges in his quest to to establish administrative authority over areas of northern Syria that have been secured by the rebels.

(emphasis mine)

If you don’t think that this guy was hand picked by the US State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to you.

BTW, when you look at the history of exiles chosen by the US to rule, Achmed Chalabi and Hamid Karzai come to mind, the history is not pretty.

As the saying goes, “ない愚かさはない薬です”.*

*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.

Facepalm

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Yes, considering the disaster that was the Israeli rump state in Lebanon, the idea that Israel is planning to establish a “buffer zone” in Syria does not bode well:

ISRAEL is considering creating a buffer zone reaching up to 10 miles inside Syria to protect itself from fundamentalist rebels on the other side of the border.

 The proposal, which has been drawn up by the military and presented to Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is intended to secure the 47-mile border against a growing Islamist threat if President Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime loses control of the area.

 The buffer would be modelled on the Lebanese security zone, in which the Israeli defence forces patrolled jointly with the South Lebanon army, a militia, up to 16 miles inside Lebanon from 1985 to 2000.

Yeah, and that whole Lebanese buffer zone worked so f%$#ing well.  derf

This is insanity.