Category: War

A Bit of Analysis on the Probable Shoot Down in the Ukraine

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Putin’s Flight Route from Sao Paulo to Moscow, and MS-12 MH17’s Route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur


Buk Missile Launcher


50 Km Radius about Snizhe (Red) where Launcher was Reported, and the crash site in Grabovo (Hrabove) (Blue)

Click for Popup Slide Show

What we know right now is that the Malaysian Airlines Flight 12 crashed in the Ukraine, and that it was very likely shot down by a medium of heavy surface to air missile (SAM).  (The aircraft was at about 10,000m, well above the range of light SAMs and AAA)

RT (obvious caveats apply) is noting that Putin’s presidential transport crossed paths with the airliner not that long before the shoot-down: (See map)

“I can say that Putin’s plane and the Malaysian Boeing intersected at the same point and the same echelon. That was close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at the height of 10,100 meters. The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the Malaysian aircraft – 15:44 Moscow time,” a source told the news agency on condition of anonymity.

I don’t know what exactly happened and why, but I’m inclined that the regular Russian military would not be pointing anything into the air bigger than a water pistol until Putin’s plane was on the ground.

I’ve checked a couple of sources online, and it appears that timing is as close as RT describes.

I think that RT is implying that  it was the part of an attempted assassination against Putin, but I am calling BS on that.

Furthermore, I plotted a great circle route from Sao Paulo to Moscow (below, attached), which would appear to indicate that the Putin’s aircraft and aircraft would have come close to MH17’s flight path.

Given the timing, it is hard to imagine that anyone in the Russian military was allowed to point anything skyward more potent than a water pistol.

Ukrainian sources are alleging that a Buk missile launcher was used to shoot down the aircraft, and it should be noted that the Ukrainian rebels did capture some of these systems:

Ukrainian official said Thursday that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, a passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down near Snizhe today, a town close to the Ukrainian-Russian border. The plane was carrying 295 people and crashed early evening, local time.

 No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but immediate reports say that the airplane was grounded by a Buk surface-to-air missile system. The Buk, developed by the Soviet Union in 1979, has remained widely in use throughout the former Soviet states, including Ukraine.

 General Philip Breedlove, the commander of the U.S. European Command, said that Moscow has been supplying Ukrainian separatists with anti-aircraft weaponry, and has held training sessions along the eastern Ukrainian border, teaching rebels how to operate the systems.

 Direct supply of the Buk from Moscow to rebels would be a major escalation in the ongoing conflict. However, on June 29, Russia’s official news agency, ITAR-TASS, reported that pro-Russian separatists took a Buk system under their control. The report does not specify whether or not this was theft from the Russian or Ukrainian militaries, only that the rebels had seized control of the weapons system. An AP report, dated yesterday, noted that, “A launcher similar to the Buk missile system was seen by Associated Press journalists near the eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne, which is held by pro-Russia rebels, earlier Thursday.”

As I noted the Buk fires the SA-11 (30km range) or the SA-17 (50km range).

The crash location is given as Grabovo (Hrabove), though, given the physics of the situation, the impact point could be anywhere from 10 to 100 km east northeast of that.  (See map)

Assuming that it was a missile, my opinion  is that the rebels are the most likely perps, followed by the Ukrainian armed forces or irregulars, with the Russian military a distant third.

I would also note that while it does appear that the rebels captured the missiles from the Ukrainian military, I cannot see them being able to operate the system without extensive training by Russian military of the FSB.

Oh Crap

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Israel has begun ground operations against Gaza:

Israeli tanks rolled into the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday night and naval gunboats pounded targets in the south as Israel began a ground invasion after 10 days of aerial bombardment failed to stop Palestinian militants from showering Israeli cities with rockets.

Israeli leaders said the incursion was a limited one focused on tunnels into its territory like the one used for a predawn attack Thursday that was thwarted. They said it was not intended to topple Hamas, the militant Islamist movement, from its longtime rule of Gaza.

As rockets continued to rain down on Israeli cities, a military spokesman said the mission’s expansion was “not time bound” and was aimed to ensure Hamas operatives were “pursued, paralyzed and threatened” as it targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in the north, south and east of Gaza “in parallel.

The only agenda that will be served by this is Bibi Netanyahu’s electoral ambitions.

This is Going to get a Lot Worse Before it Starts Calming Down

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We have worries on both sides about more abductions of children and teens, and Hamas and the IDF exchanging love notes full of explosives:

Jewish and Muslim parents here kept their children indoors Monday, as anxious residents formed neighborhood watch groups and monitored social media, alert for revenge attacks following the recent abductions and killings of three Israelis and a Palestinian, all teenagers.

“It is the time of the ambush,” said Ahlam Kawasmi, 36, a mother of five who cares for the elderly. She was walking on the nearly deserted streets in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City.

“I tell my kids, ‘I don’t know if you leave if you will come back,’ ” she said. The family is avoiding public parks and outdoor evening celebrations during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Among Jewish residents of Jerusalem, warnings circulated on text-messaging services such as WhatsApp asking citizens to report suspicious cars, strangers and activities.

“Pay attention,” a typical message began. “We have received information from the police that there are Arabs in Jerusalem who are opening doors and pretending they are police. . . . Send this message to as many people as possible.”

The Israeli police issued a statement saying that none of the messages were official. Residents said the atmosphere in the city was beginning to remind them of the tension and distrust that marked the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000.

In Israel’s south, meanwhile, residents were dealing not with rumors but with sirens warning them hourly to seek shelter.

Since the abduction of three Israeli students last month, mortar rounds and rocket shells have been fired at Israel almost daily from the Gaza Strip. Almost 100 were fired Monday, and sirens sounded in 10 towns, the military said, adding that Israel’s U.S.-supported Iron Dome missile-defense system shot down a dozen rockets. The security cabinet had warned earlier that Israeli forces would retaliate with a major sustained salvo in the event of such a barrage.

This is depressing.

At the end of this, nothing will have changed, and some more people will have died on both sides.

Finally, Someone Says IT to a Neocon

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Thats Gonna Leave a Mark

Katrina Vanden, editor-in-chief of The Nation finally calls out the Neocons as cowards when she tells Bill Kristol join the Iraqi army:

“For example, the president should go to Congress if he’s going to take military action in Iraq,” she explained. “There’s no military solution to Iraq, and I have to say, sitting next to Bill Kristol, man — I mean, the architects of catastrophe that have cost this country trillions of dollars, thousands of lives — there should be accountability.”

 “If there are no regrets for the failed assumptions that have grievously wounded this nation — I don’t know what happened to our politics and media accountability, but we need it, Bill,” she continued. “Because this country should not go back to war. We don’t need armchair warriors, and if you feel so strongly, you should, with all due respect, enlist in the Iraqi Army.”

(emphasis mine)

This needs to be said, repeatedly.

The Neocons have spent decades accusing anyone who does not support their stupid military adventures of cowardice.

Calling out them as armchair warriors who send other people’s children to die is an essential part of our public discourse.

Eric Arthur Blair is Spinning in His Grave, Again

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Over at Emptywheel, Jim White shows us a bit of cognitive dissonance that will make your head spin on the “World” section of the New York Times:

Seriously, first, we, (and the House of Saud) arm rebels in Syria, then they move into, and take over ¼ of Iraq, and take more of our weapons, and the very serious people think that we need to send them more weapons.

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

(On Edit)

And Obama is looking at air strikes to support the government. Obama has gone the full Nixon/Vietnamization route.

We’ve Always Been at War with Eastasia

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If there is anything more Orwellian than the Pentagon refusing to reveal who we are at war with.

Note that this was in a hearing about extending the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) where the Pentagon refused to say with whom we are fighting.

So they are asking for an authorization to make war while refusing say who they are making war with, and why we are making war with them.

This is a miasma of the most profoundly disturbing visions of both Orwell, and Kafka.

Your Ukraine Update

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We now have some on the ground media reports that make it very likely that US security consultants (mercenaries) are on the ground in the Ukraine:

The leaks may have more truth in them than I had assumed. Paris Match, a well regarded weekly French magazine, investigated the recent incidents in Krasnoarmeysk in east Ukraine where some para-military gang disrupted the vote on more autonomy for the region by killing two supporters of the federalists. It finds photographic evidence that the gang was led by functionary from the fascists paramilitary Right Sektor:

These images show Andrey Denisenko, one of the Pravy Sektor chiefs, among a group of mysterious gunmen that attacked a voting station Sunday in the small town of Krasnoarmeysk, some 60 kilometres from the separatist « capital », Donetsk. After occupying the local town hall for several hours, the militiamen shot down point blank one local civilian, and killed two other unarmed protesters.

These Pravy Sektor thugs were hired for the “special battalion Denjpr” of the newly created “National Guard” and are paid by oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

 But there is an even bigger scoop in this story.

 Jerome Sessini, an experienced war photographer for Magnum who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, was in Krasnoarmeysk and made some very interesting observations:

Several witness also said they heard some of the gunmen speaking with strong western Ukraine accents. They also noticed that some of the gunmen appeared to come from the Caucasus area, possibly mercenaries from Chechnya. Other gunmen never spoke a word and seemed foreign to the region. French war photographer Jerome Sessini spent about an hour face to face with the gunmen before they opened fire. « I found that their general attitude and their very precise techniques gave off the impression that they were American mercenaries, or people trained by American mercenaries » said Sessini. « I can’t guarantee this for sure, but I’d give it a 95 per cent, » added the photographer, who frequently interacted with various U.S. security contractors during his years covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A long time ago, when I took part in martial arts competitions, I could tell which dojo my opponents had learned at just by watching their warming up rituals. Someone who’s longtime profession is to observe, identify and document people at war should surely be able to categorize special forces he interacted with along the “schooling” and attitude those have.

Also you have to read this essay by Michael Hudson on the underlying motivations for US and EU adventurism in the Ukraine, where asserts the program of destabilization and austerity (austerity being the EU/IMF deal that Yanukovich rejected):

Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices. It is what today’s New Cold War is all about. Backed by the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) as knee-breakers in what has become in effect a financial extension of NATO, the aim is for U.S. and allied investors to appropriate the plums that kleptocrats have taken from the public domain of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet economies in these countries, as well as whatever assets remain.

He then a suggestion of how to fix this:

The cure for a rent-seeking oligarchy is to tax away rent seeking and de-privatize public monopolies. What Ukraine’s kleptocrats have taken (and what foreign investors seek to extract) can be recovered by promoting classical progressive policies taxing land and natural resources, regulating monopolies and providing public infrastructure investment, including a public option for banking and other basic services. That is what drove the U.S. and Western European industrial takeoffs, after all.

When reading Hudson’s essay, I realized something:  the role of international finance as a hostile colonizing is not just limited to the former Soviet Union, or 3rd nations.

When we look at Wall Street, and the City of London, they aren’t just business interests who are f%$#ing up our economy.   They are an occupying colonial power all over the world, which while far less mellifluous than Matt Taibbi’s term, “Vampire Squid,” is a better description.

One only needs to look at things like Timken’s Wall Street driven spin off of its steel business (which will eliminate a core competency in its bearing business) to see how the policies of deindustrialization and looting are being applied here.

Wall Street is not just a corrupt and corrupting part of our economy, it is an invading colonial force.

And Our Forever War Continues………

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Under the laws of war, once the war is over, the POWs are set free. Well, not this time:

Typically, when a war ends, so does the combatants’ authority to detain the other side’s fighters. But as the conclusion of the US war in Afghanistan approaches, the inmate population of Guantánamo Bay is likely to be an exception – and, for the Obama administration, the latest complication to its attempt to close the infamous wartime detention complex.

In December, when President Barack Obama and his Nato allies formally end their combat role in Afghanistan, US officials indicate there is unlikely to be a corresponding release of detainees at Guantánamo who were captured during the country’s longest conflict.

The question has been the subject of recent internal debate in the Obama administration, which is wrapped up in the broader question of future detention policy.

Already human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees say they anticipate filing a new wave of lawsuits challenging the basis for a wartime detention after the war ends – the next phase in more than a decade of attempts to litigate the end of indefinite detention.

For the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon, the complicating factor is the unique legal authority undergirding the Afghanistan war.

Passed by Congress days after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Authorization to Use Military Force cleared the legal path for the invasion of Afghanistan – and much more.

Known as the AUMF, its broad language blessed not only the Afghanistan war, but a global battle against al-Qaida without an expiration date. Subsequent interpretations of the AUMF broadened the definition of the adversary to include al-Qaida’s “associated forces”.

If they are not released when the war is over, then try them in civilian courts.

This state if nebulous never-ending war is destroying us.

Osama bin Laden is sitting somewhere laughing.

Shades of “Nurse Nayirah”

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Remember her?

She was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter (and member of the royal family) who testified to Congress that she saw Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators.

She falsely claimed to be a nurse’s aid when she had not even been in the country at the time of the invasion.

Well,”Nurse Nayirah,” meet Liz Wahl, the former RT News anchor who resigned on the air:

Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation as a Russia Today news anchor came amid a perfect geopolitical storm. She announced her departure from RT just as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.

“I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin,” said the 28-year-old American reporter and show host, who worked at RT America for two-and-a-half years. “I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth. And that is why, after this newscast, I am resigning.”

………

Wahl’s Howard-Beale-like moment came just one day after her colleague Abby Martin, host of RT America’s “Breaking the Set,” committed her own on-air indiscretion. Martin denounced Russia’s military occupation of the Crimean peninsula, which had been part of neighboring Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

Unlike Wahl, however, Martin didn’t quit the network; she is still hosting her daily 30-minute show. Martin’s decision to stay at RT drew criticism from the same reporter who landed the first interview with Wahl after her resignation, The Daily Beast’s Jamie Kirchick.

“Indeed, far from damaging the propaganda efforts of the Russian government, Martin’s momentary act of nonconformity plays right into the Kremlin’s hands,” Kirchick wrote in a March 4 article in Tablet Magazine. “RT will now be able to hold up her 60-second departure from the official script as evidence of its editorial independence.

………

Case in point: The Beasts’ Kirchick—who got the first interview with Wahl and was critical of Martin after she remained at RT—gets his paychecks from the neoconservative Foreign Policy Institute, where he is a Fellow. FPI has been described as a renascent version of the Project for the New American Century, which is in turn often described as one of the well-connected brain trusts behind the launch of the Iraq War.

Note that the Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) was founded by William Kristol, who founded PNAC, and

A source from inside RT, who spoke to WhoWhatWhy anonymously for fear of retribution, had at one point “observed [Wahl] taking pictures of the office over the summer, asking all sorts of odd questions about my experience, and looking at Jamie Kirchick’s website while in the office.”

This led the RT America employee to believe that Kirchick—with the help of Wahl—was planning to write a hit piece on the organization.

A recently published piece by TruthDig goes further, contending that Kirchick and neoconservative allies orchestrated—in TruthDig’s words “stage managed“—Wahl’s resignation right from the start.

………

A large part of TruthDig‘s contention that Kirchick and the Foreign Policy Institute “stage managed” the whole thing relies on FPI’s Twitter feed activity in the minutes leading up to Wahl’s on-air resignation.

FPI’s feed that day telegraphed “something big might happen on RT” and teased “you’re really going to want to tune in to RT” within 19 minutes of Wahl’s stepping down. Then, as soon as Wahl made her announcement, FPI tweeted, “RT Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin.’”

Asked about the feed and timing of the tweets by WhoWhatWhy, Kirchick responded, “I am an employee of FPI. Liz called me [while I was] at work. I told everyone in the office to watch. We did.”

Wahl corroborated Kirchick’s account of how events unfolded.

The prevalence of this kind of sh%$ in the political and media landscape is why I try to get as much of my news as possible from overseas sources.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

Oh Crap

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Russia has annexed the Crimea.

This is going to be a complete clusterf%$3 for everyone involved, particularly the people of the Ukraine, about whom all the actors profess to care.

There is a lot of blame to allocate:

  • Some of it goes to Vladimir Putin, because, after all, he is the one sending troops.
  • Some of it also goes to the EU, which is so hell bent on expansion that it ignored the nature of its premature attempts to bring the Ukraine into its its orbit because ……… Europe.
  • Viktor Yanukovych for his abject corruption and venality.
  • Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko for their abject corruption and venality, which is what got Yanukovych elected.
  • The oligarchs, because ……… oligarchs.

That being said, the decision to support and bolster the Fascists in the Svoboda party and the Right Sector militia, and make them the tip of the spear in the protests that drove Yanukovych from power after a deal had already been cut, tripping every switch in Russian psyche, that wasn’t any of them.

That was us.  That was neocon Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland and our State Department, and our CIA, and our front groups like the National Endowment for Democracy that put the Fascists in control of the defense and interior portfolios in the new government.

The Neocons have been wrong about everything since before they were Republicans, when they were staffers for Scoop Jackson’s (D-WA) staff, and yet they continue to drive our foreign policy decisions.

Where are the “Adults in the Room” who are supposed to keep the metaphorical firearms out of the metaphorical hands of metaphorical children (neocons)?

Theoretically, Barack Obama, who won the primaries, and later election as president, over his opposition to “stupid wars”, and so should be keeping these people’s hands away from the reigns of power.

The fact that Nuland was promoted from spokesman to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs by Secretary of State John Kerry, but Obama is in charge, and the decision to place a former Cheney aide in such a position is ultimately his decision.

Or, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point, the Cossacks work for the Czar, which is kind of ironic, because the Cossacks actually come from the Ukraine.

    This is More than a Russian-Ukrainian Thing

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    At the New Yorker, Natalia Antelava notes that Crimean Tatars are completely without any ally or patron:

    At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, and its significance cut even deeper, evoking a memory Kadyrov shares with all Crimean Tatars. Kadyrov, who is thirty-one, grew up hearing stories about marks on doors. In May of 1944, Stalin ordered his police to tag the houses of Crimean Tatars, the native Muslim residents of the peninsula. Within a matter of days, all of them—almost two hundred thousand people—were evicted from their homes, loaded onto trains, and sent to Central Asia, on the pretext that the community had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Crimea.

    Kadyrov’s grandmother, Sedeka Memetova, who was eight at the time, was among those deported. “The soldiers gave us five minutes to pack up,” she told me, when I visited the family on Thursday. “We left everything behind.” Memetova still has vivid memories of her journey into exile: the stench of the overcrowded train carriage, the wailing of a pregnant woman who sat next to her, and the solemn faces of the men who had to lower the bodies of their children off of the moving train—the only way, she said, to dispose of the dead. Four of her siblings were among the thousands of Crimean Tatars who never even made it to their final destination, Uzbekistan.

    Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet Union began to allow survivors of the deportation to return. Memetova and her family came back to Crimea almost three decades ago, in 1987. This weekend, at around 3 P.M. on Saturday, Memetova’s forty-four-year-old daughter, Ava, looked out the window and saw four young men, strangers to the neighborhood, walking down the street, armed with batons. The men were also carrying pieces of paper, Ava told me—which she believes were lists of homes belonging to Crimean Tatars. Seventy years after Memetova’s deportation, her house had been marked once again. “Just as we thought we finally had a future,” she said. “How could anyone do this in the twenty-first century?”

    On one side of the conflict are the Russians, (Yes, I know that Stalin was a Georgian) who engaged in Genocide in 1944, and on the other side is the neo-Nazi influenced government in Kiev.

    It’s kind of like what happened to the Roma following the fall of the Warsaw pact.

    The new Europe has some frightening echos to the interwar years.

    Ukraine: Sniper Theory Leaves Tinfoil Hat Territory

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    We have another leaked conversation between high level diplomats involving the Ukraine, in this case Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton.

    The big story in this discussion, a lot bigger than Victoria Nuland’s, “F%$3 the EU,” comment is Paet’s statement that sources on the ground strongly implied that the snipers at the protests were from the opposition, not Yanukovich:

    A leaked phone call between the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet has revealed that the two discussed a conspiracy theory that blamed the killing of civilian protesters in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on the opposition rather than the ousted government.

    The 11-minute conversation was posted on YouTube – it is the second time in a month that telephone calls between western diplomats discussing Ukraine have been bugged.

    In the call, Paet said he had been told snipers responsible for killing police and civilians in Kiev last month were protest movement provocateurs rather than supporters of then-president Viktor Yanukovych. Ashton responds: “I didn’t know … Gosh.”

    The leak came a day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said the snipers may have been opposition provocateurs. The Kremlin-funded Russia Today first carried the leaked call online.

    The Estonian foreign ministry confirmed the leaked conversation was accurate. It said: “Foreign minister Paet was giving an overview of what he had heard in Kiev and expressed concern over the situation on the ground. We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition’s involvement in the violence.” Ashton’s office said it did not comment on leaks.

    During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga – who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor – blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.

    “What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides,” Paet said.

    Note that there is no accusation of blame for the snipers, nor for a cover-up in the phone conversation, but it does indicate that allegations that elements among the protesters were behind this bears further investigation.

    Also, Paet gives an eyewitness account of a member of the Ukrainian Parliament being beaten just outside of the parliament building, and harassment of MPs by “uninvited visitors” (militiamen), which would imply that there is a use of violence or threat of violence against MPs to ensure that they vote “the right way.”

    I do not know what is up in the Ukraine, but it does seem that this sh%$ is all f%$#ed up and sh%$.

    Hillary Drops the H-Bomb

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    No, I do not mean thermonuclear weapons, I mean the full up Godwin.

    She invoked Hitler on the events in the Ukraine:

    Hillary Clinton Likens Russia’s Passport Move In Ukraine To Nazi Germany

    Hillary Clinton likened aspects of Russia’s involvement in Crimean Ukraine to Nazi Germany during a fundraising event, according to two people present.

    Buzzfeed, citing two sources, reported that the former secretary of State said at a fundraiser on Tuesday that Russia’s move to start issuing passports in Crimean Ukraine was akin to “population transfers” that happened in Nazi Germany during World War II.

    “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” Clinton said according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

    Seriously, her need to go to war at the drop of a hat was why she did not get the nomination in 2008, and here she is making John McCain look like Timothy Leary.

    She is not going to be the President-Elect in November of 2016. Hillary Clinton just flushed that down the toilet.

    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.

    Light Posting Tonight

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    I had to apply the flea treatment to RP, and there was some blood, mine, not hers.

    Not a whole lot of blood, enough to freak out my wife and my son, but not enough to freak me out.

    I’m not sure why they were freaking out, it was my blood, after all.

    No need for stitches, just some band-aids.

    I have concluded that we are not going to get the feral out of this cat, and since it knows how to get into and out of our house, trap, neuter, and release in our neighborhood is not an option.

    Anyone know of somewhere in a 100 mile radius of Baltimore that takes care of stray cats?

    Guess Who is Seen as the Greatest Threat to World Peace in the World Today?

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    USA!!! USA!!! USA!!!:

    US President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize four years ago. Today, the country he leads is seen — according to a new poll — as the biggest threat to world peace.

    The global survey, conducted by WIN/Gallup International, polled residents in 68 countries on everything from the global economy to politics and living conditions.

    According to the poll, 24 percent of the surveyed countries ranked the United States as the greatest threat to world peace today, followed by Pakistan at 8 percent, China at 6 percent and four countries (Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea) tied at 5 percent.

    Thirty-seven percent of Mexicans ranked their northern neighbor the top threat to the world.

    We’re Number One!!!!! We’re Number One!!!!!

    Gee, I wonder if the Swedes are feeling now about about giving President Drone Strike a f%$#ing Nobel f%$#ing Peace Prize.

    Heck of a Job, Barry………

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    What a surprise we do another drone strike, a “success”, and transformed the person that we assassinated from public enemy number one to a martyr and hero:

    In life, Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was Public Enemy No. 1: a ruthless figure who devoted his career to bloodshed and mayhem, whom Pakistani pundits occasionally accused of being a pawn of Indian, or even American, intelligence.

     But after his death, it seems, Pakistani hearts have grown fonder.

     Since missiles fired by American drones killed Mr. Mehsud in his vehicle on Friday, Pakistan’s political leaders have reacted with unusual vehemence. The interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, denounced the strike as sabotage of incipient government peace talks with the Taliban. Media commentators fulminated about American treachery. And the former cricket star Imran Khan, now a politician, renewed his threats to block NATO military supply lines through Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa — a province his Tehreek-e-Insaf party controls — with a parliamentary vote scheduled for Monday.

     Virtually nobody openly welcomed the demise of Mr. Mehsud, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistani civilians. To some American security analysts, the furious reaction was another sign of the perversity and ingratitude that they say have scarred Pakistan’s relationship with the United States.

     “It’s another stab in the back,” said Bill Roggio, whose website, the Long War Journal, monitors drone strikes. “Even those of us who watch Pakistan closely don’t know where they stand anymore. It’s such a double game.”

     To many Pakistanis, though, it is the United States that is double-dealing, and sentiments like Mr. Roggio’s exemplify typical American arrogance. Shireen Mazari, a senior official in Mr. Khan’s party, has urged the Pakistani military to shoot down drones.

    Does anyone really really think that this makes us any safer?

    It might temporarily increase the safety of our imperial contingent in Afghanistan, but our incessant drone strikes, and the resultant terror that this engenders in the population creates people who want to kill us.

    It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

    It is a Myth that US Forces Lost No Battles in the Vietnam War

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    That quote from the recently deceased General Vo Nguyen Giap is false, but we still find people claiming that neither the Viet Cong or the (then North) Vietnamese army ever won a battle.

    David Petraeus was one of these people. He wrote that, “Military leaders recall US units never lost a battle,” in 1986.

    This is something that you will hear said from members of the US Military all the time.

    It it might be legitimately through provoking if it weren’t complete humbug.  A cursory examination reveals 70 lost battles in the Vietnam War.

    Given that General Giap died a few days ago at the age of 102 (!), it behooves us to examine what happened in Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Laos, and ask how General Giap, and the people of Indochina beat us.

    The military, as been asking a slightly different question, “How did we lose,” and so blame the American public.