Did the Syrian REBELS use chemical weapons?

From the start, I mistrusted the allegations that Assad had used chemical weapons against the U.S.-backed, Al Qaeda-linked rebels hoping to unseat him. Now the redoubtable Brad Friedman directs our attention to this important story from Reuters:

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," she added, speaking in Italian.

(Why would the rebels do this? See the important "added note" at the end of this story.)

It seems likely that the Obama administration has had this same information for a while now. Brad Friedman helpfully reminds us of Barack Obama's statement:

"What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don't know how they were used, when they were used, who used them. We don't have a chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened," the President said, seemingly responsibly.

Brad also has a few choice words about the Israeli airstrikes against Syria, allegedly to take out missiles to be used by Hezbollah against Israel:

From the various anonymous U.S. and Israeli officials cited by news agencies, Israel was striking "a shipment of missiles destined for Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement ... a consignment of advanced, long-range, ground-to-ground missiles destined for Hezbollah"

"The shipment did not contain chemical weapons, but the missiles were potentially 'game-changing,' one official told the Associated Press," Washington Post is reporting.

(Without citing evidence, the fully-discredited-yet-still-well-paid [Ari] Fleischer described the missiles as "delivery systems for chemical weapons".)

Do you smell the toxic stink of disinformation in the air? I do.

In the first place -- as I noted in an earlier post -- Assad is in the midst of the fight of his life. Why would he be so fixated on Hezbollah now? Why invite Israel to the party?

Second, why would Ari Fleischer and others be so quick to link those missiles -- or whatever it was that the Israelis had targeted -- to chemical weapons? Nobody has cited any verifiable evidence to justify that particular conclusion-hop.

Like it or not, the Angry Arab asks a valid question:

I really wonder: is all this noise about chemical weapons in the Western media intended to conceal another story (which is still unreported): that the Syrian armed groups are retreating on all fronts?

Someone somewhere has written a narrative. A fiction. The purpose of this fiction is to goad America into giving the Syrian rebels an unlimited supply of truly serious (as in serious) aid, now that the tide of battle has started to turn against them. I'm reminded of the Afghan/Soviet conflict: Just when the Russians had come close to victory, America decided to give Stinger missiles to the jihadis.

What is Obama's role in all this? Although I remain pissed off at the guy for any number of reasons (drones, Gitmo, surveillance, Wall Street, free trade), I honestly don't think that he is the author of this exercise in disinformation. If he were, he would not have sounded a cautious note -- he'd be standing with John McCain and screeching for blood, milking the moment for all of its pseudo-historical worth.

No. Barack Obama is the target of this disinformation bomb. The neo-neocons created this "chemical weapons" scenario because they had hoped to manipulate the President into involving this country in yet another unwinnable war.

Incidentally: In the coming days, you may be seeing more journalistic puff pieces focusing on a Syrian Army defector named Colonel Abdul-Jabbar Mohammed Aqidi, who heads up an anti-Assad umbrella group called the Military Revolutionary Council in Aleppo. The media will try to convince you that he's the Charles de Gaulle of this war. We're supposed to think of him as a moderate leader, not at all connected to those awful, awful radical jihadis.

Israel seems to be backing Aqidi and his group.

I advise caution. This LAT story from last year indicates that Aqidi resembles Ahmed Chelabi a lot more than he resembles de Gaulle. The U.S. may consider Aqidi a future leader of Syria -- but how many people in Syria feel that way?

Added note: If you are wondering why the jihadis used chemical weapons, Lew Rockwell makes an excellent argument:

Of course anyone whose brain fired on more than one cylinder should have questioned why in the hell the Syrian government would use in such a limited and militarily insignificant way the one weapon it knew would likely bring on a US and NATO Libya-style intervention. It made no sense at all for the Syrian government to use "just a little" sarin -- not enough to do more than kill a few people, nothing to alter the course of the war -- knowing about "red lines" and a US/Saudi/Qatari/Israeli/Turk bloodlust to invade.

On the other hand, it made all the sense in the world for the insurgents to release some sarin here and there, make some videos of the victims, and email the links to some very willing Israeli generals and McCainian rabid warhawks in the US and their absurd poodles in the UK and France.

(Emphasis added.) In other words, it's a frame. Rockwell suspects that the sarin came from Libya, which had lots of the stuff floating around.

Read More

The examined life is not worth living

The most important ramification of the Boston bombing attack may be one that no-one anticipated: The investigation has led to the revelation that the government records and stores all telephone calls in the U.S.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

Forgive the long quote, but Greenwald has focused on an extremely important matter. His article sounds a theme we've heard in many previous posts: See here and here and here.

Although your parents and grandparents never would have tolerated America's culture of warrantless eavesdropping, today's sheepish generation accepts electronic totalitarianism without protest. Too many of your fellow citizens will happily chant that Nazi-era mantra: "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

The NSA's monstrous, intrusive capabilities did nothing to prevent the Boston attack, did nothing to capture the perpetrators. The NSA does not protect us. It observes us. It restricts us. It controls us.

We do not need to stand naked before Big Brother. We do not need to let Uncle Sam record every moment as we interact, fantasize, scheme, aspire, search, investigate, communicate, seduce, masturbate, reveal our psychic depths. Only a masochist would make himself so thoroughly vulnerable. In BDSM terminology, we have become a nation of bottoms.

Socrates had it wrong. The examined life is not worth living.

We can have our old lives back. We can insist that our politicians investigate the NSA, reveal the way it functions, and tether the beast. Tolerate no closed-door committee hearings: We pay for what the NSA does to us and thus we have a right to know.

You know why the NSA doesn't want the facts disclosed? They aren't protecting us; they're protecting themselves. If more Americans knew what was happening, they would put a stop to this nightmare.

Here are a few more excerpts from Greenwald's piece:

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits.

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture.

Greenwald's link goes to a Greg Sargent opinion piece, which in turn points to this Time/CNN poll:

When given a choice, 61 percent of Americans say they are more concerned about the government enacting new anti-terrorism policies that restrict civil liberties, compared to 31 percent who say they are more concerned about the government failing to enact strong new anti-terrorism policies.

But while Americans are increasingly amenable to passive surveillance efforts, including cameras and facial recognition, they are growing more opposed to expanded monitoring of cell phones and email and are more concerned about law enforcement monitoring Internet chat rooms. A plurality, 49 percent, are unwilling to give up civil liberties even if deemed necessary to curb terrorism in the United States — 40 percent say they are willing, and 9 percent day it depends.

Both the 49 percent and the 40 percent need to understand that the NSA's capabilities already go far beyond what most consider possible. The system has but one flaw: The people who run the surveillance state cannot easily use the data they acquire without revealing that a surveillance state exists.

Defeatism won't do any good. We need a movement. We need to make privacy an issue. We need investigations -- and we need to tell Congress that we will tolerate no hearings in executive session.

Read More

Israel and Syria

Apparently, Israel launched airstrikes against targets in Syria last night. The initial reports indicated that the targets were chemical weapons facilities -- a claim which anyone with any sense regarded with extreme caution. CNN:

Both officials said there is no reason to believe Israel struck at a chemical weapons storage facilities. The Israelis have long said they would strike at any targets that prove to be the transfer of any kinds of weapons to Hezbollah or other terrorist groups, as well as at any effort to smuggle Syrian weapons into Lebanon that could threaten Israel.

The NYT has now said that the target was missiles from Iran, allegedly being readied for transfer to Hezbollah, although I would put that last bit in the "Yeah, right" category. Assad has been fighting a civil war for two years, and his chances of survival look slimmer by the day. The guy has other things on his mind (and other uses for those missiles) than helping Hezbollah attack Israel.

When you think about Syria, the important factors are these:

1. Always remember that the Nusrah Front -- the anti-Assad rebels being supported by the U.S. -- pretty much is Al Qaeda. On the Sunday talk shows, you'll hear a lot of talk about the need to support "moderate" rebels in Syria, but this is just bluff.

2. The claims that Syria has already used chemical weapons are dubious at best. Consider the source. A little more than a week ago, Lew Rockwell (yes, yes, I know) published a good discussion of these reports:

They wouldn't falsify those, would they? It's not like they have a history of faking reports to suit their goals of drawing the US into the conflict...do they?

Reading between the lines in such a situation is very important. What Hagel said was that the US intelligence community has determined “with varying degrees of confidence" that the Syrian government used chemical weapons (based on samples collected by the Syrian rebels). What this means in English -- and here I am forced to speculate based on what we know from the "footnote" taken by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) on the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which turned out to be absolutely correct -- is that some zealots in the intelligence community ran with this dubious intelligence passed on by Israel and "produced" by the insurgents like they ran with the yellowcake and the aluminum tubes lies on Iraq in the run-up to the war. Cooler heads (and my money is on INR, and not only because they have been right on the mark in the past but also because I am familiar with their independent streak and track record) screamed to the hilltops that this analysis was bogus, thus providing the "varying" degrees of confidence cited by Hagel.

Varying degrees of confidence likely means that INR believes the conclusion is garbage...

Let's get back to point one, above: Marcy Wheeler notes that the FBI, up to its usual entrapment shennanigans, has gone after a young fellow named Abdalla Ahmad Tounisi. His crime? He wanted to join the Al Qaeda-linkd Nusra Front and help topple Assad.

But those are the same people we are supporting!

A short while ago, Marcy also showed us the fascinating tale of Eric Harroun, a likely CIA recruit arrested for fighting with Nusrah. He, too, was charged with using "weapons of mass destruction," even though he never had anything to do with the sort of devices we normally think of when that term is used. (Shades of the Tsarnaev brothers!) Harroun is still in jail awaiting trial.

As the Harroun case demonstrates, the U.S./Nusrah/Al Qaeda linkages are absolutely mad. Americans would be outraged by this alliance if our media told the public the full truth. Make no mistake: Assad is a dictator who deserves to be toppled. But do we really have reason to believe that his replacement will be better?

Read More

Are they really going after a...a BANK?

Just a short while after I print a scoffing piece on our antinomian banksters, the NYT prints the welcome news that JPMorgan is in serious trouble:

Government investigators have found that JPMorgan Chase devised “manipulative schemes” that transformed “money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers,” and that one of its most senior executives gave “false and misleading statements” under oath.

Lying under oath. You and I might go to jail for that sort thing. Do you think that...just possibly...this time...?

The 70-page document also took aim at a top bank executive, Blythe Masters. A seminal Wall Street figure, Ms. Masters is known for helping expand the boundaries of finance, including the development of credit default swaps, a derivative that played a role in the financial crisis.

The regulatory document cites her supposed “knowledge and approval of schemes” carried out by a group of energy traders in Houston. The agency’s investigators claimed that Ms. Masters had “falsely” denied under oath her awareness of the problems and said that JPMorgan had made “scores of false and misleading statements and material omissions” to authorities, the document shows.

One still occasionally hears from old school feminists who insist that if women ran the world, everything would be ever so much more nurturing, peaceful, spiritual and Smurfy. Let the record show that Ms. Blythe Masters is the inventor of the credit default swap, the instrument that made possible so many of the games bankers played using all of those crappy home loans they had accumulated. In brief:

The "time-bomb mortgages" were insured by credit default swaps (CDSs) in an unregulated environment, so that neither sellers (such as AIG) needed capitalization, nor buyers needed to own the insured assets. Further, AIG's investment arm invested in CDOs as a collateral to lend-out stocks further exposing itself to financial calamity.

Thank you, Blythe! Have a great time with the regulators!

I've never before wanted to see a woman put in the joint. My usual preference is the other way round.

Read More

Ain't it the truth

The following image comes from this story about dying careers and the suggested alternatives young job-seekers should consider. Don't bother with the text. Just skim the sub-heads, and admire the juxtaposition:

I suspect that many of our "reporters" have already made the switch.

Read More

The real terror enablers

Am I going back on my pledge not to discuss the Boston bombing case? Not really. I still don't want to talk a whole lot about those tzany Tzarnaevs, because previous posts on this topic attracted comments which veered into deep-dish conspiracy theory -- and even though some folks count me among the paranoia addicts, there are times when too much CT gives me acid reflux. By all means, please pursue your favorite scenarios. Have fun. But not here. It's a big damn internet, and Cannonfire is just one small blog -- a blog which need not cover every aspect of every story that catches the public's fancy.

That said, we must bend policy to make brief mention the latest revelation: Doltish, potheaded Dzhokhar seems to have had three equally fuzzy-brained pals who may have helped him clean up his tracks, perhaps without realizing the full implications. Naturally, right-wing anti-Islam crusaders are treating this news as further proof that all Muslims have formed an international conspiracy against Our Way of Life and therefore every hideous thing we did at Gitmo was perfectly justified, hallelujah and amen.

The best response comes to us by way of the marvelous Marcy Wheeler:

I’m not defending what the young men did. Nor am I vouching for their intelligence. Nor am I saying they shouldn’t be prosecuted — they should!

But I’m having a hard time distinguishing what they did from what, say, HSBC did, for years. Aside from the fact that HSBC affirmatively helped terrorists, rather than just covered up that help. And aside from the fact HSBC made a billion dollars doing so.

Let's pause here. My one problem with Marcy's writing is that she sometimes presumes that her readers are as up-to-speed as she is, when in fact very few mere mortals are as up-to-speed as Marcy Wheeler. Bloggers should never forget that helpful scene in Road to Morrocco in which Bob Hope explains the plot for those who showed up late.

Allow me to perform a similar task here. HSBC is, as you may already know, a bank. A big bank. A big corrupt bank. And...

Yes, Teresa? You want to know if there's any other kind? Of course, my dear. Offhand, I can name...uh... Well. The Nile has big banks, and I don't think they're very corrupt. May I now continue with my story?

In short and in sum, HSBC did something very naughty: They laundered a lot of money for crooks and terrorists. All of this naughtiness upset Senator Elizabeth Warren. Here's what she had to say:

It's possible to shut down a bank... Individuals can be banned from ever participating in financial services again. And people can be sent to prison. in December, HSBC admitted to... laundering $881 million that we know of... They didn't do it just one time... They did it over and over and over again… They were caught doing it, warned not to do it, and kept right on doing it. And evidently made profits doing it. Now, HSBC paid a fine, but no individual went to trial. No individual was banned from banking and there was no hearing to consider shutting down HSBC's actives in the US.... You're the experts on money laundering. I'd like your opinion. What does it take? How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?

Marcy's point is simple. The pothead's dimwitted pals may well go to jail for a nice, long stretch because they stashed Dzhokhar's stuff and then fibbed about their actions when The Man came round for a chat. This behavior, however deplorable, was hardly as harmful as the actions taken by the guys running HSBC.

This article gives you a pretty good overview of the many ways in which HSBC has aided and abetted terrorism:

Laid out in detail in a Senate report released in July of this year, HSBC was engaged in banking with the Al Rajhi Bank, which is run by members of the Al Rajhi family alleged to have been “major donors to al Qaeda or Islamic charities suspected of funding terrorism.” They established “their own nonprofit organizations in the United States that sent funds to terrorist organizations, or used Al Rajhi Bank itself to facilitate financial transactions for individuals or nonprofit organizations associated with terrorism” in the years after the September 11th attacks, according to the report.

Additionally, a key founder of the Al Rajhi Bank was one of twenty key terror financiers Osama bin Laden dubbed the “Golden Chain.”

What's that, Teresa? You want to know how the folks running HSBC managed to avoid the pokey? Simple, my dear. These people are bankers. Bankers -- unlike potheaded college kids -- are a holy people, sacrosanct and unassailable.

As Marcy summarizes:

The dumb-as-shit buddies have done nothing amounting to what HSBC did before and after, making $1 billion off a trade that probably helped terrorists finance their plots.

And yet the dumb-as-shit buddies are probably going to do prison time (and be deported in the case of the two Kazakh buddies).

The folks involved in HSBC’s support for terrorism?

They got promoted.

You may also want to check out what Glenn Greenwald has to say:

It is commonplace to hear US elites unblinkingly insisting that those who become sufficiently important and influential are – and should be – immunized from the system of criminal punishment to which everyone else is subjected.

Worse, we are constantly told that immunizing those with the greatest power is not for their good, but for our good, for our collective good: because it’s better for all of us if society is free of the disruptions that come from trying to punish the most powerful, if we’re free of the deprivations that we would collectively experience if we lose their extraordinary value and contributions by prosecuting them.

On Tuesday, not only did the US Justice Department announce that HSBC would not be criminally prosecuted, but outright claimed that the reason is that they are too important, too instrumental to subject them to such disruptions. In other words, shielding them from the system of criminal sanction to which the rest of us are subject is not for their good, but for our common good. We should not be angry, but grateful, for the extraordinary gift bestowed on the global banking giant...

And now, dear readers, you will no doubt want to thrill me with your latest Boston bombing conspiracy theories. If you must, you must; this may be your last chance. But be gentle, and please don't forget about my acid reflux problem. Although these Ranitidine tablets work pretty well, one must worry about the possible side effects.

Read More

Sanford

This blog used to devote much cyber-ink to Republican politicians who tarnished the GOP's image as the party of family values. I was particularly amused by Mark Foley and former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert (one of the more obvious closeted gays in the history of Congress).

But I never truly wanted those guys to lose their jobs over sex scandals. For other reasons, yes. The sex stuff was simply...funny.

Which brings us to the case of Mark Sanford, who hopes to make a comeback. Sure, the "hiking the Appalachian Trail" thing amused me as much as it amused everyone else, but now -- well, I'm not sure I feel comfortable with Larry Flynt's satirical jabs at Sanford's indiscretions.

"No one has done more to expose the sexual hypocrisy of traditional values in America today. He is the man of the hour — the midnight hour," Flynt says in his endorsement posted online Tuesday afternoon. "He has demonstrated by his words and deeds that traditional values are shameful and that he will not live by such rules. As the bible teaches us: 'Ye shall know them by their fruits.'"

Don't get me wrong: I like Flynt. Sure, his porn was always kind of disgusting, even by porn standards -- back in my younger days, I'd look at Hustler only if I wanted to quell horniness -- but the guy is funny and politically savvy. And I admire that elaborate John Wayne monument he put in front of his building. Only a man of great wit and insouciance would place a massive piece of cowboy art in the middle of Beverly Hills on Wilshire Blvd.

Nevertheless, Flynt's jabs at Sanford are out of line. You can't combat sexual hypocrisy by being a hypocrite yourself.

A man's private life is his own business. Sins unrelated to either public policy or finance should not determine a politician's fate. There are plenty of reasons to vote against Sanford, but "the Appalachian Trail" is not among them.

I'm sorry now about the earlier Cannonfire posts on Hastert and Foley.

Read More