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Questions on Syria’s Chemical Weapons disarmament

By Dr. Kaveh L. Afrasiabi | Press TV | September 11, 2013

Citing a “potential positive development” in the Russian proposal regarding Syrian chemical weapons stockpile, US President Barack Obama has put a temporary break on the express train of war on Syria and, simultaneously, accelerated the White House push for a congressional authorization for a military strike.

This new development, following a purportedly off-the-cuff press statement by US Secretary of State John Kerry, has been viewed as a potential game-changer that may result in a win-win scenario, whereby Obama can safeguard his reputation, heal the rifts with Moscow, avoid another US entanglement in Middle East conflicts, and simultaneously declare victory by resorting to “credible military threat,” an important consideration given the close links with the US’s Iran policy (of nuclear containment).

The Russian proposal, put forth by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, has two skeletal components respecting the international supervision and monitoring the Syrian chemical stockpile and the provisions for the destruction of that stockpile, yet to be fleshed out. The Syrian foreign minister has welcomed this initiative and so has UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who has warned that a unilateral US strike without the UN authorization would be illegal. Iran’s initial reaction has been positive as well, in the light of a statement by the Foreign Ministry spokesperson articulating the position of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In turn, a number of important questions have been raised as a result of this new development. First, how feasible and practical is the idea of international supervision of the chemical weapons stockpile in the present context of warfare in Syria? The likelihood of danger to the inspectors being relatively great, will they need to be accompanied by an international force and, if so, is the UN willing to risk its peacekeepers in a war zone?

Second, although the international community is correct to push Syria to join the Protocol on Chemical Weapons and to disarm, such a decision cannot be taken in the vacuum of regional realities, above all the fact that historically these weapons have served a deterrent purpose for the Syrian regime vis-à-vis Israel, which has reportedly amassed a huge arsenal of chemical weapons over the years; a recent CIA document confirms this by referring to Israel’s “nerve gas facilities” which went into production decades ago. Indeed, the deterrent value of Damascus’ chemical weapons capability have been demonstrated in the current crisis, whereby Israel has been forced to take several drastic steps such as mass distribution of masks, early installation of Iron Dome defense shield, etc.

Henceforth, Syrian disarmament without a parallel disarmament of the Israeli stockpile would, in strictly military terms, shift the balance in Israel’s favor. Therefore, it is important to explore the short and long-term implications of Syrian disarmament with respect to the long-standing territorial dispute between Syria and Israel. Perhaps Israel should pledge to refrain from the use of chemical weapons against Syria as a part and parcel of the Syrian disarmament agreement.

Third, what happens if the Syrian regime disarms but the rebels, who are reportedly in possession of chemical weapons, do not and resort to these weapons? The threat of chemical weapons by the Syrian rebels has so far been completely overlooked by the White House and, yet, must be taken into consideration in any agreement on Syrian disarmament. In other words, a total disarmament covering the rebels as well as the government, irrespective of the difficulties with respect to the leading rebel groups, which have known Al-Qaeda ties. In principle, this is the right approach that would not discriminate toward any group suspected of possessing and or using the ghastly weapons.

Fourth, a complicating factor is the role of certain regional states that support the rebels and may not consent to any such deal, which raises the question what happens if these sates are not brought on board the agreement on Syrian chemical weapons disarmament? The US should push for explicit and unequivocal endorsement of the plan by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Persian Gulf Cooperation Council member states.

Finally, the two issues of supervision and destruction of Syrian chemical weapons stockpile should not be conflated, and a preliminary investigation of the merits of the former without the necessity of the latter should be conducted. Given the stated concern of Obama and other Western leaders regarding the future use of chemical weapons, the stationing of international monitors on the ground will go a long way in terms of confidence-building that the regime will not use them. This more moderate approach is far more realistic than the issue of “control” that raises serious practical difficulties, such as interfering in the Syrian system of military “command and control.”

For now, however, a glimmer of hope against a US strike on Syria has sparked on the horizon that may not be long-lasting, if the disarmament issue is used by the White House to acquire a “yes” vote on the war power authorization and then attack Syria with the excuse that it has skirted its disarmament obligation.

Theoretically, it is now easier for Obama to lobby the US Congress, by nuancing the pitch in the name of the noble objective of chemical weapons disarmament. In that case, the potential breakthrough in the Russia disarmament proposal may only serve the ultimate US’s war aims which have been partly checked, ironically, by Syrian chemical weapons threats to Israel. By removing these weapons, the imminent threat of US strike may be put to rest and, yet, the paradoxical effect is likely to be a weakened Syria more vulnerable to foreign threats and pressures. In a word, a war-saving proposal adversely affecting Syrian national security interests may be an invitation to war in the future.

September 11, 2013 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama Offers No Evidence Assad was Behind Poison Gas Attack in Damascus

By Dave Lindorff | This Can’t be Happening | September 10, 2013

In what NPR called “perhaps President Obama’s last best chance” to make his case for launching a war against Syria, the president tellingly didn’t make a single effort to present hard, compelling evidence to prove that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had been behind the alleged Sarin Aug. 21 attack on residents of a suburb of Damascus.

Not one piece of evidence.

Instead, he continued the talking point of the past week, focussing on the admitted horror of seeing young children “writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor.”

Given that two thirds of Americans, according to polls, do not want the US to unilaterally attack Syria, and really do not want yet another war in the Middle East, it is truly amazing that the president didn’t try to make the case, at least, that Assad was the guilty party. He simply stated, as was done in the two-page propaganda article posted on the White House website, that “We know the Assad regime was responsible” for the gas attack.

Except that we don’t. As I have written (but as the corporate media have blacked out throughout this latest crisis), a group of 12 veteran intelligence officers has written to the president telling him that the intelligence does not point to Assad, but to the rebel forces as the source of the gas attack.

What Obama did instead was try to make a case that attacking Syria to punish the government for its unproven use of gas against its own people was a matter of US national security.

Here he pulled out an even more far-fetched version of the old “domino theory” than even Lyndon Johnson’s and John F. Kennedy’s crew came up with to justify the Vietnam War.

If the US didn’t act against Syria, the president intoned darkly, Assad might eventually feel confident enough to use poison gas against neighboring Turkey, Jordan or Israel. And “other tyrants” around the world, he went on, might decide, if the US didn’t respond in Syria, to stockpile poison gas weapons that might “over time” be used against American soldiers. Even worse, he warned, Iran might decide, if the US failed to bomb Syria for its alleged gas use, that it would be safe developing those nuclear weapons that the US insists Iran wants to build.

There is, in short, no limit to the horrors that could be visited on the world if the US isn’t ready to bomb the crap out of Syria, according to President Obama.

And just to close the deal regarding Syria’s existential threat to America, the president said that we needed to bomb Assad’s forces in order “to make our children safer in the long run.”

Talk about a stretch!

Oddly, he at another point belittled the idea of any threat posed by Syria, saying that “the Assad regime does not have the ability to seriously threaten our military.”

There was another striking omission in this address. The president initially declared gravely that Assad’s regime, in using poison gas weapons, had “violated the laws of war.”

And yet he surely knows, as a Constitutional scholar, that he himself has already violated a more serious law of war — Article 51 of the United Nations Charter — by threatening Syria, a country that he himself admits poses no imminent threat to the US, with attack — and not just verbally threatening, but by assembling an armada in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf ready at a moment’s notice to fire hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles into the country. Such a threat is termed a Crime Against Peace, and carries a maximum punishment of execution.

Apparently, to this president, as to presidents before him, other countries are bound by the Geneva Convention and by the United Nations Charter, on pain of unilateral attack by the US, but those rules to not apply to what he called this “exceptional” nation.

Obama made a slight reference to Russia’s peace bid, under which Syria has agreed to sign the chemical weapons convention (which Israel’s Knesset has yet to ratify, incidentally, and which the US itself has yet to comply with, as it still maintains significant stocks of poison gas and even smallpox virus), and to turn over his chemical weapons and manufacturing facilities to international control for eventual destruction. But he said only that he would ask Congress to postpone a vote on authorizing an attack on Syria, not that he would drop the idea.

In closing, the president claimed that the US,for seven decades, has been the “anchor of international security” and he insisted that “the world’s a better place” because of that role. It’s an appallingly ahistorical statement that the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, who lost upwards of three million civilians to American bombs, gas, napalm, anti-personnel bombs and bullets, the people of Iraq, who lost over a million civilians to US weapons, and who are still suffering massive birth defects from the depleted uranium that was callously spread across their land by US forces, and that the people of Afghanistan, whose country has been ripped apart by 12 years of US occupation and war, would certainly find repellant.

No, the world is decidedly not a better place because of America’s endless, unilateral and criminal wars and depredations, and Syria will fare no better following an American assault.

The real obscenity of this address was recalling at the end that the man giving it has somewhere on a wall in the White House a Nobel Peace Prize medal hanging.

September 11, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

False-flag meme goes viral on 9/11 anniversary

By Dr. Kevin Barrett | Press TV | September 11, 2013

On the 12th anniversary of 9/11, everyone is talking about false-flag operations.

Pat Buchanan, a leading American conservative, says that the Syria chemical weapons incident “reeks of a false flag operation.” Buchanan says he cannot believe that Syrian President Assad would be so stupid as to order a chemical strike with no military purpose except to invite the US to bomb his country.

Assad’s opponents, on the other hand, would have every reason to launch such a strike and blame it on Assad.

Ron Paul agrees, saying: “I think it’s a false-flag.” His son Rand Paul adds: “There is a great incentive for this to actually have been launched by rebels, not the Syrian army.”

Rush Limbaugh suspects a false-flag with Obama’s complicity. Limbaugh cites Yossef Bodansky: “The rebels nerve gassed themselves in order to engineer a response that takes out Bashar, putting the US on the side of Al-Qaeda.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, went one step further. Citing sources in the intelligence community, Wilkerson said the chemical weapons attack was an Israeli false-flag operation. Wilkerson explained that “Israel is in a very, very dangerous situation right now. Netanyahu is clueless as to this. I hope that President Obama gave him a lecture into geo-strategic realities.”

Wilkerson’s statement that Israel is in a “very, very dangerous situation” seemed on the surface to refer to the turmoil in the Middle East. But Wilkerson may have been conveying another message as well: By orchestrating a barely-disguised chemical weapons false flag designed to force Obama to attack Syria on or around the 9/11 anniversary, Netanyahu showed he is “clueless” about one very important fact: More and more senior members the US military and intelligence establishments, including Wilkerson, know that Israel also orchestrated the 9/11 false flag operation. And they are ready to push back.

These senior US decision-makers are unhappy that Israel orchestrated the murder of almost 3,000 Americans on 9/11 in order to drag the US into endless wars against Israel’s enemies. They are seething about Israel’s continuing deception of the American public through its domination of the mainstream media. They are furious about the Israel lobby’s influence over Congress via bribery and threats. They are disgusted at the way Israel’s false-flag attack on 9/11 led to the evisceration of both the Constitution and the national treasury, drowning America in debt to the international bankers and destroying the nation’s economic future.

Wilkerson was saying (between-the-lines) that if Netanyahu thinks he can drag the US into yet another major war for Israel, by staging a transparently obvious false-flag attack close to the 9/11 anniversary, he is treading on very dangerous ground.

Dr. Alan Sabrosky, an ex-Marine and former Director for Strategic Studies at the US Army War College, is more forthright than Wilkerson: “I have had long conversations over the last two weeks with contacts at the Army War College and the headquarters, Marine Corps, and I’ve made it absolutely clear in both cases that it is 100% certain that 9/11 was a Mossad operation. Period. The Zionists are playing this as an all-or-nothing exercise. If they lose this one, they’re done.”

Dr. Sabrosky, who says he expresses his Jewish identity through cuisine not foreign policy, explains what he means by “they’re done”:

“If these Americans and those like them ever fully understand just how much of their suffering – and the suffering we have inflicted on others – is properly laid on the doorsteps of Israel and its advocates in America, they will sweep aside those in politics, the press and the pulpits alike whose lies and disloyalty brought this about and concealed it from them. They may well leave Israel looking like Carthage after the Romans finished with it. It will be Israel’s own great fault.”

This is what Wilkerson means when he says Netanyahu was “naïve” to launch the Syrian false flag chemical attack: Naïve Netanyahu imagines he can keep on fooling the Americans forever. He thinks he can get away with rubbing Israeli false-flags in America’s face just in time for September 11th. He is putting Israel in a “very, very dangerous” position.

Naturally, Israel’s American fifth column is trying to save Netanyahu from the consequences of his own folly. They are pushing back hard against the rapidly-rising awareness of false-flags.

Example: Netanyahu’s American megaphone for liberals, the Daily Beast, has published an article attacking the false-flag “conspiracy theories” about Syria.

The Daily Beast is owned by Jane Harmon – who while in Congress was caught by the FBI spying for Israel – and Hollywood Zionist mogul Barry Diller. The Daily Beast’s latest attempt to nip false-flag awareness in the bud is headlined “Enough Already: Syria Wasn’t a False Flag Operation.”

Author Jamelle Bouie admits “there’s no hard confirmation that Assad gave the order to use sarin gas against civilians.” Since there is no evidence implicating Assad, Bouie conjures up “the logistical complexity of setting up the attack and a subsequent cover-up.”

But this “logistical complexity” implicates Israel, not Syria. Israel’s spy service, the ruthless and reckless Mossad, has as its motto: “By way of deception thou shalt do war.” The Mossad is undoubtedly the world’s most experienced intelligence service in the field of logistically-complex false flag deceptions.

Playing dumb, Bouie pretends that Wilkerson cannot explain why Israel would stage such a false flag attack. Since Israel has no motive, Bouie claims, it cannot have perpetrated the attack. But wait a minute – a few paragraphs earlier, Bouie ridiculed those who said Assad had no motive, so he probably didn’t do it!

In fact, Israel does have a motive. Netanyahu has been working overtime in his efforts to drag Obama into war against Syria and Iran. AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby are the only significant political force in the US that wants an attack on Syria. And that attack could not possibly happen without a chemical weapons incident attributed to Assad. Obviously, Israel is the prime beneficiary – and the likely culprit.

When someone like Lawrence Wilkerson warns Israel to stop using false-flag atrocities to drag America into ill-advised wars, the Israelis had better listen. When the American people finally wake up to these deceptions – especially 9/11 – Israel could end up, as Dr. Sabrosky suggests, as a smoking pile of rubble.

September 11, 2013 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

President Al Assad’s CBS interview with Charlie Rose

September 10, 2013 Posted by | Video | , , | Leave a comment

A ‘Message’ to Iran–or Misinformation?

By Peter Hart | FAIR | September 10, 2013

There’s plenty of discussion about how the threatened U.S. military attack on Syria is really a way of sending a “message” to Iran. And some media accounts inaccurately portray what is known about Iran.

Take this Washington Post news story (9/10/13), by Paul Kane and Ed O’Keefe, about the pro-war lobbying underway by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee):

An AIPAC official said the group is playing an active role because it sees a direct connection between the Syria crisis and Iran’s effort to get nuclear weapons. “If America is not resolute with Iran’s proxy Syria on using unconventional weapons, it will send the wrong message to Tehran about their effort to obtain unconventional weapons,” said the AIPAC official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about the effort.

The Post would seem to be portraying “Iran’s effort to get nuclear weapons” as if it were a fact. It’s not–it’s an allegation. Either that, or the Post is granting a source anonymity to make a claim that goes further than the facts allow.

This isn’t a new problem for the Post; in December 2011 the group Just Foreign Policy noted that the Post was running a Web feature with the headline, “Iran’s Quest to Possess Nuclear Weapons.” After readers sent messages to Post ombud Patrick Pexton, the headline was changed (“Iran’s Quest to Possess Nuclear Technology”).

As Pexton wrote (12/9/11), the International Atomic Energy Agency “does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb.”

The Post no longer has an ombud, but Douglas Feaver is acting as the paper’s “Reader Representative.” He can be reached  at readers@washpost.com.

Related article

September 10, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama, the US Liar-in-Chief

By Finian Cunningham | Press TV | September 10, 2013

Forget diplomatic protocol: When a government is outrageously pushing the world into a criminal war based on a crock of lies, that government and its representatives forfeit the customary right to diplomatic niceties.

When truth is being twisted with rhetoric and bombast, then it is incumbent to untwist it with simple words.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is right. The American Secretary of State John Kerry is a barefaced liar. And it’s not just Kerry. President Barack Obama is an even bigger liar, and so is the entire White House administration, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey.

All of them are lying through their teeth about the forthcoming American criminal war of aggression on Syria, claiming that it is “limited” and “punitive.” Not that such description would make a military assault on Syria any less criminal. But the fact is that the US is gearing up for an all-out war on the Arab country. That American leaders are trying to play down the onslaught they are intending to unleash on the people of Syria belies their depth of deception and their real criminal agenda.

If these leaders in Washington cannot even tell the American people about what the real military contingency plans are for Syria, why should we believe them on all their other claims about chemical weapons used in that country. It’s a con trick, and the American people know it. Moreover, Liar-in-Chief Barack Obama and his partners-in-crime know that the people know it.

That is why the White House is going on a “media blitz” this week, with Obama and his top aides saturating the television networks in a bid to convince the American public and Congress to back its plan to launch a military attack on Syria – a country of 22 million people, a third of whom are refugees, which does not pose any threat to the US.

This media bombardment of the American people ahead of the physical bombardment of the Syrian people speaks of a desperate move by the White House. Poll after poll shows that the US public does not believe what the politicians are telling them about the Syrian government’s alleged use chemical weapons.

It really is saying something of the collapsing legitimacy of the US presidency when foreign leaders such as Vladimir Putin or even Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad – the latter vilified as a despotic tyrant – project more moral authority and credibility to the American people than their own leaders do.

The American people are right. American governments, and the Obama administration in particular, are chronic liars. They have lied about every past and recent overseas military intervention, from Kosovo to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Libya, and the supposed humanitarian or security reasons that allegedly motivated these wars.

American wars have bankrupted the country’s economy, forcing millions of US citizens into poverty, and have greatly worsened the humanitarian suffering in the targeted countries. American wars have trashed international law and increased global insecurity. They have created the exact despicable opposite of what they claimed to seek.

The latest Big Lie is the White House telling the American people and the world that the US is “not going to war” in Syria.

President Obama says: “This would not be another Iraq or Afghanistan.

There would be no American boots on the ground. Any action we take would be limited, both in time and scope – designed to deter the Syrian government from gassing its own people again and degrade its ability to do so.”

US top diplomat John Kerry spun the lie to gossamer thinness while on a visit to London this week when he said: “We are not going to war. It is about holding [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad accountable in a very limited, very targeted, very short-term action… on an unbelievably small scale.”

Right there, that is the pathetic, contemptible voice of a chronic liar who has lost the cognitive ability to realize how ridiculous he sounds.

What the US Congress is voting on this week is a resolution that would give Washington a 90-day period to strike Syria at will. The resolution also contains provisions for indefinite prolongation of the military attacks and for sending in US troops under the guise of “search and rescue missions.”

While on the one hand the White House talks about “very limited, targeted punitive strikes to deter chemical weapons” in order to con Congress to vote Yes, on the other hand the evidence and the White House’s own words speak of an all-out war on Syria.

Four US Navy destroyers off the coast of Syria are equipped to launch 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles [each]. On its way to Syrian waters are the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and another battle group of three destroyers.

US officials have told The New York Times and others that the plan is to launch “the vast majority of those missiles.”

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told Congress last week that the cost of the American military campaign would be “tens of millions of dollars.” Well, that’s another lie, aimed at playing down the crime. The above US navy launch of at least 400 cruise missiles at a cost of $1 million each puts the war bill at $400 million. And that’s not counting all the other costs to implement those strikes.

In addition, media reports say that the US is planning to deploy long-range B-52 and B-2 bombers from North America, as well as B-1s based in Qatar in the Persian Gulf. All of these aircraft are capable of launching cruise missiles from outside Syrian airspace to avoid Syria’s defense systems. At a conservative estimate that brings the cost of war up to near $1 billion – or a hundred-fold more than what Hagel claimed.

The point is that the White House and Pentagon are preparing for a full-scale war, not some kind of limited, punitive action.

The New York Times reports: “Mr Obama… is now determined to put more emphasis on the ‘degrade’ part of what the administration has said is the goal of a military strike against Syria – to ‘deter and degrade’ Mr Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons. That means expanding beyond the 50 or so major sites that were part of the original target list.”

Yet, incongruously, the American media quote Obama as saying elsewhere: “I’m not itching for a military action [in Syria].”

The ABC news channel reported more on the expanded list of targets in Syria that Obama is drawing up with his generals: “According to [General Martin] Dempsey military planners were focusing on targets directly linked to the control of chemical weapons but without exposing those chemical weapons to a loss of security. Secondly, the means of delivery and the third, those things that the regime uses – for example, air defense, long-range missiles and rockets – in order to protect those chemical weapons or in some cases deliver them.”

That open-ended list – wrapped up in false talk about chemical weapons – just about covers every military installation in Syria and much more, including obliteration of civilian infrastructure and mass murder. How many times have we heard this nonsensical cynical charade before?

Think about it. Even if American secret intelligence accusing the Assad government in Syria of using chemical weapons were true, which it is not according to independently verifiable Russian reports and many other international sources, the massive military American build-up is in no way plausibly “limited” or “punitive”?

It is absurd to claim otherwise. Yet, that is what Liar-in-Chief Barack Obama and his lieutenants are telling the American people and the world. They are telling barefaced lies about their criminal regime-change plan towards the sovereign government of Syria involving a full-scale war of aggression and possibly thousands of deaths due to “collateral damage.”

If Liar-in-Chief Barack Obama can’t even come clean on a war build-up that is staring the whole world in the eyes, nothing, absolutely nothing, he and his White House says should be given the slightest respect. Far from it; Obama and his cabal in Washington should be hauled off to face a Nuremberg trial.

September 10, 2013 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Getting Off The Tree

By Gilad Atzmon | September 10, 2013

As the Jewish Lobby (AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and other Jewish groups) faces its first colossal defeat, Jewish media outlets and Zionists commentators are desperate to find a respectful way for AIPAC to ‘get off the tree’.

Yesterday, a Jerusalem Post editorial went out of its way to save American Jewry from the Lobby’s blunder. “Just as Israelis are split on support for US military intervention against Assad, so undoubtedly is the American Jewish community.” This may be true, American Jews are probably divided on the topic, yet, we didn’t hear about a lobby of hundreds of ‘progressive’ Jews awaiting to raid the Capitol Hill and advocate the push against the war. If anything, we came across the usual sporadic so-called ‘progressive Jewish voices’  who shamelessly attempted to divert the attention from the tribal nature of AIPAC/ADL‘s pro war operation.

The Jerusalem Post also contends that Israeli leaders are actually against the war.  “Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon stressed that we are not involved and not interfering in what is happening in Syria. We repeat and emphasize that.” But if this is indeed the case, then AIPAC  and other Jewish Lobby groups shouldn’t  be conceived anymore as ‘The Israeli Lobby’. Supposedly the Lobby doesn’t follow Israeli policy. It is actually an autonomous collective that promotes what it believes to be ‘good for the Jews’.

In order to save American Jewry from the stupidity of their lobbies, The Jerusalem Post has produced the most ludicrous argument ever:

”AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and other Jewish groups have the same right as other American organizations to come out publicly in support of military intervention in Syria.”

I guess that this is a true statement as far as it goes; however, as long as they do it under a Jewish banner, as they clearly did, their activity will continue to reflect on Jews as a collective. This is indeed a disaster and Jews had better address this issue once and for all, and hopefully from a universal perspective.

Veteran IDF Concentration camp Guard Jeffery Goldberg, is obviously embarrassed by AIPAC’s failure. He looks for someone to blame but he wouldn’t dare criticize his fellow Zionists.

“If I believed in conspiracies,”  says Goldberg,  “I’d be tempted to think that President Barack Obama… dragged the group (AIPAC) into what at the moment looks like a losing battle to get Congress to approve an intervention in Syria just to tarnish AIPAC’s reputation as all-knowing and all-powerful.”

Actually, I believe that Goldberg’s ‘conspiratorial’ narrative is far from being farfetched. By now our Western political universe is hijacked by some sinister Lobbies (Jewish and others). The Jewish Lobby was pushing for a war the American people didn’t agree with. Obama and his administration were hanging in the middle. The president was left with one simple option. He told his paymasters, If you really want a war, make sure you fight for it; if the congress says No, you have yourself to blame. If the congress says Yes, and we once again end up with a military blunder, the Lobby would have to take the heat.

Goldberg is far from being stupid. He grasps that AIPAC’s defeat this week is just a beginning of a far greater and more important battle. “If American support for Israel wanes, then AIPAC is in trouble. If Americans shift their opinions on Iran or become comprehensively isolationist, then AIPAC will have difficulty with that portfolio, too.”

For Goldberg, Dershowitz and other unsavoury Zionist characters, Syria wasn’t really the issue. They are obviously after Iran. They see the big picture. And for them Israel is the centre of the universe. They are willing to get off the Syrian tree only because they have a much bigger tree in mind.

Some Israeli diplomats and foreign affairs experts have been horrified all along by the Lobby’s public push for a war.  Ben Caspit, a leading Israeli analyst quoted yesterday  a long-standing Israeli diplomatic source who attacked the attempts to activate AIPAC. “It is not wise, it is not correct, it is excessive,” said the diplomat. “Israel is too often viewed as a country that drags the United States into conflicts and wars.”

Seemingly, Israeli analysts and foreign affair experts do know very well  that Mearsheimer, Walt, Petras and yours truly are hitting the nail on the head pointing at the Jewish Lobby as a grave danger to world peace.

And yet, a few crucial questions remain open. How did AIPAC, ADL and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization fall into this trap? How did they manage to walk into this ambush openly and loudly advocating a war against America’s will? Couldn’t they foresee the possible outcome? Couldn’t they predict Jews being once again blamed for global scale conflict? Are they really that stupid?

My answer is simple. They are far from being stupid but they are clearly blind, because blindness is, unfortunately, intrinsic to chosenness, which implies dismissal of the other as well as otherness. Chosenness is a narcissistic modus operandi. It doesn’t leave much room for self-reflection, let alone regret or compassion.

Chosenness is the birth of the Jewish tragedy, a theme I explored in my latest book The Wandering Who. I guess that ‘The Jewish question’ must be addressed again and sooner the better, but this time we must verify first what the meaning of Choseness is and how it fits with Jewish culture, ideology and politics.

September 10, 2013 Posted by | Deception | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

International experts have strong proof images of chemical victims fabricated – Moscow

RT | September 10, 2013

Footage and photos of the alleged chemical attack in Syria, which the US cites as the reason for a planned military intervention, had been fabricated in advance, speakers told a UN human rights conference in Geneva.

Members of the conference were presented accounts of international experts, Syrian public figures and Russian news reporters covering the Syrian conflict, which back Russia’s opposition to the US plans, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The speakers argued that the suspected sarin gas attack near Damascus on August 21 was likely a provocation of the rebel forces and that a military action against the President Bashar Assad government will likely result in civilian casualties and a humanitarian catastrophe affecting the entire region.

The possible attack by US military without a UN Security Council mandate would violate international law and should be prevented by the United Nations, some of the speakers said.

Evidence for the Russian case, including numerous eyewitness reports and results of investigations of the chemical weapon incident by activists, was handed over to a UN commission of experts probing the Syrian crisis, the ministry said.

The Obama administration voiced an intention to use military force in Syria after reports of mass deaths in Eastern Houla, a neighborhood of Damascus, which killed more than 1,400 people according to US estimates. Washington says the deaths was due to a chemical weapons attack of the Syrian army on rebel forces and says it plans to use force to prevent such incidents in the future.

Russia is convinced that the chemical incident was a provocation by rebel forces, which staged a false flag attack to drag the US into the conflict and capitalize on the damage that the Syrian army is likely to sustain in the American intervention.

An increasing number of reports are backing Russia’s position, with local witnesses, US and British former intelligence professionals and Europeans recently released from rebel captivity all speaking for a provocation scenario.

In the latest development this week a possible way to de-escalate the tension was voiced, which would involve the Assad government handing over control of his chemical arsenal to the international community. The plan was backed by Russia, China and Syria’s main ally Iran, while Syria said it will review it.

Mixed signals over the plan came from the US. The US State Department initially said Secretary of State John Kerry, who initially voiced a possible disarmament, saw it as a rhetorical move and didn’t expect Bashar Assad to actually disarm. But later President Obama said such a move from Damascus would make him put the military action plan on pause.

Meanwhile RT learned that Syrian rebels might be planning a chemical weapons attack in Israel. The possible attack would be carried out from the territory supposedly controlled by the Syrian government and would trigger another round of escalation, leaving little hope of defusing the tension.

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September 10, 2013 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama ‘should be grateful’ for face-saving chance to backpedal on Syria

RT | September 10, 2013

President Obama should curb threats of a US military strike on Syria by joining Russia’s “face-saving” proposal for Damascus to give control of its chemical weapons to the international community, independent researcher Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich told RT.

Sepahpour-Ulrich said that Russia’s proposal allows Obama and America “to save face,” given the fact that a military strike on Syria would be “contrary to the people’s will” and receive little international support.

RT: Do you think this nascent solution is something that can actually lead to a workable compromise?

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich: It could. It’s a face-saving out for Mr. Obama, really. Because he doesn’t have the support to go to war, and if he chooses to go over the people of the United States, the majority of whom disapprove of this war, and the strikes, then he’s turning his back on democracy, and they always say in America they want to export democracy to other countries. So this is a blatant violation and goes contrary to the people’s will. And I think the proposal is really being very kind to Mr. Obama, giving him a way out.

RT: Why do you think Russia’s proposal to put Syria’s chemical stockpiles under international control received a positive response so quickly?

SSU: I think it was very positive because, well, for one, Assad doesn’t want war, he doesn’t want his people to die because there are lobby groups in Washington pushing for war. So I think he was happy to accept that. And I think the other countries, although Kerry and Obama are skeptical, they do not want this war. They do not want to go to this war. They do not have the support they hoped to have and yet they have those red lines that they have drawn which in fact were violated back in May. That’s when the United Nations said they thought the rebels were responsible and they didn’t act on it. But then to have painted themselves in a corner and this gives them the way out. It helps America, of course, its allies are happy not to go to war. It might be a win-win situation for all.

RT: The president has recently come out in some interviews saying this could be a positive step in the right direction, but we haven’t heard any assertive decision on his part. How do you think his quick his repositioning on the subject can be explained?

SSU: I think when he saw there is absolutely no support at all whatsoever, I mean even if Congress did vote for him to carry out these strikes, again, Congress would’ve been acting against the will of the people. America’s really onstage right now for the whole world to see. Not from a degree of, perhaps, hypocrisy, but the fact that it’s not really a promoter of democracy anywhere. And I think that this is a face-saving way for Obama to back-pedal on his position, and he should be very grateful that this solution was offered.

RT: Many legislators we’ve heard from say they were relieved by this talk of a compromise. Do you think they were looking forward to a vote on this subject?

SSU: I think they were very apprehensive because on the other hand, any legislator that would not have acted out the people’s will and had voted for war to please the lobby groups – no matter how much money the lobby would have actually put into their re-election – they would still need the vote of the people. So they were in a dilemma as well. I think the whole country, the whole nation was in a dilemma. And this really was a very clever way of avoiding all sorts of conflicts and casualties and allowing America to save face.

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September 10, 2013 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jonathon Cook: Israel is regional bully with nuclear weapons

RT | July 22, 2010

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is continuing to divide the Middle East. RT sat down with journalist and author Jonathan Cook who says that Israel actually benefits from the division.

“The Jewish population in Tehran is at least 20,000, maybe 30,000 people, and when they talk about their lives there, they seem very comfortable. If Iran had a kind of racial hatred against Jews, if the Iranian regime was just a symbol of a ‘new Hitler regime’, the Nazis, why would they not be starting with their own population?” Jonathan Cook says.

“The reason why Israel can’t allow Iran to have nuclear weapons is because if Iran developed its own nuclear arsenal, it would totally change the balance of power in the Middle East,” he says. “At the moment Israel is the regional bully, it has its own nuclear weapons, it can pull them out as it has done several times in the past, most notably during the 1973 war when it threatened the US that it might use those weapons if it wasn’t rearmed and that is why the Americans had to come in and intervene. It has that kind of ability to pressure America and terrorize the rest of the neighborhood, if you like, because it has nuclear weapons.”

Jonathan Cook says that if Iran had nuclear weapons, there would be a balance of power.

“There would be this mutually assured destruction principle, which may not be an ideal principle, but at least it’s something in terms of counteracting the benefits that Israel has as the only nuclear power [in the region],” he says.

As for the possible solution to the conflict, Jonathan Cook says he would support anything that brought peace and gave Palestinians and Israeli Jews the right to live happy, contented lives.

“The question now is how you achieve that. Some people say a two-state solution could do that. I don’t actually think that it is even technically possible any longer, if it ever was,” he says. “We are talking about very small areas of land that would be left to the Palestinians. Nobody is talking about it being a militarized state that would control the borders – I mean all sorts of questions that nobody really wants to look at in any kind of depth at the moment because everybody knows the answers, that this wouldn’t really be a proper state. I don’t think it would end the conflict, I think it might postpone it very briefly, but we would just end up with the same kind of conflict.”

September 10, 2013 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CBS’s Face the Nation: Blatant Pro-Israel Pro-War Bias Revealed

By Michael Gillespie | Dissident Voice | September 9, 2013

CBS’s Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer brought together this morning what he characterized as “one of our best panels of analysts ever,” a group of five supposed experts, to discuss President Obama’s plan to launch military action against Syria: the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward, the Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol, the New York Times‘ David Sanger, the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)’s Danielle Pletka. Schieffer presented this group as if his audience might expect it to represent a range of views. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Daniel Pletka is vice president of AEI, a neoconservative think tank that was instrumental in dragging the US into the hideously expensive and stunningly counterproductive war in Iraq. Several AEI scholars—including Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen—were associated with war profiteering and the phony intelligence used by pro-Israel neoconservative operatives inside the Bush/Cheney administration to stampede the USA into war in Iraq. Pletka was last in the news for smearing the then-Secretary of Defense nominee, former Senator (R-NE) and decorated Vietnam War veteran Chuck Hagel, as an anti-Semite. (Secretary of Defense Hagel is reported to be privately unenthusiastic about plans for military action against Syria.)

David Ignatius routinely defends Israel and champions proposed Israeli solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict without letting facts get in the way. In 2009, Ignatius caused an international incident that adversely affected Turkish-Israeli relations when, during a panel discussion about the 2008-2009 Gaza War at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he allowed Israeli President Shimon Peres to speak twice as long as the other participants and then attempted to silence Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan. The panel featured two heads of state, the U.N. secretary-general, and the secretary of the Arab League, and it dealt with an extremely sensitive issue. In allowing Peres to go last, giving him twice as much time to speak, and then repeatedly attempting to cut off Erdogan’s response, Ignatius showcased his pro-Israel bias on a world stage.

David Sanger has long propagandized for a US war against Iran in the pages of the New York Times. According to SourceWatch: “A few days after Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defense minister, admitted that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program, the New York Times ran a series of articles slighting Barak’s assertion all the way to confirming the opposite, i.e., that Iran was actually pursuing such weapons program. Sanger was key in the NYT’s drum beating.” Ray McGovern, a former CIA senior officer who briefed several US presidents, had this to say about Sanger’s articles: “Next it was time for the Times to trot out David Sanger from the Washington bullpen. Many will remember him as one of the Times’ stenographers/cheerleaders for the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in March 2003. An effusive hawk on Iran also, Sanger was promoted to a position as chief Washington correspondent, apparently for services rendered. In his Jan. 22 article, ‘Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections,’ Sanger pulls out all the stops, even resurrecting Condoleezza Rice’s “mushroom cloud” to scare all of us—and, not least, the Iranians.”

Bill Kristol is the chairman and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and a board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel. Author David Corn has referred to Kristol as “the No. 1 cheerleader for the Iraq War.” Kristol was one of the architects of the blueprint for regime change and “creative destruction” in the Middle East dreamed up by PNAC. Kristol signed the September 20, 2001, PNAC letter endorsing President George W. Bush’s “admirable commitment to ‘lead the world to victory’ in the war against terrorism.” Kristol said in a January 14, 2003, PBS Frontline interview “that the significance of President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 2002 (the ‘axis of evil’ speech) is too easily forgotten—that it was a rare moment, ‘the creation of a new American foreign policy’—and that Bush deserves credit for realizing very quickly after Sept. 11 that his presidency would be judged by how he handled the post-9/11 threat of weapons of mass destruction.” Weapons of mass destruction that, as it happened, could not be found because they did not exist.

Bob Woodward is yet another pro-Israel propagandist for executive power and for war. Andrew Bacevich, an accomplished author, Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, and a retired career officer in the United States Army has described Woodward this way: “Once a serious journalist, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the governing class. … Back in 2002, for example, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Woodward treated us to Bush at War. Based on interviews with unidentified officials close to President George W. Bush, the book offered a portrait of the president-as-resolute-war-leader that put him in a league with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the book’s real juice came from what it revealed about events behind the scenes. ‘Bush’s war cabinet is riven with feuding,’ reported the Times of London, which credited Woodward with revealing ‘the furious arguments and personal animosity’ that divided Bush’s lieutenants. Of course, the problem with the Bush administration wasn’t that folks on the inside didn’t play nice with one another. No, the problem was that the president and his inner circle committed a long series of catastrophic errors that produced an unnecessary and grotesquely mismanaged war,” wrote Bacevich. Somehow, Woodward missed all of that and a great deal more. “That war has cost the country dearly—although the people who engineered that catastrophe, many of them having pocketed handsome advances on their forthcoming memoirs, continue to manage quite well, thank you,” declared Bacevich.

This then is “one of our best panels of analysts ever,” according to Bob Schieffer, who once might have rightly claimed to be something other than a stooge for the Israeli foreign ministry. What CBS’s collection of well-heeled pro-Israel propagandists all agree on is this: The US government should launch military action in Syria in order to maintain political and military pressure on Iran, which Israel views as enemy No. 1 (though Iran has not attacked another country in well over 200 years).

One detail the panelists didn’t mention is that Syria is in the Russian sphere of influence and Russia has warships stationed in the eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Syria. Another thing the panelists didn’t mention is that Israeli air and sea forces attacked a lightly armed US Navy signals intelligence vessel, the USS Liberty, in the eastern Mediterranean on June 8, 1967, killing 34 US personnel and wounding 171. Nor did the panelists mention that in the middle 1980s Israeli spies handling an American-Jewish traitor, Jonathan Pollard, stole thousands of highly classified intelligence documents from the US Navy counter-terrorism intelligence facility where Pollard was employed, or that Israel provided many of those documents to the Soviet Union causing great harm to US intelligence capabilities and interests.

What CBS panelists didn’t say is that Syria is the next stop on Israel’s road to a US war against Iran. What they dare not say is that a US attack on Syria might well draw the USA into a much wider war in a region already severely destabilized by more than a decade of enormously expensive, ill-conceived, poorly managed, hideously destructive, and extraordinarily counterproductive US military actions undertaken largely at the insistence of pro-Israel neoconservatives whose wildly inordinate influence over the Washington foreign policy establishment poses an imminent threat to a great many legitimate US national interests, if not to the uninterrupted progress of human civilization.

~

Michael Gillespie, in addition to his regular freelance work for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is also a contributing editor and the Des Moines, IA correspondent for The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans, published by Sami Mashney in Anaheim, CA.

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September 9, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Syria: Fate of Historic Christian Town Still Unknown

Maaloula is considered a heritage site by UNESCO, where a number of ancient Christian churches and monasteries are located. (Photo: Marwan Tahtah)
By Abdel Rahim Assi | Al-Akhbar | September 9, 2013

Reports coming out of the ancient Christian town of Maaloula remain unclear as to whether the Syrian army has in fact regained control after radical Islamists entered it last week.

Until Sunday, September 8, news reports of Maaloula conflicted each other. Some reports suggested that the hardline al-Nusra Front managed to filter back into the town after the Syrian military claimed it had expelled the militants and re-established security. Yet the town’s representative in the Syrian parliament, Maria Saadeh, explained that the army had in fact regained control of Maaloula after having been forced to retreat briefly for “tactical reasons.”

The number of casualties cited has ranged between four and 20 dead, in addition to four to 15 kidnapped locals.

Saadeh added that most of the residents are still in their homes, reluctant to leave due to the presence of snipers dug into the cliffs that surround the town, although some women and elderly people did manage to leave when the army first entered the area.

Maaloula is considered a heritage site by UNESCO, where a number of ancient Christian churches and monasteries are located. The town lies over 40 km from Damascus near the Lebanese border. Saadeh noted that some reports of the fighters’ targets were exaggerated, while confirming that at least two historic churches were heavily damaged.

The MP insisted that the attack on the town was not essential from a military point of view, saying that the fighters could have easily bypassed it in order to carry out attacks on army checkpoints in the area. But, she says, they wanted to enter Maaloula to vandalize and destroy it, adding that many residents confirmed to her that the fighters they saw were of foreign nationalities, including Chechens and Libyans.

She said that targeting the historic town was part of a larger plan to drive Christians out of Syria, pointing to many examples such as the attacks on a number of Christian areas in Damascus, Homs, and the Jazira area in the north.

By assaulting such a symbol of Christianity in the area as Maaloula, she maintained, the fighters are sending a message to the community that they must leave Syria, after having driven them out of Iraq over the last decade. Saadeh completely rejected European offers of refuge to Syria’s Christians, insisting that they have no intention of abandoning the deep roots and heritage that connect them to the Levant.

September 9, 2013 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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