Young Voters Want To Vote-- But Not For Warmongers-- Of Either Party... Watch Out Josh Gottheimer, Anthony Brindisi And Kendra Horn

Writing for the American Independent on Friday, Dan Martin reported that Political activism skyrocketing among high schoolers. Martin wrote that "Since the 2016 election, high schools around the country have seen an explosion of activism by young people... [and that] most of the excitement is on the progressive side, with the membership in the High School Democrats of America doubling over the past year... In the 2018 midterm election, voter participation by voters aged 18 to 29 increased in all 42 states where data is available [and] young voters preferred Democratic House candidates by a 35-point margin, a gap the group says helped Democrats win back the House majority." The issues motivating them are the issues Bernie and the candidates running on his platform are talking about: the Green New Deal, a more equitable distribution of wealth, general reform-- from campaign finance and government ethics to gun safety and more government ethics, the social safety net and, of course, peace.

Over the weekend, New Republic editor, Chris Lehmann, sent the magazine's subscribers a note ("The Neocons Strike Back") with this photo of Republican politicians and GOP fellow-travelers, some familiar Concast-TV characters as #NeverTrumpers:

Lehmann noted that "Trump's drone strike on Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani shocked much of the world when it happened, but at least one group greeted it as the welcome return of a familiar and beloved policy outlook: D.C.’s influential corps of neoconservative thinkers and global strategists. As New Republic writer Jacob Heilbrunn notes, the neocons-- long viewed as a bulwark of anguished Never Trump dissent in the reconfigured alignments of right-wing power-- were abruptly jolted into a familiar, pleasing sense of their own realpolitik wisdom and policy clout:

Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani’s killing-- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals in the region-- a central part of his 2020 reelection bid.

And the neoconservative establishment is forever poised to retake its role in the sanctums of interventionism, Heilbrunn writes: Thanks to their well-documented organizational prowess and political savvy, neoconservative policy gurus always function as a sort of floating government-in-waiting, keenly attuned to the moment when unilateral military action pivots the D.C. consensus-sphere back onto a war footing. The movement’s “hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party,” Heilbrunn observes. Neoconservatives have been able to trade on the movement’s warrior prestige ever since the fall of communism and gathered momentum with the 1991 Iraq invasion, alongside philosophic rationales for American interventionism under the rubric of democracy promotion produced by neoconservative intellectuals such as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Francis Fukuyama.

The disastrous and ongoing military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, launched in the early aughts, appeared to put the movement into a provisional state of disfavor—and Donald Trump’s election in 2016, on at least a partially isolationist “America First” platform, seemed to further secure the neoconservatives’ state of near-permanent policy exile.

But appearances are deceiving-- and not simply because Trump’s foreign policy views, like all his positions not devoted exclusively to the promotion of his own ego, are stunningly incoherent. In reality, plenty of Trump’s inner circle is tightly aligned with neocon doctrine, from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Special Representative to Iran Brian Hook to Lindsey Graham and Rudy Giuliani. And a subfaction of what Stephen Wertheim has dubbed “anti-globalist neocons” furnish a conceptual bridge from the president’s occasional posture of guarded nationalism on the global stage to the bellicose, where-do-we-invade-next worldview forever in favor on the neocon right. The resulting, chilling synthesis can of course be glimpsed on Trump’s Twitter account. In one recent tweet, Heilbrunn writes, Trump “dismissed his national security adviser... Robert O’Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: ‘Actually, I couldn’t care less if they negotiate,’ he said. ‘Will be totally up to them, but no nuclear weapons and don’t kill your protestors.’”

In other words, behold the 2020 model of the neoconservative world order-- one in which intellectual consistency, and indeed coherent leadership, is an entirely disposable commodity. “Whether the neoconservatives themselves are occupying top positions in the Trump administration is almost irrelevant,” Heilbrunn argues. “The ideology itself has reemerged to a degree that even Trump himself seems hard-pressed to resist it—even if he wanted to.” After three chaotic, scandal-plagued years in power, Donald Trump has finally stumbled into a corner of Washington where he can be made to seem to belong.

No one is going to argue about the inclusion of war-mongers likJohn Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Robert O’Brien, Bill Kristol, Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, David Frum, Mark Dubowitz, David Wurmser, Tom Cotton. But considering that the vote was just a couple of weeks ago, they might have mentioned that when the House brought up the War Powers Resolution on January 9, there were 8 Democrats who refused to vote for it:

• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)
• Elaine Luria (New Dem-VA)
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)

You like activism among idealistic young people manifesting itself at the polls? Then don't keep nominating fake Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Blue Dogs and New Dems-- to muddy the Democratic Party brand. Because if young people get riled up enough-- and find the Democratic Party as distasteful as the Republican Party-- there are other options. These people are not, after all, beholden to party bosses.

Saturday Walter Shapiro wrote, also for the New Republic, that "Biden is drawing significantly smaller Iowa crowds than Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren. In fact, Biden may have played to more packed rooms in the run-up to the 2008 caucuses in which he limped home with an embarrassingly weak fifth-place finish." No one-- particularly people under 60-- want to come see him or his pathetic cast of conservative surrogates who often seem downright prehistoric with their ancient Republican-like ideas. (And by the way, I haven't seen a single poll showing Status Quo Joe breaking into double digits when people under 30 are asked which Democratic nominee they prefer. Do you think they're going to even bother voting in great numbers if Biden somehow gets the nomination, especially if that nomination is viewed as having been obtained illegitimately through the kinds of shenanigans the DNC pulled to hand it to Hillary in 2016?)

There Are Democrats... And Then There Are Democrats-- They're Not Interchangeable

Rolling Stone's politics guy, Matt Taibbi welcomed the new version of the Weekly Standard (RIP), The Bulwark by noting that "Neoconservatives, the architects of the War on Terror, are the political version of Jason in Friday the 13th: You can never bank on them being completely dead. They just hide under a log until the next funder appears."

Neocons began as liberal intellectuals. The likes of Bill Kristol’s father, Irving (who famously said a neoconservative was a liberal who’d been “mugged by reality”), drifted from the Democratic Party in the Seventies because it had become insufficiently hawkish after the Vietnam debacle.

They abhorred realpolitik and “containment,” hated Richard Nixon for going to China and preferred using force to spread American values, even if it meant removing an existing government. Reagan’s “evil empire” gibberish and semi-legal muscle-flexing in places like Nicaragua made neocons tingly and finalized their defection to the red party.

The neocon-Republican marriage wasn’t exactly smooth. After all, it required sanctimonious, left-leaning intellectuals to get into political bed with the Jerry Falwells of the world and embrace all sorts of positions they plainly felt were absurd. But they believed pretending to support religiosity or other popular passions was fine for ruling elites. This was supposedly a version of Plato’s “noble lie” concept, as Irving Kristol wrote in Commentary half a century ago:

“If religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of religion… and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves,” Kristol wrote, adding: “Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men.”

Using this strategy, this self-appointed “handful of sages” rode the mule of Republican politics all the way to the White House. By the early 2000s they achieved such status that David Frum, the speechwriter who coined George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” felt confident in publicly calling for the excommunication of libertarians, isolationists, nationalists and all sorts of other breeds from the Church of the GOP.

“Antiwar conservatives” had “turned their backs on the country,” Frum wrote. “Now we turn our backs on them.”

Having alienated big chunks of the Republican coalition, the group then sank the mainstream GOP politically with the idiotic prosecution of the Iraq war.

Because they started this Middle East disaster on a lie and even bragged about doing so-- “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”-- they undermined faith in a smorgasbord of American institutions, from the news media to the presidency to the intelligence community to their own party.

This was a huge reason for the rise of Trump, who ran against “elites” and capitalized on voters’ loss of trust in institutions like the press. Conveniently, neocons had already begun tacking back to the Democrats by then.

...[L]ongtime Democratic Party advisers are once again triangulating against their party’s own progressive wing, which was the core strategy of the original “Third Way” Democrats in the early Nineties. Party leaders now want to kick out populist, antiwar liberals in the same way Frum once wanted to excommunicate antiwar conservatives.

This overlaps nicely with neocons’ efforts to stake out the same turf between Trump and Sanders.

This is becoming a little like watching two people pretending not to be attracted to one another even though everyone knows they make each other horny. I’d say the Bulwark neocons and their Democratic allies need to get a room, except they already have MSNBC (as noted by recently resigned reporter William Arkin, who complained the network had become a forum for a “single war party”).

As Glenn Greenwald noted in the Intercept last year, the “most extreme and discredited neocons” began uniting with Democrats “long before the ascension of Donald Trump.”

These two groups came together over a common enemy: the insufficiently bloodthirsty Barack Obama. In July 2014, in “The Next Act of the Neocons,” New York Times writer Jacob Heilbrun predicted the future union:

“Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

Democracy Journal ran a similar piece in 2015, in which Robert Kagan talked about a union with Democrats, hoping to replace the term “neoconservative” with the less-infamous-sounding “liberal interventionist.”

The union achieved formal expression in 2016 with groups like the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is backed by neocons like Kristol and Jamie Fly as well as former Joe Biden and Clinton campaign security adviser Jake Sullivan. These are the same people advising Facebook about which sites to zap (last week, Revolutionary Left Radio was the latest alt media voice to get the axe).

Both groups praised Trump’s early missile strikes on Syria (Kristol, echoing his dad, said Trump had been “mugged by reality”; Kagan said the strikes should just be an “opening salvo”). Both were horrified by Trump’s recent tweet about withdrawing from the Middle East.

The neocons are trying to create with Democrats a true political movement of shared goals and common adversaries. Apart from “liberal interventionism,” they’re emphasizing stridently anti-populist leanings, making little distinction between Trump and “mouth-breathers” like Rep. Steve King on the one hand, and Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other.

Onetime neoconservative icon Max Boot even went so far as to compare Ocasio-Cortez to Sarah Palin, bemoaning the fact that she has more Twitter followers than Nancy Pelosi-- more evidence of democracy’s imperfections!

Both groups get starry-eyed around generals and spooks and mourned the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis like music-lovers after the death of Prince (“I am shaken,” said Nancy Pelosi). There were even shared fantasies about a presidential run by the Nosferatoid ex-Defense Secretary, whose greatest achievements to date had been grimacing with military severity while standing next to Trump, and clamoring for an increased role in the bombing of Yemen.

If you’re not concerned about undead neocons making a comeback while Trump is in office, that’s understandable. Many people will take allies against Trump from wherever they can.

Just don’t be surprised if “liberal interventionists” are sitting in the White House once Trump leaves the scene. These are determined revolutionaries who’ve been scheming for years to throw a saddle on the Democratic Party after decades in bed with Republicans. Sadly, they have willing partners over there.

OK-- time for an OpEd from The Guadian by Bhaskar Sunkara on one of my favorite topics: These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don't be fooled by their progressive veneer. I've been dealing with this in a series of posts called Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President. So we have Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson and Jeff Merkley on the one hand and then a bunch of others who are running as conservative Democrats (Bloomberg, McAuliffe, Delaney, the Starbucks guy, Biden, Klobuchar) or who are conservative but have decided to run as progressives or progressive-lite candidates (Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Beto). I'm guessing Gillibrand's focus group testing isn't complete but she'll get back to us what mix of right and left she "is." And everyone's running on an anti-Trump platform, of course, hoping that's all that's needed to make it over the finish line and then "be" the president.

"[M]ainstream Democrats, such as the likely presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand," wrote Sunkara, have "been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic party. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare. Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders’ single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college tuition for most Americans.

But outward appearances aren’t everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late-- on Wall Street. According to CNBC, all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.

Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and Gillibrand weren’t far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and other powerful executives.

When CNBC’s story about Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take “no corporate Pac money.” But what’s most telling isn’t that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street’s money, it’s that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn’t take their contributions, she’s signaling that she’s just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.

...Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances, the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.

The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don’t have a labor-backed social democratic party that could create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It’s telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper’s recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: “We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values across sectors.”

Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments like that, it doesn’t take fake news to convince working-class Americans that Democrats don’t really have their interests at heart.

Of course, the Democratic party isn’t a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn’t going to scare capital away from the Democratic party, it’s going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.

Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of Bernie Sanders. It seems likely that he will run for president, but he’s been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team’s experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal will morph into all-out war.

Wall Street isn’t afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It’s afraid of the Democrats who will take them on-- and those, unfortunately, are few and far between.

New Evidence that Syrian Gas Story Was Fabricated by the White House

A man breathes through an oxygen mask as another one receives treatments, after what rescue workers described as a suspected gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib, Syria April 4, 2017 (Ammar Abdullah / Reuters; source). Notice the bare hands of the doctor.

by Gaius Publius

(This piece is organized in two parts, the story to this point and the new evidence. To go directly to the new evidence, click here.)

Since our last report on the Syrian "gas attack" story (see "Another Intelligence Group Makes the Case: Assad's Responsibility Is Not Proved"), events have moved along. Nothing, though, has dismissed the doubts of those willing to entertain doubts that the story as told by the White House — and repeated by Democrats and Republicans alike — is baseless, a fabrication.

First, British scientists were given samples from the alleged gas attack that contained traces of sarin. The presence of sarin had previously been doubted, since first-responders were videoed handling victims with their bare hands (see image at the top), actions that would have killed them if sarin were present on the victims' bodies. On this evidence — the discovery of sarin in samples given to analysts — British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft concurs with the U.S. that Assad's responsibility for a gas attack is "highly likely." In other words, an estimation.

Second, a small crater that was said to have been made by a sarin-containing munitions blast has been studied by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritis at MIT, and he showed that the blast dispersal pattern is "more consistent with the possibility that the munition was placed on the ground rather than dropped from a plane." Postol continues, "Analysis of the debris as shown in the photographs cited by the White House clearly indicates that the munition was almost certainly placed on the ground with an external detonating explosive on top of it that crushed the container so as to disperse the alleged load of sarin [downward]."

Dr. Postol's report has been referenced in such pieces as this, by Robert Borosage writing at The Nation. Postol's original document is available here.

The Story to This Point

Gareth Porter, an investigative reporter who writes on national security policy, summarizes events to that point as follows (my emphasis):

The Trump administration officials dismissed the Russian claim that the Syrian airstrike had targeted a munitions warehouse controlled by Islamic extremists as an afterthought to cover up the Syrian government's culpability for the chemical attack. Moreover, the Trump officials claimed that US intelligence had located the site where the Syrian regime had dropped the chemical weapon.

However, two new revelations contradict the Trump administration's line on the April 4 attack. A former US official knowledgeable about the episode told Truthout that the Russians had actually informed their US counterparts in Syria of the Syrian military's plan to strike the warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun 24 hours before the strike. And a leading analyst on military technology, Dr. Theodore Postol of MIT, has concluded that the alleged device for a sarin attack could not have been delivered from the air but only from the ground, meaning that the chemical attack may not have been the result of the Syrian airstrike.

[...]

[T]he US military allegedly knew in advance that the strike was coming: Russian military officers informed their American counterparts of the Syrian military's plan to strike the warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun city 24 hours before the planned airstrike, according to the former US official who spoke with Truthout. The official is in direct contact with a US military intelligence officer with access to information about the US-Russian communications. The military intelligence officer reported to his associate that the Russians provided the information about the strike to the Americans through the normal US-Russian Syria deconfliction telephone line, which was established after the Russian intervention in 2015 to prevent any accidental clash between the two powers. The officer said that Russia communicated to the US the fact that the Syrians believed that the warehouse held toxic chemicals.

That information was considered so politically sensitive that after its initial dissemination, it was available only to a few officials, the US military intelligence officer told his associate.

[...]

The senior US officials briefing the press insisted that a Syrian air strike delivering sarin was the only credible explanation for the dozens of deaths in Khan Sheikhoun. One of the officials cited a video showing a crater in the middle of a main road, which the Trump administration's key officials have determined was the site of the chemical weapon that reportedly killed 50 to 100 people. He implied that this was evidence that a Syrian airstrike had released what was believed to be sarin.

But Dr. Theodore Postol of MIT, who debunked the original official claims of the location of rockets that hit Syria's Ghouta area with what appeared to be sarin on August 21, 2013, has come to a different conclusion. Postol says that the carcass of the delivery vehicle -- shown in last week's video and in still photos of the small crater -- indicates that the chemical attack was not delivered via airstrike but from the spot on the road where it was found.

For more, see the rest of Mr. Porter's clear write-up here. To that point, sarin had been suspected, but not proved. As Porter notes: "Exposure to smoke munitions that create phosphine gas when in contact with moisture can cause neurological symptoms that mimic those of sarin, because they both damage the body's ability to produce the enzyme cholinesterase."

Postol's piece showing that the suspected sarin device "could not have been delivered from the air" is linked both in Borosage's piece and in my fifth paragraph, above.

Finally, if Gareth Porter and his sources are right, the U.S. military knew everything they needed to know to understand that the reason they gave for launching the Tomahawk strike was false. That they knowingly lied, in other words.

New Evidence that the Trump Administration Lied about Assad's Role

And now the new evidence. I'd like to print the follow-up report from Dr. Postol. It contains video evidence that indicates tampering with the "bomb site" by men wearing "Health Directorate" uniforms in rebel-held Idlib in the two or three days after the so-called "gas attack.

Theodore Postol is the former Chair of the MIT Security Studies Department and was called as an expert witness in a lawsuit against the National Missile Defense Program. This is his area of expertise. According to Dr. Postol, this clear evidence should have been available to any competent intelligence professional. The attack was reported on April 4. The U.S. intelligence report claiming that Assad was responsible for a sarin attack was published April 11.

In other words, Dr. Postol's piece below supports the conclusion in my headline — that it indeed contains "evidence that the Syrian gas story was fabricated by the White House." (Side comment: What does that make of claims by even well-meaning Democrats like this one?)

Note also, as you read, the role and responsibility in this deception of General McMaster, a member of Trump's National Security Council. According to one report (detailed here), McMaster may well have become, in my phrasing, the "tip of the spear for neocon control of Trump's foreign policy."

The rest of this piece is Dr. Postol's report, printed in full. Emphasis, where mine, is called out and attributed. Emphasis added by Dr. Postol is called out but not attributed. Remaining emphasis is in the original quoted document.

GP

---

Evidence that the White House Intelligence Report
of April 11, 2017 Was Fabricated

April 14, 2017

Video Evidence of False Claims Made in the White House Intelligence Report of April 11, 2017

Theodore A. Postol

Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This is my third report assessing the White House intelligence Report of April 11, 2017. My first report was titled A Quick Turnaround Assessment of the White House Intelligence Report Issued on April 11, 2017 about the Nerve Agent Attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria and my second report was an Addendum to the first report.

This report provides unambiguous evidence that the White House Intelligence Report (WHR) of April 11, 2017 contains false and misleading claims that could not possibly have been accepted in any professional review by impartial intelligence experts. The WHR was produced by the National Security Council under the oversight of the National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster [emphasis added (GP)].

This image was extracted from a video of a worker during midday (note shadows) on April 5, 2017 next to the crater where sarin was allegedly released according to the White House Intelligence Report (WHR) issued of April 11, 2017. The WHR asserts that it reviewed commercial video evidence and concluded that sarin came from the crater next to a man. Other video frames show unprotected workers in the crater showing no evidence of sarin poisoning at the same time the dead birds are being packaged. The URLs to this and a related video are contained in this report.

The evidence presented herein is from two selected videos which are part of a larger cache of videos that are available on YouTube. These videos were uploaded to YouTube in the time period between April 5, 2017 and April 7, 2017. Analysis of the videos shows that all of the scenes taken at the site where the WHR claims was the location of a sarin release indicate significant tampering with the site. Since these videos were available roughly one week before the White House report was issued on April 11, this indicates that the office of the WHR made no attempt to utilize the professional intelligence community to obtain accurate data in support of the findings in the report.

The video evidence shows workers at the site roughly 30 hours after the alleged attack that were wearing clothing with the logo “Idlib Health Directorate.” These individuals were photographed putting dead birds from a birdcage into plastic bags. The implication of these actions was that the birds had died after being placed in the alleged sarin crater. However, the video also shows the same workers inside and around the same crater with no protection of any kind against sarin poisoning [emphasis mine (GP)].

These individuals were wearing honeycomb face masks and medical exam gloves. They were otherwise dressed in normal streetwear and had no protective clothing of any kind.

The honeycomb face masks would provide absolutely no protection against either sarin vapors or sarin aerosols [emphasis mine (GP)]. The masks are only designed to filter small particles from the air. If there were sarin vapor, it would be inhaled without attenuation by these individuals. If the sarin were in an aerosol form, the aerosol would have condensed into the pours in the masks, and would have evaporated into a highly lethal gas as the individuals inhaled through the mask. It is difficult to believe that such health workers, if they were health workers, would be so ignorant of these basic facts.

In addition, other people dressed as health workers were standing around the crater without any protection at all.

As noted in my earlier reports, the assumption in WHR that the site of the alleged sarin release had not been tampered with was totally unjustified and no competent intelligence analyst would have agreed that this assumption was valid. The implication of this observation is clear – the WHR was not reviewed and released by any competent intelligence experts unless they were motivated by factors other than concerns about the accuracy of the report [emphasis mine (GP)].

The WHR also makes claims about “communications intercepts” which supposedly provide high confidence that the Syrian government was the source of the attack. There is no reason to believe that the veracity of this claim is any different from the now verified false claim that there was unambiguous evidence of a sarin release at the cited crater.

The relevant quotes from the WHR are collected below for purposes of reference:

The United States is confident that the Syrian regime conducted a chemical weapons attack, using the nerve agent sarin, against its own people in the town of Khan Shaykhun in southern Idlib Province on April 4, 2017.

We have confidence in our assessment because we have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence, laboratory analysis of physiological samples collected from multiple victims, as well as a significant body of credible open source reporting.

We cannot publicly release all available intelligence on this attack due to the need to protect sources and methods, but the following includes an unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community's analysis of this attack.

By 12:15 PM [April4, 2017] local time, broadcasted local videos included images of dead children of varying ages.

… at 1:10 PM [April4, 2017] local … follow-on videos showing the bombing of a nearby hospital …

Commercial satellite imagery from April 6 showed impact craters around the hospital that are consistent with open source reports of a conventional attack on the hospital after the chemical attack.

Moscow has since claimed that the release of chemicals was caused by a regime airstrike on a terrorist ammunition depot in the eastern suburbs of Khan Shaykhun.

An open source video also shows where we believe the chemical munition landed [Emphasis Added]—not on a facility filled with weapons, but in the middle of a street in the northern section of Khan Shaykhun. Commercial satellite imagery of that site from April 6, [Emphasis Added] after the allegation, shows a crater in the road that corresponds to the open source video.

observed munition remnants at the crater and staining around the impact point are consistent with a munition that functioned, but structures nearest to the impact crater did not sustain damage that would be expected from a conventional high-explosive payload. Instead, the damage is more consistent with a chemical munition.

Russia's allegations fit with a pattern of deflecting blame from the regime and attempting to undermine the credibility of its opponents.

Summary and Conclusions

It is now clear from video evidence that the WHR report was fabricated without input from the professional intelligence community [emphasis mine (GP)].

The press reported on April 4 that a nerve agent attack had occurred in Khan Shaykhun, Syria during the early morning hours locally on that day. On April 7, The United States carried out a cruise missile attack on Syria ordered by President Trump. It now appears that the president ordered this cruise missile attack without any valid intelligence to support it [emphasis mine (GP)].

In order to cover up the lack of intelligence to supporting the president’s action, the National Security Council produced a fraudulent intelligence report on April 11 four days later [emphasis mine (GP)]. The individual responsible for this report was Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor. The McMaster report is completely undermined by a significant body of video evidence taken after the alleged sarin attack and before the US cruise missile attack that unambiguously shows the claims in the WHR could not possibly be true. This cannot be explained as a simple error.

The National Security Council Intelligence Report clearly refers to evidence that it claims was obtained from commercial and open sources shortly after the alleged nerve agent attack (on April 5 and April 6). If such a collection of commercial evidence was done, it would have surely found the videos contained herein.

This unambiguously indicates a dedicated attempt to manufacture a false claim that intelligence actually supported the president’s decision to attack Syria, and of far more importance, to accuse Russia of being either complicit or a participant in an alleged atrocity [emphasis mine (GP)].

The attack on the Syrian government threatened to undermine the relationship between Russia and the United States. Cooperation between Russia and the United States is critical to the defeat of the Islamic State. In addition, the false accusation that Russia knowingly engaged in an atrocity raises the most serious questions about a willful attempt to do damage relations with Russia for domestic political purposes.

We repeat here a quote from the WHR:

An open source video also shows where we believe the chemical munition landed—not on a facility filled with weapons, but in the middle of a street in the northern section of Khan Shaykhun [Emphasis Added]. Commercial satellite imagery of that site from April 6, after the allegation, shows a crater in the road that corresponds to the open source video.

The data provided in these videos make it clear that the WHR made no good-faith attempt to collect data that could have supported its “confident assessment.” that the Syrian government executed a sarin attack as indicated by the location and characteristics of the crater.

This very disturbing event is not a unique situation. President George W. Bush argued that he was misinformed about unambiguous evidence that Iraq was hiding a substantial store of weapons of mass destruction. This false intelligence led to a US attack on Iraq that started a process that ultimately led to the political disintegration in the Middle East, which through a series of unpredicted events then led to the rise of the Islamic State [emphasis mine (GP)].

On August 30, 2013, the White House produced a similarly false report about the nerve agent attack on August 21, 2013 in Damascus [emphasis mine (GP)]. This report also contained numerous intelligence claims that could not be true. An interview with President Obama published in The Atlantic in April 2016 indicates that Obama was initially told that there was solid intelligence that the Syrian government was responsible for the nerve agent attack of August 21, 2013 in Ghouta, Syria. Obama reported that he was later told that the intelligence was not solid by the then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.

Equally serious questions are raised about the abuse of intelligence findings by the incident in 2013. Questions that have not been answered about that incident is how the White House produced a false intelligence report with false claims that could obviously be identified by experts outside the White House and without access to classified information. There also needs to be an explanation of why this 2013 false report was not corrected. Secretary of State John Kerry emphatically testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeating information in this so-called un-equivocating report.

On August 30, 2013 Secretary of State Kerry made the following statement from the Treaty Room in the State Department:

Our intelligence community has carefully reviewed and re-reviewed information regarding this attack [Emphasis added], and I will tell you it has done so more than mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment. Accordingly, we have taken unprecedented steps to declassify and make facts available to people who can judge for themselves.

It is now obvious that this incident produced by the WHR, while just as serious in terms of the dangers it created for US security, was a clumsy and outright fabrication of a report that was certainly not supported by the intelligence community [emphasis mine (GP)].

In this case, the president, supported by his staff, made a decision to launch 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base. This action was accompanied by serious risks of creating a confrontation with Russia, and also undermining cooperative efforts to win the war against the Islamic State.

I therefore conclude that there needs to be a comprehensive investigation of these events that have either misled people in the White House White House, or worse yet, been perpetrated by people to protect themselves from domestic political criticisms for uninformed and ill-considered actions.

Sincerely yours, Theodore A. Postol


Professor Emeritus of Science,
Technology, and National Security Policy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Email: postol@mit.edu

---

Video Evidence That Reveals the White House Intelligence Report Issued on April 11, 2017 Contains Demonstrably False Claims about a Sarin Dispersal Crater Allegedly Created in the April 4, 2017 Attack in Khan Sheikoun, Syria

VIDEO #1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qeosawyrgyo
Dead Birds Video
[Embedded below (GP)]



[Stills from VIDEO #1, click to view (GP)]


VIDEO #2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyFAl2gjZJQ
Idlib Health Directorate Tampering with Alleged Sarin Dispersal Site Video
[Embedded below (GP)]



[Stills 1–10 from VIDEO #2, click to view (GP)]


[Stills 11–13 from VIDEO #2 below (GP)]

---

 

Another Intelligence Group Makes the Case: Assad's Responsibility Is Not Proved

The Great Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which an imaginary native American asks the white population of England to "Come over and help us" (source). Imaginary natives have been asking that of us ever since, to their less-than-imaginary misfortunes.

by Gaius Publius

"Widen the discussion beyond those advisers clearly bent on war"

—Advice given to George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq war. He didn't take it.

The quotation above is a shortened version of something written by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in their first memo to President Bush after Colin Powell's "aluminum tubes" testimony before the U.S. in 2003 (archived here).

At that time, the group included only five members, all ex-intelligence officers (links added for your convenience):

Richard Beske, San Diego
Kathleen McGrath Christison, Santa Fe
William Christison, Santa Fe
Patrick Eddington, Alexandria
Raymond McGovern, Arlington

Their 2003 self-description read like this:

Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is a coast-to-coast enterprise; mostly intelligence officers from analysis side of CIA, but Operations side also represented.

This group has a long history and has since added many new members. It was actively anti-war in 2003, and its members, especially McGovern, have published copiously. They are who they say they are, ex-intelligence officers from all branches, with extensive insider contacts among their peers.

This group is still at it, now publishing at Robert Parry's site Consortium News. Here's the current make-up of their steering group:

Eugene D. Betit, Intelligence Analyst, DIA, Soviet FAO, (US Army, ret.)

William Binney, Technical Director, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)

Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer and former Office Director in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, (ret.)

Thomas Drake, Senior Executive Service, NSA (former)

Robert Furukawa, Capt, CEC, USN-R, (ret.)

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)

Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator

Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq and Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)

Larry C. Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)

Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (Ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC)

John Brady Kiesling, Foreign Service Officer (ret.)

John Kiriakou, former CIA analyst and counterterrorism officer, and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)

David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Near East, CIA and National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Torin Nelson, former Intelligence Officer/Interrogator, Department of the Army

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)

Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, and former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq

Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA

Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)

Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat

That's quite a list.

I've highlighted a few names to note: William Binney, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou and Coleen Rowley are among the most important whistleblowers of the Bush-Obama era (a list that also includes former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, former NSA intelligence analyst Russell Tice, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and Edward Snowden). Scott Ritter was the Bush era U.N. weapons inspector who proved a considerable thorn in the pro-Cheney pro-war side. Click the links for more information.

Once Again: Assad's Responsibility for a "Chemical Attack" Is Not Proved

All of this introduction is to establish the credibility of the group itself, which has just published another memorandum — this time to President Trump — detailing and adding to the information contained in our own last piece on this subject: "The 'Assad Launched a Chemical Attack' Story Has Not Been Proved."

Their memorandum to President Trump begins (my emphasis):

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)*

SUBJECT: Syria: Was It Really “A Chemical Weapons Attack”?

1 – We write to give you an unambiguous warning of the threat of armed hostilities with Russia – with the risk of escalation to nuclear war. The threat has grown after the cruise missile attack on Syria in retaliation for what you claimed was a “chemical weapons attack” on April 4 on Syrian civilians in southern Idlib Province.

2 – Our U.S. Army contacts in the area have told us this is not what happened. There was no Syrian “chemical weapons attack.” Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died.

3 – This is what the Russians and Syrians have been saying and – more important –what they appear to believe happened.

4 – Do we conclude that the White House has been giving our generals dictation; that they are mouthing what they have been told to say?

5 – After Putin persuaded Assad in 2013 to give up his chemical weapons, the U.S. Army destroyed 600 metric tons of Syria’s CW stockpile in just six weeks. The mandate of the U.N.’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW-UN) was to ensure that all were destroyed – like the mandate for the U.N. inspectors for Iraq regarding WMD. The U.N. inspectors’ findings on WMD [in Iraq] were the truth. Rumsfeld and his generals lied and this seems to be happening again. The stakes are even higher now; the importance of a relationship of trust with Russia’s leaders cannot be overstated.

6 – In September 2013, after Putin persuaded Assad to relinquish his chemical weapons (giving Obama a way out of a tough dilemma), the Russian President wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he said: “My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this.”

The rest of the memo documents the "absolute mistrust" that has been engendered between the Russian government and the U.S. as a result of the push by many, in and out of our military, in and out of our government, for greater U.S. involvement in a larger war in Syria.

Needless to say, the only beneficiaries of that war, other than Raytheon and the rest of the "defense" industry, will be the bipartisan neocon pro-war consensus and their media enablers. I doubt many of us, or our children, will see any benefit at all. I'd be shocked if the average Syrian, like the average pre-war Iraqi, was not made a lot more miserable.

But the neocons and the "defense" establishment seems to still want war. They and their allies are more than determined to get it.

Suspending the Syrian Air Space De-Confliction Agreement

Note that one of the immediate consequences of the U.S. action has been Russia's suspension of the agreement to deconflict flight activity over Syria. In this atmosphere, mistakes are easy to make. More about that agreement:

Russia said it suspended an airspace deconfliction agreement with U.S. forces operating in and around Syria, in a statement deriding the U.S. for its Thursday night attack on a Syrian airfield with 59 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles launched from two destroyers operating in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, but senior U.S. military officials said the deconfliction hotline is still open and Russians are answering their calls. [...]

Under the deconfliction agreement, set up in the fall of 2015, U.S. and Russian forces can communicate via a flight safety hotline run out of the Combined Air Operations Center at U.S. Central Command. Previous uses of the hotline include a Russian official alerting coalition forces in September 2016 that the targets they were attacking and believed to be Islamic State forces were, in fact, Syrian government-aligned forces, and U.S. officials alerting the Russians in March 2017 that Russian and Syrian fighters were bombing U.S.-backed fighters rather than Islamic State forces.

Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters in a statement Thursday night that the U.S. warned Russia about the strike before firing 59 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles from USS Porter (DDG-78) and USS Ross (DDG-71) at the Western Syrian target.

Is the agreement really suspended? Or are the Russians just putting pressure on the U.S.? Can statements made by the U.S. military be believed? The answers could easily be yes, yes, and no, all at the same time. After all, we're well beyond Trump's entry into "spook world," where more is hidden (and lied about) than is revealed.

Did All 59 Tomahawks Reach the Target?

I've seen some articles that suggest deeper layers to what's hidden beneath this story. The Russians have the ability, as do we, of engaging in electronic warfare (EW) — signals jamming and electronics interference — against incoming missiles like the Tomahawk. The U.S claims that all 59 Tomahawks reached their target. The Russians claim otherwise — that only 23 Tomahawks struck the airfield.

From the New Zealand site Newshub:

Russia and the US are at odds over how much damage the US tomahawk missile strike had in Syria on Friday.

US officials claim the strike was a success, with "about 20" jet fighters destroyed at the Shayrat airfield in Homs, but the Russian ministry claims only six Mig-23 jet fighters were lost, and that only 23 out of 59 tomahawk missiles reached their target.

Either way, the losses are just a fraction of the airpower within the Syrian Arab Air Force.

Syria has at least 450 Russian-made jet fighters such as powerful Mig-23, Mig-25 and Mig-29 military aircraft.

The U.S. may be telling the truth, and the Russians lying in order to discredit U.S. military capabilities. But if the Russians are telling the truth and the U.S. is lying (in order to maintain faith in U.S. military capabilities), what happened to the remaining missiles? Russians claim to have developed the ability to electronically "fry" the guidance mechanisms of incoming missiles.

If that's indeed what happened, the Russians would be able to aid the Syrians without being guilty, technically at least, of the more overtly hostile act of shooting them down. And if they did that — knocked out the guidance control of more than half of these missiles — what an interesting and complex message it would send about their capabilities to the Pentagon.

Certainly something to think about. Wheels within wheels, and frightening ones at that.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is as it's always been — bipartisan assertions of Assad's "certain" guilt, even from pro-peace Democrats, are being presented as fact. Those assertions will lead to war, may in fact be deliberately manufactured by elite leaders to do just that. People have wanted war with countries like Iran and Syria since Cheney days. They still do.

And as if war lust weren't motive enough, there's this:

For more on the pipeline aspect of our animus toward Syria, see here. It never ends, the hubris of these people.

As the Veteran Intelligence Professionals said near the end of their memo to Trump (my emphasis):

A handful of CIA veterans established VIPS in January 2003 after concluding that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had ordered our former colleagues to manufacture intelligence to “justify” an unnecessary war with Iraq. At the time we chose to assume that President George W. Bush was not fully aware of this.

We issued our first Memorandum for the President on the afternoon of Feb. 5, 2003, after Colin Powell’s ill-begotten speech at the United Nations. Addressing President Bush, we closed with these words:

No one has a corner on the truth; nor do we harbor illusions that our analysis is “irrefutable” or “undeniable” [adjectives Powell applied to his charges against Saddam Hussein]. But after watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion … beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.

Respectfully, we offer the same advice to you, President Trump.

The only way this stops is if people stop it. That requires, first, not playing the game on the enemy's playing field, the enemy's home ground. The enemy is the bipartisan neocon coalition. That "home ground" is fertilized and fortified with the assumption that Assad's guilt is a fact, that he's uniquely evil, and as a result, this New Hun must be taken down as a moral imperative.

That kind of "moral imperative" always points to war, profitable for a few, usually disastrous for most of us.

 This "war to end all wars" guaranteed the next one (click to enlarge).

The last half generation, the one that failed to stop Bush, was taken to war. As a result, we are all paying the price, at the airport, in our homes, whenever we log into the Internet, whenever our militarized police forces shout "keeping you safe" while ignoring the Bill of Rights.

This generation can't reverse that disaster, we're now doomed to live in it. But we can avoid the next one and an even worse fate. Another moral imperative, if you ask me.

GP
 

The "Assad Launched a Chemical Attack" Story Has Not Been Proved

by Gaius Publius

"Fool me once ... can't get fooled again."

—Someone who knows a thing or two about fooling you once

The war strain is strong in both parties.

—Yours truly

It's dangerous for the major media, almost all of it, to continually tout as proven what is only surmised. The current push for war is not only not well grounded, it's bipartisan, which makes it even more dangerous. The last time the bipartisan elite wanted a not-well-grounded war, it did not go well.

Touting as proved what is only surmised starts with the assertion that Russia "hacked" (hijacked, stole) the last American election. That Russia both wanted to and tried to "interfere" in the recent election is easy to demonstrate. That Russia "hacked" or stole the U.S. election in an act of espionage that rises to an act of war, though, is an unproved assertion.

Yet we're hearing that kind of loose talk more and more:

“I think this attack that we’ve experienced is a form of war, a form of war on our fundamental democratic principles,” [Rep. Bonnie Watson] Coleman [D-N.J.] said during a hearing this week at the House Homeland Security Committee. ...

“I actually think that their engagement was an act of war, an act of hybrid warfare, and I think that’s why the American people should be concerned about it,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). ...

“This past election, our country was attacked. We were attacked by Russia,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). ...

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking member, has similarly described the election meddling as an “attack” and likened it to the United States’ “political Pearl Harbor.”

"Political Pearl Harbor"?

Even Dick Cheney has gotten into the act: ""There's no question that there was a very serious effort made by Mr. Putin and his government, his organization, to interfere in major ways with our basic fundamental democratic processes. In some quarters, that could be considered an act of war."

Following the lead of our leaders, the major media has repeated the unproved assertion — that Russia "hacked" or stole the election in an "act of war" — sometimes with disclaimer, sometimes without. For weeks, the repetition has been endless. In the phrase of a long-gone commercial, "You're soaking in it."

This is a pattern and there's a price. The pattern happens on both the right and the left. Only the assertions are different. On the right: "Obama was born in Kenya." On the left: "If not for Russia, Clinton would have beaten Trump." On the right the assertions are often demonstrably false. On the left the assertions often turn a possibility and into a certainty.

And the price — both of these patterns are dangerous, since they both involve spreading a falsehood. The consumers of these falsehoods — we the public, on both the left and the right — never seem to consider the motives of their purveyors, nor the danger of believing as true what has not, and can not, be demonstrated with certainty. Which sets us up for a repeat. Contrary to Mr. Bush's famous saying, this almost guarantees we can get fooled again.

That may be playing out now, getting fooled again, with the Syrian "gas attack" story.

What Is Known about the "Gas Attack in Syria"?

What is known for sure about the Syrian "gas attack"? Actually very little. 

The best that I can find purporting to show that Assad and Syria launched a "gas attack" against Khan Sheikhoun is contained in this article from Business Insider. (The same information has appeared elsewhere.) The Pentagon has released a map allegedly showing the flight path of a Syrian military plane over the area.

Based on that, at least in part, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said,"We have a very high level of confidence that the attacks were carried out by aircraft under the direction of the Bashar al-Assad regime, and we also have very high confidence that the attacks involved the use of sarin nerve gas" (emphasis mine).

What that tells you is (1) there's no proof that sarin was used, or they'd show you the proof. And (2) there's no proof that the identified plane dropped gas bombs or canisters, or they'd show that to you as well. Instead, we hear the now-common, telltale phrase, "high level of confidence." Expressing a "high level of confidence" involves an educated guess on their part, and an exercise in trust on yours.

Note: This doesn't prove that Assad is innocent. It proves nothing at all.

What Are Other Sources Saying?

Other sources are saying that there's a great deal of uncertainty about this incident, including whether it was a gas attack at all (see below) versus a conventional bombing of a rebel facility in which dangerous chemical weapons were stored. Some intelligence sources say they are hearing from their colleagues that the facts are entirely contrary to administration and the military assertions — and that both the administration and our military know that.

None of these assertions are proved, just as the assertions of Assad's guilt are proved, but none of this can be discounted. Unfortunately, the only assertions you're "soaking in" are those that lead to war.

About the uncertainty of Assad's guilt, I want to present two sources out of several I could have brought forward. A search produces a fair number of them. The first one below is via Robert Parry.

A very good reporter, Parry did excellent investigative work at the Associated Press and Newsweek exposing many aspects of the Iran-Contra scandal undiscovered by others. In recognition Parry "was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 and the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation in 2015."

In fact, according to Salon, Parry's "continuing quest to unearth the facts of the alleged October Surprise has made him persona non grata among those who worship at the altar of conventional wisdom." The "October Surprise" was the collapse of the negotiations between the Carter White House and the Iranian hostage holders just prior to the 1980 election, which brought Ronald Reagan narrowly to victory. Parry thought the October Surprise was the source of the events that led to later Iran-Contra scandal. (More at the link. That connection, as near as I can tell, is proved, though widely ignored in elite bipartisan circles.)

Parry opens (my emphasis throughout):

Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.

Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.

There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.

But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.

I've run across these counter-assessments in several unconnected places (places that don't quote each other or depend on a common source). Again, the counter-assessments are either that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels launched a "false flag" attack for reasons that will be detailed below, or that they stored poison gas at a facility that was bombed using conventional weapons by either the Russians or the Syrians (perhaps by the plane whose flight path the Pentagon has been showing, or perhaps not).

More from Parry, this time about the danger this situation represents — the reinstallation of neocons into foreign policy decision-making:

One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.

The source said the Trump national security team split between the President’s close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a protégé of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus.

[...]

In this telling, the earlier ouster of retired Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser and this week’s removal of Bannon from the National Security Council were key steps in the reassertion of neocon influence inside the Trump presidency. ...

Though Bannon and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said, they shared the belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria, revealing the Obama administration’s CIA analysis that a fatal sarin gas attack in 2013 was a “false-flag” operation intended to sucker President Obama into fully joining the Syrian war on the side of the rebels — and the intelligence analysts’ similar beliefs about Tuesday’s incident.

There's an interesting section that examines Assad's reasons for not launching either attack:

In both cases – 2013 and 2017 – there were strong reasons to doubt Assad’s responsibility. In 2013, he had just invited United Nations inspectors into Syria to investigate cases of alleged rebel use of chemical weapons and thus it made no sense that he would launch a sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, guaranteeing that the U.N. inspectors would be diverted to that case.

Similarly, now, Assad’s military has gained a decisive advantage over the rebels and he had just scored a major diplomatic victory with the Trump administration’s announcement that the U.S. was no longer seeking regime change” in Syria. The savvy Assad would know that a chemical weapon attack now would likely result in U.S. retaliation and jeopardize the gains that his military has achieved with Russian and Iranian help.

Remember, Assad may be brutal — frankly, most of these people, the ones we "like" and the ones we don't — are brutal. But he didn't survive this long by being stupid.

Finally, Parry quotes ex-intelligence officer Philip Giraldi on the Russian role in the incident and also on the reaction of the intelligence community to the way this situation is playing out:

Alarm within the U.S. intelligence community about Trump’s hasty decision to attack Syria reverberated from the Middle East back to Washington, where former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reported hearing from his intelligence contacts in the field that they were shocked at how the new poison-gas story was being distorted by Trump and the mainstream U.S. news media.

Giraldi told Scott Horton’s Webcast: “I’m hearing from sources on the ground in the Middle East, people who are intimately familiar with the intelligence that is available who are saying that the essential narrative that we’re all hearing about the Syrian government or the Russians using chemical weapons on innocent civilians is a sham.”

Giraldi said his sources were more in line with an analysis postulating an accidental release of the poison gas after an Al Qaeda arms depot was hit by a Russian airstrike.

I'll send you to the article for the rest. There's actually quite a bit more, and Parry does a good job. But do note two things — the assertion that Obama knew that the 2013 sarin attack was a false flag operation (i.e., that Assad didn't do that one either; here's the link again), and the assertion that McMaster, a protégé of David Patraeus, is the "tip of the spear" for neocon control of Trump's foreign policy.

For Parry, this is Trump's "wag the dog" moment. For me, however, the key takeaway is different. No one who tells you the case against Assad is proved can show the proof. I would think, when it comes to going to war, that part matters. Especially given our recent bipartisan war-making past.

Yes, Parry is making assertions, not offering proof. I'm even willing to bet that Parry has "very high confidence" that he's correct. Does this mean Assad is innocent? No. Just as the military's assertions mean he's guilty, absent actual proof.

One More Source, Ex-DIA Colonel Patrick Lang

The following was offered to me via an email list by someone I respect. I have not heard of Patrick Lang, but he's another of those, like Parry, with connections in the intelligence community. Clearly a former Trump supporter, he's now very angry with him. That may or may not have anything to do with these assertions.

What's striking, though, is the degree to which Lang and Parry are saying pretty much the same thing — that the facts were known in the intelligence community, that the White House (meaning the military and civilian team that decided on the missile strike) distorted those facts to the public for their own purposes, and that at least some faction within the intelligence community is not happy with the distortions.

Lang (my emphasis below):

Donald Trump’s decision to launch cruise missile strikes on a Syrian Air Force Base was based on a lie. In the coming days the American people will learn that the Intelligence Community knew that Syria did not drop a military chemical weapon on innocent civilians in Idlib. Here is what happened.

1. The Russians briefed the United States on the proposed target. This is a process that started more than two months ago. There is a dedicated phone line that is being used to coordinate and deconflict (i.e., prevent US and Russian air assets from shooting at each other) the upcoming operation.
    
2. The United States was fully briefed on the fact that there was a target in Idlib that the Russians believes was a weapons/explosives depot for Islamic rebels.
    
3. The Syrian Air Force hit the target with conventional weapons. All involved expected to see a massive secondary explosion. That did not happen. Instead, smoke, chemical smoke, began billowing from the site. It turns out that the Islamic rebels used that site to store chemicals, not sarin, that were deadly. The chemicals included organic phosphates and chlorine and they followed the wind and killed civilians.
    
4. There was a strong wind blowing that day and the cloud was driven to a nearby village and caused casualties.
    
5. We know it was not sarin. How? Very simple. The so-called “first responders” handled the victims without gloves. If this had been sarin they would have died. Sarin on the skin will kill you. How do I know? I went through “Live Agent” training at Fort McClellan in Alabama.

There are members of the U.S. military who were aware this strike would occur and it was recorded. There is a film record. At least the Defense Intelligence Agency knows that this was not a chemical weapon attack. In fact, Syrian military chemical weapons were destroyed with the help of Russia.

This is Gulf of Tonkin 2.

Your bottom line — You can believe any of these stories and sources if you like. But recognize that you're choosing whom to believe, and that it's belief. You're not being led to any of these beliefs by proof, because none has yet been brought forward.

A fake war scene in the dark 1997 comedy “Wag the Dog,” which showed a girl and her cat fleeing a bombardment in Albania.

Belief without proof, when it comes to war, can have horrible consequences, as we have seen already in Iraq.

On the other hand, one of these groups of assertions will eventually be proved right. If it's Trump who is wrong, this really is Gulf of Tonkin 2 — bait, in other words, that Trump gladly took which Obama apparently would not.

GP
  

U.S and U.K. Sending Planes, Troops to Romania and Poland

Reversing our initial promise to Gorbachev not to advance NATO to the east, we now have Russia almost completely surrounded. What do they think we're planning to do? (Source)

by Gaius Publius

Before you read this piece, ask yourself, how likely is it that Russia would invade, with tanks and troops, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Would that not be the start of World War III? Yet that's the fear that's being passed around as an excuse for what you're about to read.

Reuters (emphasis mine throughout):

Britain, U.S. sending planes, troops to deter Russia in the east

Britain said on Wednesday it will send fighter jets to Romania next year and the United States promised troops, tanks and artillery to Poland in NATO's biggest military build-up on Russia's borders since the Cold War.

Germany, Canada and other NATO allies also pledged forces at a defense ministers meeting in Brussels on the same day two Russian warships armed with cruise missiles entered the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Denmark, underscoring East-West tensions.

One, the U.S. is much more a threat to bomb or invade another nation than Russia is. Two, why shouldn't armed Russian ships sail in international waters? Ours do all the time. Three, again, do you really think Russia would be crazy enough to invade a first-world (read, ethnically Caucasian) country on Europe's eastern doorstep? First-world countries only consider moves like this in third-world (read, ethnically darker) countries, like Syria, or Iraq, or ... you name it, there are plenty of examples.

Speaking of Syria, this may be a reason for the latest threatening moves. From the same article:

In Madrid, the foreign ministry said Russia had withdrawn a request to refuel three warships in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta after NATO allies said they could be used to target civilians in Syria.

The ships were part of an eight-ship carrier battle group - including Russia's sole aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov - that is expected to join around 10 other Russian vessels already off the Syrian coast, diplomats said.

(Did you catch that? Russia has one aircraft carrier, just one. One in its whole navy. Some military threat.)

This Baltic invasion stuff is nonsense. The article continues to announce even more Western military build-ups, including troops to be sent to Estonia — as "deterrence." The only thing I see being deterred is (a) Russian intervention in Syria, and (b) the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe, a market the U.S. wants to secure for U.S. companies.

Ginning Up Fear of a Baltic Invasion

The context, or excuse, for all this was laid down after the Russians retaliated for U.S. interference in Ukraine (for more on that, see here and here). And while we're on the subject of U.S. interference and Ukraine, watch for the name Victoria Nuland, the wife of neocon and Iraq War architect Robert Kagan, as the next administration's appointees are announced. Nuland was deeply involved in our Ukrainian adventurism and is expected to get a high-level appointment in the next Democratic administration, perhaps as Secretary of State or National Security Adviser.

Russia retaliated to Western interference in Ukraine by promoting a referendum in ethnically Russian Crimea that ended in Russian annexation. The West retaliated to Russian annexation of Crimea by ginning up fear of a Russian invasion in the Baltics.

Not kidding. Fears of a Russian invasion in Europe were widely circulated and carried for months in Western journals and papers. Newsweek, for example, from January 2016:

Counting Down to a Russian Invasion of the Baltics

Although Russia's economy is reeling and its military forces are increasingly engaged in Syria and Ukraine, NATO commanders, governments and analysts are concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin's adventurism has not run its course. Most anxieties focus on the Baltic states as Russia's next potential military target.

Russia has many advantages in the Baltics. The situation of Russians there, particularly in Estonia and Latvia where many Russians remain non-citizens, provides Moscow with an issue with which to stoke tensions. ...

Furthermore, Russia's conventional and nuclear deployments cover the entire Baltic Sea area. From its fortified base at Kaliningrad, Russia can project power not only into the Baltic Sea but also to Poland and even Germany.

By all accounts, Russia enjoys a wide margin of conventional superiority over NATO. Indeed, NATO commanders publicly and privately profess that given the strength of Russia's capabilities on land, sea and air, NATO would suffer enormous casualties in any effort to defend the Baltic states from attack.

And given the publicly discussed defects in NATO and individual Western intelligence cited in Western media, it would be relatively easy for Moscow to launch an invasion during one of its vaunted "snap exercises" without the United States detecting it in time.

"Counting down"? It reads as if it were dictated from the State Department.

This will not end well. The U.S. wants the Russians out of Syria, wants Western natural gas to flow to Europe, and is apparently willing to rattle many sabres to do it. Also cages. Some of those cages contain bears.

This will not end well.

GP