Geez... between drinking scotch... standing death-watch... continuing to plan the details of the upcoming trip to India... Facebooking... getting reamed out by my buddy Phil on account of Facebooking... watching U.S. Open Tennis... giving free trips to the airport... and preparing awesome dinners and lunches...
(*EXHALING*)
I'm friggin' exhausted!
(Well... Andy Murray just got his ass kicked by Wawrinka... who just might end up surprising everyone and taking home the whole enchiladas!)
Anyway... on to some newsbiting!
9 comments:
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/09/04/history-lesson-when-the-united-states-looked-the-other-way-on-chemical-weapons/
* THE HEADLINE:
History lesson: When the United States looked the other way on chemical weapons
* THE ESSAY:
“People say, ‘Well, he killed 100,000 people. What’s the difference with this 1,400?’ With this 1,400, he crossed a line with using chemical weapons. President Obama did not draw the red line. Humanity drew it decades ago, 170-some countries supporting the convention on not using chemicals — chemical warfare.” – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sept. 3, 2013
* NOT EXACTLY, NANCY...
* READ ON...
One of the administration’s main arguments for attacking Syria is because the government crossed an important line by using chemical weapons against its own people.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a strong supporter of military strikes, echoed that argument on Tuesday. She noted that as far back as 1925, nearly 40 nations had joined together to ban the first use of chemical weapons when the Geneva Protocol was signed. (Her mention of 170 countries appears to refer to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which seeks to prohibit the production of chemical weapons and mandates their destruction; Syria has refused to sign the treaty, though 189 other countries have signed it.)
* IN ANY EVENT, THE TREATY DOESN'T EMPOWER A U.S. PRESIDENT ALONE - OR EVEN A U.S. PRESIDENT WITH THE SUPPORT OF CONGRESS - TO ATTACK A SUSPECTED VIOLATOR OF SAID TREATY.
Such treaties generally do not have mechanisms for enforcement.
* AND THIS ONE DOESN'T!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
As far as we know, no nation has ever attacked another to punish it for the use of chemical weapons, so Obama’s request is unprecedented.
* OBAMA'S REQUEST ITSELF IS A REQUEST TO FURTHER VIOLATE INTERNATIONAL LAW... SUPPOSEDLY "IN DEFENSE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW."
Indeed, Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman’s agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear weapons, Syria’s pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public acknowledgement or criticism. (The Fact Checker, when serving as The Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent, learned of this secret arrangement from Middle Eastern and Western diplomats, but it was never officially confirmed.)
These are the sorts of trade-offs that happen often in diplomacy. After all, Israel’s nuclear stockpile has never been officially acknowledged, and Syria in the 1980s and 1990s was often supportive of U.S. interests in the region, even nearly reaching a peace deal with Israel.
But there is an even more striking instance of the United States ignoring use of the chemical weapons that killed tens of thousands of people — during the grinding Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s.
As documented in 2002 by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, the Reagan administration knew full well it was selling materials to Iraq that was being used for the manufacture of chemical weapons, and that Iraq was using such weapons, but U.S. officials were more concerned about whether Iran would win rather than how Iraq might eke out a victory. Dobbs noted that Iraq’s chemical weapons’ use was “hardly a secret, with the Iraqi military issuing this warning in February 1984: ”The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.”
As Dobbs wrote:
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)
* THE NEXT FOUR PARAGRAPH'S ARE DODD'S:
A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the “human wave” attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague….
* NOTE WHO CONTROLLED CONGRESS DURING THE DAYS OF RONALD REAGAN AND GEORGE H.W. BUSH, FOLKS...
(*SHRUG*)
To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis, sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.
The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory.
Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to “almost daily use of CW” against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president’s recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
* AND, FOLKS... THESE WERE WONDERFUL YEARS FOR U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, FOR THE UNITED STATES, AND FOR MOST OF THE WORLD!
In 1988, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered chemical weapons attacks against Kurdish resistance forces, but the relationship with Iraq at the time was deemed too important to rupture over the matter. The United States did not even impose sanctions.
Without much apparent irony, two decades later Rumsfeld and other members of the then George W. Bush administration repeatedly cited Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against own people as a justification for invading Iraq. (Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill did not respond to questions about her views on how the Reagan administration handled the Iraqi situation.)
For interested readers, we have embedded below an English translation of the French intelligence report on the alleged chemical weapons attack last month because it includes a history of the Syrian chemical weapons program.
* WORTH READING!
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/09/05/201268/russia-releases-100-page-report.html#.Uij3U3_fLXQ
Russia says a deadly March sarin attack in an Aleppo suburb was carried out by Syrian rebels, not forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, and it has delivered a 100-page report laying out its evidence to the United Nations.
A statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry website late Wednesday said the report included detailed scientific analysis of samples that Russian technicians collected at the site of the alleged attack, Khan al Asal in northern Syria. The attack killed 26 people.
A U.N. spokesman, Farhan Haq, confirmed that Russia delivered the report in July.
The report itself was not released. But the statement drew a pointed comparison between what it said was the scientific detail of the report and the far shorter intelligence summaries that the United States, Britain and France have released to justify their assertion that the Syrian government launched chemical weapons against Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. (The longest of those summaries, by the French, ran nine pages.) (Each relies primarily on circumstantial evidence to make its case, and they disagree with one another on some details, including the number of people who died in the attack.)
The Russian statement warned the United States and its allies not to conduct a military strike against Syria until the United Nations had completed a similarly detailed scientific study into the Aug. 21 attack.
* SOUNDS REASONABLE...
It charged that what it called the current “hysteria” about a possible military strike in the West was similar to the false claims and poor intelligence that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
Russia said its investigation of the March 19 incident was conducted under strict protocols established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international agency that governs adherence to treaties prohibiting the use of chemical weapons. It said samples that Russian technicians had collected had been sent to OPCW-certified laboratories in Russia. “The Russian report is specific,” the ministry statement said. “It is a scientific and technical document.”
The Russian statement said Russian officials had broken the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ code of silence on such probes only because Western nations appear to be “preparing the ground for military action” in retaliation for the Aug. 21 incident.
* US AND... er... FRANCE...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
A U.N. team spent four days late last month investigating the Aug. 21 incident. The samples it collected from the site and alleged victims of the attack are currently being examined at the chemical weapons organization’s labs in Europe. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged the United States to delay any strike until after the results of that investigation are known. But U.S. officials have dismissed the U.N. probe, saying it won’t tell them anything they don’t already know.
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
But U.S. officials have dismissed the U.N. probe, saying it won’t tell them anything they don’t already know.
* OBAMA OFFICIALS!
The U.S. State Department did not respond to questions about whether Obama administration officials were aware of the Russian report or had read it.
* DON'T YOU FIND THIS A BIT DISTURBING...? I DO!
Independent chemical weapons experts contacted by McClatchy said they were not familiar with the report and had not read the Russian statement, which was posted as Secretary of State John Kerry was appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to make the Obama administration’s case for a retaliatory strike on Syria as punishment for the August attack. But they were cautious about the details made public in the Russian statement. Richard Guthrie, formerly project leader of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said the Russian statement on the makeup of the sarin found at Khan al Asal, which the Russians indicated was not military grade, might reflect only that “there are a lot of different ways to make sarin.” He added: “The messy mix described by the Russians might also be the result of an old sarin stock being used. Sarin degrades (the molecules break up) over time and this would explain a dirty mix.”
* BUT IF THE "REBELS" ARE USING SARIN...???
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* NOT CONCLUDING... MAKE IT "FOUR-PARTER"... (Part 3 of 4)
He also said there could be doubts about the Russian conclusion that the rockets that delivered the sarin in the March 19 incident were not likely to have come from Syrian military stocks because of their use of RDX, an explosive that is also known as hexogen and T4. “Militaries don’t tend to use it because it’s too expensive,” Guthrie said. He added in a later email, however, that it’s not inconceivable that the Syrian military would use RDX “if the government side was developing a semi-improvised short-range rocket” and “if there happened to be a stock available.”
“While I would agree that it would be unlikely for a traditional, well-planned short-range rocket development program to use RDX in that role, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that, as the Syrian government did not seem to have an earlier short-range rocket program, it may have been developing rockets with some haste and so using materials that are at hand,” he wrote.
* SO... SHOULDN'T WE FIND OUT WHAT'S WHAT...???
Jean Pascal Zanders, a leading expert on chemical weapons who until recently was a senior research fellow at the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies, questioned a Russian assertion that the sarin mix appeared to be a Western World War II vintage.
“The Western Allies were not aware of the nerve agents until after the occupation of Germany,” he wrote in an email. “The USA, for example, struggled with the sarin (despite having some of the German scientists) until the 1950s, when the CW program expanded considerably.”
* AGAIN... I'M NOT TAKING WHATEVER THE RUSSIANS SAY AS GOSPEL... BUT... LET'S SEE WHERE AN INVESTIGATION INTO THESE CLAIMS BRINGS US. AFTER ALL, WE ARE THE NATION THAT CLAIMED "SLAM DUNK" ON SADDAM HUSSEIN'S "WMD."
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 4 of 4)
The Russian Foreign Ministry posted the statement shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin had asked a Russian interviewer what the American reaction would be if evidence showed that Syrian rebels, not the Assad regime, had been behind a chemical weapons attack.
The report dealt with an incident that occurred March 19 in Khan al Asal, outside Aleppo, in which 26 people died and 86 were sickened. It was that incident that the U.N. team now probing the Aug. 21 attack was originally assigned to investigate, and the Russian statement noted that the investigation had been sidetracked by the sudden focus on the later incident.
Haq, the U.N. spokesman, acknowledged that the most recent attack “has pushed the investigation of the Aleppo incident to the back burner for now.” But he said that “the inspectors will get back to it as soon as is possible.”
The statement’s summary of the report said that neither the munitions nor the poison gas in the Khan al Asal attack appeared to fit what is possessed by the Syrian government. The statement said Russian investigators studied the site, sent the materials they found to study to the Russian laboratories of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and followed agreed-upon United Nations investigation standards.
According to the statement, the report said the shell “was not regular Syrian army ammunition but was an artisan-type similar to unguided rocket projectiles produced in the north of Syria by the so-called gang ‘Bashair An-Nasr.’”
The Russian analysis found soil and shell samples contained a sarin gas “not synthesized in an industrial environment,” the statement said. The report said the chemical mix did not appear to be a modern version of the deadly agent but was closer to those “used by Western states for producing chemical weapons during World War II.”
The statement said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons team had examined Syrian soldiers injured in the March attack and said that no reaction to the more recent alleged chemical account should be considered without also considering that the rebels, too, have used chemical weapons.
“It is obvious that any objective investigation of the incident on Aug. 21 in East Ghouta is impossible without considering the circumstances of the March attack,” the statement said. Ghouta is the area near Damascus where the Aug. 21 attack took place.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/brutality-of-syrian-rebels-pose-dilemma-in-west.html?hp&_r=0
The Syrian rebels posed casually, standing over their prisoners with firearms pointed down at the shirtless and terrified men.
The prisoners, seven in all, were captured Syrian soldiers. Five were trussed, their backs marked with red welts. They kept their faces pressed to the dirt as the rebels’ commander recited a bitter revolutionary verse.
“For fifty years, they are companions to corruption,” he said. “We swear to the Lord of the Throne, that this is our oath: We will take revenge.”
The moment the poem ended, the commander, known as “the Uncle,” fired a bullet into the back of the first prisoner’s head. His gunmen followed suit, promptly killing all the men at their feet.
* THESE ARE OUR ALLIES...
* REMEMBER WHAT OUR LIBYAN ALLIES DID TO GADDAFI... AND THEN TO OUR AMBASSADOR AND OUR PEOPLE?
Across much of Syria, where rebels with Western support live and fight, areas outside of government influence have evolved into a complex guerrilla and criminal landscape. That has raised the prospect that American military action could inadvertently strengthen Islamic extremists and criminals.
* YA THINK...?!?!
Abdul Samad Issa, 37, the rebel commander leading his fighters through the executions of the captured soldiers, illustrates that very risk. Known in northern Syria as “the Uncle” because two of his deputies are his nephews, Mr. Issa leads a relatively unknown group of fewer than 300 fighters, one of his former aides said. (The former aide, who smuggled the video out of Syria, is not being identified for security reasons.)
A trader and livestock herder before the war, Mr. Issa formed a fighting group early in the uprising by using his own money to buy weapons and underwrite the fighters’ expenses.
His motivation, his former aide said, was just as the poem he recited said: revenge.
In Washington on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the issue of radicalized rebels in an exchange with Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican. Mr. Kerry insisted, “There is a real moderate opposition that exists.” Mr. Kerry said that there were 70,000 to 100,000 “oppositionists.” Of these, he said, some 15% to 20% were “bad guys” or extremists.
* OH... "ONLY" 15%-20%... OF 70,000-100,000... MEANING POTENTIALLY 20,000 NEW "BAD GUYS" WHOM WE'RE ARMING AND TRAINING. SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN, HUH? (A BAD ONE!)
Mr. McCaul responded by saying he had been told in briefings that half of the opposition fighters were extremists.
* NAH... KERRY WOULDN'T DOWNPLAY THE NUMBER... WOULD HE...?
(*SNORT*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Much of the concern among American officials has focused on two groups that acknowledge ties to Al Qaeda. These groups — the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — have attracted foreign jihadis, used terrorist tactics and vowed to create a society in Syria ruled by their severe interpretation of Islamic law. They have established a firm presence in parts of Aleppo and Idlib Provinces and in the northern provincial capital of Raqqa and in Deir al-Zour, to the east on the Iraqi border.
* SO WE'RE EITHER GONNA ALLY WITH THEM NOW OR OPPOSE THEM NOW... OR ALLY WITH THEM NOW AND OPPOSE THEM LATER... OR... OR...
(*SCRATCHING MY HEAD*)
While the jihadis claim to be superior fighters, and have collaborated with secular Syrian rebels, some analysts and diplomats also note that they can appear less focused on toppling President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, they said, they focus more on establishing a zone of influence spanning Iraq’s Anbar Province and the desert eastern areas of Syria, and eventually establishing an Islamic territory under their administration.
* SO... AGAIN... ALLIES...???
Other areas are under more secular control, including the suburbs of Damascus. In East Ghouta, for example, the suburbs east of the capital where the chemical attack took place, jihadis are not dominant, according to people who live and work there.
* NOT DOMINENT... YET...
(*SHRUG*)
And while the United States has said it seeks policies that would strengthen secular rebels and isolate extremists, the dynamic on the ground, as seen in the execution video from Idlib and in a spate of other documented crimes, is more complicated than a contest between secular and religious groups.
* COMPLICATED. YES INDEED. (AND OUR PRESIDENT IS A MAN WHO LOSES FOCUS WHEN NOT IN FRONT OF A TELEPROMPTER!)
* BUT BACK TO ISSA...
One of ["Uncle's] tactics has been to promise to his fighters what he calls “the extermination” of Alawites — the minority Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs, and which Mr. Issa blames for Syria’s suffering.
* EXTERMINATE...
This sentiment may have driven Mr. Issa’s decision to execute his prisoners in the video, his former aide said. The soldiers had been captured when Mr. Issa’s fighters overran a government checkpoint north of Idlib in March.
Their cellphones, the former aide said, had videos of soldiers raping Syrian civilians and looting.
* IF TRUE THEN THIS DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE - TO ME, ANYWAY. (BUT WHY STICK THIS BIT OF IMPORTANT INFO AT THE END OF THE STORY INSTEAD OF UP TOP WHERE IT BELONGS...? DOES THE NYT DOUBT WHETHER THESE CELLPHONE VIDEOS EVER ACTUALLY EXISTED...???
Mr. Issa declared them all criminals, he said, and a revolutionary trial was held. They were found guilty.
Mr. Issa, the former aide said, then arranged for their execution to be videotaped in April so he could show his work against Mr. Assad and his military to donors, and seek more financing.
The video ends abruptly after his fighters dump the soldiers’ broken bodies into a well.
* AGAIN... FOLKS... WHAT IS THE NYT TRYING TO PULL HERE...???
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