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Man Oh! I turn off the TV long enough to pen a blog post and turn it on to a completely new BREAKING NEWS!story: President Donald Trump has revealed classified information about US intelligence on ISIS to the Russians in the Oval Office.
We can only imagine what a newly awakened Austin Powers would have said if he saw Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office listening to President Trump brag about his ISIS intelligence:
Austin Powers: Russian Intelligence? Are you mad?
Basil Exposition: A lot's happened since you were frozen.
The cold war's over.
Austin Powers: Well, finally, those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh?
Eh, comrades, eh?
I hope that made you laugh because this is serious shit, so now let's connect some dots. Donald Trump is in way over his head. And what is more, he is a traitor in the fight against ISIS. He thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are our allies in the fight against ISIS terrorism, but he is mistaken because they both helped to create ISIS, continue to benefit from its existence, and even collaborate with it to their mutual benefits. For example this would be a good time to again raise the question that became the title of an article on Russia-ISIS collaboration by Ceren Kenar and Ragip Soylu in Foreign Policy, 9 February 2016 "Why Are Russian Engineers Working at an Islamic State-Controlled Gas Plant in Syria?" They reported:
Officially, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and his Russian allies are at war against the Islamic State. But a gas facility in northern Syria under the control of the jihadi group is evidence that business links between the Syrian regime and the Islamic State persist. According to Turkish officials and Syrian rebels, it is also the site of cooperation between the Islamic State and a Russian energy company with ties to President Vladimir Putin.
The Tuweinan gas facility, which is located roughly 60 miles southwest of the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, is the largest such facility in Syria. It was built by Russian construction company Stroytransgaz, which is owned by billionaire Gennady Timchenko, a close associate of Putin. More...
There is another important direct connection between the Russian state and ISIS. Putin's government has had a policy of exporting its jihadist problem to Syria. There are reports of jihadists being released from Russian custody on condition that they moved to Syria, others have been helped in getting to Syria to make jihad there. For more on this see also: Russia's Double Game with Islamic Terror, Michael Weiss, 23 Aug 2015, Daily Beast How Russia allowed homegrown radicals to go and fight in Syria, Maria Tsvetkova, 13 May 2016, Reuters Vladimir Putin’s Newest Export: Terrorists, Katie Zavadski, Michael Weiss, 04 Jan 2017 Daily Beast To complete this latest Trump story in a way you are not likely to see anywhere else, let me remind you that I have recently published a number of blog posts that highlights the fact that it is Russian President Vladimir Putin that is really in the driver's seat when it comes to the Syrian military, meaning the Syrian state: 05/05/2017 Who runs Syria? Why are more sarin attacks coming? 04/24/2017 A valuable admission: Russia controls Syria & Putin runs the war
Sunday, 19 April 2015, CBS News' 60 Minutes did its first segment about the sarin attack that killed more than 1400 people in the Damascus suburbs of East Ghouta and Moadarniyah on the morning of 21 August 2013. It failed to mention the strongest evidence of responsibility for this crime, that the sarin used came from the military stockpiles of Bashar al-Assad, according to the UN. It did report that the rockets were of a type used only by the Assad regime and that they came from an area controlled by the Assad regime, as had many conventional rockets aimed at the same targets, and it squarely fixed the blame for these criminal murders with the Assad regime, mass murders which it called "A Crime Against Humanity."
In an interview done before the broadcast, Scott Pelley explained why he thought it so important to present the images of this horror:
"If you don't see it, I don't believe the impact truly hits you. Even though people will be disturbed by what they see, it has to be seen."
Eyewitness cellphone videos, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, show the aftermath of the 2013 sarin gas attack and the horror that victims of all ages suffered -- including seizures, vomiting, and respiratory failure.
...
Pelley first reported on the attack for the CBS Evening News in 2013. As images of the attack were arriving in the newsroom, he decided then to embark on a more detailed investigation of what happened for 60 Minutes.
"That's not the kind of thing you want to report on for a couple of days and then walk away and never remember again."
But that pretty much describes how the "Left" handled it. While most did nothing about the chemical murders, what the "Left" did was worst than nothing, it rushed to the defense of the killers.
First Responders...
The first response of the Assad regime and its Russian backers to the reports of the nerve agent attack in East Ghouta was a flat denial that the attack had even taken place. For three days while the regime refused the UN inspectors access to East Ghouta, Syrian State TV claimed there was "no truth whatsoever" to the reports of a chemical attack.
Democracy Now has long been a leading force on the "Left" and the way it handled this crime against humanity was typical of the way the mainstream "Left" handled it, occasional voices of dissent, like mine, excepted. Democracy Now's first reports on the "unverified Syria chemical attack," was its first report on the bombardment of Ghouta ever, even though the Assad regime had been murdering civilians there with conventional rockets for close to a year. Host and producer Amy Goodman allowed that the attack, "if confirmed," would "be the most violent incident...," noted the Syrian government denial of "the reported chemical weapons attack" and pointed out that while video of hundreds of dead and dying children had already been uploaded to YouTube, that there "has been no independent verification so far," thereby reaping propaganda value from the Assad regime's first refusal to allow independent UN access to the sites, even as it ended this brief second report by saying "The Syrian regime is reportedly continuing its bombing of Ghouta today, making any immediate visit by U.N. inspectors highly unlikely."
The Democracy Now show format is headline news followed by two or three main show segments. Two weeks would past before it dedicated one of these segments to this massive sarin attack. Two days after the attack, Democracy Now started its Syria paragraph with "The Syrian government is facing growing pressure to allow an international probe of an alleged chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus." Belittling the eye-witness testimony and video evidence that was starting to pile up, it was still the "alleged attack" and "if confirmed." She ended this doubtful Syrian paragraph two days after the chemical murder of over 1400 civilians by quoting Patrick Cockburn of The Independent, "The evidence of chemical attack seems compelling — but remember — there’s a propaganda war on." And indeed there was. Sadly, Democracy Now and most of the "Left" played the despicable role of supporting and promoting the propaganda of a fascist dictatorship and a criminal regime. That was the "Left's" crime against Humanity.
Monday, August 26 Democracy Now reported"Syria has agreed to allow a U.N. inspection of the site of an alleged chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds of people near Damascus last week," and used a Doctors Without Borders report to falsely make it sound like they were saying only 355 people had died. The next day Democracy Now did three headlines on Syria, leading with "The Obama administration is reportedly weighing a military attack on Syria following last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack near Damascus."
Wednesday, Democracy Now reported that the UK was proposing a UN resolution to condemn "the Syrian government for allegedly using chemical weapons in Ghouta last week." It goes on to state that "Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moualem categorically denied the regime used chemical weapons." We know this must be true because Moualem also said "there is no country in the world that will use weapons of mass destruction against its people." This speaks volumes about his knowledge of history. Democracy Now also brought on "Left" commentator Phyllis Bennis, who told us "So far, no evidence has been presented as to who carried out this attack." Phyllis Bennis elaborated:
Anything is possible. It’s certainly possible the regime used these weapons. It’s also possible that part of the rebels did. We know that some of the rebel armed forces came from defectors. We have no idea whether those defectors included some defectors that might have been involved in Syria’s long-standing chemical weapons program. We also know that some of the rebels are close to al-Qaeda organizations. The Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Nusra Front, has claimed its alliance with al-Qaeda. And the idea that al-Qaeda forces may have access to these weapons is certainly a frightening but very realistic possibility. The problem is, we don’t know.
If it hadn't been born already, a whole new cottage industry in conspiracy theoryland was born with her words, and soon Democracy Now would be playing host to a great variety of theories, all designed to prove anybody but Assad was responsible for the chemical attacks against the people he had been bombing for months. Amy Goodman never fell for the 9/11 conspiracy theories but she would grow to like anything, no matter how bizarre, that let Bashar off the hook.
Thursday, 29 August Democracy Now ran three headlines related to "last week’s alleged chemical attack in Ghouta," one saying "U.S. Faces New Hurdles to Military Intervention in Syria." The main topic of the show that day was the rhetorical question "Does U.S. Have the Evidence and Authority to Hit Assad for Alleged Chemical Attack?" In this segment it had Tariq Ali on and he made the claim that Obama's evidence for the chemical attack had come from Israel. Ignoring all the Syrian voices saying otherwise, Ali goes on to tell the Democracy Now audience "virtually no one who knows the region believes that these attacks were carried out by the Syrian government." He compared it to how we "were lied to in the run-up to the Iraq War." Just ignore the dead children.
That same day Mint Press publish one of the most outlandish claims of the now budding anybody-but-Assad industry in the form of an article titled Syrians In Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack by Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh. They claim to have interviewed some rebel fighters who said they caused the sarin deaths [in 8 locations??] when they had an accident in a tunnel with a tank of sarin given to them by Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia. As ridiculous as it sounds, its amazing how much traction this story had on the "Left."AntiWar.com, FAIR, Global Research, Counterpunch, World Socialist Web Site, Occupy.com and many more gave it play, but as soon as the critics got hold of it, it began to unravel. I took it apart in my blog, a few others did the same. Soon the AP reporter on the story, Dale Gavlak, was claiming she had nothing to do with it. Retractions started rolling in, starting with AntiWar.com and FAIR. Mint Press turned out to have some very mysterious financing and family ties to Iran, and practiced what PJ Tatlercalled Shia 'advocacy journalism,' Upon further investigation, it appeared that this story originated from a Russian.
Friday, 30 August 2013, Democracy Now brought reports of anti-war rallies against proposed US military action in Syria. In many of these actions, important "Left" organizations like Veterans for Peace and Code Pink made common cause with Assad Regime supporters and marched with the flag of the fascist regime flying over their heads. In the main discussion on Democracy Now that day, the argument was advanced that "the United States is not qualified to do what it claims it wants to do, as a result of its own record in violating international law for a very long time and supporting dictators and rogue regimes and the apartheid state of Israel in opposition to all manners of international law." It would seem that any reason to not attack Assad was good enough for Democracy Now. The further argument was made that if there was an airstrike, "the situation can spin out of control in a very, very quick manner," as opposed to what has happened since there was no airstrike then.
The "Left" responds to the chemical murders in Damascus | 31 August 2013
Continuing with Democracy Now as our example, it wouldn't be until 3 September 2013 that they would refer to the sarin attack without questioning if it had even happened, as it finally the dropped the "alleged" and simply and accurately stated"A report presented to the French Parliament Monday concluded the chemical attack was carried out by the Syrian government." That day Democracy Now ran its first segment related to the chemical attack. It was not a report on the attack itself. Democracy Now never paid much attention to that, never ran the YouTube images like 60 Minutes. It was the first of many segments dedicated to opposing US military action against the Assad regime or attempting to exonerate Assad of responsibility.
More Smoke & Mirrors...
Whereas previous to this Amy Goodman's Syria coverage had been sparse, now it was coming non-stop and most of it was designed to cast doubt on Assad's responsibility for the attacks. 4 September 2013 saw three headlines related to the Syria chemical attack, including an interview with McClatch journalist Mark Seibel who had just penned "To Some, U.S. Case for Syrian Gas Attack, Strike Has Too Many Holes." The rest of the show was two segments, "As U.S. Pushes For Syria Strike, Questions Loom over Obama Claims in Chemical Attack," in which they interviewed Mark Seibel who questioned the figure of 1,429 people killed in what no one would dare continue to refer to as an "alleged attack," although he thought it "quite likely that there were more than 281 people killed" and "With Focus on U.S.-Led Strikes, Global Failure to Meet Syria’s Humanitarian Crisis Goes Unnoticed" which is an ironic title given how little attention Democracy Now paid to Syria's humanitarian crisis before the need to go to bat for Bashar arose. This show also highlighted Code Pink's opposition to any military response to the chemical massacres. "We don’t want another war!" I'm sure the residents of East Ghouta would agree. Unfortunately, they weren't granted the option, and while they were pleading with Obama not to renege on his promise, Code Pink leader Medea Benjamin sought to silent their voices, telling the world "Nobody wants this war!" Then they brought up Colin Powell and the false charges that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, as if by inference, this cast suspicious on anybody who said Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons, and ignoring the 1400+ dead people that marked the distance between weapons possession and weapons use, they demanded the same high standards and time consuming scrutiny be used in this case too and argued that nothing should be done to stop or punish these murders because how could we ever be 100% sure of anything?
The next day's Democracy Now headlines included four about Syria, including one that put the number at "502 Killed in Ghouta Chemical Attack." While the attack was no longer "alleged", the counting of the dead was being hotly disputed by Democracy Now, as was the responsibility for the crime. The bulk of the show was two segments about Syria, both of which argued against any military response to the chemical attacks. First, Democracy Now revealed it true internationalist spirit by embracing Rep. Alan Grayson's [I'm not my brother's keeper] opposition to any response to the chemical attacks because we can't take action "every time we see something bad in the world," never mind the promise the president made in our name. [To those who say he should have never made that promise, I say the time to have objected strongly was when he made it {I did}, not when it was time to pay up.] Grayson was on Democracy Now to promote the website he had just set up, DontAttackSyria.com. Now that Obama is attacking Assad's opposition in Syria, that site has gone dead. The second segment was an interview with Rim Turkmani, a well known regime apologist that had earlier co-chaired the "British Syrian Society" with Bashar al-Assad's father-in-law, Dr Fawaz Akhras, but for the purposes of this Democracy Now interview she was introduced as a "member of the Syrian political opposition group Building the Syrian State Current."
Friday, 6 September 2013 saw three Democracy Now headlines in opposition to Obama's "plan to strike Syria in retaliation for a chemical attack last month in Ghouta during which the administration claims the Syrian government killed more than 1,400 people." That bodycount came from the Free Syrian Army in Ghouta before it was validated by the White House, but Amy knows that "administration claims" are easier to deny than those of the people Assad has been slaughtering. The Syria segment of the show was "about how Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud — Saudi’s former ambassador to the United States — is leading the effort to prop up the Syrian rebels." To hear Adam Entous of the Wall St. Journaltell it on Democracy Now, the Syrian fighters are dupes of others:
The Saudis and the Jordanians draw on defectors, largely, from the Syrian military, which already have a good degree of military training. And they’re brought to this base, where different intel agencies train them. And the Americans are there. The Brits are there. The French are there. The Saudis, UAE is there. And they train them, and then they send them into the fight.
It is also in this segment that the role of Prince Bandar in gathering evidence of earlier Assad uses of sarin in Syria is first discussed in a sinister light. After Mint Press made Saudi Prince Bandar the man responsible for the chemical deaths in Ghouta, there was a lot of elaboration.
With a Congressional vote on striking Assad just days away, the following Monday saw six Democracy Now headlines about the Syria situation including "Report: Assad May Not Have Authorized Ghouta Attack." Truly acting like the devil's advocate, it advanced this latest defense: Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this "alleged" attack took place, and say, it can be proven that the Syrian military carried out this attack; How are you going to prove my client, the Syrian Commander and Chief, actually personally ordered the attack?
The next day a group with close ties to Veterans for Peace, Ray McGovern and his Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)presented their theory that blamed this chemical attack on "senior opposition military commanders and Qatari, Turkish and U.S. intelligence officials." They claimed to have gotten this intel from old buddies still in The Company. Later, it was proven that much of the VIPS material came verbatim from Yossef Bodansky, an ally of Bashar's uncle, Rifaat al-Assad.
Robert Fisk, writing from Damascus with a press pass from Assad, publish his own version of Assad-didn't-do-it with "Gas missiles 'were not sold to Syria'" on 22 September. Fisk tells us that according to his Russian sources, they have identified the sarin rockets as ones they sold to Qaddafi, leading to the conclusion that the dirty deed was done by rebels who must have brought them in from Libya. Too bad his Russian sources didn't tell him sarin is not a gas and saved him that embarrassment. Co-incidentally, this new theory came just days after the UN issued a report in which they identified the rockets used in the attack as Russian. I critiqued the Fisk piece in detail here.
Los Angeles "Left" icon Blase Bopane even had Assad's nun, Mother Agnes-Mariam, on his Sunday morning KPFKPacificia Radio show, 10 Nov 2013. Her theory was that the kids in the photos weren't from Ghouta, they had been kidnapped by jihadists and smuggled 300 miles to the chemical site. Furthermore they weren't even dead. They were faking, pretending to sleep. She said:
I am not saying that no chemical agent was used in the area – it certainly was. But I insist that the footage that is now being peddled as evidence had been fabricated in advance. I have studied it meticulously, and I will submit my report to the UN Human Rights Commission based in Geneva.
Theories about how someone other than Assad did it were popping up on the "Left" like mushrooms after a Spring rain, few even shared common culprits, none have proved their case or stood the test of time, but then they didn't have to. With the mission of defending Assad in mind, it was only necessary to create "reasonable doubt" among people who didn't want to face the truth anyway. The goal was merely to create smoke and confusion during this critical period when it looked like serious action might be taken against Assad. That was the one thing that did what the deaths of two hundred thousand ordinary Syrians couldn't do. It forced the "Left" off the fence and into the fight.
But irregardless of who the "Left" may think have done it, where is the sympathy for the people? Where are the protests against the inhumanity? Where are the relief campaigns for the refugee? Sadly, they are not to be found on the "Left" where the main task emerging from the August chemical murders was a rush to the defense of those almost certainly responsible for this horror.
Deal of the Century...
Tuesday, 10 September 2013, the first Democracy Now headline was "Syria Accepts Russian Proposal to Surrender Chemical Weapons," and with that even the pretense that Obama might strike Assad could be dropped. The Syrian National Coalition charged that this accommodation would only "allow the regime to cause more death and destruction in Syria." Looking at all that Assad has done with the likes of barrel-bombs and chlorine gas since he gave up his stockpiles of sarin, that prediction has been proven sadly prophetic. With the "Axis of Resistance" Regime safe, Democracy Now could again throttle back its attention to Syria. But the campaign to muddy the waters over who was responsible for these chemical attacks would continue on Democracy Now and on the "Left" for many months to come.
After President Obama threw his promise to the Syria people under the Congressional bus and it was clear that Assad would not face US air strikes for what he did, the mood turned celebratory on the "Left" as everybody had a party and congratulated each other over having stopped a war. The Syrians didn't attend. They were still too busy being bombed when Katrina Vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation, went on Amy's show and mused"It’s very good to see the drumbeat of diplomacy and not the drumbeat of war." 16 September 2013. The Violation Documentation Projectreported 95 Syrian's killed that day.
Norm Chomsky was on Democracy Now for 9/11 and he had his own way of obfuscating the very big gap between weapons use and weapons possession. He argued that if Syria was agreeing to give up its chemical weapons in the wake of 1400+ chemical deaths, then Israel should be made to give up its stockpiles of chemical weapons too, because they are in the same region, adding "Of course, chemical weapons should be eliminated everywhere, but certainly in that region."
He talked a lot about how the "United States is a rogue state" that "doesn’t pay any attention to international law," but he leveled no such charges against the Syrian government or its Russian backers. The carnage caused by Assad, both with and without chemical weapons didn't get discussed. The main point of this Syria segment was that Norm Chomsky thought that instead of making threats against Syria in response to the chemical murders, Obama should go after Israel's chemical weapons.
A month later, Amy was still beating the "make Israel disarm too" drum when she had Stephen Zunes on to tell us"the United States blocked an effort by Syria to create a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone throughout the region" while he spoke of "the recent tragedy that took place in Syria." as if no crime had been committed. More Smoke & Mirrors, all designed so we don't see that a Crime Against Humanity had been committed and act accordingly.
Democracy Now would not visit Syria again in one of its segments until December, and again it was for the purpose of raising questions about who was really behind the 21 August sarin attack. In all this time, just as before the attack, Democracy Now never did a segment on the daily horror of regime barrel-bomb and artillery attacks that so many Syrians live under, or the squalid refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan that they have been forced into in their millions just to escape this "Death from Above." This has never been worth a segment on Democracy Now just as it has never been worth a protest to the US "Left."
Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulitzer Prize for publicizing the Pentagon press release on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, appeared on Amy's show twice to defend Assad. Sy Hersh first appeared on Democracy Now, 9 December 2013 after a hit piece he'd written finally found a home in the London Review of Books. It was titled "Whose Sarin?" and said Obama "cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad." As scandalized as that sounds, it is undoubtedly true; if you allow that "cherry-picked" is just a colorful synonym for "selected," then that's what you do, you select evidence to make a case. But the heart of Hersh's story was that the Obama administration had secret evidence that showed the rebels may have used chemical weapons against their own people. In the article and on Amy's show, Sy Hersh made the dramatic claim that the jihadist group al Nusra "had not only the capacity and potential and the know-how, how to produce sarin, but also had done some production of sarin." His most important claim was that the Obama administration knew about this and all this intelligence meant we really couldn't know who used sarin in Ghouta. Maybe al Nusra, a rebel group, did it to other opposition Syrians?
I picked it apart then, but now a time has passed since Sy Hersh has made his claims, 17 months ago, and al Nusra has been in some pitch battles all over Syria, against the Assad regime, against the Islamic State, and against other rebel groups. If they had mastered the production and use of this terrible weapon, why would they have refrained from using it in any of these subsequent battles? Why use it just once in a failed attempt to frame Assad, as many on the "Left" then claimed, and then put it back on the shelf even as they lose territory to rivals?
18 December 2013 it was Patrick Cockburn's turn to come on Democracy Now and tell the people"It is clearly a proxy war. This might have started off as a popular uprising in Syria, but by now [you have] an opposition that is fragmented and really proxies for foreign powers, notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey." The Assad regime is barrel-bombing schools, dropping sarin on neighborhoods, disappearing thousands into a horrendous gulag and Patrick Cockburn is here to talk about "the criminalization of the military forces of the Syrian opposition." It's not that there's not some truth to what he is saying, its that there is a whole 'nother side to what he is saying. He also told us the Free Syrian Army "never really controlled much on the ground." There is no truth in that, in fact they were part of the opposition coalition that just freed Idlib from regime control. The problem with Patrick Cockburn's near-Left coverage of the Syrian conflict is that it is one-sided, Assad's side.
In spite of an on-going murder rate that at times was reaching 5000/month, Democracy Now wouldn't revisit Syria again until 17 March 2014. Again it was with Patrick Cockburn, but before he is introduced, Amy quickly summarizes all the news they didn't think worth covering earlier in greater detail:
More than 146,000 people have been killed since the conflict began March 15, 2011, roughly half of them civilians. The conflict has displaced more than nine million people, with two-and-a-half million refugees living outside Syria and six-and-a-half million displaced within the country.
Last week, Save the Children reported several thousand Syrian kids have died because of a drastic reduction in access to health services, losing their lives to diseases and conditions including cancer, epilepsy, asthma, diabetes, hypertension and kidney failure. Overall, at least 10,000 children have died in violence.
Cockburn's message was a defeatist one for anyone wishing to see the end of the regime that had caused all this misery, "Well, it’s very bad for Syria and very bad for Syrians, as you’ve just been describing. There’s a stalemate on the ground, but it’s a stalemate somewhat in favor of the government."
Sy Hersh came back on Amy's show 7 April 2014 with a new theory: Turkey was behind the chemical strikes in Syria. Whereas before he said the Syrian rebels were quite capable of making their own sarin, when his claims of "kitchen sarin" were shown to be ridiculous, he now claimed Turkey gave it to them. He flat out contradicted the UN report by saying "the sarin that was recovered wasn’t the kind of sarin that exists in the Syrian arsenal," without giving the scientific basis for his claim. Sy Hersh then when on to lie about the known facts, saying sarin was easy to produce and the rockets were homemade, when sarin can not be produced outside of a major facility and the rockets were a known element of the Syrian military that had already been used many times loaded with conventional explosives. Which brings us to another important point. The murderous brutality the Assad regime has shown with conventional bombs and artillery never got discussed. This was all about defending Assad from charges that he killed with chemicals and it was clear that Sy Hersh was rooting for him. In fact Sy Hersh told us, with his great knowledge of the region, that Assad was winning and "the war is essentially over." That was over a year ago, but the fat lady hasn't sung yet. The Assad regime just lost a second provincial capital last month!
Syria in the news again...
This year Syria is making headlines again but not because of the on-going carnage caused by Assad. That would be yesterday's news if it ever was news. Syria is making headlines this year because of the role it has played and continues to play in the rise of the Islamic State or Da'ish. That's what concerns the West. It even has some now arguing for Assad as the lesser of two evils. This year Obama had no problem bombing Syria without congressional approval, and with little in the way of protest from the "Left," but the target has not been bases from which barrel-bomb attacks are launched or any part of the Assad regime, it has been primarily the IS. It has also been against some forces fighting the Assad regime.
The irony of this situation is that Obama's failure to bomb Syria in the Fall of 2013 is one of the reasons why he felt forced to bomb Syria in the Fall of 2014 and the decision that the "Left" campaigned so hard for, not to respond as promised to the chemical attack, was one of the important factors feeding the dramatic rise of Da'ish in the year after the chemical attack.
Obama's decision not to act after his "red-line" had been crossed more than 1400 times may have brought relief and celebration on the "Left," but it brought outrage and disillusionment to Syrians. Many felt neglected by the world; now they felt betrayed by the United States. The Free Syrian Army lost creditability, as did all west-leaning rebel groups. The jihadist groups that had always preached distrust of the West gained influence and membership.
My friends in the Syrian American Counciltold me that it is hard to over-estimate the negative effect on the morale of the opposition of Obama's failure to take military action. Jamie Dettmer, of the Daily Beast,wrote about how the "already high skepticism over American policy toward the war in Syria" among rebel groups "skyrocketed when the Obama administration failed to enforce in 2013 its “red line” against Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons."
It was not a complete coincidence that Raqqa, the first provincial capital to be liberated from regime control, it was freed by a coalition of rebel groups headed by the FSA in March 2013, fell to ISIS in mid-October after Obama reneged on his promise in September, or that 14 chiefs of the largest clans gave an oath of allegiance to ISIS Emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi a short time later. 5 October 2013 Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimiwrites of "the recent ascendancy in the Syrian jihad of ISIS and its much-vaunted emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi." 21 November 2013 EAWorldViewreported"many Jabhat al-Nusra fighters left to join ISIS."Along with Bashar al-Assad, Baghdadi and Da'ish gained greatly from Obama's decision not to bomb.
Actually, a good argument could be made that it was the combination of the political shift among opposition forces caused by Obama's betrayal, together with the safe haven in Raqqa provided by Assad, that allowed Da'ish to grow into the monster it has become. Now it has so threatened to gain ground in Iraq and Syria that Obama has felt forced to carry out air strikes in both those countries of the better part of a year now.
Both the Assad Regime and the Islamic State have benefited from the "me?-no?-never-mind?" attitude of the "Left" to the struggle of the Syrian people. This "Syrian Lives Don't Matter" attitude has almost certainly repelled any young person with humanitarian concerns and that has been a boon to the Right, especially to Islamic-fascists like Da'ish and al Qaeda among Muslim youth.
This "Left" of my generation has no appeal for them. It has grown fat and senile, resting on its laurels. It longs for the simplicity of the Vietnam War when the United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. That wasn't the case in 2014, but they missed the changes and they just don't know how to act when an enemy of the people pretends to be an enemy of western imperialism.
Its not that everyone on the Left supports Assad, far from it, but there is so little opposition from those that don't, that the the casual observer should be forgiven for thinking the mainstream "Left" is in Assad's corner. Perhaps the "Left's" greatest crime against humanity has been how it has shared in the media coverup, failed even to publicize the daily horror a people are being subjected to by its government because that government claims opposition to Israel. The Left is suppose to be the champions of the people internationally, and instead it denied the people's struggle, participated in the cover up, and gave comfort to the oppressor.
Not only is another Left possible, another Left is necessary!
A huge humanitarian crisis...
A huge humanitarian crisis that has made news recently, because it affects Europe, has been the drowning disasters that have taken the lives of hundreds of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Africa and the Middle East in rickety, over-crowded boats that capsize in the Mediterranean Sea.
The EU use to pay Libyan dictator Mummar Qaddafi billions to keep the African migrants at bay. He used the most brutal methods to do so, as documented in this 92-page HRW report, keeping them in detention camps or dumping them in the desert. Now that arrangement is gone and the biggest headlines of the recent crisis have been made by the big boats filled with Africans like the 900 migrants that died off the Libyan coast a week ago, but the largest group risking this "trip of death" are Syrians attempting to cross the Aegean in smaller boats like the 100 Syrian refugees rescued off the coast of Sicily on 20 April 2015, or the three Syrians killed the next day when their boat ran aground on the Greek holiday island of Rhodes. On 21 April Turkey's coastguard rescued 30 Syrians after their boat began taking on water in the Aegean Sea. On 17 April 414 migrants landed on Greece's Aegean shores. That same day, a vessel carrying four women, a man, and newborn twins.
These are people fleeing Assad's bombs and blockades. Will the world response be to help him enforce this blockade? For despicable "Left" groups like the UK-based Stop the War Coalition, the apparent answer is "Yes." They refused to let the Syrian Solidarity Movement speak about Syria refugees at the Migrant Lives Matter protest last Saturday in London. In other news on Saturday, Angelina Jolie was joined by her brother and son Maddox as she arrived at LAX after urging world powers to aid Syrian refugees. During her powerful United Nations speech on Friday, she told them "We cannot look at Syria, and the evil that has arisen from the ashes of indecision, and think this is not the lowest point in the world's inability to protect and defend the innocent."
Two Syrian babies are carried to safety after being rescued from a boat on the coast of Italy. All 100 of the people on board survived
A big part of this humanitarian crisis has its roots in the world's willingness to look the other way while a fascist dictator and his allies bring death and destruction to the people under them. We often discuss these things in Geo-political terms but it is humans who are affected. This poem has been shared widely in Arabic in recent days and now it has been translated into English. No one knows its true source or author. Some are saying it was written by a Syrian refugee before he drowned, but nobody knows for sure. This is brought to us by The Syria Campaign, which you should support:
I am sorry mother that the ship sunk and that I couldn’t get there and pay off the debts from the journey,
Don’t be sad mother that they didn’t find my body, for what use could it be to you now, except for the cost of transport, the funeral and burial,
I’m sorry mother that war came to us and I had to leave like the others, although my dreams were not big like theirs,
As you know, all my dreams were the size of a box of medicine for your colon, and the cost of fixing your teeth. On that note, my teeth are now green from the colour of the moss clinging to them,
Despite that, they are still more beautiful than the dictator’s teeth,
I am sorry my dear for building you a house of illusions. A wooden cottage like the ones we saw in movies. A humble cottage far away from the barrel bombs, far away from sectarianism, ethnic loyalties and the rumours of our neighbours,
I am sorry brother that I couldn’t send you the fifty Euros that I promised you at the beginning of every month so you could have a good time ahead of your graduation,
I am sorry sister that I didn’t send you the new mobile phone that has wi-fi like the one your better-off friend has,
I am sorry my beautiful home that I will never hang my coat behind your door,
I am sorry dear divers and search and rescue workers, for I don’t know the name of the sea I drowned in,
Rest easy immigration department, for I won’t be a heavy burden on you,
Thank you dear sea for welcoming us without a visa or a passport. Thank you to the fish who will share me without asking about my religion or political beliefs,
Thank you to the news channels who will report the news of our deaths for five minutes every hour for two days,
And thank you for grieving us when you hear the news… I’m sorry I drowned.
I am blogging today from the So. Cal. Linux Expo [SCALE9x]. I am promoting Anonymous, among other things to the Linux and Free Software communities. While I was here yesterday, someone attending the conference told me what Google did to support the popular uprisings in Iran a few years ago.
He said that at before that time there was basically nothing in the way of computer based Farsi translation but Google had a project in the lab which they rushed into production to support the struggle then rapidly developing in Iran.
"We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran" said Google principal scientist Franz Och in a statement on Goolge's Official Blog.
After Wael Ghonim was released from the custody of Mubarak's thugs, he said he would like to return to work at Google if he was not fired. Outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt tweeted back "We're incredibly proud of you, @Ghonim, & of course will welcome you back when you're ready."
Just why founder Larry Page is now stepping in to replace Eric Schmidt as Google CEO is not clear but rumor has it that differences over Google's China policy played a big role. Schmidt opposed the decision by founders Page and Brin to pull out of China over government censorship.
When the revolution developed in Egypt, Google engineers worked over the first weekend after January 25th with Twitter to setup a Speech to Tweet service with 3 international phone numbers that helped Egyptians get the word out in spite of the Internet blockage set up by the Egyptian regime. They are doing the same thing now in Libya. They started that Speech-to-Tweet service shortly after the uprising began against Gaddfi in Libya. As before the service and the phone numbers have been constantly posted on Al Jazeera.
They have also supported a proxy service to help people in Libya get around Gaddfi's Internet shutdown at this critical time.
Apparently Google's Wael Ghonim had initialed a project which greatly improved Google's Arabic translation ability a few months before the current wave of protests in North Africa and the Middle East started in Tunisia. Google's Arabic translation service has played an important role in these uprisings and probably has saved more than a few lives.
This Guide is for civilians who feel they are about to be caught up in a violent uprising or revolution to overthrow the oppressive government of their country. Although a revolution in favor of the people is a joyful thing when seen from the outside, it can be a bloody mess for those inside it.
Most of all we suggest:
* Don't panic, stay cool headed.
* Take a break and rest if your body needs to relax, lack of sleep is a major weakening factor.
* Avoid consuming mind altering substances like alcohol and drugs. They will cloud your judgment and ability to think and act rationally. You are also arming the regime with propaganda that the crowd is made up of a bunch of intoxicated rioters. Don't allow your movement to be portrayed in an unfavorable light.
This guide will give you some basic ideas and tips for how you and your friends/neighbors/family can stay safe in the violent turmoil around you. It is not a ready-made recipe, but it contains general
survival tactics and strategies.
The brute force approach to popular uprisings is now being tried in earnest in Libya. In using artillery, aircraft and navy on peaceful protesters Colonel Gaddfi is attempt to break the protest movements with massive violence.
If he is successful, this type of violent response to popular uprising will almost certainly be used elsewhere with all the terrible consequences for humanity. If he fails and is hopefully executed for his war crimes, the reigning powers around the world will favor more peaceful methods of resolving contradictions.
Colonel Gaddfi is not the only head of state that counts human life cheap. What he has been doing this week using large caliber military weapons against unarmed civilians, US Presidents do as a matter of course, week in and week out. This week US air assaults on the Afghan village of Heelgal killed 64 civilians including many children according to Afghan President Karzai. It was hardly noticed because the spot light is on the innocent blood being spilled by Gaddfi this week and because, with an estimated 8 million civilians killed by the US military since the Korean War, US presidents using military power on civilians isn't exactly news.
When Secretary of State Clinton made the rounds on the TV talk shows Sunday morning talking about events in Libya and complaining that it is wrong to turn to violence to solve political problems, most of the world knew they were listening to a hypocrite. The United States has led the world in using massive violence to resolve political problems.
Nor am I implying that the other world leaders are any less squeamish in applying massive violence if it will resolve their political problems. What I am saying is that the abhorrence for Gaddfi's violence that has been displayed by most world leaders, including our own, is mostly for public consumption.
They know that we are facing a world economic crisis of historic proportions. It's root cause is a world economy that has been organized to benefit a select handful at the expense of the majority. This system has insurmountable internal contradiction that can not be solve unless the rich and powerful are dispossessed and the world economy is re-organized to benefit the world.
They are having none of that. They will fight that with their last dying breath. The other day an Indiana Official suggested that peaceful protesters in Wisconsin be shot. They are like Gaddfi on a world scale in that they would sooner bring disaster and suffering for all rather than give up their privilege.
In Tunisia the general of the army refused to use massive violence on the protesters and the revolution succeeded in ousting the dictator. In Egypt the junior officers refused to open fire with their tanks and the revolution succeeded in ousting the dictator. And while all the leaders of the US, UK and EU are now claiming to welcome and even champion these popular democratic movements, it is a sham. That's not why they have supported these dictators all these years.
If massive violence can contain the wave of mass rebellions that now has reached even the state house in Wisconsin, they won't mind the bloodshed. They just haven't had the opportunity yet. Gaddfi gives them that opportunity.
That is why they have so far been so anemic in their response to Gaddfi. They secretly want him to succeed. They are hoping he will succeed and they won't act until it is clear to all [as is quickly becoming the case] that he has failed. You can count on it. If he can put a lid on things, restore the status quo and with it, the oil flow, they may put him back on the pariah list but they will allow him to stand and continue to do business with him.
This is a test and fate or history has selected the Libyan people to take it. But all of us will be drastically affected by the outcome. The unarmed Libyan protesters that have braved machine gun, anti-aircraft and artillery fire to take many of Gaddfi's fortresses around the country are giving their all, their very lives in many cases, to show that even massive violence won't stop the people's movement forward.
If Gaddfi's violence fails Governor Scott will negotiate with the demonstrators in the Wisconsin state house, if it succeeds he will send in the police. If Gaddfi's violence succeeds, many more will die in Yemen and Bahrain and everywhere else that people resist tyranny. If he fails, the powers that be everywhere on the planet will be less likely to follow his lead and try and massive violence approach.
Those brave Libyans who fate chose to brave machine gun fire to win their freedom are braking that machine gun fire for all of us.
Al Jazeera says this about the video piece which they showed for the first time yesterday evening and put on YouTube minutes later. It describes how "Tunisian members of Anonymous, the same group of hackers that targeted anti-WikiLeaks sites" are now supporting the struggle in Egypt. The piece features an interview with the Tunisian hacker anon.m. It is less than 2 minutes long.
Social media played a crucial role in organizing the uprising in Tunisia, and now, activists there are focusing their technical skills on helping anti-government protesters in Egypt.
Tunisian hackers say they will attack website belonging to the Egyptian government in solidarity with the pro-democracy activists protesting in Cair, Alexandria and Luxor.
Nazanine Moshir reports from Tunis.
Arab language news video on Tunisian Anonymous members. Can someone please translate. I want to know what they are saying.
Operation Egypt: Anonymous attacking government websites in Egypt. The Egyptian People living under inhumane conditions, his basic rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association and free access to information is violated. By imposing censorship to his people and denying them the simplest freedoms, the government has proved to be criminal and in fact became the target and the enemy of Anonymous ...
The Anonymous poster gives the URLs for two downloads and the Anonymous Operation Egypt's chat line. The one of the downloads is a 160 page manual on how to circumvent Internet censorship and filtering.
The second download is a 86MB Anonymous "Care Package" uploaded on January 20, 2011. It contains a number of software tools for circumventing Internet censorship and other tools for securing communications and a number of How-To Guides including How to IRC, How to climb a fence, How to deal with tear gas, How to defend against dogs, make wheatpaste, run from cops, military hand signals as well as a cut out Guy Fawkes mask.
Here is a another "How To" that is being distributed on the Internet, printed out and circulated on the ground from an Anonymous source.
Mao Tse Tung famously said "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire" and lately it has become very fashionable to remember this phase in connection with events in North Africa. Most people who are now raising it are doing so in support of a new domino theory and point to the street vendor who burned himself up in protest that so propelled events in Tunisia and by extension the rest of North Africa and now the Middle East as the spark. Given the inflammatory nature of his original act, it is easy to apply Mao's saying in that way and given our general lack of understanding of the internal organization of these revolutions, it is easy to see them as the more or less spontaneous result of the terrible conditions the people face, the dry grass or tinder, as many commentator have put it.
But outrages and heroic acts of rebellion happen all the time as a result of Imperialist oppression. They don't generally lead to "prairie fires", and I don't think that is what Mao was talking about. In his paper "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire", Mao was addressing the communist party and party strategy. He was speaking to the critical role of the conscious element, the professional revolutionaries that make a study of revolution and it's tools and are willing to go wherever a spark has flared among the dry kindling and fan those sparks into a roaring fire. I think he was saying that a very small group, a spark, can make a very big difference in the outcome of events.
The hacker group Anonymous certainly didn't cause events in North Africa and they aren't the force behind it. The importance of what they have done, however, should not be underestimated. They have kept the Internet more or less open in spite of the best efforts of totalitarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt to cut it off, and they showed activist how to use the Internet, and provided tools with which they you use the Internet without ending up in some dark dungeon. One writer assessed the role of Anonymous in the Tunisian Revolution this way:
Let’s take the Internet out of the equation. Groups of Tunisian protesters would not have been able to organize themselves so quickly; images of unrest in other towns and cities across the country would not have been there to galvanize the ranks of rioters by showing them their compatriots were taking the fight to the authorities; Ben Ali would have found it easier to kill the unrest in its infancy as state television would have spoon-fed viewers the official line while international channels would not have been able to broadcast mobile phone footage they retrieved from the web. Word would have spread more slowly, buying Ben Ali precious time.
The same can be said about events in Egypt, furthermore, one international body that has been consciously spreading the practical lessons of the Tunisian Revolution to Libya, Algeria and Egypt has been Anonymous. The role of Anonymous is not a sideshow but has been absolutely critical to the development of these movements.
A security company that's been working with the government to track down the cyber-activists involved with Anonymous has now become the target of that very group.
HBGary's website has been defaced and its CEO Aaron Barr has had his social media accounts hijacked and his personal information leaked online - all in retribution for his claims that he had infiltrated Anonymous, the loosely-affiliated collective of hacktivists.
I also have heard from Anonymous sources that they got copies of all the source code for the company's security products. Maybe they need to hire some computer security experts themselves. The article goes on:
The actions by Anonymous follow a recent story in The Financial Times in which Barr claimed that he had "penetrated Anonymous as part of a project to demonstrate the security risks to organisations from social media and networking." In the article, Barr identified people he said were key members of the Anonymous "hierarchy," including a co-founder in the U.S. and leaders in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Australia. Barr claimed he had discovered these individuals' identities via Facebook and Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
Anonymous dispute Barr's findings, claiming the group has no such hierarchy or leadership. Anonymous also contends that Barr was poised to sell some of this data to the FBI. Law enforcement in the U.S. and Europe have been tracking Anonymous, with several arrests made late last month.
In a very tongue-in-cheek press release on the AnonNews site, Anonymous writes that "Mr Barr has successfully broken through our over 9000 proxy field and into our entirely non-public and secret insurgent IRC lair, where he then smashed through our fire labyrinth with vigor, collected all the gold rings on the way, opened a 50 silver key chest to find Anon's legendary hackers on steroids password."
Less tongue-in-cheek, the hacking of Barr's social media accounts and the hijacking of HBGary's website. Tweets from Barr's hacked account include links to torrents of over 50,000 HBGary emails. The tweets also claim that hackers have full administrative access to the company's website, all its financials, and its software products.
HBGary founder Greg Hoglund has told Krebs on Security that Anonymous "didn't just pick on any company, but we try to protect the US government from hackers. They couldn't have chosen a worse company to pick on." For its part, Anonymous contends that HBGary couldn't have picked a worse group to pick on.
