Saudi High Command fired by King over Yemen Quagmire

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The Saudi cabinet, chaired by King Salman, on Monday evening fired army chief of staff and several prominent officers, forcing them into retirement. The government offered no explanation for the seismic upheaval in the Saudi officer corps, but it was widely believed that the palace is impatient with the quagmire in the three-year-long Yemen war, which has created a the worst humanitarian crisis in the world in that country.

Yemen has become such a scandal for the Saudi royal family that crown prince Muhammad Bin Salman, widely thought to be the real power behind the throne, has not been able firmly to set a visit to Britain, allegedly because his publicity flacks fear massive demonstrations in London against his prosecution of the Yemen War. MbS himself is thought to have launched that war in spring of 2015. He then went on vacation in an island location and cut off his communications, leaving the US Department of Defense unable to contact him with urgent questions. The Saudi intervention was impelled by the coup made in fall 2014-winter 2015 by the Helpers of God (Houthi) guerrilla movement and its attempt to take over all of Yemen in partnership with troops loyal to the deposed former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Some reasons for which the Saudi war effort has so far failed:

1. Muhammad Bin Salman thought that he could wage an air war against a rural guerrilla movement. In other words, he is insisting on repeating all the mistakes of the US military in Vietnam all over again. And at least the US did send in 500,000 troops. The Saudis and their allies have sent in very few.

2. Although the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates were welcomed in Aden, where people are Sunni and many are left of center, and where the Houthis were seen as northern conquerors in 2015, they haven’t been nearly as welcome in the north of the country. Many Sunnis in north and northwest Yemen belonged to the Islah Party, which is more or less the local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Saudis have been collaborating with Egypt to annihilate the Muslim Brotherhood. Likewise, many Sunni tribes in north Yemen were allied with the Houthis against outsiders.

3. The Yemen army split, with the crack troops remaining loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, deposed as a result of the Arab Spring protests, in early 2012. Saleh in turn allied with the Houthis until recently, when he split with them and they killed him. By now what’s left of the old national army is pretty tattered.

4. The United Arab Emirates is now backing a different faction than Saudi Arabia, and the two Yemeni factions on the ground have clashed in the south, so that the invaders do not have a common front.

Yemen had been split into a Communist-ruled south and south-east and an Arab nationalist north and northwest in 1967-1990. When the Cold War ended, the two halves merged, but the south, which is heavily Sunni and Sufi with some strong progressive traditions in cities like Aden, remains resentful of the north, which is disproportionately Zaydi Shiite and tightly connected to the government and the army through the capital, Sana’a. The Zaydis are not Shiites on the Lebanese, Iraqi or Iranian model (the latter are Twelvers) and are famously closer to the Sunnis on many issues. In the 1990s and after the Saudis launched a massive missionary effort in the Zaydi north to convert them to the hard line Wahhabi branch of Islam, which is to the right of Sunnism though nowadays often counted part of the latter. Resentments over this Saudi missionary push and attempt at political hegemony brought the Houthi movement into being, which rebelled against the central government for having let the Saudis run riot in the country.

The Saudis blame the successes of the Houthis on Iran, but Iran can’t be proved to have been significantly involved in Yemen, where the Saudis and their allies control the seas and the major ports and the Yemeni border. Saudis and their allies in contrast have spent billions bombing the country back to the stone ages and creating a cholera epidemic from which some one million of Yemen’s 24 million have suffered.

The Russian Federation vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to criticize Iran for sending arms to the Houthis, since the UNSC has an arms embargo on Yemen. Presumably the Russians felt that the Iran contribution is small potatoes (it is) whereas Trump is selling billions to the Saudis and UAE in weapons that are actually being used on a massive scale in Yemen.

Hence, heads have just rolled in the upper echelons of the Saudi officer class. We’ll see if the new war commanders have more success than their predecessors. If this war goes on and millions who are on the verge of starvation do actually starve, the long term consequences for Saudi Arabia’s elite will be enormous and possibly even fatal.

https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/saudi-command-quagmire.html

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Why is Intel Community Targeting Kushner?

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

US intelligence agencies are gunning for Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and have leaked charges to the Washington Post that officials in the United Arab Emirates, Israel, China, and Mexico have privately strategized how to use him as a pawn in their power plays with Washington.

Despite denials by his office, the charge against Kushner is clearly being led in some part by National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, who apparently was frozen out of Kushner’s diplomatic activities for months and only recently received a commitment that the National Security Council would be read into his meetings with foreign dignitaries.

While the charge that Kushner is at least naive and very possibly corrupt is entirely plausible, we should also be suspicious of the leaks. (And remember, Ed Snowden was villified by the same people for his leaks, but they think it is all right when they do it).

The most troubling aspect of the WaPo story is that Kushner himself was not being accused of doing anything wrong by the intel sources. The central reveal was that the Emiratis, Israelis, Chinese and Mexicans think he is a useful idiot because a) he is inexperienced in the ways of the world and almost terminally gullible and b) because he has a nearly $2 billion balloon note coming due on 666 Park Avenue and hasn’t been able to refinance, and so has been going around hat in hand to Gulf, Chinese, (Israeli?) and other investors.

But that foreign officials have had such conversations is not surprising and Kushner could not control them. Why are they a black mark on himin and of themselves? And is Kushner really thought more naive or corrupt than Trump himself? Why the selective leaks?

How do US intel officials know about these discussions within the halls of the Israel and UAE prime ministers’ offices and the presidential palaces of Mexico and China? They are eavesdropping on the foreign leaders with exactly the tools Ed Snowden told us about, which are apparently more often used for economic espionage than busting terrorism, as in this case. And the most troubling aspect of the US “total information awareness” doctrine of spying on everyone all the time is that US citizens are inevitably caught up in it, in an assault on the Fourth Amendment.

So look, Kushner probably has played a sinister role in some Trump foreign policy fiascos. It is alleged that he was cultivated by UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba as an ally in the assault on little Qatar, after Qatar pulled out of a finance deal regarding 666 Park Avenue. If so, that truly is criminal, and, as Talleyrand said of Napoleon, even worse than a crime, it was a mistake. The Trump stance on the June 5 blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the UAE likely destroyed the Gulf Cooperation Council that had grouped Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar since the early 1980s, and the destruction of the GCC is a great gift to Iran. If Kushner played a role in that, he helped destroy the security architecture of the Gulf and gave Iran a leg up in the Middle East. But of course the impetus for all that came from Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman and UAE mover and shaker Muhammad Bin Zayed; Kushner was just a way to get to Trump and to get Trump to tweet approval of the propaganda against Qatar.

Kushner has also been criticized for appearing to imply that his company, in which he still has a minority stake, could smooth the way to visas for Chinese investors in the US.

It would be interesting to hear more about alleged quid pro quos for Kushner et al. with regard to moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which will knee-cap US diplomacy in the Muslim world for decades to come. The main impetus for that piece of stupidity, however, appears to have come from sketchy casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

But these issues are already well known and have been reported on. The intel leaks clearly are intended to get Kushner out of the White House, and they aren’t actually charging him with anything, only saying that people out there are talking about him.

Michael Wolff’s potboiler Fire and Fury depicted Kushner as essentially a liberal Democrat inside the Trump circle.

What we really should be asking is what McMaster and NSA director Mike Rodgers want to do that Kushner is standing in the way of.

—–

Bonus video:

CBS News: “Jared Kushner security clearance downgraded”

https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/community-targeting-kushner.html

Israel Arrests Ahed's Relatives, Including A Child Missing A Third Of His Skull After They Shot Him

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

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Abby Zimet, staff writer

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Having evidently "gone out of its mind" in its thirst for vengeance, Israeli forces just undertook a pre-dawn raid on occupied Nabi Saleh to arrest 10 relatives of Palestinian teenager and resistance hero Ahed Tamimi, currently in an Israeli prison awaiting trial on 12 assault charges after slapping an IDF soldier in December. For good measure, the soldiers also sprayed the village with putrid "skunk water," ostensibly designed for "crowd control"; it was the middle of the night, and there was no crowd. 

Those detained - half were children - included her 15-year-old cousin Mohammed, whose shooting in the head at close range by an Israeli rubber-coated bullet drove Ahed to her furious confrontation with the  soldier. Improbably, Mohammed survived after doctors put him into a medical coma and removed almost a third of his skull. He remains in fragile health, and is scheduled for major skull reconstruction surgery next week. During the raid, his father reportedly pleaded with soldiers not to arrest him, but Israeli medics found him “fit for custody.”

A child's shattered skull holds little interest for an Israel so threatened by the abiding resistance of the Tamimi family that last month a senior official - and former American- sought to investigate them, alleging they were not a real family but a group of actors hired to “make Israel look bad.” (Not difficult, at this point). In the wake of this week's raid, Israelis remain no less zealous: Having interrogated  Mohammed with no parent or lawyer present, Major General Yoav Mordechai, who oversees the occupied rule of Palestinians in the West Bank, declared that the still-traumatized boy had "confessed" he was “injured while he was riding his bicycle and fell off.” "Oh wow. What a liar," he wrote on Facebook. "What is the truth about Mohammad Tamimi?" (Maybe that he was terrorizing and coercing a terrified child?) Mordechai insisted eyewitness reports in Israeli, Palestinian and international media of Mohammed's shooting were "fake news" and, in a final surreal flourish, accused the Tamimi family of “a culture of lies and incitement.” Savage pot/steadfast kettle.

Facts, it turns out, still matter. Noting "there is no limit to how low Israel is willing to sink in its attempt to discredit" them, the Tamimi family swiftly released records from the Istishari Hospital in Ramallah stating that Mohammed presented "after a bullet injury (by) Israeli soldiers (left maxillary area entrance, no exit wound).” They go on, “Patient underwent craniotomy with bone fragments gently removed, dura sutured to the bone edges...Patient also underwent bullet removal with left maxillary sinus repair." Ha'aretz and other media outlets also published images of the CAT scan and bullet fragments doctors removed. "Israel has gone out of its mind to discredit (us)," said the Tamimi family in a furious statement blasting the arrest of "an injured, post-traumatic 15-year-old in the middle of the night (that) got him to lie out of fear of being sent to prison" in his condition. "What began with a far-fetched attempt to claim that we are not a real family at all has now moved to the denial of documented reality.”

Thanks to outrage on the part of Israeli rights activists at Mohammed's arrest, part of a growing outcry to the widespread abuse of Palestinian minors under the Occupation, he was released a few hours after his interrogation. His other newly detained relatives remain in prison; so does Ahed, who faces years in prison, and her mother and aunt. As news spread of his release, so too did video of the nighttime arrests, filmed by another relative who was not taken. It shows two bulky, visored, assault-weapon-toting IDF soldiers arrive in the modest family home, seize and handcuff two of Ahed's brothers, nudge them outside into the darkness, and begin to walk them to awaiting Israeli vehicles. The vigilant camera follows, tracking the two young men as they shuffle further and further into the night. As the car doors slam and the vehicles pull away, we hear - soundtrack of the Occupation - a woman weeping.

Moredchai's Facebook post proclaims "Fake News"

The Tamimis have been here before. Photo by Abbas Momamni/AFP

https://www.commondreams.org/further/2018/02/27/israel-arrests-aheds-relatives-including-child-missing-third-his-skull-after-they

New York Times Time Warps Back To 2002 - New Bogus WMD Claims Made

New York Times, September 8 2002 

U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts

Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.

The infamous aluminum tubes Iraq sought to buy from Italy were for short range rockets, not for uranium enrichment centrifuges as the Bush administration claimed. That was a fact well known to several U.S. agencies like the Energy and State Departments. But the claim, first propagandized by the NY Times, was repeated by then President Bush in a speech to the UN and became a main basis for the war on Iraq. The Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) Washington Bureau, but not the NY Times, reported about the many doubts experts had about such  Weapon of Mass Destruction claims.

New York Times, February 27 2018
U.N. Links North Korea to Syria’s Chemical Weapons Program

North Korea has been shipping supplies to the Syrian government that could be used in the production of chemical weapons, United Nations experts contend.
...
The supplies from North Korea include acid-resistant tiles, valves and thermometers, according to a report by United Nations investigators.
...
The possible chemical weapons components were part of at least 40 previously unreported shipments by North Korea to Syria between 2012 and 2017 of prohibited ballistic missile parts and materials that could be used for both military and civilian purposes, according to the report, which has not been publicly released but which was reviewed by The New York Times.

The valves, thermometers and acid resistance tiles Syria may have sought to acquire could be used for medical facilities, the production of candy or for dozens of other civilian purposes. They could be used to produce something for the military with chemical weapons probably being the most unlikely.

But like the discredited aluminum tube story, the current NYT piece, written by its UN reporter Michael Schwirtz, obfuscates the doubts about WMD connections of the issue. It makes false claims and is full of war-mongering assertions by hawkish figures. It is a scare story constructed to vilify various opponents to U.S. hegemony on meager factual grounds.

The reporter does not understand the issue he writes about. The "possible chemical weapons components" are not such. Chemical weapons obviously do not contain valves, thermometers or acid resistance tiles. To increase the "be afraid" effect of his piece the author mentions an alleged 2007 accident "in which several Syrian technicians, along with North Korean and Iranian advisers, were killed in the explosion of a warhead filled with sarin gas and the extremely toxic nerve agent VX." No weapon designer ever thought of "a warhead" that was filled with both - Sarin and VX. That would be lunacy and reports thereof are obviously bogus.

The "United Nations investigators" are a bunch of spooks selected by individual Security Council members who collect claims of North Korean breaches of sanctions. The group was set up in 2006 under the UN Security Council resolution 1718 as a "Committee of the Security Council consisting of all the members of the Council". The Committee is not part of the UN bureaucracy and they are not "UN experts" or "UN investigators". The reports of the committee list various claims made by single UN member countries without judging their veracity.

The Associated Press report on the issue makes this clear:

[The report] said, a visit by a technical delegation from North Korea in August 2016 “involved the transfer to Syria of special resistance valves and thermometers known for use in chemical weapons programmes”.That information came from another member state, which also reported that North Korean technicians “continue to operate at chemical weapons and missile facilities at Barzeh, Adra and Hama”, the report said.

The valve and thermometer point in the Committee report are based on the claims of one country alone. But the NY Times lists those claims as "the [UN] report says" giving them a false aura of neutrality. That one country also claims that Syria still has chemical weapons facility. In 2013 the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) verified(pdf) that all Syrian production facilities for chemical weapons and under control of the government were rendered unusable or destroyed. The OPCW can request to inspect additional facilities it deems suspicious. It has not done so. The AP, but not the New York Times, notes that the Syrian government officially denied that any North Korean technicians are working there.

The New York Times discredited itself over its support for the false Bush administration claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It later issued a lame mea culpa and fired one reporter while the responsible editors and managers stayed on.

The paper has obviously not changed. It is again creating false pretexts for wars by publishing unobjective, one sided and intended-to-scare pieces about alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Posted by b on February 28, 2018 at 08:36 AM | Permalink

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/new-york-times-time-warps-back-to-2002-makes-new-bogus-wmd-claims.html#more

Safe travels (if you're wealthy and Western)

Westerners believe travel for leisure to be a right, as they shut their own borders for those that travel to be safe.

by Rafia Zakaria

 

"Frankly, I personally was tired of explaining the difference between a travel warning and a travel alert," complained the seemingly exasperated US State Department official given the task of explaining the State Department's new ratings system. The system released recently ranks countries from 1 to 4 based on their safety for American travellers. The new system, she added, would clear up the confusion between the alerts and warnings, and make clear to American travellers planning their summer travels where they should and should not go. 

She is not entirely wrong. Ironic as it may seem, given their predilection for lethal weaponry, Americans are obsessed with safety abroad. In the Trump era, where rhetoric from the White House consistently paints most of the rest of the world as an ominous place, full of hatred for America and Americans' bounty and luck, this habit has become an obsession. The irony is not limited to guns; even as Americans support erecting walls to keep out Latin Americans and Mexicans from its southern border, ban Muslims, denigrate family reunification, they continue to believe in their own entitled right to rank other countries in this way and traipse into them for tourism and vacations.

The inequity is not borne of Trump-era xenophobia alone. At its heart, is an acute inability by Westerners, including anti-Trump tourists, to note this alarming contrast of our time, one in which wealthy Westerners imagine travel to be a right, even an ethical pursuit, even as they shut their own borders for those that travel to actually be safe.

The economies of privilege that maintain this status quo are pervasive; the belief that the rich are entitled to shut their borders while insisting on their own right to travel safely, where the pollution emitted by experience-seeking Millenials is excluded from discussions of climate change, and where the tragedy of migrants who have lost everything merits at best the margins of newspapers, are all part of them. 

The blind and blinkered Westerners who fail to see the ghastly injustice of this contemporaneously existing contrast are all over the West: in Denmark, whose parliament passed a package of measures to deter refugees from seeking asylum, including confiscating valuables to pay for their stay; in Sweden, which declared that it would not take more asylum seekers because it was just getting too many; in Italy, where desperate migrants continue to wash up on the shores of the Island of Lampedusa; in Australia, where migrants languish in deplorable conditions in off-shore detention centres; and of course, in the United States, where even those who come legally are imagined criminals or terrorists. All of these countries send vast hordes of travellers into the world every year, even as they refuse those for whom travel is not a choice, not an act of leisure, not a dream vacation, but a condition of life.

The hypocrisy of the Western traveller does not end there. At home, many pretend to be preoccupied with stopping climate change; Europeans bike to work and gather their rubbish into compartments, Americans drive their hybrid cars, everyone imagines that they are doing their part. They are not. Research has shown that air travel is the single largest contributor to an American's or European's carbon footprint. One round-trip flight from Europe to New York emits two to three tonnes of carbon dioxide a person. This is a huge percentage of the 19 tonnes an average American and the 10 tonnes an average European produces every year. The round-trip flight produces half of the total emissions a car produces every year, and most wealthy Westerners take a lot more than one trip.

If climate change were truly more than a conceit, there would be fewer Western travellers zipping across continents toting plastic luggage and cramming into jetliners with their goods. Frequent travellers, whose total contribution to air pollution is huge, would not be wheedled and wooed with credit cards and canapes; they would be blacklisted. But this is not so; far from it. Experts estimate that there are currently 20,000 aeroplanes being operated, many to the "safe" vacation destinations listed in the State Department rankings. The numbers are only set to increase; it is estimated that by 2040 the number will double and reach 50,000. The kicker, however, is not simply in these numbers; it is also in the fact that while Westerners are furiously polluting the world to sate their travel fetishes, none of their nations recognise climate refugees whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the pollution that their travel-happy selves emit into the atmosphere. Farmers fleeing famine, medical asylum seekers whose asthma cannot withstand the poor air quality of their homelands are not welcome in America, or anywhere in the Western world.

There is also a generational component to the equation that demands safe travel yet denies safety and refuge to those not out to have fun but travelling to save their lives. A 2016 survey of US Millennials found that 72 percent of the generation prefer to spend more money on "experiences" rather than material things. Inevitably, "experiences" include travel to distant (but safe) lands, where they can post their "experiences" (the more obscure and rare the better) on social media, thus gaining recognition from their peers. To stanch any lingering guilt that this generation may have about their habit of widely broadcasted consumption, new industries of "eco-tourism" (where travelers emit jet fuel all the way to distant destinations and then may help plant trees when they get there) or "voluntourism" (where thousands of dollars are spent to travel to an exotic locale, and a few hours of hugging children at an orphanage is presented as the justification) have cropped up. Since the companies selling tour packages are beholden to their experience-craving customers, nobody ever points this out. The recipients of their "help" are, of course, too poor, not to mention entirely unwelcome in the same countries their benefactors have come from. None of these do-gooder travellers ever seem to go back and oppose the closing of borders, or the granting of citizenship based on the fickle accidents of birth.

Packaging consumption as "experience" may be a great marketing strategy to sell stuff-by-another-name to Western Millennials with full pockets, but failure to expose the hypocrisies involved in maintaining the myth of concern, whether it be for forlorn people everywhere or climate change anywhere, is killing us all. The safe travel rankings are just one daft example of the double standard that creates conditions of exploitation and exclusion and then turns around and blames the excluded for them. The economies of privilege that maintain this status quo are pervasive; the belief that the rich are entitled to shut their borders while insisting on their own right to travel safely, where the pollution emitted by experience-seeking Millenials is excluded from discussions of climate change, and where the tragedy of migrants who have lost everything merits at best the margins of newspapers, are all part of them.

A better world cannot exist unless these are exposed, and until travelling "safely" means not simply ensuring one's own safety but also the safety of the planet, where safety accrues not simply to those who wish to be safe on vacation but also those who, for the sake of safety, have been forced to abandon home forever.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rafia Zakaria

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney and author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan; and Veil.

 @ RafiaZakaria

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/safe-travels-wealthy-western-180228084544142.html

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• Tourism
• Immigration
• Racism
• Environmen

Assad, Kim & chemical weapons: NYT ties in all the ‘villains’ in story on leaked UN report

Published time: 28 Feb, 2018 13:02Edited time: 28 Feb, 2018 13:10

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What could be better to beat the drum for regime change than tying North Korean missiles to Syria and chemical weapons? Apparently, the New York Times did just that when it wrote about a leaked UN report.

The article, run by the respectable US newspaper on Tuesday, is based on a 200-page report by a group of eight experts who were tasked by the UN Security Council to monitor how sanctions against North Korea are implemented. The country was punished for developing nuclear weapons and rocket technology with serious restrictions on how it can trade with foreign nations and has been finding ways to circumvent those.

The NYT focused on two particular episodes mentioned in the report. One was the interception in January 2017 of two ships carrying acid-resistant tiles from North Korea to Syria, with three other such contracted shipments revealed via paper tracking, although whether or not they were actually made remains unclear. The UN experts said such tiles are “commonly used in the construction of chemical weapons factories.”

Max Blumenthal

✔@MaxBlumenthal

Just how badly do they want a war? “United Nations security council diplomat” is almost certainly a Nikki Haley advisor. And “medical aid organizations” is SAMS, the pro-regime change group funded by USAID and active only in insurgent held areas. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/02/27/politics/north-korea-syria-chemical-weapons/index.html …

7:40 AM - Feb 28, 2018

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Another episode happened in August 2016, when a delegation of “North Korean missile technicians” visited Syria and brought with them “special resistance valves and thermometers known for use in chemical weapons,” according to the report. Both episodes were reported to the UN panel by unidentified UN personnel.

Experts who reviewed the report on behalf of the newspaper said the evidence presented by the UN “did not prove definitively that there was current, continuing collaboration between North Korea and Syria on chemical weapons.” The NYT did not say how or when it obtained the UN document, which is not available to the public.

Read more

Pentagon admits zero evidence of E. Ghouta chem attack – but blames Russia all the same

The publication of the report comes as the Syrian government stands accused of repeatedly using chemical weapons against civilian targets in eastern Ghouta, a neighborhood of Damascus controlled by several jihadist groups. The alleged attacks with chlorine gas – which make little sense from the military point of view – are reported by local sources with ties to the militants. They cannot be verified by independent observers, including those from the countries openly calling for the toppling of the Syrian President Bashar Assad, like the US.

This does not stop the Western mainstream media from bombarding their audiences with reports of intolerable civilian suffering inflicted by the Russia-backed “Assad regime” and “experts” calling for a US-led military intervention against Damascus. With Assad presented as a contender to the title of the world’s top villain, adding Kim Jong-un of North Korea, another figure reviled in the West, would apparently bolster the bellicose narrative.

One may almost suspect that the US media have not learned their collective lesson from the run-up for the Iraqi invasion. Joseph Kahn, the managing editor of the New York Times, assured everyone last month  that the coverage of the Iraqi WMDs was “an example of seriously flawed policy for political goal,” and that the paper has since made changes to editorial policy. We can now rest assured that the Syria coverage is a different story altogether.