AMERICA’S RIDICULOUS POSITION ON SYRIA

John Chuckman

I read that an American Senator, Bob Menendez, wanted “to vomit” when he was supplied with a copy of Vladimir Putin’s New York Times’ op-ed piece about Syria.

Well, I’m sure it wasn’t just a matter of Sen. Menendez’s delicate stomach: there have been many times in the past I wanted to vomit over something in The New York Times.

It is, after all, an impossibly pretentious, often-dishonest publication faithfully serving America’s military-industrial-intelligence complex, one which never fails to support America’s countless wars, insurgencies, dirty tricks, and coups – all this while publicly flattering itself as a rigorous source of journalism and even a newspaper “of record.” Many regard The Times as simply the most worn-out key of that thunderous public-relations instrument an ex-Agency official once called his “mighty Wurlitzer.” Only in the antediluvian political atmosphere of America could The Times manage to have something of a reputation for being “liberal.”

Mr. Menendez, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, holds a powerful position, one he has used in lockstep with President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to promote illegal war. Like them he blubbers about rights and democracy and ethics while planning death and destruction to people who have done nothing against the United States except disagreeing with it and being hated by that greatest single outside determinant of American foreign policy, Israel.

Sen. Menendez’s personal anecdote actually provides a perfect miniature replica of the entire operation of America’s foreign affairs. American officials never fail to invoke words about democracy or human rights when addressing their next piece of dirty work or effort to pressure another people into doing what America wants.

So naturally the Senator might be a bit upset over Putin’s upstaging the top officials of the United States and proving himself the superior statesman and rational politician in every detail.

First, every honest, well-read person, not trying to promote American special interests, knows there is no proof that Assad used chemical weapons. Absolutely none. Even as I write, an Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports that the UN inspection team could find no evidence of chemical weapons used in the place cited by Syria’s rebel army.

A video which made the rounds among American allies and which purported to show the attack has been declared a fake by the UN. Russia’s secret services also declared it a fake.

The only other bit of “evidence” worth mentioning is a supposed recording of Syrian officials provided to American officials by Mossad. Yes, that’s Mossad, the very people who pride themselves on deception and who have a long track record of expertly using it, even in several cases successfully against the United States.

You do not kill thousands of people and destroy a country’s infrastructure citing rubbish like that.

Again, as I write this, a former British Ambassador, Craig John Murray, states that the United States has been deceived by Mossad with its purported recording and that Britain’s super-sensitive listening post in Cyprus, vastly superior to Israel’s listening assets, had picked up no such information.

Germany, based on its secret service operations, also has publicly stated that Assad did not use chemical weapons.

And, of course, after all America’s huffing and blowing and threatening in recent months, Assad and his senior associates would have to have been genuinely mad to use them, but there is no sign of madness. Assad remains a calm and thoughtful person whose voice is largely silenced in the West by his having been declared arbitrarily not an acceptable head of state.

Second, there is significant proof that ugly elements of the rebellion – the substantial al Qaeda-like components who hate Assad for his tolerance towards all religions in Syria – did indeed use limited amounts on more than one occasion, hoping, undoubtedly to create a provocation for American entry. The UN has said so and so have other agencies.

We have incidents, reported reliably, of rebel elements receiving small canisters of chemical weapons, likely from Saudi agents working on behalf of American policy. We also have an incident of a canister caught by authorities moving across the Turkish border in the hands of rebel fighters, the Turkish border having been used extensively since the beginning of the rebellion as a way to inject weapons and lunatic fighters into Syria and as a refuge for rebels when corned by Syria’s army. Even the American military confirms this last event.

Third, we absolutely know that Israel has a stockpile of this horrible stuff, Sarin, but not a word is said about it. This stockpile has been confirmed by CIA sources recently. Even before CIA sources, we knew of Israel’s chemical weapons from the 1992 crash of an El Al cargo plane in Amsterdam, a plane whose illegal cargo proved to be precursor chemicals for such weapons.

Now, if you were regarded as an enemy by Israel, the most ruthless country in the Mideast when simply measured by the number of times it has attacked its neighbors, wouldn’t you want weapons to counteract theirs? And, of course, to counteract not just Israel’s chemical weapons but secret nuclear ones? So it is hardly a terrible thing for Assad’s military to posses them.

Perhaps most importantly, the United States is in no position to draw lines or make public judgments about the behavior of anyone with regard to such weapons.

It stands as likely the greatest user of various chemical weapons over the last four or five decades. Napalm and Agent Orange were used on a colossal scale in Vietnam, a true holocaust in which the United States killed about three million people. The residue from millions of pounds of Agent Orange still causes horribly mangled babies to be born in Vietnam, and the United States has never lifted a finger to clean the mess or treat its victims.

In the terrible Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, the United States supplied Iraq – the clear aggressor in the war – with the materials for chemical weapons which eventually killed many thousands of Iranian soldiers.

In the illegal invasion of Iraq – where the United States killed upwards of half a million people and created millions of refugees – it employed white phosphorus (a good substitute for napalm), flame-throwers, depleted-uranium (cancer-inducing) ammunition, and hideous child-crippling cluster bombs. The children of Iraq today suffer a plague of cancer caused by breathing tons of vaporized depleted-uranium the United States dumped there.

In the unnecessary invasion of Afghanistan, the United States used massive carpet bombing to support the thugs of the Northern Alliance, who happened to be old enemies of the Taleban, though often being equally horrible in behavior. This was one of the first instances of the strategy America employed in Libya and wants to employ in Syria: local rebels on the ground, supplied with money and intelligence and weapons, are supported by high-tech hell from the air, yielding the needed results with minimum American casualties.

Thousands of Taleban prisoners of war were “disappeared’ by members of the Northern Alliance by sealing them in trucks, driving them out to the desert to suffocate, and then dumping their bodies in mass graves – all this while American soldiers looked on and picked their noses.

Nothing which has happened in recent years so horrifyingly recalls the work of Hitler’s Einsatzkommandos using mobile killing-trucks before the death camps were built, yet there can be no question that senior American commanders and the White House were aware of these events.

And of course, the only nation on earth ever to actually use atomic weapons – twice, and both times on civilian, non-military targets – is the United States, a country which also seriously planned to use them in Cold War pre-emptive strikes against Russia and China and later in Vietnam.

The voice of the United States today is shrill with hypocrisy and dishonesty and self-interest when it is heard condemning Syria, or anyone else, for using unacceptable weapons. Where was that voice when its ally, Israel, committed atrocities, as it did in Lebanon and in Gaza and on the high seas against unarmed humanitarians or when it steals the land of defenceless occupied people? Indeed, the white phosphorus and cluster bombs Israel used in some of Israel’s attacks were supplied by the United States, as were the planes and artillery used to deliver them.

And this brings us to the real cause of the rebellion in Syria. Israel would like Assad gone and Syria reduced to a broken state the way Iraq was reduced. It does not want to do this directly because Syria is a serious military opponent and not easy prey, and Israel’s doing so would arouse new waves of anger in the Mideast and new difficulties for the United States.

So the United States has had a long-term program of creating a kind of cordon sanitaire around Israel, breaking all of its potential opponents for many hundreds of miles around, but doing so always under contrived circumstances of supporting peoples’ revolts or removing dictators. It surreptitiously supplies large amounts of money and useful intelligence to the genuinely disaffected peoples of various states, encouraging them to revolt, indicating air and other support once things are underway. This is reminiscent of the dirty work of Henry Kissinger carried out with Iraq’s Kurdish population in 1975, promising them anything if they revolted but failing to deliver and leaving them to face a massive slaughter by Saddam Hussein’s troops.

Today’s is a complex black operation using a bizarre collection of intermediaries and helpers. Events in Benghazi, Libya, never explained in the United States, were certainly one little corner of this with the CIA operating there to collect weapons and jihadist types for secret entry into Syria through Turkey.

Saudi Arabia too plays a large role, surprising as that may seem to some given that Israel is a major beneficiary. Saudi Arabia’s ruling family plays the anti-Israel card just enough to keep its own fundamentalist Wahhabi population from revolting. But in truth, the wealthy Saudi elites have always had more in common with American and Israeli elites than with popular leaders in the Mideast.

Those Saudi elites were rendered extremely vulnerable to American pressures during 9/11. George Bush, always a good friend and beneficiary of Saudi largess, secretly rounded up a number of them who were in the United States (at places like Las Vegas casinos) and shipped them back to Saudi Arabia for their safety. As it proved, the greatest number of perpetrators of 9/11 were Saudi extremists, and it was discovered, though not publicly announced, that bin Laden’s movement regularly received bribes from the royal family to keep his operations out of Saudi Arabia. Thus the royal family financed bin Laden. All this made the Saudis extremely nervous and willing to be of more conspicuous future assistance in the Mideast.

And so they are, supplying money and weapons through various routes to the rebels. There is also a report of the Saudis releasing more than twelve hundred violent prisoners in return for their training and going to Syria to fight as jihadist volunteers.

American officials know all these things while they stand and blubber about democratic rebels and “red lines” and other fairy stories. They want to bomb Syria because the recent success of Assad’s army has begun to endanger the huge effort to have him overthrown. Just as their planes and missiles tipped the scales in Libya with a phony zero-fly zone, they want to repeat that success in Syria.

Now, Putin appears to have upset the plan with admirable statesmanship, and Sen. Menendez will just have to console himself with Pepto-Bismol.

But then the Russians have always been great chess players.

FOOTPRINTS IN THE DUST
Signs of Connections between the CIA and the WTC Attack

John Chuckman

One of the most fascinating snippets on the latest Nixon Watergate-era tape to be released to the public, the same tape that contains an 18-minute erasure and anti-Semitic remarks, was a brief, unexplained comment by Nixon on what a fraud the Warren Commission had been (http://www.radioleft.com/article.php?sid=318&mode=nocomments&order=0 ).

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but as part of a lifelong interest in history, I’ve read most of the worthwhile books analyzing Kennedy’s assassination, and I am left only with the certainty that we’ve never been told the whole truth.

I’ve always believed it to be a ridiculous idea that the CIA had a direct role in killing President Kennedy. No more ridiculous, mind you, than the story that gets floated every few years about Castro having been involved, a story that has the distinct odor of disinformation, and where disinformation exists, so do motives for generating it.

And of course, Bertrand Russell’s famous question has never been answered. It remains as a powerful indictment of the secrecy that yet surrounds the case (See my earlier article at http://www.amliberals.com/article1100.html ). Lord Russell asked, “If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?” In other words, on the Warren Commission’s own premise, the assassination reduces to an ordinary murder, and the facts of a murder case are supposed to be a matter of public record.

For those who bother plowing through the literature, the conclusion that the CIA knows far more than it ever has revealed is inescapable. There are too many suggestive trails and tantalizing bits of evidence. Too many stories put out. Too few questions answered. Too many important documents missing.

One of the most potentially explosive is the CIA’s photograph of whoever it was that went to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City shortly before the assassination claiming to be Oswald – of course, every person entering or leaving that embassy was routinely photographed. The photograph the CIA did submit was obviously incorrect since the person in it could never be confused with Oswald by anyone. And then there are the recordings of phone calls supposedly made by Oswald at that time. Again, these phone calls, since they involved the Soviet embassy, certainly would have been recorded, but the CIA claimed the tapes had been destroyed.

I’ve always believed that some CIA operation, likely involving one of the many unsavory groups it financed in those days trying to topple Castro, went very sour right under its nose. What other likely explanation is there for claims of national security over the years? Had something like this been revealed in the 1960s, the CIA might well have been destroyed in the middle of the Cold War. It already had been badly hurt owing to its gross negligence in the Bay of Pigs. Here indeed was a reason important enough for some very important people to lie.

Anyway, it is beginning to look like events around September 11 may well offer this generation of Americans a repeat performance. Recent discoveries concerning those events bring that same sure but murky sense of the CIA’s presence leading up to the attack. Perhaps another operation gone very sour.

First, there is the former American diplomat’s story about the issuing of visas almost without question to many very questionable people (www.straightgoods.ca /ViewNote.cfm?REF=1267 19/1/02).

Then, there is the strong suspicion that the flight school in Florida where one of the terrorists, Mr. Mohamed Atta, trained likely had connections to the CIA (http://www.madcowprod.com/index19.html 25/2/02 and http://www.madcowprod.com/index7.html 19/10/01) .

And then, there is the Saudi connection. As is well known, the Saudis were important financial contributors to Al Qaida. The use of a country like Saudi Arabia, that would be credited by others as having its own motives for contributing, represents the kind of arrangement the CIA likes to use in channeling financial support abroad. And even were the CIA not involved in this activity, it is almost impossible that it would have been unaware of it.

As is also well known, the Saudis have received almost no seriously hostile attention over this connection. This at a time when the junior partners of Bush, Ashcroft, von Rumsfeld & Co. stay up late into the night looking to prosecute the most inconsequential people involved in sending any money to the Middle East.

And, of course, many of the nineteen who died in the attacks were from Saudi Arabia, including Mr. Atta. There is even some indication that Mr. Atta may have been related to the royal family (www.madcowprod.com 8/3/02)

We also have the recent arrest and expulsion, although this is officially denied in Washington, of a large Israeli spy ring (www.intelligenceonline.com 28/2/02), many of whose members worked out of Florida, the same state as Mr. Atta’s flight school.

Spy rings as large as this one simply do not operate in a place like the United States without the CIA being aware of them. Apparently, there is a serious question whether Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, told the US what it knew before September 11. At any rate, we know the aftermath of the attack certainly has tipped the balance to favor Mr. Sharon’s bloody-minded way of seeing the world.

All in all, there are some very suggestive footprints in the settled dust of the World Trade Center, and they tend to point towards Langely, Virginia. Americans, for a second time, may have been the unintended victims of their own agency’s dirty work.