Todays thoughts---QUESTIONS QUESTIONS QUESTIONS ON SYRIA (while we most certainly march towards a strike and enlarged war in Syria)
Gareth Porter @GarethPorter was on the FAIR podcast Counterspin (
link here ) poking necessary holes in the White House's case for war (oops I mean ""limited airstrikes"")
article here
The claim that ""we"" (The US) picked up intelligence
All intelligence picked by the Troodos listening post is shared between the U.S. and British intelligence, Murray wrote, but no commmunictions such as the ones described in the U.S. intelligence summary were shared with the British Joint Intelligence Organisation. Murray said a personal contact in U.S. intelligence had told him the reason was that the purported intercept came from the Israelis. The Israeli origin of the intelligence was reported in the U.S. press as well, because an Israeli source apparently leaked it to a German magazine.
IMPORTANT McClatchy article on white house claims here
The Obama administration dismissed the value of a U.N. inspection team’s work by saying that the investigators arrived too late for the findings to be credible and wouldn’t provide any information the United State didn’t already have.
U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq countered that it was “rare” for such an investigation to begin within such a short time and said that “the passage of such few days does not affect the opportunities to collect valuable samples,” according to the U.N.’s website. For example, Haq added, sarin can be detected in biomedical samples for months after its use.
two human rights groups dispatched a forensics team to northern Iraq in 1992 and found trace evidence of sarin as well as mustard gas – four years after a chemical attack.
Anthony Cordesman....criticized Kerry as being “sandbagged into using an absurdly over-precise number” of 1,429, and noted that the number didn’t agree with either the British assessment of “at least 350 fatalities” or other Syrian opposition sources, namely the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has confirmed 502 dead, including about 100 children
“President Obama was then forced to round off the number at ‘well over 1,000 people’......
An unclassified version of a French intelligence report on Syria that was released Monday hardly cleared things up; France confirmed only 281 fatalities, though it more broadly agreed with the United States that the regime had used chemical weapons in the Aug. 21 attack.
Kerry to Dems ""This is Munich Moment""
no, I'm sorry but its not---Syria has not invaded other countries, and we are not giving it one more in order to stop it, and our whole fear is that a limited strike will NOT bring ""peace in our time"" and we are worried about regime change and changing tide of civil war, NOT because we dont care about civilians, but because we care about what a larger war would mean for the middle east.
REMEMBER that Syria is an ally of Iran which is now strengthened in region after we ousted Saddam from power!!!!
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/john-kerry-to-democrats-munich-moment-96165.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement
The Munich Agreement was a settlement permitting Nazi Germany's annexation of Czechoslovakia's areas along the country's borders mainly inhabited by German speakers.
McCain's poker app adds new rooms (poking fun at McCain story) (Senate Chambers, House of Representatives) and sales increase 30% (from NY Daily News)
NSA has backdoor to encryption used by websites, banks, social media etc
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/surveillance_09-06.html
0HARI SREENIVASAN: And this sort of influence by government is something that we have accused Chinese companies of, putting in backdoors into American technologies.
NICOLE PERLROTH: That's right.
What we found out is that all these accusations that American lawmakers have leveled against Huawei and ZTE in China, that basically American lawmakers accuse those companies of planting backdoors in their systems that would allow the PLA to spy on American corporations.
And what we have been finding out essentially in our report today is that the U.S. government has been doing the exact same thing. So, it definitely puts American lawmakers in a bind and it puts American companies in a bind in terms of their global market share. And it will be interesting to see what happens over the next coming months.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/6/the_end_of_internet_privacy_glenn
NSA abuse and leak investigations of journalists expose US as no better than countries it accuses of threatening 1st amendment protections (in the US) of freedom of speech and the press
GLENN GREENWALD: It should be a major scandal. I mean, the United States and the U.K. run around the world constantly denouncing other countries that aren’t friendly with it for abusing press freedoms or failing to protect them, and yet at the same time both of these countries are engaged in a major assault on journalism when it comes to those who are trying to report on what it is they’re doing. The idea that the U.K. government, at the behest of the highest levels of that government, the prime minister and their top—it’s his top security officials—went into The Guardian and threatenedThe Guardian's top editor repeatedly and ultimately forced him to destroy hard drives that contained the byproduct of our journalism is the stuff that, you know, the U.K. and the U.S. governments would like you to think happen only in Russia or China or other governments that they love to depict as tyrannical, and yet it's happening in the closest ally of the United States.
