Author: Dave LIndorff

This article originally appeared in WhoWhatWhy
 

The US is demanding, in negotiations at the UN, that all Syrian chemical weapons, stocks and production facilities be eliminated by June 30 of next year. This shockingly short deadline has an element of hypocrisy, because the US itself has been dragging its feet and incredibly slow about eliminating its own stocks of chemical weapons.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has referred to Syria as having one of the largest chemical stockpiles in the world. But the US and Russia both still have stocks of chemicals many times as large. Syria’s neighbor Israel, which refuses to admit it has the weapons and has yet to ratify the treaty banning them, is suspected of also having a large arsenal.

The US caches, at 3100 tons, are three times as large as Syria’s reported 1000 tons.

16 years after it signed a UN Treaty requiring it to eliminate all chemical weapons, the US still has a stockpile three times Syria’s, and insists it will take another decade to get rid of it all (Pentagon photo)
 

The United Nations Convention on Chemical Weapons, which Washington ratified in 1997, required signers to eliminate all stocks of chemical arms by 2012. But the US, like Russia, requested an extension to 2023. It claimed that “difficulties involving old chemical warheads” and environmental issues were making it impossible to comply within the framework of the treaty.

Destroying the stocks is no small task. The Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot, in Pueblo, Colorado, still houses an estimated 2611 tons of mustard gas and the Blue Grass Army Depot, Blue Grass, Kentucky, may have on site 523 tons of sarin (the same weapons whose use in Syria caused such an uproar), VX and mustard gas agent. That’s a whole lot of poison to dispose of safely.

Some $10 billion has been spent to date on the process of locating and destroying the US chemical arsenal—and the ultimate cost may top $30 billion. According to the US Army Chemical Materials Agency (USCMA), two huge destruction facilities are being constructed at a cost of billions of dollars each at the Pueblo and Blue Grass sites, by war profiteer extraordinaire Bechtel Parsons.

In other words, disposing of chemical weapons is not something you just do, like snapping your fingers…
 

For the rest of this article, please go to WhoWhatWhy.com where it originally appeared

Syrian civilians and children should count themselves lucky that mass opposition in the US, the UK and much of the rest of the world to the idea of a US bombing blitz aimed at punishing the Syrian government for allegedly using Sarin gas in an attack on a Damascus neighborhood forced the US to back off and accept a Russian deal to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons.

Had the US attacked, primarily with a two- or three-day barrage of Tomahawk missiles, many of those rockets would likely have carried warheads containing BLU-97 cluster munitions, according to the United States Campaign to Ban Cluster Munitions — cluster bombs that would have assuredly killed or maimed many Syrian children.

This news should come as no surprise. The US made heavy use of deadly body-shredding cluster munitions in its invasion of Iraq in 2003 and during the subsequent bloody war and occupation there, as well as in its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Some 30 tons of cluster bombs were dropped or fired into urban neighborhoods of Iraq during the first few weeks alone of the 2003 US invasion of that country. Another 250,000 antipersonnel bomblets were dropped or fired into Afghani neighborhoods during the 2001-2002 US invasion of that country.

The US Campaign to Ban Cluster Munitions notes that the last documented US use of cluster munitions was in 2009. The organization writes that was:
 

“…in Yemen, when one or more Tomahawk cruise missiles loaded with BLU-97 bomblets struck the hamlet of al-Majala in the southern Abyan province. The strike killed at least 41 civilians and at least four more civilians were killed and 13 wounded by unexploded bomblets after the attack. Four years later, the site of the attack remains contaminated by cluster munition remnants.”
 

In fact, cluster weapons, whether bombs dropped from planes, warheads fired by missiles, or shells fired by cannons or tanks, are among the deadliest and most untargetable weapons devised by man, holding the distinction of being particularly lethal to civilians and children. They work by having a larger bomb, warhead or shell deliver a payload of smaller “bomblets” to a target (each Tomahawk cluster warhead contains 166 of the lethal bomblets). These casings burst open, releasing the small devices, either on the ground, or lowered by little parachutes. Many burst on impact, sending small deadly spinning flechettes out in all directions to tear the flesh off of bones, maiming and killing anyone in the vicinity, while others routinely fail to explode, and then lie around, sometimes for years, until someone steps on one, or a child picks it up to see what it is. (Unexploded BLU-97s look like cardboard drink containers and are bright orange.)”’

Unexploded US BLU-97 cluster bomblet in Afghanistan awaiting a curious child’s touch

(This Q&A article was commissioned by, and appears exclusively in WhoWhatWhy.org)
 

As Syrian expatriate Dr. Rim Turkmani was watching President Barack Obama give his brief nationally televised address to the American people and the people of the world last night, she says she had two contradictory feelings. “I felt good that it was not a war speech,” says this British-based member of the political office of an organization called The Syrian State Current, a movement that is seeking non-violent democratic change in Syria. “But what upset me was his repeated referring to what is happening in Syria as a ‘civil war.’ There is an element of civil war in the violence in Syria, but more importantly it is a proxy war between the US and Russia, and it has to be acknowledged that the US and Russia are the key players.”

Dr. Turkmani is an astrophysicist who teaches at Britain’s Imperial College in London. As a native of Homs, a city that has suffered much death and destruction in the current civil war between Syrian rebels and the government of Bashar al-Assad,, she knows the evils the regime is capable of. She spoke with WhoWhatWhy’s Dave Lindorff the other day about the Syrian crisis:
 

Lindorff: What is your analysis of the current situation in Syria?

Turkmani: The regime of Bashar al-Assad is fully capable morally and practically of using poison gas against Syrian people. After all we have witnessed far worse atrocities committed by him. But we don’t think that US interference through missile strikes will help the situation at all, because there is a complex war on the ground already — both a civil war and an international one. Adding a new direct military player with a new strategy and new aim will just complicate things further. It will not help either side win or bring Assad to the negotiating table.
 

For the rest of this article, please go to WhoWhatWhy.org

Rim Turkmani, advocate of peaceful democratic change in Syria, condemns US arming of Syrian rebels.

Let’s be clear here. The people of the US and the world have won a huge victory over a war-obsessed US government and an administration that was hell-bent on yet again launching a criminal war of aggression against a country that poses no threat to the US or its neighbors. Overwhelming public opposition in the US and the nations of Europe, as well as most of the rest of the world to a US strike on Syria have forced the US to falter and to accept the idea of a compromise deal offered by Russia.

The Obama administration by all accounts was facing an unprecedented defeat in Congress of its proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to launch a new Middle East war, this time on the nation of Syria. It is now desperately trying to spin the bad news, with the mindless support of the US corporate media, so as to claim that it has won some kind of victory. The White House, absurdly, is arguing that the Syrian government’s apparent agreement to a surprise Russian plan to place all Syria’s chemical weapons stocks under international control and then to destroy them is somehow the administration’s doing.

The reality: it was a quick move by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to grab hold of what Kerry’s State Department staff quickly labeled a “rhetorical slip” by the serial-lying, war-promoting US Secretary of State John Kerry, and run with it, that has produced this backdown by the US administration.

Kerry, in brief impromptu session with reporters following a meeting with Britain’s foreign secretary, was asked an unscreened question by a reporter, who wanted to know “what Syria could do” to avoid a looming US bombing blitz of the country. Kerry, like Obama used to scripted press conferences and puff-ball questions from the US press corp, offered a stumbling, off-the-cuff answer saying Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week …. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, hearing this bumbling answer, took Kerry at his word and immediately announced that Russia would seek Assad’s agreement to such a plan, and would help to ensure its implementation.

Prior to this surprise development, the US was offering Syria no deals. Indeed, the Obama administration was in the midst of a “flood-the-zone” lobbying campaign in Congress and the media, promoting its plan for an aerial blitz of Syria, with Obama scheduled to make a televised pitch at 9 pm ET today to pump Americans up for war.

Impromptu anti-war demonstrations in New York (left) and London, and an outpouring of negative calls and mails to elected officials, reflecting a broad rejection of another Middle East war, have this time blocked the war machine in the US and UK.

In what NPR called “perhaps President Obama’s last best chance” to make his case for launching a war against Syria, the president tellingly didn’t make a single effort to present hard, compelling evidence to prove that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had been behind the alleged Sarin Aug. 21 attack on residents of a suburb of Damascus.

In fact, he presented not one piece of evidence at all.

Instead, he continued the warn out and irrelevant talking point of the past week, focussing on the admitted horror of seeing young children “writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor.”

Given that two thirds of Americans, according to polls, do not want the US to unilaterally attack Syria, and really do not want yet another war in the Middle East, it is truly amazing that the president didn’t try to make the case, at least, that Assad was the guilty party. He simply stated, as was done in the two-page propaganda article posted on the White House website, that “We know the Assad regime was responsible” for the gas attack.

Except that we don’t. As I have written (but as the corporate media have blacked out throughout this latest crisis), a group of 12 veteran intelligence officers has written to the president telling him that the intelligence does not point to Assad, but to the rebel forces as the source of the gas attack.

What Obama did instead was try to make a case that attacking Syria to punish the government for its unproven use of gas against its own people was a matter of US national security.

Here he pulled out an even more far-fetched version of the old “domino theory” than even Lyndon Johnson’s and John F. Kennedy’s crew came up with to justify the Vietnam War.

If the US didn’t act against Syria, the president intoned darkly, Assad might eventually feel confident enough to use poison gas against neighboring Turkey, Jordan or Israel. And “other tyrants” around the world, he went on, might decide, if the US didn’t respond in Syria, to stockpile poison gas weapons that might “over time” be used against American soldiers. Even worse, he warned, Iran might decide, if the US failed to bomb Syria for its alleged gas use, that it would be safe developing those nuclear weapons that the US insists Iran wants to build.

“A citizen’s first responsibility is to oppose his or her own government’s crimes, not those of others.”
— Fred Branfman
 

The Obama administration’s campaign for war against Syria is so flagrantly wrong, so ill-advised and so illegal, that it is making a fool of both the president and his secretary of state, John Kerry.

Certainly Kerry, who was in combat in Vietnam, where he commanded a river boat in the waterways of the lower Mekong River estuary, who later had the good sense to become an opponent of the war, and who clearly knows what war is, surely knows that launching an armada of high-explosive-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles and probably high-altitude heavy bombers for a three-day blitz of Syria is exactly that: war. And yet there he was telling members of Congress during a hearing over the weekend that “the president is not asking you to go to war,” but “only” to bomb Syria for two or three days.

Think for a minute what the US would call it if Russia, or Venezuela, or Iran, fired even one cruise missile at a target in the US. Would we say it wasn’t an act of war? Just a missile firing?

The idea is laughable, right? And yet that is the argument that our vaunted Yale-graduate Secretary of State is making to Congress and the American people.

And Obama? This ludicrous holder of a Nobel Peace Prize is claiming that the US has to attack Syria to defend “international norms,” because the Syrian government allegedly launched a poison gas attack on an area of Damascus allegedly killing upwards of 1000 people, including children. A big point is made about the deaths of children.

The thing is, the focus of Obama’s outrage is always the children and the civilian deaths, which nobody denies. But the evidence he presents that it was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government army that launched that attack, is not just thin, it is purely circumstantial. It is not even internally consistent.

One of the worst parts of the president’s argument is the claim that the US had satellite and ground-based intelligence showing that the Syrian army was making preparations for a gas attack three days before the attack allegedly occurred. Yet in prior cases when the Syrian government was thought to be preparing to use its stocks of gas weapons, the administration issued a clear warning that if it did so, the US would act. That was the “red line” which President Obama once did announce for US involvement in Syria’s conflict (a “red line” which he now claims, preposterously, that he never announced, claiming it is “the world’s red line). So the question is: if it were true that the US had advance evidence that Syria was planning to use gas in late August, why didn’t it re-issue its warning? Nothing was said, and in fact, according to a letter written by 12 senior veterans of the defense department and the CIA, instead forces in Turkey and Jordan, and rebel forces being advised and armed by the US, were told to prepare for military action in Syria by the US.

US ships launching Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria would "not be an act of war," says US Secretary of State John Kerry

 
Where to protest the looming US attack and war on Syria: Click here and here
 

I just had two discussions with neighbors in my suburb of Philadelphia that offer both a hope that the Republican-run House may block President Obama’s war on Syria, and a warning that liberal Democrats could hand him the narrow majority he needs to claim Congressional backing for his war.

The first conversation was with a neighbor whose family is fundamentalist Christian. Each national or statewide election, they enthusiastically back, including with roadside signs on their property, the Republican candidate, including McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan.

We are friends with this family. The parents are very much do-it-yourselfers, home-schooling their three kids with the help of a religious-based home-schooling association in the area that helps organize some group activities, cutting their own firewood, raising chickens, etc. The kids are all very smart and open-minded, though both boys are attending religious colleges. But while we all get along well and like each other, we never talk politics.

That is, until yesterday, when the mother and I got onto the issue of the looming war on Syria. “This is terrible,” she said. “I thought at least that Obama was against this kind of thing. Didn’t he say he thought the war on Iraq was wrong? What’s going on?”

She wants to know what the US has to do with a civil war in Syria, and how bombing and killing Syrians is going to make anything any better in that country, or this one. And she said she thinks there are more important things to spend money on in the US, noting the terrible condition of education in neighboring Philadelphia, where class size in elementary schools is now 37, “with no teachers’ aides,” and where the school district is bankrupt.

I found myself thinking this woman sounded like me, and we parted casting shared aspersions on both political parties, which we agreed are not responding to the public’s views.

Then it was lunch with a several liberal friends. We very quickly found ourselves discussing what looks to be the next in this country’s unending string of wars, which have been a national constant at least since Pearl Harbor–and for all of our lives.

I was expecting to have a four-man rant about the insanity of a bombing attack on Syria, but was stunned when one of the men at the table, a sweet retired guy who I’m sure wouldn’t harm a fly, and who spent his life in the health care field, said, “I hope we go in and bomb Syria, and I hope we ‘take out’ Assad and his wife.”
Obama's side in Syria — the rebels the US is arming, and who would be helped by a US bombing campaign against the Syrian military and government — are seen here moments before they execute captured and brutalized Syrian soldiers.

Independence Mall, Philadelphia — The US has yet to launch President Obama’s latest war crime of massively bombing Syria (a country that does not threaten this nation) and already federal police thugs, in this case National Parks Service Rangers, have violently arrested an Iraq War Veteran who was peacefully playing her banjo in the shade on Independence Mall in Philadelphia following an anti-war protest and march.

Emily Yates, an activist with the group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), and a professional folksinger and banjo player, can be seen in this video, peacefully standing plucking her instrument when she is ordered to move by a group of Park Rangers. When she asks them (politely) why she has to move off of federal park property that is open to the public, she is not given any explanation. Then at one point, she is grabbed from behind roughly without warning and slammed, bent over, across the wooden top of a park bench, with several large rangers pinning her down, and with her hands wrenched behind her back, as they try to place metal cuffs on her wrists.

As she struggles to breathe with all that pressure on her forcibly bent-over form, a senior officer can be heard telling her to “relax” and to “stop resisting” — though with three men piled on top of her, it is clear she is not resisting..

Yates was held in a federal lockup for two days before an arraignment on Monday, at which she was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and, most seriously, “assaulting a federal officer.” The latter charge, absurd when matched up against the video of the arrest, is a felony carrying a heavy jail sentence.

One is reminded of those black jokes about police ramming arrested persons head first into the sides of patrol cars and then charging them with damaging public property, or punching handcuffed victims in the face and then charging them with banging their heads into the officer’s fist. It is impossible to view the above video and see any evidence of “assault.” Nor could Yates have been assaulting the larger scrum of rangers who were all over her prone body later when she can be seen being held on the ground, screaming for help, as angry spectators shouted from the sidelines for the rangers to let her go, to “stop strangling her” and to call for a medic.

Yates’ attorney, Larry Krassner, offered TCBH! a statement on the case saying: “Emily is a six-year military veteran who served honorably for two tours in Iraq. She has PTSD. She was arrested and injured by federal officers for no good reason. The US government owes its veterans better treatment than this, even when they happen to be opposed to further war in Syria.”
This is “resisting arrest” and “assaulting an officer”? So claim Independence Mall Park Ranger thugs in Philadelphia, who arrested banjo-playing Iraq War Vet and Syria Bombing protester Emily Yates and leveled those charges against her in federal court (click on image to see video)

The document released on the White House web site to “prove” to the American people that the Syrian government had used poison gas — allegedly the neurotoxin Sarin — to kill hundreds of civilians, is so flawed and lacking in real proof that if it were being used to make a case against a terrorist group it would be too weak to justify an indictment.

For starters, there is no documentary proof offered. Only assertions about evidence which is never actually shown. No maps. No satellite or aerial spy-plane or drone surveillance photos. No identified witnesses with verifiable expertise. All there is in this document is a narrative with assertions like: “The United States Government assesses with high confidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013.”

There are coy explanations for the lack of any hard evidence, like: “To protect sources and methods, we cannot publicly release all available intelligence – but what follows is an unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s analysis.”

Remember, we’re talking about a debate over whether to have the US launch a war of aggression against a sovereign nation that poses absolutely no risk either to the US or even to its allies directly abutting Syria. The reality is that this is about launching a war against a country wracked by civil war, not a country that is threatening its neighbors, or US interests and citizens. And make no mistake, a major US bombing campaign against Syria will not be clean and precise. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of innocent Syrian men, women and children will be killed, whether by errant bombs and rockets, or by accurate ones that hit targets located near residences.

The first section of the report is devoted to trying to make the case that poison gas, and specifically Sarin, was used in a suburb of Damascus. No actual evidence is presented, though certainly there is evidence available — specifically the reports of physicians working in Syria with Doctors Without Borders. Why those doctors are not identified is never explained, but perhaps it is because to do so would make the lack of identifiable sources for the rest of the argument all the more blatant. In any event, it is probable that Sarin was used and that a considerable number of people were killed or injured by the chemical, but that is no casus belli, since it is not at all clear who is responsible for the release of the deadly chemical–the Syrian government, the rebels, or, as retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell has suggested, Israel.

Moving along, the White House document becomes even more opaque and useless.
Civilians killed in war: alleged Syrian Sarin gas victims (left), and US bombing victims in Afghanistan (right). All just as innocent; all just as dead.

Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, a former associate of murdered Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, has for years been paying the price for her commitment to a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion: death threats, having to go to work wearing a bullet-proof vest, even at one point carrying a gun.

Because of that commitment, the Operation Rescue fanatics in Kansas, with the help of a craven bunch of Republican charlatans in state government, have successfully revoked her medical license, and are now seeking to sock her and her family with the bill for all the “court costs” of the kangaroo-court-like “hearing” by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts whose stacked members stole her hard-earned right to practice medicine.

The bill for this legal lynching: $92,000.

As Katha Pollitt has written in an excellent piece in the Nation magazine: Operation Rescue v. Ann Neuhaus, Hero Provider, Neuhaus and her journalist husband Mike Caddell are in danger of losing their run-down family farm. Neuhaus these days has to drive 20 miles to her mother’s house just to do the family laundry because their own washing machine is down and there’s no money to repair it. They have to borrow a car because theirs is busted and in need of $1000 worth of repairs. With all that, they also have a son with type 1 diabetes who is in need of medical care they can’t afford.

Neuhaus and Caddell have set up a fund-raising campaign to try and save their home and are seeking donations. ThisCantBeHappening! urges our readers to go to the site, read the account of the witch-hunt the fanatics in Kansas, from Gov. Sam Brownback on down, are mounting against them, and then donate generously to help them fight back.

Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus