This Can't Be Happening!

 
Responses to wrongdoing must not exacerbate problems.
– Jonathan Granoff, President, Global Security Institute
 
 
Watching news coverage of the debate over bombing Syria, one realizes there’s more going on than Barack Obama or John Kerry are telling Congress and the American people. Kerry may have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — but that doesn’t mean he has to tell the whole story.

The fact is there’s an elephant in the room everyone involved seems sworn to never mention. Or if it slips out, it suddenly gets silenced. That elephant is Israel.

Consider this little mind game: What if Syria and the rest of the volatile Middle East did not surround the tiny state of Israel? Would we still need to bomb Syria? With the Arab world in an uproar right now, tensions are especially high in Israel, thanks to its iron-walled determination to sustain a military occupation over native Palestinians.

Secretary of State John Kerry sees the Israel/Palestine crisis as one of his most important diplomatic challenges. It’s ironic that Kerry, once an eloquent antiwar Vietnam veteran, is now the Obama administration’s point man pushing hard for war and the bombing of Syria. The same irony haunts President Obama, a consistent opponent of the Iraq War and, of course, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bashar al-Assad, John Kerry, Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama

Let’s extend this mind game: What if Israel had been established in the early 20th century on the Africa continent between Chad and Darfur, which is in western Sudan. Imagine that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had voiced hatred for this tiny neighbor populated by refugees from Europe. When Bashir took up slaughtering many thousands of Darfurians, would the president of the United States have sent in cruise missiles — instead of what he did, which was nothing? In fact, while the US president damned Bashir’s slaughter on one hand, US Pentagon and Intelligence operatives met with Sudan’s chief military intelligence officers to iron out cooperation against terrorism. (In the hunt for al Qaeda, let’s not forget how Bill Clinton actually sent cruise missiles into Sudan to blow up what turned out to be a civilian pharmaceutical plant. It was a big embarrassment.)

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)

While certainly not over-shadowing the Obama Administration’s military threats against Syria, the cyber attack that brought the mighty New York Times to its knees last week is a major development and should get us all thinking.

The attack, a Dedicated Denial of Service attack, took the Times’ website off-line for a day and was one of a series of attacks on major information institutions by a hacker group called The Syrian Electronic Army. The SEA appears to be a network of hackers (some of them outside Syria) who are loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and apparently ready to attack anyone who’s not. Because this was, after all, the website of one of the world’s most powerful and prominent newspapers, the sudden exposure of its vulnerability was daunting.

The SEA logo — Hackers of the Moment!

The vulnerability of websites was further demonstrated by the five day attack two weeks ago on the website of Sahara Reporters, a site featuring news on Africa that is always provoking the ire of repressive governments and corrupt politicians. This attack was particularly nasty and protracted. It took technologist Ross Glover of May First/People Link, of which Sahara Reporters is a member, nearly five days to combat and then finally control the attack so that the website could return to normal functioning.

There were nearly ten major cyber attacks in August against very prominent targets and such coincidence begs for a lesson. It’s not hard to find. The Internet is vulnerable to attack. Our corporations and governments concentrate on defending against attacks on financial and military targets on-line, conducting surveillance on the human race and launching their own cyber-attacks against “enemies” abroad. All the while they do literally nothing to protect against threats on information and organizing centers, some of the resources people need the most. With all the money put into on-line surveillance, there’s been very little put into developing ways to block DDOS attacks or secure the real Internet. Put simply, you and your communications are not a priority.

Most of these attacks appear to be the work of the SEA which, while insisting it’s not a government project, makes no bones about its allegiance to the Assad regime. The SEA’s strategy, as it were, is to disrupt news websites and social media that carry criticism of the regime, to “spread the truth” they say. But its targets, like the Times, indicate that a website’s prominence and authority are also important criteria. There are lots of publications that are much more critical of Assad than the Times. And the character of their attacks — providing almost no informative content — mean they’re more interested in disrupting information than spreading it.

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

The forces arrayed in Washington propelling the nation into a war against Syria, including the Pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the cabal of neo-conservative pundits and “think” tanks, whose ranks include President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice, the arms industry, the oil industry and other groups, are very powerful, and it may well be that eventually sheer momentum will lead to a US bombing attack on Syria. But for the moment, a grass-roots global anti-war campaign has triumphed.

Only days ago, the corporate media were shamelessly beating the drums for war, quoting “official sources” as saying the decision to attack had already been made with the only question being the timing of an attack, and with some saying bombing could begin as early as Thursday, Aug. 29. Meanwhile, leaders of countries around the world, especially in Europe, were voicing their support for a US plan to “punish” the Syrian military and government for an alleged gas attack on civilians.

On August 29, however, instead of a US bombing blitz there was a debate in the British Parliament on a motion by Prime Minister David Cameron to authorize Britain to join the US in an attack on Syria. It was to have been a token display of democratic debate, with the outcome — approval of the motion — foreordained. Instead, Cameron’s support, even among members of his own Tory party, withered, as the evidence he presented was skewered, as memories of the lies of the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, were revived, and as the British public demonstrated and demanded that there be no attack. Cameron, by day’s end, conceded defeat, and Britain was no longer “America’s poodle.”

Since then, support for an American attack to “punish” Syrian leader Bashar al Assad for an alleged gas attack has eroded further. Earlier this week, the media were reporting as fact Obama administration claims that the Arab League was in support of a US-led airstrike on Syrian government forces. By Saturday, the media were reporting that the Obama administration was “struggling to locate” just one Arab state that would endorse an attack on Syria.

There are no takers. Not even Saudi Arabia (which some reports suggest was actually behind the gas attack on civilians in Damascus, rather than Syrian government forces as claimed by the US), is willing to publicly back a US attack.
Obama faces a spreading global opposition to his illegal plan to launch a bombing attack on Syria, like this mass demonstration (left) Saturday in London

If you needed more evidence that former president Jimmy Carter was correct when he said, in response to reports of the massive National Security Agency spying program exposed by Edward Snowden, that that democracy no longer exists in the US, just look at Washington’s push to launch a new war against Syria. According to the latest Reuters poll, 60 percent of Americans, despite weeks of propaganda out of Washington, and cheerleading in the corporate media, oppose a US war in Syria. Only nine percent are in favor of the US launching an attack.

Does that matter? Clearly not. The aircraft carriers and cruise missile-armed submarines and surface ships have been moved into position. The corporate media quote unnamed government “sources” as saying that “only the timing of an attack” is in question, and suggesting that an attack could come as early as Thursday.

UN inspectors have just gone to the site of an alleged gas attack to see if such a thing actually happened, as charged by Syrian rebels. But is the US (which reportedly tried to scuttle the independent UN investigation into the alleged gas attack) waiting to see whether there even was an attack, and to hear whether if there was one, it was the work of the Syrian government, or, as some have charged, of the rebels themselves? No. Rather, the Obama administration and the war-mongers in Congress are already declaring that the attack “certainly” occurred, and that it was the Syrian government’s doing. (Hey, if the US really wanted a justification for a war, and was “certain” Syrian troops were behind the poison gas attack, wouldn’t they have wanted UN investigators’ confirmation of the crime and the guilty party?)

US Navy ships line up to join in the latest American war crime: an assault on Syria, which poses no threat to the US.

 
Here we go again.

Polls suggest the American people are fed up after two full-bore wars and the killing of an ambassador in Benghazi following our escapade in Libya. Yet, the Obama administration seems poised to launch another war in Syria.

“We can’t do a third war in 12 years!”

This exasperated response was not from a lefty peace activist ready to do civil disobedience; it was from Colonel David Hunt on the Bill O’Reilly Show. Like many Americans, Hunt is not sure who let loose chemical weapons in a section of Damascus. He knows that canisters of chemical weapons can be delivered to a place in any number of ways from any number of sources. He says we need to ask, “Who benefits” from such an attack?

This is, of course, a very good question, since the Assad regime is currently winning the civil war in Syria and, thus, would not seem to have much of an incentive to use chemical weapons so blatantly. And, of course, a chemical attack is a perfect bloody shirt to provide anyone inclined to wave it to promote an attack, since President Obama made chemical weapons a “red line.”

.

Hunt was joined on the O’Reilly Show by the usually bloodthirsty right-wing militarist Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters. He agreed with Hunt that an attack on Syria was a terrible idea. “In Syria now our enemies are killing each other,” he said. “We should let them continue.” Peters was referring to the Assad regime and the most powerful rebel elements linked with al Qaeda. Forces loyal to the United States and Israel are by far the weakest element in the rebel matrix.

What this means is the logic for a US military attack would be to bolster that losing, non al Qaeda element, and, we must presume, hope for the best as far as who might be able to take over once we prevail — or, more likely, leave with egg all over our faces and with US power and respect diminished even more.

The military judge in Pvt. Bradley Manning’s kangaroo trial has announced his sentence, but right now I’m thinking about another soldier: William Laws Calley.

A Second Lieutenant in the Army during the Vietnam War, Calley famously was convicted of slaughtering 22 innocent men, women and children, including babies, during a day-long slaughterfest in which he and his men massacred over 500 unarmed Vietnamese.

It was an appalling war crime, and Calley, far from accepting his responsibility, initially tried to blame the atrocity on a helicopter gunship. But at least one of the men in his unit eventually told the truth and ratted him out. If Calley had any mitigating defense it was that he, like many other unit commanders in the field in Nam, were being ordered to do this kind of thing by their senior officers, who were getting promotions based on the “body counts” of “Viet Cong” that their men could rack up, and just as today the Pentagon calls every human being in Afghanistan or Yemen or Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province that it blows up or guns down a “terrorist,” back in the Vietnam War, killed Vietnamese, even those that were still too young to stand up, were labeled “VC.”

I’m thinking about William Laws Calley because, after he was convicted of killing those 22 human unarmed beings by a military court, he was sentenced to life in prison, doing hard labor at Leavenworth. But his trial was always controversial. The pro-war crowd had a “Kill ‘em all and let God sort it out” mentality when it came to the Vietnam War, and to many, Calley was a hero. Jimmy Carter, who at the time was governor of Georgia, was running for the redneck vote back in 1971, not the Nobel Peace Prize, and he protested the verdict by signing an order establishing a “American Fighting Man’s Day” and by calling on all red-blooded American Georgians to drive with their lights on for a week.

In fact, Calley never served a day of that richly deserved hard time. The following morning, President Richard Nixon commuted it to house arrest at Ft. Benning, pending his appeal of the conviction. Later, a general reviewing the sentence reduced it to 20 years, which was later reduced to 10 by the Secretary of the Army.
Lt. Calley (l), Pvt. Manning and their respective crimes.

It is becoming perfectly clear that the outrageous detention of American journalist Glenn Greenwald’s Brazilian partner David Miranda by British police during a flight transfer at London’s Heathrow Airport was, behind the scenes, the work of US intelligence authorities.

British police and the British Home Office (the equivalent of America’s Department of Homeland Security) are claiming that the action was taken by them on the basis of an anti-terrorist statute, passed in 2000, with the Orwellian name “Schedule 7.” The give-away that this was not something that the British dreamed up on their own, however, is their admission that they had given Washington a “heads up” in advance about their intention to detain Miranda, a Brazilian national, before the detention actually occurred.

Note that the British did not notify Brazilian authorities. It was the Americans who got the call. Why would British police notify American authorities about the detention of a Brazilian citizen except to ask what US authorities wanted done ? Clearly, Miranda was on one of America’s “watch lists” and the British police called because they needed instructions from their superiors in the US regarding whether to detain him and what to do with him once they had him. It looks like that call to Washington, rather than a “heads up,” was actually more of a request for a “thumbs up” from Washington to go ahead and detain and interrogate Miranda. (The ironically named new White House press secretary, Josh Ernest, denied any involvement by the US in Miranda’s ordeal, saying, “This is a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement – and not at the request – of the United States government. It is as simple as that.” He was not pressed on the matter by the assembled members of the White House press corps–a group that is not known for its aggressiveness even when its own interests are at stake.)

Miranda, subsequent to the UK police’s call to the US, was detained and held, without access to a lawyer, for nine hours — the maximum amount of time allowed under the draconian terms of Schedule 7 — and was during that time questioned by at least six security agents, whom Miranda says threatened him with jail and asked him about his “entire life.” Never was there any suggestion that he was a terrorist or that he had any links to terrorism. Rather, the focus was on journalist Greenwald’s plans in relation to his writing further articles about the data he had obtained from US National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, now living in Russia under a grant of political and humanitarian asylum.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald (r) with David Miranda following Miranda's release from 9-hour bogus "terror" detention in the UK