Hot take on uncritical leftists supporting Jimmy Dore Thought

As regular readers here know, I've done several blogposts about uncritical, nonskeptical leftists peddling, and drinking themselves, the Kool-Aid of Xi Jinping Thought.

Now it's time to turn domestically and look at Jimmy Dore Thought for the first time.

I just do not get why Greens like David Bruce Collins think Jimmy Dore is a good dood, ignoring that his political framing on Force the Vote was likely wrong, and all of Dore's other issues.

Oh, yes, all those "other issues."

Per Rational Wiki, with which I do NOT fully agree on what is conspiracy and what is conspiracy theory, Dore is:

A JFK conspiracy theorist;

A 9/11 falser;

A Seth Rich conspiracy theorist.

This ignores his bromance with/whitewashing of the Boogaloo Bois, which DBC also ignores. That said, elsewhere, DBC ignores Caity Johnstone's past support of red-brown alliances in trumpeting her calls for "unity" on the left.

Sidebar: Dunno about Dore, but Greenwald is also a sexist, which DBC may not know. Glennwald has sexism going back 25 years, and yes, gays, despite bigotry against them, can be sexist — in fact, some of the most vociferous sexism I've run across has been from gays.)

Given that many people, like Bob Fisk at Douma, have pointed out realities otherwise, Rational Wiki is full of shit in saying that claims that Assad didn't do every chemical weapons attack attributed to him is a conspiracy theory. And, sometimes Rational Wiki is not just wrong, it's full of shit, and there's no other way to put it. I've done an editing note, similar to ones at Wikipedia, and we'll see if it sticks. (That said, this and related issues, such as whether OPCW has internally lied about some of this or not, is in many ways a cesspool.)

And, if people claim I'm hypocritical? No, based on how I know how to use evidence and critical thinking, I know the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. So, both conspiracy theorists and Rational Wiki can go get stupid.

More tough stuff to swallow for the #TulsiTwerkers

Who will of course seek to explain it away.

Why did she agree to speak to Religious Right wingnut de luxe John Hagee's Christians United for Israel four years ago? (That's the lead-in.)

Islamophobia and being generally in bed with neocons, per The Nation.

LobeLog reminds us that this is the same Hagee who blessed the opening of the (unconstitutionally moved??) U.S. embassy in Jerusalem last year.

That, in turn, is why on July 24 she voted FOR AIPAC and AGAINST BDS (and the First Amendment). The Tulsi Twerkers simply cannot explain this one away, though they try.

You’ll have to read the bill, and read Tulsi’s response. I don’t agree with her vote, but I understand the nuance. I’ve yet to read the full bill, but will be doing so. AIPAC is far too involved in US FP, and it reflects on all the candidates. No exceptions.

— Ryan Hook (@RyanHoo17407976) July 25, 2019

So, Ryan is claiming, I guess, that this was really a vote AGAINST AIPAC? Sure.

Snark aside, and more seriously, this is a good example of cultlike, or even full-on cultic behavior.

It's one thing when the leader tells the masses that "black" is "white" and they then agree.

It's a step deeper when they make the brainwashed decision on their own that "black" is "white" without any prompting.

Besides, Ryan, the three more actually progressive Squad members voted against it. They know.

Besides that, as I've already said, Tulsi claims Palestinians use people as human shields.

Third, the House could have had a simple two-state resolution without the BDS. Related? Tulsi could have abstained on this resolution; THAT could arguably be seen as nuanced. A yes vote? No way, Cochise.

Fourth, HRes 246 ain't that long, and it's easy to understand. "I've yet to read the full bill?" Takes about 3 minutes, if that. The anti-BDS parts twist what the movement is about and twist Omar Barghouti's words, among other things. Period.

Fourth, part two: Mondoweiss NAILS the NYT, and AIPAC behind this, for taking Barghouti's words out of context.

So, Ryan, you're either lazy, or you're lying. Or both. And, as for the "it reflects on all the candidates"? I thought Tulsi was supposed to be different? Outside the crowd. Actually, the crowd is her cult-like following. I consider her to have the greatest degree of cultiness of any Dem presidential candidate, well above Sandernistas or even the more stereotypical BernieBros.

Fifth, the resolution was crafted in March. She's had four months to decide to abstain, if she couldn't vote no.

And, Tulsi herself now tries to explain this away and fails. She eventually admits she opposes BDS, while lamely saying she'll support Ilhan Omar's pro-right to boycotts bill. Too late, the horses are out. Her stance is just like most Democrats, including most (with the 17 exception votes) on the alleged left of the party. "We can't pressure Israel that much." (Setting aside Tulsi's own neocon-friendly background.)

Update, Sept. 17: Mondoweiss says that two and only two Democratic presidential candidates have explicitly talked about cutting U.S. foreign aid to Israel. Guess what? Neither Bernie Sanders nor Pete Buttigieg is named Tulsi Gabbard.

Maybe Ryan can next explain her background in repeatedly indulging and being with conspiracy theorists. (That's another reason I would absolutely oppose her as a Green candidate; the party's got more than enough damned conspiracy theorists as is.) As for Jimmy Dore, at the first link, I don't care if he's on RT or not. I know he's not a Russian pawn. But, I'd never really paid attention to him other than noting he's an attention-getter.

Ryan, or maybe it was another Twerker, also tried to explain to me everything about Syria. That was before I said (which I then did say) that I'm a Green, that I don't believe everything the foreign policy establishment claims about Syria, that I've read Sy Hersh, Ted Postal, and Robert Fisk, among others, and that I knew not everything alleged to have been done by Assad actually had been. At the same time, I noted that Assad had plenty of blood on his hands, too, and that some chemical weapons use, especially before Russia brokered an alleged disposal of his remaining stock, almost surely had been done by him.

A full half a dozen years or more ago, when Tulsi Gabbard wasn't even a fucking blip on the national political horizon, I had multiple long blog posts about Syria, including facts/allegations/strawmen about Assad AND Erdogan AND the rebels, who would benefit from some attacks. Since then, I've written about the alleged Assad chemical attack two years ago and the White Helmets reality. That said, in one other case, whether Assad ordered it or not (and I doubt this flew under his radar), Syrian officers DID do it. And, Syrian troops — the guys who report to Assad — have committed other war crimes and crimes against humanity. The reality in Syria, per LobeLog, is a lot dirtier and a lot more complex than Tulsi and the Twerkers paint.

Fisk has also noted her close ties to dictators, plural, not just Assad, looking first at her and Egypt's al-Sisi, the man who likely had his predecessor killed. (Fisk asked Gabbard for comment for that first story and she took a powder, unsurprisingly.)

Another Twerker, one who thinks if you put hashtags on the names of Tulsi, Bernie, Stein and Baraka, you're truly a deep thinker as well as outside the deep state or whatever, was even worse.

Part of how the Twerkers are a collective pain in the ass is that they not only assume Tulsi is right about every foreign policy statement she makes, but, where she actually is right, you can only learn the truth from her. Bullshit.

That said, it doesn't surprise me Dore is both a 9/11 truther and a Seth Rich conspiracy theorist. Wouldn't surprise me if Tulsi is.

Is every Tulsi follower cultlike enough to be a Twerker? No, but I honestly think about half are.

Are all Twerkers as cultlike as Ryan on the anti-BDS bill? No, but probably 1/3 are.

So, at minimum, 1/6 of Tulsi followers will call "white" as "black" without prompting.

And, while we're here? As of Aug. 1, Brains still has a bromance, or hard-on, or whatever for her. David Bruce Collins, with less vitriol for those calling out Tulsi, also still likes her. Brains is back to his Dem-first Green-leaning unless Sanders (or maybe Warren, we'll see his take) isn't nominated. DBC is a full-on Green, so why he cares favorably about Gabbard, let alone doesn't look at realities?

==

Update, Aug. 23: Tulsi has remained strict social media radio silence on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's suspension of the constitution, suspension of constitutionally based agreements, a de facto declaration of martial law and more in Kashmir. Many people are calling Kashmir "India's Palestine." Given that Gabbard has claimed Palestians use human shields, etc., I am sure she thinks Kashmir being India's Palestine is a good thing.

And Twerkers, don't give me this "she's been on Guard duty" bullshit. She's had plenty of tweets in the past two weeks.

The reality of Kashmir as a "giant prison camp" and how India (led by the BJP, but with Congress and allies in acquiescence) got to this point is explained in detail by Arundhati Roy.

White Helmets: "Russian meme" vs mainstream liberal progaganda

Taking on a new level of interest, with Germany and other EU members indicating they're willing to cooperate with Moscow, is the short- and medium-term future of Syria. And, part of that will surely be further discussion of how evil Bashar al-Assad is, and how saintly in many people's minds the White Helmets are. Related and lurking in the background for many will still be "Putin collusion with Trump ideas."

Unfortunately, people who should know better refuse to.

Shane Bauer's new book about the problems of the private prison system, expanded from an article he wrote for Mother Jones, is pretty good to very good.

Unfortunately, Bauer's employer is Mother Jones — the same Mother Jones that has been part of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in warmongering about the Middle East, including Syria, and even more, led the now clearly vacuous "Trump-Putin collusion" brigade.

So, I guess it shouldn't be of any surprise that Bauer, jumping in a Twitter conversation that was started by Glenn Greenwald, claimed that anybody who attacked the mainstream line that the White Helmets were saints in preserving Syria's Arab Spring against the Assad regime was spouting a "Russian meme."

So, per Bauer's "Russian meme," then:

The United Nations, in confirming much of Ted Postal's analysis at Eastern Ghouta, is a Russian meme.

UN weapons inspector and Iraq invasion critic Scott Ritter is a Russian meme.

Sy Hersh, on Khan Sheikhoun, is a Russian meme.

Dennis Kucinich is a Russian meme.

So, too, is Counterpunch Consortium News founder Robert Parry and along with him, many others. That would even possibly include the European Union, though it may have opposed Syria sanctions for other reasons. (Per David's comment, Ken Silverstein, the actual founder of Counterpunch, would also be a Russian meme, though.)

Bauer joins a long list of people to strawman Syria. They're neocons plus (neo)liberal hawks for the most part, though there's also a few Trots claiming that no leftists but them understand Syria. Both groups, in more nutter expressions, call leftists like me "tankies." Wrong. Neither I nor any of the "Russian meme" people above are apologists for either Bashar al-Assad or Vladimir Putin. (Trots use the term "tankie" more narrowly to attack non-Trots of the left or far left on any grounds.)

And, an example here of Fisk NOT whitewashing Assad, at the end of this column about Jamal Khashoggi in particular and Middle Eastern hypocrisy in general.

And, with that, it's once again time to cite our old philosopher friend Idries Shah.

Idries Shah

Once again, Idries Shah:

“To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.” 

It's not surprising that average janes and joes with an investment in two-siderism pull this crap. And, that they don't want to know better. At one time, I would have called it surprising that a Shane Bauer did something like that. But, even though I know he knows better (I think), in the last 18 months, I find this less and less surprising.

This is also NOT to say, as my third-siderism goes fourth-siderism, that I agree with every bit of Russia apologetics from a Mark Ames or Yasha Levine. I like a fair amount of what both say, but don't buy everything.

Sy Hersh: No, Assad didn't do it this spring

I would never bet against the meat of a Sy Hersh story. He might have bits and pieces wrong at the corners, but the center gist will turn out to be right and stand up against all challenges.

His latest longform investigative piece?

The alleged “chemical attack” in Syria this spring by President Bashar Assad, the one that prompted US President Trump into his first attack on Syria, against Khan Sheikhoun?

Assad didn’t “do it” because it wasn’t actually a chemical weapons attack. Rather, it was the Russians, in a rare handoff, letting Assad use a Russian smart bomb, that appeared to hit agrichemical storehouses and or other chemical storage.

US intelligence agencies said there was no evidence of sarin at the scene. Hersh, working with other news, and his own sources, takes it from there. That includes being cued in on a conversation between a soldier on duty at an operational base key to the attack and a security advisor at an unattributed level.

And, this from said solider:

AS: I guess it really didn't matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump. Fuck.    

Unfortunately, Trump launched the attack of Tomahawks and claimed that it was due to an Assad sarin attack.

And is now lying about the idea that Assad is already planning another attack. Which he isn't.

Unfortunately there, as Hersh notes, warhawk Democrats domestically, and NATO allies abroad, both rallied around Trump's decision, even though it was based on a lie. And, as Hersh also notes, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons never maintained a clear custody trail of evidence since the April attack and also has yet to release official findings.

For people who criticize Hersh for a legitimate use of anonymous sources, Die Welt addresses that too.

As for other people who have stood to gain from known chemical weapons attacks in Syria, like Ghouta? I've already addressed that. Turkey's President Erdogan is high on the list.

I saw the link to the original story from a reporter for Vice, IBTimes and other MSM outlets. In other words, he's buttered his bipartisan foreign policy establishment turd-polishing, to mix metaphors.

Worse yet? Counterpunch says the London Review of Books, which had paid for previous reportage of Hersh's, like how U.S. intelligence had aided in smuggling loose arms from Syria to Turkey, paid for this as well and then refused to run it. That's bad.

And, the best public attack dog to come forward so far is "Bellingcat," Eliot Higgins, who is neither a journalist nor an expert weapons inspector, and has made grievous errors before in the Ukraine war, the Syrian Civil War and elsewhere. And, he's received funding from bipartisan foreign policy establishment hacks Open Society Foundation and National Endowment for Democracy.

And Hersh has now done a takedown of Bellingcat, along with myths of the White Helmets and other things. An even further takedown of Bellingcat, and the White Helmets, is here.

Per that piece's reference to Ted Postal and other serious researchers of the 2013 Ghouta attack and other things, let's remember that other attacks have been falsely attributed to Assad as part of strawmanning him and Syrian Civil War issues. Let's also, also, remember that per Postal, the heavy thumb of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems connected to Ghouta.

Facts, allegations and strawmen on Syria

Bashar al-Assad

As the dispute continues over who was behind a sarin attack earlier this month, what form that attack took and more, and as I've gotten more involved with some question-answering on Quora, all three of the items in the header are coming into play.

There's three — and only three — incontrovertible facts related to this issue at the most macro level, although surely there's many lower-level facts we could state. Those three biggies are:

1. Syria is in a civil war;
2. One or more parties in that war have used sarin on one or more occasion.
3. Identifying a "signature" for a particular sample of sarin in order to trace its origin is pretty damned hard.

With that, let's get to those allegations and strawmen.

Allegations, or assertions?
1. That Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been behind all sarin attacks.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Reality on this? Obama's "red line" attack of 2013 was very likely done by rebels, rebels backed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

It took a couple of weeks for this to start being questioned, a couple of months for good evidence, and deduction from it, to weigh against the "Assad did it" line, and several months for that all to be pieced together to point a fairly solid finger toward somebody else. See this recent post of mine for details. See also the link at Fact No. 3.

Strawman
1. Claiming that it's likely Erdogan did it is the same as "he did it," on the 2013 incident. I've tried to be careful on that, although I have occasionally slipped, I'm sure.

Allegation or assertion
2. That on the attack earlier this month, "this time," "we" (whoever "we" is) have the goods on Assad.

Strawmen?
2. Claiming that offering multiple different possible objections to that is weaker than offering one objection. (It's not; try learning modern logic.) Claiming that "we" have the goods on Assad when that was exactly what was what was claimed after that 2013 Ghouta attack, per my blog post linked above. Or, per Atlantic, the UN itself backtracking after a May 2013 attack.

Assertion or allegation
3. Claiming that raising objections to "Assad did it" is defending Assad.

Actually, of course, that is ...

Strawman
4. Claiming that raising objections to "Assad did it" is defending Assad.

Assertion or allegation
4. Claiming that attacking those raised objections to "Assad did it" is not acting as defense for all the various rebel units.

Actually, of course, that is ...

Strawman

4. Claiming that attacking those raised objections to "Assad did it" is not acting as defense for all the various rebel units.

Assertion or allegation

5. Assad has used chlorine, barrel bombs, torture, and more as well as sarin.

Strawman?

5. The unspoken (and highly untrue) idea that ONLY Assad has done all this.*

Assertion or allegation

6. It's sarin, so it had to have been Assad.

Strawman

6. Independent actors can't make sarin. In reality, also per SciAm, like the issue on the difficulty of tracing a sarin signature, it's not that hard.

Assertion or allegation
7. The rebels have managed to take control of the majority of Syria and inflict major losses on Assad's force while causing minimal civilian casualties.

Strawman
7. This is of course a strawman to booster the "purity" of at least some rebels in the hopes that this will pass ill-informed Americans' smell test. Mondoweiss crushes it. Via Mondoweiss, N+1 has more detail on how there have been mistakes galore, starting with Assad but about equally by the fractious oppositions, that have led to today's point.

Assertion or allegation

8. That one can talk about how bad Assad is while ignoring the issue of, "if he's that bad, then don't we need to take him out"?

Strawmen

8. Such questions and issues don't exist in vacuums — despite at least one person on Quora trying to pretend they do.

8A. Presumes Assad is the worst option to rule Syria that's currently out there and reasonably attainable.

Assertion or allegation

9. That, on the issue of "cui bono," Assad benefits from launching such attacks more than anybody else.

Strawman

9. Making that claim without analyzing other actors, as I did with Erdogan.

Assertion or allegation

10. That you have to have followed the Syrian Civil War 24/7 for six years.

Strawman

10. That if you haven't, you're an uninformed idiot, who needs to defer to smug, asserted national-security establishment defenders.

Assertion or allegation

11. (Tacit, from No. 8) Really, air strikes can take him out, just like Libya.

Strawman

11. The idea that this will work; the idea that this will put someone better in his place. (See "Libya" and "slave markets therein.")

Assertion or allegation

12. (Tacit, from No. 8) That, if we do take him out, we'll have somebody better lined up, and this will be easy. Also tacit from No. 8 — that "we" have learned from Libya or Iraq.

Strawman

12. The idea that President Donald Trump and his national security establishment could do anything that sane.

The real issue here?

Are neocons, on one side of the coin, and liberal hawk interventionists, on the other side of the same warhawk coin, hoping they can manipulate a mercurial President Trump into a greater degree of intervention?

Survey says yes.

Anyway, when presented with these strawmen, whether tacit or spoken, demand that the hawks put up or shut up on what they actually want to do with Assad and how.

* This also ignores that if barrel bombs are terror weapons, then Israel and the US (shock me) are the first terrorist nations to use them. (That said, I have no good evidence that Syria's army wasn't first on this.)

==

Update, July 2: We have even more reason to slow-walk Syria after Trump's lies about Khan Sheikhoun, as reported by Sy Hersh.

And, beyond strawmen, I haven't even mentioned the PR lies of the White Helmets on behalf of the ISIS that President Obama funded.

Once again, let's slow-walk Syria

In my blogging about the 2013 chemical attacks in Syria, the ones that allegedly crossed President Obama's red line, only for him to do nothing, I at first signed off on the UN report, proclaimed loudly by American mainstream media, that Assad — or at least, Assad's military — were pretty red-handedly guilty.

Well, not so fast.

By spring of 2014, Sy Hersh was pretty much demolishing that claim, as well as exposing the whole geopolitical and military background behind it. (In the current geopolitical climate, it's worth noting that someone from Russian intelligence gave British intelligence the chemical samples that led the Brits to tell Obama — "Assad did NOT do it.")

Also claiming "Assad did NOT do it"? The country's most interesting sub-5-foot politician, Denny the Dwarf, also known as Dennis Kucinich.



Denny has one other good point — there's a difference between Assad having chemical weapons, and Assad using them, whether sarin, or the relatively mild raw chlorine gas. (ISIS, by the way, has been accused of using mustard gas, scourge of WWI battlefields.)

And, even before the end of 2013, the Old Gray Lady had backed off its initial claims based on vector analysis of the rockets' paths, mainly because they had too short of a range to be traced back to Syrian army units. On the other hand, at least one could be traced, on the same vector, to a rebel unit that was within range to have used them. (And, the cheapness of the rocket warhead also is an indirect argument against Syrian military firing.

Robert Parry, a recognized former investigative reporter for the AP, has further analysis of both the NYT and Hersh pieces.

His conclusion? Turkish President Reçep Tayyip Erdogan was behind whichever group of rebels — and he believes it was rebels — who launched the 2013 attack.

Also claiming Assad did NOT do it? Erm, the UN itself over an earlier 2013 strike.

As for the current airstrike, it seems ever more clear that this was the Syrian Air Force attacking a rebel ground site that had the sarin. (Ted Postol, a weapons expert in academia is now claiming another option — that this was a false flag by rebels. That, I doubt. First, I'm not an explosives expert, but I think it would be hard to tell, under current Syrian situation, the difference between a deliberately set explosion in the ground, on the one hand, or an impact explosion by a bomblet or a rocket, on the other. Second, I'm not a conspiracy theorist in general. I know Theodore Postol was among those who refuted "Assad did it" in 2013. But, there's a more conventional refutation of "Assad did it" for this attack already out there. And all Postol says is "more likely," in contrasting this to the MSM option of aerial Syrian gas attack; he doesn't even consider the option of Syrian rockets hitting buried sarin. On the other hand, the UN backed up his earlier claims about Eastern Ghouta.)

That said, there's other contra-indications to "Assad did it."

Some people note the alleged difficulty of producing or storing sarin. I counter with Aum Shinrikyo and the Toyko subway attack. And, no, contra the "Assad did it" crowd, sarin, if in a relatively crude state, is not that hard to produce. (This ignores the possibility of government-produced sarin stolen by one group of rebels or another.)

Some talk about the claims of the White Helmets about what they've allegedly seen Assad done, and how they're apolitical. First, most White Helmets claims have not been verified. Second, they're not apolitical.

Next: torture and extra-judicial murder have all been documented by most players in the war. Use of chemical weapons has been alleged of most. Don't let neocons or liberal warhawks claim any of this is unique to Assad. Don't let them claim that pointing this out makes you an Assad defender.

Finally, if they truly believe in regime change, ask them what they think the reasonable price is in "boots on the ground" — not reasonable for US public support first and foremost, but reasonable for getting the job done, not just to replace Assad, but replace him with someone better.

The strawmanning from the mix of neocons and liberal hawks has gotten bad enough that I created a new blog post about it.

Make to the main thread.

If Parry et al are right on 2013, given Erdogan's own lurch toward authoritarianism having increased over the last four years, this makes Syria dangerous indeed. Yes, Erdogan has cuddled up more to Vladimir Putin's Russia in the past four years. At the same time, while not a full-blown Islamic fundamentalist, he has certainly exploited Islamic fundamentalism for his own political ends, and his personal inclinations surely tilt that way to some degree. In other words, Putin is feathering his bed with an asp.

That said, in Erdogan's case, cui bono? I don't have an immediate answer, and any potential angle may be at least as tangled as Syrian ethnic and religious political issues. In general, though, if he can limit the flow of refugees to his country, he can shake down the EU for more financial support, keep Syria destabilized enough to be weak, shake down the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf for money to do that, and cozy up with Putin enough by offering him help against more extremist Islamicist movements inside Russia.

And, that is 11-dimensional chess indeed.

(That said, this all sets aside who was behind the production of the chemicals that Assad's air force bombed in the recent issue. It also sets aside whether or not Assad, or Russia, or other players knew these rebels, whomever their backers are, knew that they had sarin, etc. That, in turn, makes Syria even more dangerous.)

For more on this issue, not only on how Erdogan stands to benefit, but on how Bashar al-Assad and Syria 2017 are similar to Saddam Hussein and Iraq in 2013, pre-Bush invasion, read below the fold.

#Sarin: Did Obama cherry-pick #Syria chemical weapons info?

In what is indeed explosive, without hyperbole, that's exactly what Seymour Hersch is claiming. He says, in a story released Sunday, that after Team Obama found out about the Aug. 21 sarin attack, but not having advanced warning from systems that specifically monitor the Assad government, that the National Security Agency went through its accumulation of other, more "chattery" radio communications around Syria at the time of the attack, and found what it wanted to, to claim this was an attack by the Assad government.

Here's a couple of specific tidbits. First, this:

The White House needed nine days to assemble its case against the Syrian government. On 30 August it invited a select group of Washington journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay, the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited), and handed them a document carefully labelled as a ‘government assessment’, rather than as an assessment by the intelligence community. 

That's interesting enough, and a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.

As I've blogged here before, when it came to Bush's run-up to the Iraq War, McClatchy was far and away the most aggressively skeptical national newspaper chain bureau or wire service organization. And, it's continued that same skepticism against the Obama Administration, specificially on Syria, in fact. It's also questioned the logic of Obama's Libyan intervention.Also, calling it a "government assessment" does appear to be narrowly legalistic.

Next, this:

An unforseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the Free Syrian Army’s leadership and others about the lack of warning. ‘It’s unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the crime,’ Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail was more blunt: ‘Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people – including more than 400 children.’ 

Yes, also an eyebrow-raiser. If we want to be blunt, if Team Obama really knew about this in advance and did nothing, not even warming the Free Syrian Army, then it's arguably complicit in murder.

There's more there than this, in a long article. Hersh indicates that it seems Islamist group al-Nusra is a likely candidate for having done this. In turn, as I said in my first articles about the sarin attacks, written when the fruit of Obama's Libyan intervention was already looking a bit bittersweet, this was even more reason not to get involved in Syria.

Of course, the push-back from Team Obama is fast and furious. And, shock me that Tiger Beat on the Potomac is running flak for that push-back.

And, on this issue, while I'm not totally surprised the WaPost rejected it, the New Yorker does raise an additional eyebrow. HuffPost has more on Hersh's publication attempts before it ultimately going in the London Review of Books. On first glance, that's weird. But, that's somewhat pre-Internet thinking.

However, Sy Hersh is far from infallible. His claim that Obama is lying about Osama bin Laden's death needs to be taken with a big grain of salt, for example.

My bottom line on this particular issue? It's possible.

But, without follow-up reporting, especially by someone other than Hersh, I'm still somewhat skeptical.

There's also the "narrative" issue. Obama was ready to go to war over this, than backed off. Was he really ready to go that far down the road of George W. Bush and "Curveball"?

Syria: It appears Assad did do it, at least this time

The UN investigation looking at the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack in Damascus, though not given the assignment of blame as part of its remits, ties the attacks to senior officers of President Bashar Assad. And, contrary my previous guesstimates, given that these appear to have been Republican Guard troops, unless President Assad has been a hostage of his generals for a month and counting, we can't say that these are rogue troops.

So, pending further information that would drastically change things, I stand corrected. And I'm willing to admit that.

That said, the UN is planning on investigating other reported uses of chemical weapons. And, some of those may have been by rebels, or generals not directly connected to Assad. Stay tuned.

All of that said, per the oft-cited piece by William Polk at the Atlantic? His "cui bono" was, and still is, a good question. And, if part of why he wrote that piece was pushback, given America's generally poor history of regime change in the Middle East, the neocons leading the charge again on this one and Obama not having a Syria exit plan, the shoot-first warmongers can still look themselves in the mirror.

That includes Obamiac friends on Facebook and elsewhere. Because, as I note in that link immediately above, a "pinprick" will not change who's in command. And "more than a pinprick," per Dear Leader's own warmongering comments, can only effect such change if its boots on the ground. This is not Libya, where there was a semi-coherent, semi-unified opposition there. That said, per the attack on our CIA spook shack in Benghazi, we've seen what happens even with a semi-coherent, semi-unified opposition when there's not a bunch of American boots on the ground.

My position on that still stands. So, since this removes a lot of measure of doubt, and Obama will probably be making another speech to the nation by the end of this month, I want more specifics, including a realistic exit plan and realistic listing of hoped-for achievements. Until then, I will continue to oppose intervention in Syria.

Meanwhile, it's no surprise the Russians are doing everything they can to tear down the credibility of the report.

And, now, a day later, Vlad the Impaler Putin is just being a fucking idiot, playing Alex Jones and saying this was a rebel false flag operation.

The one remaining question is: In Britain, will David Cameron try to run a second vote on Syria action by Parliament? If so, will he get his whips on line and will they get the coalition on line?

Now, back to the original blog post.