The American Bear

› Syria And Sarin Gas: US Claims Have A Very Familiar Ring | Robert Fisk

Is there any way of escaping the theatre of chemical weapons? First, Israeli “military intelligence” says that Bashar al-Assad’s forces have used/have probably used/might have used/could use chemical weapons. Then Chuck Hagel, the US Defence Secretary, pops up in Israel to promise even more firepower for Israel’s over-armed military – avoiding any mention of Israel’s more than 200 nuclear warheads – and then imbibing all the Israeli “intelligence” on Syria’s use/probable use/possible use of chemical weapons.

Then good ol’ Chuck returns to Washington and tells the world that “this is serious business. We need all the facts.” The White House tells Congress that US intelligence agencies, presumably the same as Israeli intelligence agencies since the two usually waffle in tandem, have “varying degrees of confidence” in the assessment. But Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee – she who managed to defend Israel’s actions in 1996 after it massacred 105 civilians, mostly children, at Qana in Lebanon – announces of Syria that “it is clear that red lines have been crossed and action must be taken to prevent larger-scale use”. And the oldest of current White House clichés – hitherto used exclusively on Iran’s probable/possible development of nuclear weapons – is then deployed: “All options are on the table.”

In any normal society the red lights would now be flashing, especially in the world’s newsrooms. But no. We scribes remind the world that Obama said the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “game changer” – at least Americans admit it is a game – and our reports confirm what no one has actually confirmed. Chemical arms used. In two Canadian TV studios, I am approached by producers brandishing the same headline. I tell them that on air I shall trash the “evidence” – and suddenly the story is deleted from both programmes. Not because they don’t want to use it – they will later – but because they don’t want anyone suggesting it might be a load of old cobblers.

CNN has no such inhibitions. Their reporter in Amman is asked what is known about the use of chemical weapons by Syria and replies: “Not as much as the world would want to know … the psyche of the Assad regime ….” But has anyone tried? Or simply asked an obvious question, posed to me by a Syrian intelligence man in Damascus last week: if Syria can cause infinitely worse damage with its MiG bombers (which it does) why would it want to use chemicals? And since both the regime and its enemies have accused each other of using such weapons, why isn’t Chuck as fearful of the rebels as he is of the Assad dictatorship?

It all comes back to that most infantile cliché of all: that the US and Israel fear Assad’s chemical weapons “falling into the wrong hands”. They are frightened, in other words, that these chemicals might end up in the armoury of the very same rebels, especially the Islamists, that Washington, London, Paris, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are supporting. And if these are the “wrong hands”, then presumably the weapons in Assad’s armoury are in the “right hands”. That was the case with Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons – until he used them against the Kurds.

Now we know that there have been three specific incidents in which sarin gas has supposedly been used in Syria: in Aleppo, where both sides accused each other (the hospital videos in fact came from Syrian state TV); in Homs, apparently on a very small scale; and in the outskirts of Damascus. And, although the White House appears to have missed this, three Syrian child refugees were brought to hospital in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli with deep and painful burns on their bodies.

But now for a few problems. Phosphorus shells can inflict deep burns, and perhaps cause birth defects. But the Americans do not suggest that the Syrian military might have used phosphorus (which is indeed a chemical); after all, American troops used the very same weapon in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, where there is indeed now an explosion of birth defects. I suppose our hatred of the Assad regime might better be reflected by horror at reports of the torture by Syrian secret policemen of the regime’s detainees. But there’s a problem here, too: only 10 years ago, the US was “renditioning” innocent men, including a Canadian citizen, to Damascus to be interrogated and tortured by the very same secret policemen. And if we mention Saddam’s chemical weapons, there’s another glitch: because the components of these vile weapons were manufactured by a factory in New Jersey and sent to Baghdad by the US.

That is not the story in our newsrooms, of course. Walk into a TV studio and they’re all reading newspapers. Walk into a newspaper office and they’re all watching television. It’s osmotic. And the headlines are all the same: Syria uses chemical weapons. That’s how the theatre works.

› Washington fabricates chemical weapons pretext for war against Syria | Bill Van Auken

Behind the sudden turn to promoting the chemical weapons pretext for direct military intervention is the growing frustration of the US and its European allies over the failure of their proxy forces in Syria to make any headway in overthrowing the Assad regime.

This is in large measure because the Syrian government retains a popular base and, even among those who detest the regime, many hate and fear even more the Islamist elements, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaeda, which are seeking to replace it.

The US and its allies are themselves increasingly wary about the potential “blowback” from the sectarian civil war that they have promoted. The governments in Britain and Germany as well as the European Union have all made statements in the last week warning of the dangers posed by hundreds of Islamists from their own countries going to Syria to join with Al Qaeda elements.

Behind the pretense that the cutthroats that rule the US and Europe are concerned about human rights and Syrian lives, the reality is that they are preparing bombings, the use of cruise missiles and Predator drones, as well as a potential ground invasion that will dramatically increase Syria’s death toll.

The motives underlying such a war have nothing to do with qualms about chemical weapons, but rather concern definite geostrategic interests.

› Times Square Targeted By Boston Marathon Bombing Suspects, FBI Says

Good to know that speculation won’t be a factor in this case:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, told interrogators that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, intended to set off explosives in Manhattan, according to unnamed law enforcement officials who spoke to Reuters and NBC News.

This was pre-Miranda, drugged on painkillers, at the hands of an FBI “special interrogation team”, with no legal counsel, but those details are unimportant. Nor is the detail that Tsarnaev hasn’t said anything since: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev confessed before Miranda rights, then fell silent.

Whether the NYC plot is true doesn’t matter though, really. Kelly and Bloomberg just want their cameras and drones.

› The Day That TV News Died | Chris Hedges

… The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. And when there is war these news personalities assume their “patriotic” roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an estimated $5 million a year—did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts.

It does not matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization. What mattered then and what matters now is likability—known in television and advertising as the Q score—not honesty and truth. Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.

› Presented with heavy face-palming.

pbump:

The Washington Post commissions a piece on pre-Iraq media failures, kills it, runs one about how the media did great.

Via @mlcalderone

(via shortformblog)

› Arundhati Roy on Iraq War’s 10th: Bush May Be Gone, But "Psychosis" of U.S. Foreign Policy Prevails

From a speech at Riverside Church in NYC, October, 2003:

When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported al-Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence, because there isn’t any. All of it is based on insinuation or to suggestion and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the “free press,” that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests. Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

Apart from the invented links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent—went to the extent of saying it would be suicidal … for the U.S. not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries. Earlier, there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Granada, Panama. But this time it wasn’t just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was frenzy with a purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the doctrine of preemptive strike, also known as the United States can do whatever the hell it wants, and that’s official. The war against Iraq has been fought and won, and no weapons of mass destruction have been found, not even a little one.

watch the rest →

› Propaganda Deja Vu? Media Uncritically Echoes Unnamed US Officials on Syria’s Chemical Weapons | Rania Khalek

There’s no doubt that Assad, whose family has passed down authoritarian rule of Syria like an heirloom, appears to have committed war crimes for which there is no excuse.

That being said, the mainstream media is so invested in villainizing the Assad regime, they have neglected to report accurately on certain factions of the armed opposition who have committed atrocities as well. This is partly due to the brutal escalation in violence that has made it unsafe for journalists to report from inside Syria (even the United Nations was forced to pull out its staff), leaving media outlets reliant on information from people on the ground. Since Syria has long been designated as “evil” by the west (an arbitrary label that need not apply to the repressive government’s of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), the media has followed suit, unquestioningly publishing rebel claims as fact, a trend meticulously documented in an October article by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

In this context, the media’s willingness to parrot unverified claims by unnamed officials about Assad’s alleged plans to use chemical weapons should come as no surprise. That doesn’t mean it can’t be true. After all, Assad is no angel and has a track record of unleashing indiscriminate violence. But so did Saddam Hussein when anonymous American officials (better known as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice) deliberately spread the lie that he was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Media outlets were happy to take the bait, setting the stage for a war that should have never happened.

That’s not to say that present-day Syria is identical to Iraq 2002, but the mainstream media certainly hasn’t changed, sticking to their preferred and simplistic narrative (Assad is bad, rebels are good, west is a benevolent savior) no matter the cost, which brings us to the latest round of journalist malpractice (re: chemical weapons). [++]