Syria chemical warfare claims aim to provoke Western intervention

Bill Van Auken

The unsubstantiated charges that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus killing large numbers of civilians have all the hallmarks of a staged provocation aimed at provoking Western intervention.

Reports of the attack were made by Western-backed opponents of the Assad regime early Wednesday, just as a United Nations chemical weapons inspection team, admitted to Syria by the government just 72 hours earlier, began its work.

Indeed, according to the opposition sources reporting the chemical weapons attacks, they took place in Eastern Ghouta in the eastern suburbs of Damascus, just a few miles from where the UN inspection team is headquartered.

Initial contradictory reports of the alleged attack put the number of victims at as few as 20 and as many as 1,300.

Why the Assad regime should choose such a moment to launch large-scale chemical attacks—under the noses of the UN inspectors—and what motive he would have for doing so, under conditions in which his military has been inflicting a series of defeats on the US-backed “rebels,” has not been explained in any of the extensive media coverage of these unverified allegations.

Nonetheless, the US and its NATO allies, the principal supporters of the bloody war for regime change in Syria, lost no time in issuing condemnations and demanding an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, which convened behind closed doors in New York Wednesday afternoon.


Declassified secret rulings found NSA spying program unconstitutional

Thomas Gaist

Three secret US court opinions declassified Wednesday show that the NSA collected at least 58,000 emails and other US communications per year that were “wholly domestic” and completely unrelated to terrorism. According to a senior US official quoted in USA Today, the court opinions were declassified by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper because Clapper believed they show “effective self-policing” by the NSA.

In one of the documents, a heavily blacked-out 86-page 2011 secret court opinion released Wednesday that declared NSA activities to be unconstitutional, US District Judge John Bates wrote that on three occasions within a three-year period, the state “disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.”

The declassified opinion further stated that “the volume and nature of the information [the government] has been collecting is fundamentally different than what the court had been led to believe.”

The declassified documents were posted at icontherecord.tumblr.com, a web page that was created on Wednesday “at the direction of the President of the United States,” and which claimed to provide “immediate, ongoing and direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities carried out by the US Intelligence Community.”

While the opinions were released as part of damage control efforts aimed at demonstrating the supposed effectiveness of judicial oversight of surveillance, they show a pattern of regular and massive violations by the government of its own regulations.


Gangster State US/UK

Paul Craig Roberts


David Miranda (2nd L), partner of U.S. journalist Glenn Green-
wald (L), speaks to the media at Rio de Janeiro's International
Airport August 19, 2013.
(Credit: Reuters/Ricardo Moraes)

The question is: are there sufficient brainwashed people in both countries to sustain the US/UK myth that “freedom and democracy” are attained via war crimes?

On July 23 I wrote about how the US reversed roles with the USSR and became the tyrant that terrifies the world. We have now had further confirmation of that fact. It comes from two extraordinary actions by Washington’s British puppet state.

David Miranda, the Brazilian partner of Glenn Greenwald, who is reporting on the illegal and unconstitutional spying by the National Stasi Agency, was seized, no doubt on Washington’s orders, by the puppet British government from the international transit zone of a London airport. Miranda had not entered the UK, but he was seized by UK authorities. Washington’s UK puppets simply kidnapped him, threatened him for nine hours, and stole his computer, phones, and all his electronic equipment. As a smug US official told the media, “the purpose was to send a message.”

You might remember that Edward Snowden was stuck for some weeks in the international transit zone of the Moscow airport. The Obama tyrant repeatedly browbeat Russia’s President Putin to violate the law and kidnap Snowden for Obama. Unlike the once proud and law-abiding British, Putin refused to place Washington’s desires above law and human rights.

The second extraordinary violation occurred almost simultaneously with UK authorities appearing at the Guardian newspaper and illegally destroying the hard drives on the newspaper’s computers with the vain intention of preventing the newspaper from reporting further Snowden revelations of US/UK high criminality.

It is fashionable in the US and UK governments and among their sycophants to speak of “gangster state Russia.” But we all know who the gangsters are. The worst criminals of our time are the US and UK governments. Both are devoid of all integrity, all honor, all mercy, all humanity. Many members of both governments would have made perfect functionaries in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.


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