Xymphora

"Obama Consults With France’s Hollande on Syria" - just before he announced he decided - because he is such a gracious fellow - to follow the Constitution and seek Congressional authorization. One has to assume that the last hope for going it alone was something stronger from France than Hollande was prepared to grant. Comment from 'ginger' (before the WSJ cleans things up):

10:21 am September 1, 2013
ginger wrote: The Israeli/Neocon ‘Red-Line Game’

● Everybody remembers Netanyahu on the floor of the UN last year, brandishing his RED LINE cartoon bomb, as he unsuccessfully tried to hoax the US into a war on Iran last Fall, based on numerous Israeli/Neocon fabrications?

● Everybody remembers (don’t they?) how Michael Ledeen/Mossad fabricated the Niger Yellowcake Forgeries, which Ledeen then handed off to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans, in order to hoax the US into the disatrous war against Iraq?

● And everybody does remember the last several instances of the Israelis/Neocons claiming again and again that Syria used chemical weapons’ when in fact it is the Syrian rebels who have been caught with 2 kg of Sarin gas (when the Turks arrested a group of them) and the UN Investigating teams say these attacks appear to have been done by the Syrian rebels themselves, as a False Flag operation, in cahoots with Israeli agendas.

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Craig Murray

More children may now be blown to pieces by massive American missile blasts. It is nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. It is, yet again, the USA acting at the behest of Israel.

The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence cooperation. The communications intercept agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US, share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6).

Troodos is valued enormously by the NSA. It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus. Even almost all landline telephone communication in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos.

Troodos is highly effective – the jewel in the crown of British intelligence. Its capacity and efficiency, as well as its reach, is staggering. The US do not have their own comparable facility for the Middle East. I should state that I have actually been inside all of this facility and been fully briefed on its operations and capabilities, while I was head of the FCO Cyprus Section in the early 1990s. This is fact, not speculation.

It is therefore very strange, to say the least, that John Kerry claims to have access to communications intercepts of Syrian military and officials organising chemical weapons attacks, which intercepts were not available to the British Joint Intelligence Committee.

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Paul Craig Roberts

While still claiming dictatorial powers to start a war on his own authority, Obama put his unilateral attack on Syria on hold when he received a letter from more than 160 members of the House of Representatives reminding him that to take the country to war without congressional approval is an impeachable offense and when he saw that no country that could serve as cover for a war crime, not even the puppet British government and the NATO puppet states, would support America’s announced military aggression against Syria.

Obama got away with attacking Libya without an OK from Congress, because he used Washington’s NATO puppets and not US military forces. That ploy let Obama claim that the US was not directly involved.

Now that the lack of cover and the challenge from Congress has caused the would-be tyrant Obama to put on hold his attack on Syria, what can we expect?

If Obama were intelligent, and clearly anyone who would appoint Susan Rice as his national security adviser is not intelligent, he would simply let the attack on Syria fade into the background and die as Congress returns on September 9 to face the insoluble problems of the budget deficit and debt ceiling.

A competent administration would realize that a government that is unable to pay its bills without heavy use of the printing press is in far too much trouble to be worrying about what is going on in Syria. No competent administration would risk a military strike that could result in a Middle East conflagration and a rise in oil prices, thus worsening the economic situation that Washington faces.

But Obama and his collection of incompetents have demonstrated that they have no competence. The regime is also corrupt, and the entire edifice rests on nothing but lies.

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