Seymour M. Hersh: Whose sarin? ■ [In] recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’

Tony Cartalucci: NATO's War on Syria Just Got Dirtier

Emptywheel: Sy Hersh Writing about Politicized Intelligence Again, Syria Edition

Moon of Alabama: Hersh On Obama's Lies About Syrian Chemical Weapons

Michael Calderone: New Yorker, Washington Post Passed On Seymour Hersh Syria Report

British prime minister says he was being polite when Helle Thorning-Schmidt asked him to take part in picture.
David Cameron and the Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, have brushed off criticism of their decision to pose for a "selfie" photograph at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela alongside the US president, Barack Obama. The British prime minister said he was being polite when Thorning-Schmidt, the daughter-in-law of the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, asked him to take part in the picture. He told parliament on Wednesday: "In my defence I'd say that Nelson Mandela played an extraordinary role in his life and in his death in bringing people together." The photo went viral on Tuesday, prompting accusations from some of poor taste. Many noted that Michelle Obama looked on stony-faced during the rainy event in Soweto. Thorning-Schmidt described her impromptu snap as "not inappropriate". Speaking to the Danish media she said: "There were plenty of pictures that day. We've taken very many pictures of Obama, and I just think that it was kind of funny. It shows perhaps that when we meet from state and government, we too are just people who have fun together."

A sandwich shop owner endured eight hours of questioning by police and had his computer seized for three weeks – after making tasteless Nelson Mandela jokes on the internet. Neil Phillips, who runs Crumbs in Rugeley, Staffordshire, says he was also finger-printed and DNA-swabbed after officers received complaints about what he insists were harmless gags. In one online post, the 44-year-old wrote: 'My PC takes so long to shut down I’ve decided to call it Nelson Mandela.'

First grader, Hunter Yelton, told us he loves science and phys-ed. Also...that he has a crush on a girl at school, who likes him back. It may sound innocent enough...but at six years old Hunter now has 'sexual harassment' on his school record. "It was during class yeah. We were doing reading group and I leaned over and kissed her on the hand. That's what happened," said Hunter Yelton.

Chase Madar: The Over-Policing of America : How Every Part of American Life Became a Police Matter

Autism advocates are set to protest tomorrow against a quiet effort by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration to require annual flu vaccinations for all New York City schoolchildren. On Wednesday, with just three weeks to go until he leaves office, Mr. Bloomberg’s controversial Board of Health is set to vote on new rules that would force children as young as six months old to be immunized each year before December 31 if they attend licensed day care or pre-school programs.

Shocking video of New World Order Zionist Jews admitting they want to destroy every non-jew, and even start world war 3 to achieve their goal.

Bill Van Auken: Obama and Mandela ■ The US president was the first of six foreign heads of state to address the crowd assembled in Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium. Filled with demagogic phrases about “struggle,” “liberation,” “freedom” and “revolution,” the speech’s attempt to cloak Obama in the legacy of Mandela’s years of sacrifice, imprisonment and persecution was an obscene exercise in hypocrisy. One would never guess from Obama’s remarks that he is the head of a government that for decades counted the South African apartheid regime as a critical ally on the African continent, and that the CIA, which he now utilizes as a refurbished Murder, Inc., assassinating perceived opponents of US policy with Predator drones, played an instrumental role in Mandela’s 1962 arrest, which led to 27 years of imprisonment. It was not until 2008—nine years after Mandela had stepped down as South Africa’s president—that Washington removed him from its list of foreign terrorists.

Amid the lies and hypocrisy that dominated the platform at Tuesday’s memorial, an element of political reality intruded from the stadium bleachers. The crowd repeatedly booed South African President Jacob Zuma—the subject of endless corruption scandals—upon his arrival, when his face appeared on the giant screens, and upon his introduction as keynote speaker. Cyril Ramaphosa, Zuma’s deputy and former mine workers’ union head-turned multimillionaire capitalist, was forced to intervene repeatedly. According to the South African Daily Maverick, he appealed at one point to the crowd in Zulu: “Don’t embarrass us, we have overseas visitors here. We can deal with present day stuff once the visitors have gone.”

ALL AMERICANS STAND UP – Policeman Slams Woman into Concrete bench | This is just about the end of the line for me. If the American people do not stand up NOW, before the Police and this Gestapo Government takes all our freedoms away for good. A 47-year-old woman suffered serious injuries after an officer pushed her, face first, into a holding cell. The woman had no police record and only wanted to call her children to let them know she was in jail and couldn’t make it home so they wouldn’t worry. The Woman has been permanently damaged in her face and has had to receive reconstructive plastic surgery to her face.