Category: News

The path from Monday to today, which has brought the US to believe Syria’s chemical weapons use is unusual. This timeline may help us better get a grip on how (though not why) officials got from A to B.

Monday: Chuck Hagel is in Israel speaking with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe ‘Bogie‘ Ya’alon. According to Hagel, Syrian chemical weapons didn’t come up.

Tuesday: Israeli Brigadier General Itai Brun delivers a speech in Tel Aviv claiming that Syria has “repeatedly” used chemical weapons.

Later Tuesday: Secretary of State John Kerry calls Benjamin Netanyahu to specifically press him on Brun’s claim. Kerry says Netanyahu was unable to confirm the allegation at all, while Netanyahu’s office refuses to make any public comments on the call or Brun’s claim. Kerry follows up with this non-proof by pushing NATO to send more aid to Syria’s rebels.

Wednesday: Hagel points out how weird it is that no one in Israel told him any of this stuff during his visit, in which he (civilian leader of the US military) met with Israeli military officials.

Thursday: The White House says it believes Syria has used chemical weapons on a “small scale.” Hagel says he believes that too.

The holes in the story:

1. Israel’s military claims to have provided the evidence on which Brun makes his statement to the US, even though Hagel has apparently never heard of it.

2. Conversely, Israel’s military suggests that Brun’s assessment is based in large measure on “visual evidence” i.e. photographs from Syria’s rebels of people foaming at the mouth. This “evidence” was certainly familiar to the US before Monday, and they still had repeatedly said over the past weeks that they didn’t believe Syria had actually used chemical weapons.

Other things worth noting:

3. Brun claims Syria used chemical weapons five times. The US “assessment” says twice. Media reports of rebels claiming chemical weapons use are common, but only twice did the reports get major coverage. The more recent of the two saw Syrian troops killed by suffocating gas, leading analysts to believe that the rebels had used a make-shift lachrymatory agent as a weapon, not the “nerve agent” that Syria’s arsenal consists of and is accused of using. The US ended both of the major reports claiming that they didn’t believe chemical weapons were used, but now say they do, based only on “evidence” that they already had and already dismissed.

In honor of Bush’s library dedication today, here are some more epigrams he inspired from my 2003 book, Terrorism & Tyranny:

Killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans.

Habeas corpus is an insurance policy to prevent governments from going berserk.

Most of the homeland security successes in the war on terrorism have been farces or frauds.

Perpetual war inevitably begets perpetual repression. It is impossible to destroy all alleged enemies of freedom everywhere without also destroying freedom in the United States.

The Patriot Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel.

The more information government gathers on people, the more power it has over them. The more government surveillance, the more intimidated Americans become.

Nothing happened on 9/11 that made the federal government more trustworthy.

There is no technological magic bullet that will make the government as smart as it is powerful.

Citizens should distrust politicians who distrust freedom.

In the long run, people have more to fear from governments than from terrorists. Terrorists come and go, but power-hungry politicians will always be with us.
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For epigrams on freedom, government, & terrorism, click here.

Farea al-Muslimi, the Yemeni youth activist and journalist who testified at the Senate Judiciary Hearing this week on the drone war, will be meeting with White House officials to tell them too about how the drone war terrorizes civilians and helps al-Qaeda recruitment.

Danger Room:

Danger Room has confirmed that before he leaves Washington D.C. on Friday, al-Muslimi will meet with White House officials to tell them what he told a Senate subcommittee yesterday: CIA and military drone strikes are strengthening al-Qaida’s Yemeni affiliate and making average Yemenis hate America.

“He will meet with a working-level expert on Yemen policy,” a White House official confirms, declining to provide the name of the official or the time of the meeting. In other words, he shouldn’t count on an Oval Office sit-down with the President — or even a quick meet with Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco. And the meeting isn’t a response to al-Muslimi’s testimony yesterday.

But there’s buzz now around al-Muslimi, a Sana’a-based freelance writer on public policy. And that didn’t exist the last time he came to Washington — when al-Muslimi also had a White House meeting. In September, he recalls to Danger Room, al-Muslimi trudged from one drab policymaker’s office to another — he declines to give specifics — while his interlocutors grew uncomfortable when he wanted to talk about the human costs of the drones. “It was a taboo,” al-Muslimi says, “like if you’re talking in a conservative society about sex.”

In other words, don’t hold your breath that the Obama White House cares about al-Muslimi’s eye-witness testimony of the human costs of the secret bombing campaign in Yemen.

Here is al-Muslimi’s powerful testimony to the Senate committee this week:

At The Daily Beast, James Kirchick blasts the new Ron Paul Institute for being “comprised of anti-Semites, 9/11 truthers, and dictator lovers.” Kirchick goes astray on a number of claims, but at one point he links to a piece by former CIA official Michael Scheuer published at Antiwar.com in 2008. Since this is our turf, I thought I’d point out that Kirchick pretty blatantly distorts what Scheuer wrote.

Also on Paul’s board are prominent former government officials who claim that American Jews constitute a “fifth column” aimed at subverting American foreign policy in the interests of Israel. Michael Scheuer, a former CIA intelligence officer, has used this precise phrase, alleging that a long list of individuals, organizations, and publications are “intent on involving 300 million Americans in other people’s religious wars.”

This re-litigates the controversy in the lead up to Chuck Hagel’s confirmation over his comments about “the Jewish lobby” intimidating legislators on Capitol Hill. That opened up a can of worms about whether it should instead be called the “Israel lobby.” That’s a fine debate to have, but Kirchick makes it seem like Scheuer wrote/believes that “American Jews” constitute a fifth column aimed at promoting a pro-Israel foreign policy. This is a distortion.

Here is Scheuer’s quote in full:

American Israel-firsters have long since dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States and its genuine national interests. They have moved brazenly into the Israel first, last, and always camp. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, the Rev. Franklin Graham, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, Douglas Feith, the Rev. Rod Parsley, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Bill Kristol, the Rev. John Hagee, and the thousands of wealthy supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appear to care about the United States only so far as Washington is willing to provide immense, unending funding and the lives of young U.S. service personnel to protect Israel. These individuals and their all-for-Israel journals –Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal – amount to nothing less than a fifth column intent on involving 300 million Americans in other peoples’ religious wars, making them pay and bleed to protect a nation in which the United States has no genuine national security interest at stake.

Half of the names Scheuer mentioned are not Jewish, and last time I checked, one doesn’t need to be Jewish to donate to AIPAC. Scheuer even criticizes the predictable habit of his detractors to “identify their critics as anti-Semites.” Kirchick no less predictably satisfies that propensity five years after the piece was written.

Scheuer’s argument is clear enough without being distorted by Kirchick – namely, that the pro-Israel lobby is one of the most powerful, influential, and effective in Washington. Realists like Scheuer, as well as equally highly respected academics like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, among countless others, merely point out that the systematic compliance with Israel’s interests in US foreign policy and American politics generally conflicts with core US interests.

That is a political argument. It is an academic argument. It is not some spooky, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, as Kirchick might have us believe.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released a report today that says the Army paid $5 million for two massive incinerators to burn trash on a forward operating base (FOB)  in Afghanistan, but then never used them. The incinerators, mandated by congress after a deluge of reports that soldiers and veterans believed they got sick from the open air pits  in the war zone, have been sitting dormant since 2010 and are becoming their own health hazard.

Worse, FOB Salerno, located in Khost province in the volatile eastern region near the Pakistan border, is still burning trash in the open air, and is expected to do so until a local company starts coming to haul the trash daily starting July 31.

According to the report, Army officials there acknowledge it was the potential health hazards of burning the combined waste of food, toxic materials, human waste, medical detritus, rubber, batteries — everything — in the open air pit that forced them to get the incinerators in the first place (as well as the congressional mandate).

[Antiwar has been covering the burn pit controversy from the beginning. More background on that evolving story, here.]

So the Army Corps of Engineers contracted with a Turkish company to bring in two 8-ton incinerators. The contractor never finished the job, apparently, but got their money anyway. According to the report, there were a number of “deficiencies” like a leaking hydraulic line on one of the incinerators and missing pipe insulation, and the contractor was notified about it, but even though these items were never attended to, the contract was “closed out,” the money paid and the incinerators became the Army’s responsibility.

At that point they were never turned on. As explained in the report, the effort to burn all the trash cleanly was doomed from the start. According to specifications, the machines were supposed to process some 16 tons of waste a day, which would have required both to be operating 24-hours a day. Being in Khost where there is a greater threat level in place, the Army requires black out conditions at night, thus the incinerators couldn’t possibly be working around the clock.

So the circumstances would have required additional alternative trash removal anyway, according to the SIGAR. The Army used that, plus all the work that was left to be done on the machines (about $250,000 worth), as excuse enough to keep them offline.

The Army also noted that the maintenance for the incinerators would have cost $1 million a year, which they neglected to put in the budget, so “the facilities have fallen into disrepair.”

“In one case,” according to the report, “stagnant water has formed in an area beneath the incinerators, thereby creating a possible health hazard from malaria-infected mosquitoes.”

Absent the incinerators, FOB Salerno continues potentially hazardous open-air burn pit operations which violate Department of Defense guidelines and U.S. Central Command regulation. Although the base is now planning to contract for trash removal, it will not begin until July 2013, which is 3 to 5 months before the base’s scheduled closure.

Something stinks and it’s not just the pit. So the Army Corps of Engineers contracts with a company that not only doesn’t complete the work but it produces incinerators that the Army admits will be insufficient for the task. Instead of working it out, the Army closes out the contract, letting the company off the hook. The Army does nothing to bring the facilities into working order and instead lets them fall into disrepair. The hazy toxic plume from the open air pit continues, uninterrupted.

About 4,000 people live and work on FOB Salerno. It has been estimated that tens of thousands of American troops and contractors have been affected by the toxic burn pits on U.S bases over the last 10 years. Many have complained of severe injuries and doctors have found permanent lung damage in vets they say can only be the result of toxic inhalation.

Turns out when the military finally gets goaded into doing the right thing, like installing incinerators, they find away to slough it off anyway.

What a waste.

 

Down in Texas, the George W. Bush Library is having formal opening ceremonies today. In honor of the occasion, here’s a few epigrams from my 2004 book, The Bush Betrayal:

There are no harmless political lies about a war. The more such lies citizens tolerate, the more wars they will get.

The myths of 9/11 continue to threaten American safety.

Neither Washington nor Jefferson ever intended for the President of the United States to become the Torturer-in-Chief.

Bush is creating more terrorists than he is vanquishing. America needs a supply-side antiterrorism policy.

The only way to reconcile the Patriot Act with liberty is to assume that government intrusions into people’s lives are irrelevant to freedom.

Truth is a lagging indicator in politics.

The arrogance of power is the best hope for the survival of freedom.

We need a constitutional amendment to make the federal government obey the Constitution.

People have been taught to expect far more from government than from freedom.

Bush governs like an elective monarch, entitled to reverence and deference on all issues.

If the president is reelected, the more cynical Americans become, the less dangerous Bush will be.
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To see more epigrams on Bush, government, and freedom, click here