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Col. Pat Lang and other retired intelligence professionals who wrote a letter to Pres. Bush before the Iraq war are speaking out very strongly on Syria and the intelligence being used to sell us into another war. The article he cites here is by Gareth Porter who used those same intelligence professionals as his sources. And their sources are their friends and former colleagues who are still in the employ of the CIA. Porter has also been talking to Scott Horton who has been trying to get the word out.
Clapper "cherry-picked" for his "assessment" on Syria
James Clapper, Lieutenant General (ret.) USAF is currently Director of National Intelligence for the United States of America.
According to Porter, Clapper "cherry-picked" across the IC to find bits and pieces of opinion and "data" with which to construct a document that he then did not sign. This is why the document was issued by the WH press office rather than as an IC assessment. Perhasps he has some fear of the judgment of history.
This procedure of constructing public "reality" through control of the narrative is identical to that followed by the Iraq Group in Cheney's White House and the Office of Special Plans in Rumsfeld's office. The level of contempt displayed for the citizenry is equal to that of the Bush Administration.
This is the Gareth Porter article that Pat Lang is referring to and excerpted.
Obama’s Case for Syria Didn’t Reflect Intel Consensus
Contrary to the general impression in Congress and the news media, the Syria chemical warfare intelligence summary released by the Barack Obama administration Aug. 30 did not represent an intelligence community assessment, an IPS analysis and interviews with former intelligence officials reveals.
The evidence indicates that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper culled intelligence analyses from various agencies and by the White House itself, but that the White House itself had the final say in the contents of the document.
That part of the strategy, at least, has been successful. Despite strong opposition in Congress to the proposed military strike in Syria, no one in either chamber has yet challenged the administration’s characterisation of the intelligence. But the administration is vulnerable to the charge that it has put out an intelligence document that does not fully and accurately reflect the views of intelligence analysts.
Former intelligence officials told IPS that that the paper does not represent a genuine intelligence community assessment but rather one reflecting a predominantly Obama administration influence.
In essence, the White House selected those elements of the intelligence community assessments that supported the administration’s policy of planning a strike against the Syrian government force and omitted those that didn’t.
Lang notes that he is a co-signer of this letter to President Obama by the
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, published on Sept. 6. I was astounded by some of the things that they said. But note that they also warned Bush about the cooked intelligence before the Iraq war and they sent one other letter to Obama warning him that Israel planned to bomb Iran in 2010. From his blog posts, Lang seems to find the Mint Press/AP reporter's account, interviews of people on the ground, credible, who said that Bandar Bush and some Al Qaeda militias based in Iraq to be responsible for the attack.
The whole thing is a swirling, complicated mess. They claim that the CIA keeps track of chemical weapons in Syria and that they found that none had been moved and all of them were accounted for. Other stories claim that Syrian leaders pulled the head of their CW unit in after the attack and interrogated him for three days and that he was able to prove that none of his munitions were gone, all were accounted for. I don't know what to believe, but something seems very off about the case our govt. is making. These VIPS have proven themselves to be credible in the past when almost everyone else was wrong. If you haven't read this already, do go and read the whole thing.
Obama Warned on Syrian Intel
We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as “plausible denial.”
[...]
Our sources confirm that a chemical incident of some sort did cause fatalities and injuries on August 21 in a suburb of Damascus. They insist, however, that the incident was not the result of an attack by the Syrian Army using military-grade chemical weapons from its arsenal. That is the most salient fact, according to CIA officers working on the Syria issue. They tell us that CIA Director John Brennan is perpetrating a pre-Iraq-War-type fraud on members of Congress, the media, the public – and perhaps even you.
[...]
Déjà Fraud: This brings a flashback to the famous Downing Street Minutes of July 23, 2002, on Iraq, The minutes record the Richard Dearlove, then head of British intelligence, reporting to Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior officials that President Bush had decided to remove Saddam Hussein through military action that would be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” Dearlove had gotten the word from then-CIA Director George Tenet whom he visited at CIA headquarters on July 20.
The discussion that followed centered on the ephemeral nature of the evidence, prompting Dearlove to explain: “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” We are concerned that this is precisely what has happened with the “intelligence” on Syria.
[...]
In addition, we have learned that on August 13-14, 2013, Western-sponsored opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations for a major, irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and Qatari, Turkish and U.S. intelligence officials took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, now used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors.
Senior opposition commanders who came from Istanbul pre-briefed the regional commanders on an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development,” which, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria.
Johns Hopkins and the Case of the Missing NSA Blog Post
Citing concerns about linking to classified material, Johns Hopkins University asked a professor this morning to remove a blog post discussing last week’s revelations about the NSA’s efforts to break encryption. The post had linked to government documents published by ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times.
Several hours later, after computer science professor Matthew Green tweeted about the request, the university reversed itself.
Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins, which is short drive from the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, works closely with the spy agency.
This article by Yasha Levine from NSFWCorp is getting a lot of attention. It's behind the paywall of the pay-only (?) news/guerrilla journalism site that a lot of people seem to be trying to build a lot of hype for as the hippest new site. I hadn't noticed it before but now I'm seeing references to it everywhere. I noticed that Meteor Blades cited them in his post last night. Anyway it's an expose on Cory Booker and the neocon group who he's been involved with and who have backed him. This is a teaser and the rest of it requires a subscription.
onekade has been asking the author to unlock it. The article that MB excerpted was published on alternet so maybe this one will too, or someone might "liberate" it, as sometimes happens. Heck I've seen Barton Gellman do that with a WSJ article once, linking to the "for printer" mobile version or something (might be a way to defeat paywalls, not sure). In any case, this is really interesting and if it's true it would not surprise me at all if we found that some other prominent Dems have been connected to and/or backed by organizations like this and it might explain their baffling neocon bent at times?
The Neocon, The Messiah, and Cory Booker
How did Cory Booker end up so close to a right wing cult that promotes deep-rooted racism, violent Islamophobia, medieval positions on abortion, homosexuality, women’s rights and more?
The Times’ op-ed wizards described Booker as a “deeply unconventional politician,” known for “once rushing into a burning house before the fire department arrived— saving a woman and traumatizing his security detail,” and they predicted that he “will be able to use his political star status to fight for the neglected, the powerless, people who are working and people who need to work in New Jersey and nationally.”
Unconventional indeed. But there’s one unconventional side to Booker’s progressivism that has received much less recognition. His political career was launched with the help of the Chabad-Lubavitchers, a rabidly rightwing Hasidic cult that considers its dead Rebbe a messiah and that pushes a regressive right-wing worldview that would horrify Booker’s prog supporters: deep- rooted racism, violent Islamophobia, medieval positions on everything from abortion to homosexuality and women’s rights, and a nasty tendency to normalize sexual abuse and protect serial sexual predators in its ranks.
I don't know enough to take a side on this, but it seems to be a pretty fierce argument on the left. I have a lot of respect for fellow environmental activists so if it is true, I would think it more of an institutional thing because it's definitely not about the dedicated activists that I know. One thing that interests me though, is that I do think that in other arenas, the Left in general has been so destructive due to hyperpartisanship that they have been even more damaging than the right in a lot of ways. Maybe this is a time for soul searching for the Left about activism, effectiveness, partisanship, and the way forward. If that is the result of interviews like Klein's that would be a good thing, no matter whose feelings get hurt. Anyway, this is ThinkProgress pushing back against Klein.
No, Naomi Klein And Salon, ‘Denialism’ By Enviros Has Not Been ‘More Damaging Than The Right-Wing Denialism’
Naomi Klein has given an extended interview trashing the environmental movement, “Naomi Klein: Green groups may be more damaging than climate change deniers.” As I will show, she is not just wrong, she is profoundly wrong. Her revisionist history is wrong, too, and contradicted by her policy prescriptions.
Her interview with Jason Mark, published in Salon, is filled with contrarian “media bait” statements devoid of substance, like this:
Well, I think there is a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost.
Here is the Klein interview. Her new book is about her ideas about climate change being an opportunity for radical social change and not another shock doctrine exploited by the 1%.
Naomi Klein: Green groups may be more damaging than climate change deniers
The "No Logo" author explains how environmentalists may be more damaging to their cause than climate change deniers
Such focus is a hallmark of Klein’s career. She doesn’t do much of the chattering class’s news cycle blathering. She works steadily, carefully, quietly. It can be surprising to remember that Klein’s immense global influence rests on a relatively small body of work; she has published three books, one of which is an anthology of magazine pieces.
Klein’s first book, No Logo, investigated how brand names manipulate public desires while exploiting the people who make their products. The book came out just weeks after the WTO protests in Seattle and became an international bestseller. Her next major book, The Shock Doctrine, argued that free-marketeers often use crises – natural or manufactured – to ram through deregulatory policies. With her newest, yet-to-be named book, Klein turns her attention to climate change. Scheduled for release in 2014, the book will also be made into a film by her husband and creative partner, Avi Lewis.
Klein’s books and articles have sought to articulate a counternarrative to the march of corporate globalization and government austerity. She believes climate change provides a new chance for creating such a counternarrative. “The book I am writing is arguing that our responses to climate change can rebuild the public sphere, can strengthen our communities, can have work with dignity.”
[...]
Then I came to the idea that climate change could be a kind of a “people’s shock,” an answer to the shock doctrine – not just another opportunity by the disaster capitalists to feed off of misery, but an opportunity for progressive forces to deepen democracy and really improve livelihoods around the world. Then I came across the idea of “climate debt” when I was doing a piece on reparations for Harper’s magazine. I had a meeting with Bolivia’s climate negotiator in Geneva – her name is Angélica Navarro – and she put the case to me that climate change could be an opportunity for a global Green Marshall Plan with the North paying climate debts in the form of huge green development project.
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