NOT
ANOTHER WAR
Did the Syrian government delay by
5 days granting permission to UN inspectors, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry
claims? Not according to the Institute for Public Accuracy:
“Inner City Press asked UN spokesperson Farhan Haq at Tuesday’s noon briefing when it was that the UN formally requested access to al Ghouta — on Saturday, August 24 or before? Video here [at 12:00].
“Haq read out a press statement from August 22, in which Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said a request is being sent. Then, Haq said, Ban’s High Representative on Disarmament Angela Kane ‘stepped forward with the request’ — on August 24, Saturday.“It was granted the next day.
“Inner City Press asked again, was there any formal request by the UN other than Ban’s press statement, before August 24? Haq called this ‘semantics.’ But when Inner City Press asked Ban to respond to widely circulated press releases about a request being made to him, the UN says the actual request has not been received yet.
”He said today: “It’s like everyone is telling Syria to let the police in, but the police didn’t knock on the door. The Syrian government can’t fulfill a request before it’s made. We don’t know what Syria would have said if the request was done on Thursday, but Kerry’s claim that they Syrians delayed is without merit. This episode does not make one question the Syrian ‘regime’s credibiity’ as Kerry claims, but rather that of the U.S. and UN.”
“Why was the UN so slow and sloppy? Why has Secretary General Ban Ki-moon not even stood up for the safety of UN personnel inside Syria? These questions remain unanswered.”
Meanwhile, the US and UK are charging ahead. Bomb, bomb,
bomb! Is no one reminded of the rush to attack Iraq? Does none of this sound
frighteningly familiar??
_____________________________________________________
RETALIATION?
Meanwhile, Twitter and the New York Times were hit by hackers,
who might or might not be the "Syrian Electronic Army." It's
impossible to tell these days who's actually doing the hacking or where it
comes from. Regardless, it's a new chapter on war-making, one that doesn't
involve blowing people's brains out. The U.S. excels at that latter, which is
why it gets so upset at the former. -LS
_______________________________________________________
TELLING
STORIES
Because so many journalists are
cowardly hacks, they're not standing up for fellow journalists who are under
attack, let alone the rest of us. Look at how quickly they turn against their own.
Someday, there will be a reckoning.
-LS
________________________________________________________
I get tired of saying it. The
hypocrisy of the United States and of the so-called free world is off the
charts. And the hypocrisy of people who continue to support this president, who
has proven himself time and time and time again to be the second coming of
George W. Bush, is likewise. -Lisa Simeone
US slams "chemical
weapons" in Syria while being a serial user of weapons widely condemned by
the global community.
- Andrea Germanos, staff
writer, Common Dreams
"This is about the large-scale
indiscriminate use of weapons that the civilized world long ago decided must
never be used at all, a conviction shared even by countries that agree on
little else... And there is a reason why no matter what you believe about
Syria, all peoples and all nations who believe in the cause of our common
humanity must stand up to assure that there is accountability for the use of
chemical weapons so that it never happens again."
These statements by
Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday put on display the hypocrisy of the
United States, a serial user of weapons widely condemned by the global
community.
From cluster bombs to
depleted uranium to napalm, recent history of U.S. warfare shows a trail of
weapons leaving long-lasting civilian harm.
The U.S. has not
joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions and instead continues to produce and
sell cluster bombs, and used them as recently as seven years ago. According to the Cluster Munition Coalition, from the 1960s to
2006, the U.S. dropped cluster bombs on Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Albania, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Napalm was not only widely
used by the U.S. during the years of the Vietnam War but also in 2003 during
the invasion of Iraq, though it only admitted to having used it in Iraq after irrefutable
evidence was out.
The U.S. also used white
phosphorus on Iraq and Afghanistan. White phosphorus
was used in 2004 during the assault on Fallujah, and the New
York Times reported its use as recently as in 2011 in Afghanistan. Steve Goose and Bonnie Docherty of the Arms Division at Human
Rights Watch wrote:
The Associated Press
reported that an 8-year-old Afghan girl, Razia, was injured when a white
phosphorus shell ripped through her home in the Tagab Valley of Kapisa province
in June 2009. When she reached the operating room, white powder covered her
skin, the oxygen mask on her face started to melt, and flames appeared when
doctors attempted to scrape away the dead tissue.
White phosphorus munitions
cause particularly severe injuries, including chemical burns down to the bone.
Wounds contaminated by white phosphorus can reignite days later when bandages
are removed, produce poisoning that leads to organ failure and death, and lead
to lifetime health problems.
The U.S. use of depleted
uranium, what one peace activist described as
America's Silent Weapon of Mass Destruction, in Iraq has left a
horrific legacy of birth defects and cancers for Iraqis and soldiers.
There is also the death
and destruction the U.S. launched in 1945 when it became the only country to
drop nuclear bombs.
This all leads Middle
Eastern history professor Mark LeVine to ask on
Tuesday:
Can a government that
supported the use of chemical weapons in one conflict claim any moral,
political, or legal authority militarily to attack another country for using
the same weapons, particularly when the attack is not authorised by the UN
Security Council?
Not only did the US aid
the use of chemical weapons by the former Iraqi government, it also used
chemical weapons on a large scale during its 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq,
in the form of depleted-uranium (DU) ammunition.
As Dahr Jamail's reporting for
Al Jazeera has shown, the use of DU by the US and UK has very likely been the
cause not only of many cases of Gulf War Syndrome suffered by Iraq war
veterans, but also of thousands of instances of birth defects, cancer, and
other diseases - causing a "large-scale public health disaster" and
the "highest rate of
genetic damage in any population ever studied" - suffered by Iraqis in
areas subjected to frequent and intense attacks by US and allied occupation
forces.
Thus what we have now is a
situation in which a government (the United States) that has both supported and
committed large-scale and systematic war crimes in one country (Iraq) is
leading the international effort to stop Iraq's neighbour Syria from continuing
to use chemical weapons against its own people.
This week, as we hear
corporate media amplifying calls
to attack Syria and know of U.S. complicity in
Iraq's use of chemical weapons, a piece from
the Guardian's George Monbiot from November of 2005 stands
out. He wrote, in part:
We were told that the war
with Iraq was necessary for two reasons. Saddam Hussein possessed biological
and chemical weapons and might one day use them against another nation. And the
Iraqi people needed to be liberated from his oppressive regime, which had,
among its other crimes, used chemical weapons to kill them. Tony Blair, Colin
Powell, William Shawcross, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Ann Clwyd, and many
others referred, in making their case, to Saddam's gassing of the Kurds in
Halabja in 1988. They accused those who opposed the war of caring nothing for
the welfare of the Iraqis.
Given that they care so
much, why has none of these hawks spoken out against the use of unconventional
weapons by coalition forces?
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