JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalConsortium is among the most reliable publications, but...
as is often the case...
You are confusing "source" with "source."
A story has publisher, writer and sources. They can be separate.
This was published in Consortium News but is not a CN story.
It is an independent statement by VIPS, as the byline and signatures make clear. It has been published all around. If you happen to see it on a compiler site like Infowars (or DU!) that doesn't make it anything other than a VIPS authored statement. (Citing various sources besides the logic of their authors - their accuracy and validity are separate questions.)
Yes, I'll take Ray McGovern, Coleen Rowley, Ann Wright, David McMichael and others on that list as generally more reliable sources with a better track record, each of them especially since they left the national security state. Those inside the NSS at any time tend not to be reliable!
"The rebels gassing themselves"
This phrase mainly serves to show ignorance about the situation in Syria.
Inform yourself up to a basic standard before mouthing off.
For a start: Are the "rebels" a single group?
How many "rebel" factions are there estimated to be?
What is their relationship to each other?
What is the relationship of different factions to the actual revolution that was happening prior to the armed hostilities?
Have "rebel" factions fought each other?
Which outside powers are supporting which factions?
How many actual "rebel" fighters appear to have been killed in the August 21 attack?
Etc.
Kerry voted to authorize aggressive war on Iraq.
He was a senator. I don't care what bullshit he may have written in an ass-covering opinion column. Fuck his opinions. They are worthless. I knew the facts. I knew what Baradei, Blix and Scott Ritter knew, because they told me and the rest of the world. The facts. Like the MAJORITY OF THE WORLD, like anyone who cared to know the truth rather than to rally around the U.S. war faction, I knew the truth, not some CIA-Cheney bullshit.
Furthermore, these facts didn't even matter. By which I mean, even if Iraq had the WMDs that it so obviously did not have, that was not in any way a justification for an invasion by the U.S. regime.
I repeat:
Kerry was a senator. Senators had a vote in this. How he voted is all that matters. Fuck his opinions. Opinion columnists were not among those who could have, simply by casting their vote, directly prevented the announced unprovoked war of aggression -- the highest and worst of all war crimes -- on a distant country that posed no threat.
23 senators voted against the war. They did not authorize a war of aggression. They did not write bullshit columns pretending they didn't really want a war, and then vote for war. A choice was possible. Kerry chose to enable a criminal plan for mass murder in Iraq. Kerry, and Clinton before him: among the guilty. Key players in fact, because they are the ones who provided Democratic and "liberal" legitimacy to the Bush war crimes.
By the way, reccing 1000 times is easy...
Just get the right Persona Management software from your friendly air force contacts. I think it's being used productively by others on this site already. 
=
In the absence of evidence on attribution...
Horrible, frightening and inexcusable things happened to innocent people, but these videos are being exploited for the emotional response. It is an attempt to intimidate the skeptical: "See these horrible things. If you don't believe what we say about why these horrible things happened and what we should do about it, you are a soulless monster."
The comparison to 9/11 is apt. It's exactly what was done. The war-seeking government of that time exploited our fear and our anger and our empathy with the suffering of the victims of a real atrocity. They turned off our minds and led us straight into a declaration of global perpetual war and two bloody invasions of distant countries. None of this had anything to do with a rational response to 9/11 or defense against "terrorism."
Everyone knows there was a poison gas attack in Syria. When the war-seeking government of today shows videos from the atrocity and calling it "evidence," as though the video shows anything about who is responsible, is incredibly suspicious.
Why aren't they waiting for the UN report?
Keep telling yourself that.
A war faction decided to take the opportunity of the "red line" atrocity to push for the usual U.S. aggression on some distant nation that poses no threat to the U.S. This happens without fail every two to five years and until now has always resulted in a new U.S. war.
Obama, though clearly noncommital on Syria, decided to pimp the proposed war, just like every president has pimped wars. It's a standard part of the job and contributes to "legacy."
This time, however, the usual PR campaign for humanitarian mass murder has run into an unprecedented set of snags. No one believes the lying fuckers of the U.S. government, because they have seen too many lying fuckers of the U.S. government telling the exact same lies too many times before. Everyone is tired of the costs perpetual war, after 12 years of catastrophic wars for vague reasons that Obama, unfortunately, has done little to end (even while starting or escalating new ones).
This may turn out to be great news for Americans and for the world. Maybe sanity is coming to the U.S. Maybe we will remember this as the time when we started to liberate ourselves from the dominance of the MIC that eats 50+ percent of the federal discretionary budget. Of course, it will only happen with a popular mass resistance movement.
We need to fix Detroit, not Syria. Ending the perpetual war might mean money for fixing this fucked-up country.
We need to stop dictating to a region where the US government not only has no business, but has committed far greater crimes, killed more people and done more damage than Assad has.
You want to intervene constructively in Syria? Convene a peace conference with Iran, Russia, Saudi (unfortunately) and the EU.
You want to help the middle east? Arrest the Bush regime architects of aggressive war and put them on trial. Confess and apologize for past U.S. crimes. Suspend all U.S. military aid to any country there, including Israel. Pay reparations to all the countries you've attacked. Or at least offer cash to countries that hold legit, internationally monitored, peaceful, unfixed elections.
Attack on Syria Endangers U.S.
CALL CONGRESS MONDAY MORNING AND DON'T STOP UNTIL THEY VOTE DOWN THE WAR RESOLUTION.Self evidently, attacking Syria has nothing to do with defending the U.S.
No one claims that Syria has attacked the United States or plans to attack the United States. Syria will not attack the United States, except perhaps in the case that the U.S. attacks Syria. That, in itself, should be sufficient to oppose the resolution authorizing an unprovoked war on Syria.**
After all the unpunished war crimes and acts of aggression committed by the U.S. government, resulting in millions of deaths, this government's officials have no standing or authority to play world police.
If there was an effective world police, in fact, they would be hunting down, arresting and bringing charges against dozens of former and current U.S. officials (from every U.S. administration since at least Reagan) for planning and waging wars of aggression and for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The proposed U.S. aggression in Syria is based on lies, as with all prior U.S. initiations of aggression.*
The present U.S. government claims to be responding to the gas attack that killed Syrian civilians, but there is no consensus on who is responsible for the gas attack. Rather than wait for the U.N. to complete its investigation, U.S. threats caused the U.N. chemical weapons investigators to flee Syria. Why did the U.S. do that? Does an unhindered U.N. investigation pose a threat?
Even if this is a police action, there is no cover of international law, no support in the United Nations or even in NATO.
That means the proposed U.S. intervention is, at best, a unilateral, lawless, vigilante action.
This time there is no "coalition," even less of one than with the war of aggression on Iraq.
The only candidates for such a "coalition" include
- France (the former European colonizer of Syria, which should be paying reparations for its past crimes against that country)
- Saudi Arabia (the worst regime in the world, supporting not the Syrian revolution but the worst extremist jihadists who have infiltrated into Syria)
- Israel (under the control of parties that have explicitly declared the desire to see all Arab nations smashed and balkanized)
and
- Turkey (under the control of an Islamist party facing its own popular uprising and, like all Turkish governments, interested only in the suppression of the Kurds living in Syria)
But of course it's even worse than that!
The proposed aggression invites attack on the U.S.
Where there is no threat whatsoever to the U.S., the proposed U.S. aggression creates a threat! It is a gamble with our lives.
It also creates the threat of a wider war. With Russia, Iran, France, Turkey, Saudi and the Gulf States, Hizbollah and Iraq all involved in different parts of this conflict, a U.S. attack raises the chance of a world war from zero to something greater than zero. No matter how low, that is an unacceptable risk.
There is a new Iranian president seeking peace with the U.S. Iran and the U.S., together with Russia and the EU, can negotiate a solution to end hostilities in Syria.
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Note
* Don't come at me with your examples of "Stopping Hitler" unless you care to argue that the U.S. started World War II. In 1941 the U.S. was attacked and defended itself. This has nothing to do with the constant covert and overt wars the U.S. has waged around the world ever since.
Among the covert wars but never much of a secret was of course that the U.S. armed and trained one side in the Rwandan conflict while France armed and backed the other, meaning that the civil war there was partly the result of Western intervention, contrary to the lie that the West didn't intervene. France intervened to protect those who committed the genocide. And for 20 years "Rwanda" has been used as the favored example of the humanitarian imperialists. They rely on ignorance.
** The U.S. military should exist solely for its stated function of "defense." Of course, it exists mainly to eat half of the U.S. discretionary budget in the corporate crusade against self-manufactured threats.
That only works with followers.
I liked Dean when he said the right things, in 2003-2004. That doesn't make me a follower of Dean. So when he says the wrong things, as he often has, being an establishment politician in the end, I don't really give a fuck.
Following is a problem for a lot of people, of course, as we see with the Obama followers on this board. (These are just one of 101 varieties of followers of idols or celebrities or leaders in the world, nothing exceptional about them.) The heads of real followers never explode. This only happens if their preference was for the right thing, i.e., in those cases where they became followers only because they trusted in the leader they chose to do the right thing. However, most followers come to prefer the personality to whatever the moral question is. It makes things simple. You can never go wrong, all you have to do is assume your idol is always right.
You're welcome.
How many people did the US kill in Iraq?
How many will it kill in the next war?
Under international law and treaties dating back to the Kellog-Briand pact of 1928, war is a no-no.
Aggressive war is considered the highest international crime according to the Nuremberg principles that established modern international law. It is seen as the war crime that combines and contains all of the other war crimes.
In the post-World War II era, the government that has most often broken the prohibition on aggressive war -- by invading or bombing other nations not for reasons of self-defense -- is without a doubt the United States government (here called U.S.G. to distinguish it from the country and its people).
In the post-WWII era, this government is also responsible for killing easily the greatest number of combatants and non-combatants outside its own borders.
This government outspends the military budgets of almost all other governments combined.
It is responsible for at times more than 2/3 of the international arms trade, thus maintaining an international order based on force and guaranteeing that regimes that carry out their own atrocities will be armed to the teeth.
No top-level architects, commanders, planners, corporate profiteers or major perpetrators of U.S. government operations of war have ever been brought before U.S. or international courts to pay for their crimes.
In fact, some of the worst perpetrators of war crimes in world history, such as Kissinger and the war cabinets of the Bush administrations (father and son) enjoy incredibly rich rewards stemming directly from their activities as mass murderers. They do so publicly; some are consulted or at least hailed even by the present administration.
Sooner or later, all of the U.S.G. wars come to be whitewashed as in some way noble. We see this currently with the absolutely horrific and genocidal 20-year invasion the U.S.G. conducted in Indochina.
War means profits and war is celebrated as heroic.
These are surely among the reasons why U.S.G. officials so readily resort to renewed wars, even when, as in the current case, every other country turns against the operation, including (astonishingly) even the UK.
What are you going to do about all this, hm?
The U.S.G. as one of the most frequent violators of international law has no standing to play enforcer of it. Don't be blaming Assad or whoever the latest designated "Hitler" will be for the next bloody war started to justify the U.S.G. war machine.
.
The USG just blocked complete investigation...
by declaring the case against Assad definitive on the basis of Israeli intel reports and preparing immediate bombardment, causing the UN to withdraw the inspection team that was already in place before the gas attack. The USG "evidence" meanwhile is Israeli intel hear-say and supposed super-secret intercepts. (This is the same USG that many times has confabulated the cause for wars and that more recently was officially denying any form of NSA spying on domestic targets just before the Snowden revelations exposed that as a total lie.)
Why didn't the USG wait for the UN inspectors to make a proper investigation and issue a finding, rather than force them out of the country on the basis of extremely weak "evidence"?
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