I would advise anyone living near US/Nato launch sites and major military bases to look at possibly reserving a ticket to head as far from there as they can. Good bicycles are the best since they can go without fuel and bypass jammed roads. I am contacting friends in Northern Europe to give them a similar advice. My impression was that this chain of events was likely to happen last spring, but they seem to have taken a year longer. Spring is the war season in the Northern Hemisphere. Everything is now possible.
From the transcript of his speech about the attack, it sounds like the intelligence community has pretty solid evidence and proof that the aircraft taking part in the bombing left from the particular airfield that was targeted by the cruise missile strike.
I shall hope that this will signal a renewal in the current administration's efforts to rely on actual government intel services for strategic knowledge, as opposed to listening to talking heads on particular mainstream news and taking them at their word...
Also, just checking the news updates and it appears that the President did not clear this strike with congress, but instead informed the Russian authorities about his intentions before issuing the order. Is there any more clarification on this?
Trump didn't need to clear it with congress, especially if there were suspicions another attack was imminent. (In any case, he has 90 days to get official sanction from congress.) Also worthy of note was the Russians could have shot the missiles down but didn't.
Why do you think informing the Russians was inappropriate?
The situation is very delicate - two superpowers fight a war, supporting in a limited way two opposing sides of a conflict. US informing the Russians means they give them enough time to evacuate their people. The intention is not to kill Russians or to start a much more terrible war.
Well, he did. If you recall carefully, he had wmd that he failed to register with the un inspection team. (He had made them before, they were cataloged by the un and he was supposed to submit to periodic inspection to make sure they were still under seal). After the us invaded, those and were found, of course still under seal and not a threat to anyone. The us quietly took them away to be disposed.
Basically, either Hussein was incompetent or he was trying to play a game of brinkmanship with the international community that he lost. Whether or not his actions justified invasion by the us is debatable (I do not believe so). Also the us repeatedly blatantly misrepresented Hussein to paint him as collaborating with "terrorists". but the fact is he did have wmd.
"There's no doubt Iraq hasn't fully complied with its disarmament obligations as set forth by the Security Council in its resolution. But on the other hand, since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity has been verifiably eliminated ... We have to remember that this missing 5-10% doesn't necessarily constitute a threat ... It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons program which in its totality doesn't amount to much, but which is still prohibited ... We can't give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can't close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously, we can't reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capacity worthy of war"
Thinking someone has them and watching someone use them are a bit different. As it happens Saddam did actually use chemical weapons against the Kurds in the 80s.
I don't think the US sold him chemical weapons, maybe the chemicals to make chemical weapons. But Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Iraq to sell him high resolution satellite imagery of norther Iraq, so Saddam knew exactly where the chemical weapons he attacked the Kurds with needed to be dropped.
while the US did a lot of shady things in Iraq, selling chemical weapons was not one of them. Iraq manufactured all of their CW, and the expertise to make those factories came from Germany. The financing to build those factories came from the UK.
There's little doubt that the aircraft left that airfield. What both sides are discussing is the origin of the gas.
From the article:
"Russia said the deaths were caused by a Syrian strike on a terrorist chemical lab, but the United States, other nations and human rights groups rejected that claim as baseless."
Syria used sarin gas on civilians. There are few things as terrifying and atrocious as chemical weapons. It is absolute insanity to use nerve gas, never mind the other war crimes committed by the Assad regime.
You can't just ignore the photos, videos, testimonies, articles in international media with different ideologies only to base your thesis in "It's my opinion". Well, in fact you can, but your opinion doesn't deserve to be respected.
Nobody questions the attack - the only unknown is who perpetrated it. Whoever planned it knew very well that using a chemical weapon, especially on civilians, is likely to meet a very strong reaction. We've seen it in the past. That raises questions why anyone would do it, especially Assad who is now winning the war.
There are so many possibilities here. One of them is that Trump is being manipulated by the intelligence.
They did X horrid thing! Lets go invade Y country!. If you disagree you are a horrid person!
A extreme claim against something is not proof of the claim itself. Regardless of it happening this kind of FOR THE CHILDREN social shaming is unacceptable.
Lets not jump the gun on repeated military campaigns.
For nearly a decade, Ketchum, a psychiatrist, went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel—or, at least, he told himself such things. To achieve his dream, he worked tirelessly at a secluded Army research facility, testing chemical weapons on hundreds of healthy soldiers, and thinking all along that he was doing good.
1) They probably did something terrible to kids. They have been doing since the beginning of the war on Syria, the difference is the news coverage this time. Yes, that was manipulated. But the gas attacks had been repeated for ages. For christ sake, read some news outside of american media. Have you seen what has been hapenning to kids in this war since the beginning??? "claim they did something terrible"
2) Bombing some random country is not the solution. Americans. You are the only country in the world that did not perceived your military is stupid and invasive and destructive. This is not an argument NO ONE ELSE DOES ANYMORE BUT YOUR STUPID ASS NATIONALISTIC TRUMP VOTING ASS. It's like: Oh you hit someone you're an awful person, I'LL KILL YOUR WHOLE FAMILY.
"The U.S. strikes —59 missiles launched from the USS Ross and USS Porter — hit the government-controlled Shayrat air base in central Syria, where U.S. officials say the Syrian military planes that dropped the chemicals had taken off. The U.S. missiles hit at 8:45 p.m. in Washington, 3:45 Friday morning in Syria. The missiles targeted the base's airstrips, hangars, control tower and ammunition areas, officials said.
The attack killed some Syrians and wounded others, Talal Barazi, the governor of Syria's Homs province, told The Associated Press. He didn't give precise numbers."
I am generally anti-war, anti-Trump, anti-Republican... so you can imagine my surprise at the sense of relief this act has given me. Assad has been stomping on innocents in his little part of the world without substantive rebuke for far too long. What's the point of the US's ideals if we don't stand up to the bullies of the world? I know intervention leads to horrors, but refusal to act to stop war crimes is almost as morally reprehensible as committing them yourself. Anyone else thinking along the same lines right now?
I agree that Assad is "stomping on innocents". But so are the rebels he is fighting, namely ISIS and Al Qaeda and similar groups in a smorgasbord of terror. Shall we bomb them too (and thereby strengthen Assad)? Mideast politics are horrendously complicated and need to be untangled carefully, as one would untangle the wiring in a bomb. Unintended consequences are the norm, unfortunately.
Absolutely right. We shouldn't use the same methods to fight terrorism, though. If one of your opponents plays the centralized-government military game, play by those rules, if another plays by the decentralized-guerilla warfare game, play that. At the end of the day I think it's the US's responsibility, as arguably the most powerful military force on earth, to defend humans caught in the crossfire of other military actors. My support of unilateral action against Assad does not preclude my support for fighting the smaller repressive regimes he claims to be chasing.
what about, for a change, US didn't bomb yet another state and civilians into oblivion for something suspiciously well timed with trump domestic issues (Waging dog movie again, anybody?).
In fact, please stick your crappy US ideals somewhere deep and keep it there. Nobody in this world cares about them anymore, you guys lost all the credit for next 100 years already. US has nothing to give to this world anymore in terms of freedom. Many countries are way ahead. US ideals in face of US reality are nothing but a sad joke.
Just because an anti-Assad militia is Muslim doesn’t make it a terrorist organization. Approximately everybody in that whole region are Muslim. Of course the rebels are Muslim. A few of them have links to or are affiliated with terrorist organizations, but when you’re involved in a fight for survival you take help from anyone offering it. Fights like this are messy and dangerous and no good ever comes of them. But they still need to be fought. Trump is about to learn this.
This wasn't much of a rebuke. The message to Assad is that killing innocent people is fine--just don't do it with chemicals.
I find Trump's sudden reversal on this very suspicious. This seems to be mainly a politically motivated action that 1 - makes him look tougher than Obama on the 'red line' issue and 2 - deflects from the Russia investigation.
Things will get interesting (in a very bad way) if Assad calls the bluff.
Bearing in mind Assad has already previously used chemical weapons, and Trump's campaign vow not to intervene was well after that, one really has to wonder what his thinking is on this.
I'm not saying we shouldn't intervene, I don't see how the international community can let something like this stand, but how can he justify being against intervening after the previous chemical attacks when he was a candidate, but order intervention after chemical attacks as president? Russia and China are going to have a field day arguing this point in the Security Council. It seriously weakens the US position.
I'm thinking along those lines. I'm not American but very, very, anti-war/military. However, after all the shitty wars the world has been involved in throughout the last few decades it was bothering me that we would stand by and watch the horrors inflicted on innocent civilians AND support Assad. The problem of course is how does it all end when you have a brutal dictator vs. ISIS but to stand by and watch for the most part is immoral. I don't know what the course of action should be (arrest Assad, continue to bombard ISIS out of existence?) but something needs to be done. It's disheartening the Trump is the one to do it because that's a man I don't want running a war.
With the media, "believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see" is prudent. After having been dragged along by the nose in the case of Iraq's (non-existent) WMDs, the world should know better than to eat any old narrative presented, including this one about chemical weapons attacks.
What remains surprising to me is that this is still considered an extreme and/or paranoid attitude by many otherwise educated people. Is it really so difficult to believe that entities like Associated Press or the Washington Post, privately held entities, serve specific interests? Or that the power elite, a small group that holds 95%+ of the world's wealth, would put those resources to use in shaping public opinion to their ends?
Yet even suggesting the possibility, that you can't necessarily believe what you read in the biggest newspaper (or, shocker, the press bureaus), will yield uncomfortable looks shot back and forth, like you might be strapped with a suicide bomb. I suppose it is a modern day taboo that we can't trust the central institutions in our society.
Of course we can't trust them. That's why we have a free press and free speech - so that there is no central authority controlling the media. Anyone who wants to set up an independent media, or carry out any form of independent investigation or reporting can do so. It's strength in diversity. Anyone who has reason to doubt these reports can do exactly what these reporters did, and in fact there are plenty of cases of incorrect reports being exposed. That's the system working as it is supposed to.
>Anyone who wants to set up an independent media, or carry out any form of independent investigation or reporting can do so.
I can't - I don't have the resources or expertise to set up a global media conglomerate.
Can you ?
I could try a start up, but I would need to take venture money and that comes with giving up some control...
Pretty soon we are going to reach the conclusion that there are maybe a couple of people in the world who could, in theory, create a media outlet able to compete with the established ones.
I don't have the resources or expertise to set up a global media conglomerate.
Start small. Grab a camera, buy a plane ticket, set up a twitter account and a web page. Congratulations you are now a journalist. If your work is good you will find an audience a grow from there.
There are also lots of people already doing this, and you can follow their work if you wish
The interesting thing to me is that this same argument could be made about anything. Did the Big Bang happen, or are there a bunch of anti-religion folks? I can't independently prove the 'proof' about the Big Bang. How about global warming? Maybe there's a secret society of ludites that want us to return to a pre-industrial era. I find all three scenarios equally likely, which is not zero, but not too much higher than zero.
There quite different scenarios though. We never saw WMD's or saw them used. Iraq had show no agression to the western world especially compared to some other countries - and yet we believed the lies. In this case we know for a fact Syria had chemical weapons because they agreed to decommission them. We've seen evidence of several chemical attacks on Syrian people. There's been a civil war going on for 7 years. The only question remaining is who launched the chemical attacks? Given the horrors that have been happening over there and the reluctance of any western nation to get involved I think that, although the public should remain vigilant when it comes to evidence for going to war, this situation is very very different to Iraq.
They've expelled UN inspectors and paraded their troops in NBC gear, started moving trucks in and out of their old sites to look like there was something there.
You forget that slightly over 10 years before 9/11 Saddam gased the Kurds and killed 1000s of people.
It's really disgusting when domestic politics spills out into the outside, resulting in wars and misery. I wish this vestige of imperialist times, the practice of "short victorious war" would finally die off.
And so we jump into a 20-sided civil war that Russia also has a strong vested interest in (that airbase was being used by Russia to stage some of its operations -- interestingly enough, no Russian stuff was destroyed)
US military intervention in the Middle East. What could go wrong?
Independent report by MIT researchers conclusively refuted US claims that the 2013 sarin attacks were conducted by the Syrian Government after analysis of the rocket trajectories: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
I would caution against believing any media reports until a similar analysis is done for the current incident. Assad has no reason for jeopardizing his current favorable position.
> Most significant, he [Obama] failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.
> When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
I think many of us are asking the same thing: Is the intelligence we're being fed cherry picked.
It's unsettling that the government and the media does not have to be accountable to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which is what the general public expects.
What happens to those people who mislead us, and are we finally going to smarten up?
Because calling for the UN Security Council to do something is easy but often doesn't achieve anything, Russia, with its veto, is hardly going to allow its ally in Assad to be implicated is it?
The question for Trudeau is - when Russia says no, then what?
So there are a lot of sinister theories floating around these comments... might I be so bold as to propose that this is simply what it looks like?
People have attributed Machiavellian goals to Trump's childishness before, and it turned out he was just being childish. I have zero problem believing he saw the pictures of gassed children and directly instructed Mattis to smack Assad.
Honestly I see this as Trump being the broken clock right twice a day. Putin has long used his status as a nuclear power to muscle his way around (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, etc) as he knows that other nations will think twice about shooting at his forces, so long as his actions remain reasonably limited and he expands his influence slowly. It's about time someone called him on that.
As for whether the Syrian government actually launched the strike, keep in mind that the US, for all its flaws, has the best equipped and most expansive intelligence apparatus in the world. Whatever Trump thinks, I assure you THEY do not want another Iraq-like mistake and almost certainly crossed every t and dotted every i on this.
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[ 17.4 ms ] story [ 2236 ms ] threadI shall hope that this will signal a renewal in the current administration's efforts to rely on actual government intel services for strategic knowledge, as opposed to listening to talking heads on particular mainstream news and taking them at their word...
Also, just checking the news updates and it appears that the President did not clear this strike with congress, but instead informed the Russian authorities about his intentions before issuing the order. Is there any more clarification on this?
Basically, either Hussein was incompetent or he was trying to play a game of brinkmanship with the international community that he lost. Whether or not his actions justified invasion by the us is debatable (I do not believe so). Also the us repeatedly blatantly misrepresented Hussein to paint him as collaborating with "terrorists". but the fact is he did have wmd.
"There's no doubt Iraq hasn't fully complied with its disarmament obligations as set forth by the Security Council in its resolution. But on the other hand, since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity has been verifiably eliminated ... We have to remember that this missing 5-10% doesn't necessarily constitute a threat ... It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons program which in its totality doesn't amount to much, but which is still prohibited ... We can't give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can't close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously, we can't reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capacity worthy of war"
"Russia said the deaths were caused by a Syrian strike on a terrorist chemical lab, but the United States, other nations and human rights groups rejected that claim as baseless."
Syria used sarin gas on civilians. There are few things as terrifying and atrocious as chemical weapons. It is absolute insanity to use nerve gas, never mind the other war crimes committed by the Assad regime.
Also please don't down vote me because my opinion is different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LULzvg1gA5U
The BBC is reporting bombings in Aleppo hospitals every 3 months... The question is, how many hospitals are there in Aleppo? 50?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=aleppo+hospital
A extreme claim against something is not proof of the claim itself. Regardless of it happening this kind of FOR THE CHILDREN social shaming is unacceptable.
Lets not jump the gun on repeated military campaigns.
Dying from gas is no more horrible than those.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/operation-delir...
2) Bombing some random country is not the solution. Americans. You are the only country in the world that did not perceived your military is stupid and invasive and destructive. This is not an argument NO ONE ELSE DOES ANYMORE BUT YOUR STUPID ASS NATIONALISTIC TRUMP VOTING ASS. It's like: Oh you hit someone you're an awful person, I'LL KILL YOUR WHOLE FAMILY.
3) Hacker news is stupid.
How many will die this time?
"The U.S. strikes —59 missiles launched from the USS Ross and USS Porter — hit the government-controlled Shayrat air base in central Syria, where U.S. officials say the Syrian military planes that dropped the chemicals had taken off. The U.S. missiles hit at 8:45 p.m. in Washington, 3:45 Friday morning in Syria. The missiles targeted the base's airstrips, hangars, control tower and ammunition areas, officials said.
The attack killed some Syrians and wounded others, Talal Barazi, the governor of Syria's Homs province, told The Associated Press. He didn't give precise numbers."
https://www.thequint.com/world/2017/04/07/usa-attack-syria-g...
In fact, please stick your crappy US ideals somewhere deep and keep it there. Nobody in this world cares about them anymore, you guys lost all the credit for next 100 years already. US has nothing to give to this world anymore in terms of freedom. Many countries are way ahead. US ideals in face of US reality are nothing but a sad joke.
Just. Keep. Away.Your. Fucking. Armies.
I find Trump's sudden reversal on this very suspicious. This seems to be mainly a politically motivated action that 1 - makes him look tougher than Obama on the 'red line' issue and 2 - deflects from the Russia investigation.
Things will get interesting (in a very bad way) if Assad calls the bluff.
I'm not saying we shouldn't intervene, I don't see how the international community can let something like this stand, but how can he justify being against intervening after the previous chemical attacks when he was a candidate, but order intervention after chemical attacks as president? Russia and China are going to have a field day arguing this point in the Security Council. It seriously weakens the US position.
What remains surprising to me is that this is still considered an extreme and/or paranoid attitude by many otherwise educated people. Is it really so difficult to believe that entities like Associated Press or the Washington Post, privately held entities, serve specific interests? Or that the power elite, a small group that holds 95%+ of the world's wealth, would put those resources to use in shaping public opinion to their ends?
Yet even suggesting the possibility, that you can't necessarily believe what you read in the biggest newspaper (or, shocker, the press bureaus), will yield uncomfortable looks shot back and forth, like you might be strapped with a suicide bomb. I suppose it is a modern day taboo that we can't trust the central institutions in our society.
I can't - I don't have the resources or expertise to set up a global media conglomerate.
Can you ?
I could try a start up, but I would need to take venture money and that comes with giving up some control...
Pretty soon we are going to reach the conclusion that there are maybe a couple of people in the world who could, in theory, create a media outlet able to compete with the established ones.
So not 'anyone'.
Start small. Grab a camera, buy a plane ticket, set up a twitter account and a web page. Congratulations you are now a journalist. If your work is good you will find an audience a grow from there.
There are also lots of people already doing this, and you can follow their work if you wish
US military intervention in the Middle East. What could go wrong?
I would caution against believing any media reports until a similar analysis is done for the current incident. Assad has no reason for jeopardizing his current favorable position.
> Most significant, he [Obama] failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.
> When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
I think many of us are asking the same thing: Is the intelligence we're being fed cherry picked.
It's unsettling that the government and the media does not have to be accountable to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which is what the general public expects.
What happens to those people who mislead us, and are we finally going to smarten up?
https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450
The question for Trudeau is - when Russia says no, then what?
People have attributed Machiavellian goals to Trump's childishness before, and it turned out he was just being childish. I have zero problem believing he saw the pictures of gassed children and directly instructed Mattis to smack Assad.
Honestly I see this as Trump being the broken clock right twice a day. Putin has long used his status as a nuclear power to muscle his way around (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, etc) as he knows that other nations will think twice about shooting at his forces, so long as his actions remain reasonably limited and he expands his influence slowly. It's about time someone called him on that.
As for whether the Syrian government actually launched the strike, keep in mind that the US, for all its flaws, has the best equipped and most expansive intelligence apparatus in the world. Whatever Trump thinks, I assure you THEY do not want another Iraq-like mistake and almost certainly crossed every t and dotted every i on this.