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U.S. launches cruise missile strike on Syria after chemical weapons attack

62 points by hjalle 9y ago

unlmtd 9y ago
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.
hncommenter_ 9y ago
Good luck, America
cyberferret 9y ago
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...
- manicdee 9y ago
  Remember when we had strong evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    Fair enough - point taken. 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?
    - empressplay 9y ago
      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.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
      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.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    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.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      Scott Ritter (not exactly a gwb apologist): "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"
  - k-mcgrady 9y ago
    Syrian chemical weapons are very different though because we've seen them and they agreed to destroy them.
  - simonh 9y ago
    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.
    - pabloski 9y ago
      Chemical weapons sold by the US, to be used against Iran.
      - simonh 9y ago
        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.
      - dnautics 9y ago
        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.
- molmalo 9y ago
  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."
xchip 9y ago
We've seen that before. In order to attack a country you first claim they did something terrible to kids, then you bomb the hell out of them.
- pathy 9y ago
  You are joking right? 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.
  - xchip 9y ago
    How do you know those news are true? Also please don't down vote me because my opinion is different.
    - almavi 9y ago
      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.
      - xchip 9y ago
        @almave, Ron Paul explains better than me why this looks like a false flag attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LULzvg1gA5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LULzvg1gA5U
      - dagenleg 9y ago
        Yes, the testimonies. Remember those Kuwaiti incubator babies?
      - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
        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.
kchoudhu 9y ago
The quickest solution to a crisis at the approval polls is a war in the Middle East. How many will die this time?
- dnautics 9y ago
  Zero, so far. Let's hope it stays at that.
  - serf 9y ago
    AP ~2-3 hrs ago: "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."
    - dnautics 9y ago
      Ah, before that the report was zero. Thank you for correcting my understanding.
    - hjalle 9y ago
      Looks like 6 dead https://www.thequint.com/world/2017/04/07/usa-attack-syria-government-cruise-missiles-civil-war https://www.thequint.com/world/2017/04/07/usa-attack-syria-g...
  - timdev2 9y ago
    59 cruise missiles and nobody died?
    - dnautics 9y ago
      Russia and (by proxy Syria) were given advance warning. The target was military, so presumably no civilians live there.
audessuscest 9y ago
U.S. are still an ally of ISIS. That's a shame...
- simonh 9y ago
  That's bullshit. US planes are bombing ISIS as well.
  - audessuscest 9y ago
    ... : http://heavy.com/news/2017/04/isis-syria-attack-trump-us-missile-assault-response-terrorism-assad-homs/ http://heavy.com/news/2017/04/isis-syria-attack-trump-us-mis...
audessuscest 9y ago
U.S. are still an ally of ISIS
nefitty 9y ago
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?
- mistermumble 9y ago
  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.
  - nefitty 9y ago
    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.
    - saiya-jin 9y ago
      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. Keep. Away.Your. Fucking. Armies.
aedron 9y ago
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.
- simonh 9y ago
  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.
  - delegate 9y ago
    >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. So not 'anyone'.
    - 9y ago
dagenleg 9y ago
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.
llamataboot 9y ago
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?
dollarchy 9y ago
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 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.
- goleafsgo 9y ago
  Thank you for the link. > 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?
throwaway87541 9y ago
Note: This comes at a time when the "moderate opposition" people and Assad's side were/are meeting in Geneve for peace talks.
sunshinerag 9y ago
So was there any investigation at all that this was a false flag attack by the rebels?
chj 9y ago
Why can't U.S. have a leader like Trudeau? https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450 https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450
- cmdkeen 9y ago
  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?
  - chj 9y ago
    Ok, so let's skip investigation and just attack Syria without evidences.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
scottLobster 9y ago
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.

62 points by hjalle 9y ago

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.

hncommenter_ 9y ago

Good luck, America

cyberferret 9y ago

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...

manicdee 9y ago
Remember when we had strong evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Fair enough - point taken. 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?
  - empressplay 9y ago
    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.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    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.
- dnautics 9y ago
  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.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    Scott Ritter (not exactly a gwb apologist): "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"
- k-mcgrady 9y ago
  Syrian chemical weapons are very different though because we've seen them and they agreed to destroy them.
- simonh 9y ago
  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.
  - pabloski 9y ago
    Chemical weapons sold by the US, to be used against Iran.
    - simonh 9y ago
      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.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      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.
molmalo 9y ago
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."

xchip 9y ago

We've seen that before. In order to attack a country you first claim they did something terrible to kids, then you bomb the hell out of them.

pathy 9y ago
You are joking right? 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.
- xchip 9y ago
  How do you know those news are true? Also please don't down vote me because my opinion is different.
  - almavi 9y ago
    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.
    - xchip 9y ago
      @almave, Ron Paul explains better than me why this looks like a false flag attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LULzvg1gA5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LULzvg1gA5U
    - dagenleg 9y ago
      Yes, the testimonies. Remember those Kuwaiti incubator babies?
    - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
      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.

kchoudhu 9y ago

The quickest solution to a crisis at the approval polls is a war in the Middle East. How many will die this time?

dnautics 9y ago
Zero, so far. Let's hope it stays at that.
- serf 9y ago
  AP ~2-3 hrs ago: "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."
  - dnautics 9y ago
    Ah, before that the report was zero. Thank you for correcting my understanding.
  - hjalle 9y ago
    Looks like 6 dead https://www.thequint.com/world/2017/04/07/usa-attack-syria-government-cruise-missiles-civil-war https://www.thequint.com/world/2017/04/07/usa-attack-syria-g...
- timdev2 9y ago
  59 cruise missiles and nobody died?
  - dnautics 9y ago
    Russia and (by proxy Syria) were given advance warning. The target was military, so presumably no civilians live there.

audessuscest 9y ago

U.S. are still an ally of ISIS. That's a shame...

simonh 9y ago
That's bullshit. US planes are bombing ISIS as well.
- audessuscest 9y ago
  ... : http://heavy.com/news/2017/04/isis-syria-attack-trump-us-missile-assault-response-terrorism-assad-homs/ http://heavy.com/news/2017/04/isis-syria-attack-trump-us-mis...

audessuscest 9y ago

U.S. are still an ally of ISIS

nefitty 9y ago

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?

mistermumble 9y ago
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.
- nefitty 9y ago
  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.
  - saiya-jin 9y ago
    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. Keep. Away.Your. Fucking. Armies.

aedron 9y ago

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.

simonh 9y ago
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.
- delegate 9y ago
  >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. So not 'anyone'.
  - 9y ago

dagenleg 9y ago

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.

llamataboot 9y ago

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?

dollarchy 9y ago

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 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.

goleafsgo 9y ago
Thank you for the link. > 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?

throwaway87541 9y ago

Note: This comes at a time when the "moderate opposition" people and Assad's side were/are meeting in Geneve for peace talks.

sunshinerag 9y ago

So was there any investigation at all that this was a false flag attack by the rebels?

chj 9y ago

Why can't U.S. have a leader like Trudeau? https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450 https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450

cmdkeen 9y ago
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?
- chj 9y ago
  Ok, so let's skip investigation and just attack Syria without evidences.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

scottLobster 9y ago

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.