Speeches (“Becoming Men and Women of Integrity” 12/6/2011: “Tad R. Callister was a member of the Presidency of the Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when this devotional address was given on 6 December 2011.”
It seems as though the Iranian government is certain about the damning evidence that confirms the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons. This causes an ethical dilemma for the Islamic Republic, including in how it presents the case to its citizens. Turning a blind eye to this information would also undermine the decades-long attempts by the Iranian government to punish those responsible for targeting citizens with a similar campaign during the Iran-Iraq war, using internationally banned chemical weapons. Iranian records indicate that the Iranian government is seeking to prosecute 400 international companies accused of providing assistance in the field of chemical weapons to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime (Al Jazeera Net, 2007).
His breath was loud and hard, his mouth open wide as he struggled to force air into his lungs. ”I am,” said Muhammad Moussavi, a ”living martyr.”
Almost 15 years after Iran’s war with Iraq ended, Mr. Moussavi and thousands of others like him are painful reminders of the long-lasting effect of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in that eight-year conflict.
And the reason why is in the reaping today: “By any means necessary,” is not only never necessary — for whatever it may be, there are plenty of means limited only by imagination, perhaps, and a little money: on this, in fact, on might at last take a lesson from the Mujaheddin — but the lapse of ethical and moral investment in choice, even in war, perhaps especially in war, provides The Enemy opportunity for smug one-upmanship the next historic day.
In this way, the pot rightly calls the kettle black.
In the course of Iran’s brutal eight-year war with Iraq, it turns out President Reagan knowingly shipped dual use “poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses” — including anthrax and bubonic plague — to Saddam Hussein.
When in 1988, Hussein gassed Kurdish forces, the White House, by comparison with the same today, seemed . . . complacent.
This line of rant gets a bump with George W. Bush’s poker-faced claim about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear WMD capability, a claim helped along, actually, by Saddam’s own belligerent deflections of UN inspections.
Nonetheless, Iraq didn’t have those goods, and Bush, the CIA, Colin Powell, and the United States of America not only lost some integrity in the matter but took on the mantle its idiot enemies — far worse, as such tykes go — would give it: i.e., a big, clumsy, lumbering imperial power.
Of course, he who points that finger — or those who point it most often — should point it back at himself (themselves).
Moreover, such American misdeeds in still recent history may be mightily overshadowed by presence and depth of evil involved. Truly, Saddam Hussein was not such a nice guy.
Evidently, while flinging spittle at the Zionist Entity for the cause of entertaining its ignorant masses, Iran has a serious (gasp!) ethical dilemma going with Syria’s use of chemical weapons.
Then noted by Fatima Alsmadi in the above cited World Affairs piece: “The Martyr Foundation claims that 100,000 people in Iran were injured as a result of exposure to chemical gases during that war.”
If there’s a real basis for justice in the world, it may not be in what some (or one) may think God told them.
It may reside in this one fragment of thought indicating a glimmer of appreciation and consideration for others as well as one’s self: “Because it could happen to you.”
Updates
9/8/2013
At the German Bundestag Parliament in Bonn, then- German opposition leader Rudolf Dessler told CNN radio that German firms circumvented the ban on Germany exporting such lethal substances through a loophole allowed German firms to establish subsidiaries in the US, in an arrangement that operated with the full consent of the German government.
These firms worked on contractual arrangements with clearance and confidentiality agreements signed with the US Department of Defense.
From 1987 to 1993, Timmerman published the Middle East Defense News and was international correspondent for Defense Electronics. He also wrote monographs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center on efforts by Iraq , Syria and Libya to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Named in the current report are 300 firms in 36 countries, which have supplied Iran, Syria and Libya with “dual-use” technology — materiel and equipment ostensibly for civilian uses but easily diverted to military purposes.
Germany led the list with 100 companies, followed by the United States, France and Britain. Timmerman noted, however, that Germany has recently enacted tough new laws to “prevent German companies from creating another Iraq.”
What the United States has not done is provide the evidence itself — the satellite images, communications intercepts, and other data that would allow a fair-minded observer to reach the same conclusion on more than blind faith in the competence and integrity of our political leaders and intelligence services.
Perhaps the two boys are playing an old game with old cards and broken chips.
“I see you lost some states there,” says one.
“The cause lost some states, but, you know, people don’t change much. They’re still ours, and I see there’s more like them on the table.”
* * *
It’s an evil old game cooked by one party with crude assumptions: the other cannot walk away; the other cannot win; the other is there for beating and controlling; the stakes will be useful, pleasing, but of themselves are not important.
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Thursday the United States — which, in addition to being one of his country’s chief adversaries, has led the push to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government over chemical weapons — has no right to make “humanitarian claims (given) their track record” in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Putin said this week that any one-sided action would be rash. But he said he doesn’t exclude supporting U.N. action if it’s proven that the Syrian government used poison gas on its own people.
“Leaning forward” is one of Donald Rumsfeld’s favorite expressions. An old cold-war term, familiar to soldiers and spies, it means the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks. “I want every one of you to know how forward-leaning we are,” the secretary of Defense told a room full of Marine generals and Navy admirals at the North Island Naval Air Station, near San Diego, last month.
So somebody overheard something — purely circumstantial guff is what that comes to.
So we’ll go on but with something like ‘preponderance of the evidence” for guidance.
* * *
With Maher al Assad well known and with a peerless reputation, some media have dragged out an old familiar (to policy wonks): Bandar bin Sultan.
Beneath the banner, “Saudi Arabia’s ‘Chemical Bandar’ behind the Syrian chemical attacks?”, RT came out shouting, “Nothing the US claims about what happened in Syria adds up. We are being asked to believe an illogical story, when it is much more likely that it was Israel and Saudi Arabia who enabled the Obama Administration to threaten Syria with war” about half a day ago.
Of course, those who may lie know it’s the first one that counts, so going on to say, “The Obama Administration’s intelligence report on Syria was a rehash of Iraq,” seems only fair.
This finger pointing at the Saudi prince has been joined by, among others DigitalJournal, CounterPunch, OpEd News (from the video on the page and within its first 11 seconds, “It is growing increasingly possible that public outcry might make the imperial force of American exceptionalism with its humanitarian war sites set on Syria back down or at the very least delay”), PressTV, MintPress News, Larouche Pac, InfoWars, etc.
For InfoWars, Paul Joseph Watson wraps up with something between a disclaimer and validation:
UPDATE: Associated Press contacted us to confirm that Dale Gavlak is an AP correspondent, but that her story was not published under the banner of the Associated Press. We didn’t claim this was the case, we merely pointed to Gavlak’s credentials to stress that she is a credible source, being not only an AP correspondent, but also having written for PBS, BBC and Salon.com.
Proving integrity may be as difficult — it certainly is a sensitive issue — as proving dishonesty in a dimension or region in behavior in which plans, good or evil, rife with brutality, deflection, dishonesty, and disingenuous speech or listening, searching, defensive, and protective — are put together out of range of public sight and oversight.
* * *
If rebel forces suffered a mortal oops, it would seem more characteristic in Arab language culture to point the finger at someone else.
If a brigade under Maher al Assad’s command done it, it would be mafia cool to do it — record it, leak it, plaster it across the web — as rebels.
According to Iran’s PressTV, Bandar was under house arrest for an attempted coup,[35][36] while opposition sources said he was in Dhaban Prison.[34] Some rumors alleged that his coup was exposed by Russian intelligence services because of his frequent trips to Moscow to encourage cooperation against Iran.[34]
A month ago rebels fired rockets at Bashar’s motorcade as he headed for a Mosque in the centre of Damascus. The attempt to kill the President failed but one of his bodyguards, said to have been a particular favourite of his children Hafez, Karim and Zein was killed.
Many inside and outside Syria believe this may have been the last straw for the hot-headed Maher. No assassination attempt of Bashar al-Assad could go unpunished, especially not one in the heart of the capital.
The answer to “Syria’s CW Whodunit” may come to light if one intelligence industry or another turns up its cards and reveals its methods, capabilities, and limitations.
“So-and-so said” seems to be working to confuse rather than inform the public.
In addition to the challenge involving “Political Spychology” there is that other political psychology involving the character in personality associated with “malignant narcissism”, the features of which include delusions of grandeur, messianic complexes, paranoia, resistance to criticism, etc. (I’ll lay out a page on the language associated with that subject soon).
Through the lens that looks into dictatorship and across dictatorships, things may look a little different, for the want to control the subjugated by controlling a large information environment (“gaslighting” on a large scale) would seem inseparable from other behaviors having to do with hiding things while deeply controlling others.
This humility about the difficulty of reporting on a covert, invisible attack in the midst of a chaotic civil war actually adds to the credibility of the Mint account. It’s those who are most certain about matters of which they clearly lack firsthand knowledge who should make us most skeptical.
It’s not such a silly question. After all, the Americans are continually attacking everybody, aren’t they?
Then there’s the Israelis always doing a bit of assassinating, phosphorus spraying and creeping genocide in Palestine (although they’re never particular about confining their activities to Palestine).
This morning’s live feedfrom Fox featuring President Obama and Prime Minister Reinfeldt stunned me, really, as being the most open, most candid, most off-the-cuff press conference I’ve been aware of since the inauguration.
In it, Obama talked about Syria every which way — either he couldn’t get away from the subject or the reporters could not — including asserting that a transition from the Assad regime seemed impossible given the tens of thousands of civilian lives taken by the regime. Obama then noted that President Putin seemed to disagree with that logic, thereby throwing the policy-on-Syria hot potato to Putin who may look increasingly disingenuous and transparent clinging to his lines on behalf of Bashar and Maher al Assad.
If the “center will not hold” will there be a center?
When I started receiving the CTC Sentinel (from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point) I don’t believe I was vetted in any way but, so my impression was, on a controlled list for a publication neither secret nor to be redistributed.
Again, that was some years ago, and here I may be merely befuddled, paranoid, whatever.
Over the years, I’ve kept reference to CTC to myself and partially for the effects of its “granularity” — the detail in reported relationships — involved in combat arenas from Afghanistan to Somalia. Such material, I thought, wouldn’t tell anyone involved on any side of “field operations” what they didn’t already know, but it would suggest how deeply American defense intelligence and analysis gets into societies of interest, and that may have promoted some resentments in my social networks.
A few weeks ago I had cause to ask CTC (Facebook) about distribution and got back this answer: “We publish all of our research in the open source (on our website and in social media), and from there, we don’t have any control over its distribution.”
So there.
Short of subscribing to Jane’s, taking lonely walks (in the rain) around Foggy Bottom, and hanging out in Georgetown (now that I’m 90 minutes northwest of all of that — way out of town!), I think the following two links to Combating Terrorism Center and Foreign Policy (Magazine) reports are pretty good — and granular.
Rebels have been told by these states that they must endorse the SMC and its politics to gain access to future arms shipments.[5] Recently, the United States, the United Kingdom and France have all indicated that they will channel money and possibly weapons via the SMC.[6]
The SMC has provided wildly varying estimates of the total number of fighters in its member groups. In June 2013, Idris claimed to control 80,000 fighters, but days later an SMC representative insisted that the true figure is 320,000.[7] In practice, a meaningful headcount of rebels is almost impossible to make, both due to the scarcity of reliable information and to myriad problems of definition.[8] There is no disputing, however, that most of Syria’s large rebel factions have chosen to publicly align themselves with the SMC, recognizing it as the best way to tap into Gulf, Western and other support.
Old or new, what follows are just a few links addressing the role of humor in Syria’s agony.
* * *
On the Facebook page of the village’s artists, which bears the name “Posters of Occupied Kafr Nabl,” over 320 posters have been posted from the beginning of the rebellion until now. One, from the beginning of the year portrays Assad standing in pools of blood wearing a visored cap, with outstretched arms declaring “the situation is calm.”
We are keen to catch up, but neither of us wants to attract the attention of Syria’s secret police, so coffee is out of the question (the cafés are thick with mukhabarat). Instead, we keep walking, and as we walk and talk, Amjad tells me the latest checkpoint jokes.
But how to face those who film, upload and advertise such videos in the only aim of manipulating innocent children for their personal aims to incite mutual killings?
In our search for an answer to this question, “Bidayyat” came to the conclusion that irony is one of the few means capable to resist violence, hatred and sectarian killing. Irony prevails over hate speech, as it uses the more human impulses of laughter, joy, dancing and sarcasm.
Therefore, we produced this sarcastic video in the aim and hope that the two children of opposite will someday live side by side in dignity and freedom in a new Syria, free of tyrants and sectarian hatred.
“We should all be aware of the fact that when revolutionary – not evolutionary – changes come, things can get even worse. The intelligentsia should be aware of this. And it is the intelligentsia specifically that should keep this in mind and prevent society from radical steps and revolutions of all kind. We’ve had enough of it. We’ve seen so many revolutions and wars. We need decades of calm and harmonious development.”
Yes, sir! Says I, but, say, didn’t you put Maher al-Assad back in the fray?
We’re not going to get away from Syria’s chief challenge and problem, i.e., that of an absent middle or moderating political base that has left much of the the conflict “on the ground” to tyrants and extremists.
The AP interview covers, among a few other items, Putin’s views on CWs, S-300s, Obama, Snowden, gays, and terrorists.
Jolie said in a written statement issued to mark World Refugee Day, “I appeal to the world leaders — please, set aside your differences unite to end the violence, and make diplomacy succeed. The UN Security Council must live up to its responsibilities. Every 14 seconds someone crosses Syria’s border and becomes a refugee. And by the end of this year half of Syria’s population — ten million people — will be in desperate need of food, shelter and assistance. The lives of millions of people are in your hands. You must find common ground.”
BackChannels 