TBR News April 7, 2017

Apr 07 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. April 7, 2017: “There seems to be considerable errata concerning the motivations of Edward Snowden.

He is depicted as a pure-minded idealist on the one hand or a spy on the other.

The fact is that Edward has been both.

Edward worked for the CIA in Geneva, got disgusted with what he discovered and quit.

He contacted WikiLeaks.

They advised him to work for Booz Hamilton but in Hawaii.

Why?

Because in that branch there were no controls on the computers so that a user could look at, and download, whatever they wanted without leaving a footprint.

In Hong Kong, yes, Mr. Snowden was available in a Hong Kong hotel, and yes, Mr. Snowden was lodged at the Russian consulate at 30 Harbour Road, Wanchi.

Was Edward a free agent?

No, Edward was not a free agent.

For whom did Edward work?

Гла́вное разве́дывательное управле́ние

That’s who Edward worked(s) for.

And who owns WikiLeaks?

The same people.

The arrival of Edward at the Moscow airport ought to have alerted people to the true state of affairs but somehow it did not.

Although Edward got onto the Aeroflot plane in China, no one at the airport in Moscow ever saw him get off.

Expecting intelligent observations from the world’s media is a lost cause.

Edward’s treasure trove of gleaned information is the most significant intelligence coup in history, dwarfing the MAGIC intercepts of pre-WWII.

When refusdniks were allowed to exit Russia for Israel, many sleepers went with them.

Now, even the most coded and glactic material going from Washington to Tel Aviv is in Moscow before the next day dawns.

The President, using his special secret communicator, might as well be using a sound truck for all the privacy he really has.

And much of this comes from inside Langley from its compartmented workers holding Israeli citizenship.

‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.’”

Table of Contents

  • Is Assad to blame for the chemical weapons attack in Syria?
  • Putin believes US attack on Syria violates international law – spokesman
  • Trump Betrays Trumpism: Syria in the Crosshairs
  • Is Trump Going to Commit the Next Great American Catastrophe in Syria?
  • Did Assad use chemical weapons on Khan Shaikhoun to score an own goal in the international arena?
  • Resurrecting the Unholy Trinity
  • What are the End Days? A study in deception

 Is Assad to blame for the chemical weapons attack in Syria?

Is the regime of President Bashar al-Assad responsible for the chemical weapons attack in northern Syria? Experts suggest it could have been jihadi rebels. It wouldn’t be the first time.

April 6, 2017

by Matthias von Hein

DW

More than 80 people were killed by suspected chemical weapons in Khan Sheikhoun. That is about the only thing certain about the attack. Western statements place blame at the feet of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, an accusation Damascus and Moscow contest.

The Syrian regime may not have had a compelling motive, believes Günther Meyer, the director of the Research Center for the Arab World at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. “Only armed opposition groups could profit from an attack with chemical weapons,” he told DW. “With their backs against the wall, they have next to no chance of opposing the regime militarily. As President [Donald] Trump’s recent statements show, such actions make it possible for anti-Assad groups to receive further support.”

Former President Barack Obama famously drew a “red line” in 2012. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus,” he said at the time. Meyer views the statement as an “invitation for Assad’s opponents to use chemical weapons and make the Assad regime responsible for it.”

Rebels’ chemical weapons

In 2014, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported on opposition forces’ ability to use chemical weapons. In an article for the “London Review of Books,” Hersh obtained documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s own spy organization. They suggested that the Nusra Front, a Syrian offshoot of al Qaeda, had access to the sarin nerve agent. A chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013, which was blamed on Assad, was carried out by rebels, according to Hersh’s article. They wanted Washington to presume Assad had crossed Obama’s “red line” and draw the US into a war.

The Ghouta attack

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence at the time, James Clapper, was able to dissuade Obama from ordering a cruise missile strike, according to a newly-published book by Mideast expert Michael Lüders. Presumably, a deciding factor was an analysis of the chemical weapons used in Ghouta, conducted by a British military lab, which found the gas to be of a different composition than what the Syrian army possessed.

The attack took place while UN weapons inspectors were in the country, on Assad’s invitation, said Meyer. Assad had asked them to investigate a chemical weapons attack from March 2013 outside Aleppo, which killed Syrian soldiers.

“It makes no sense that the regime would carry out an attack with inspectors in the country,” he said.

Former weapons inspector Richard Lloyd and MIT professor Theodore Postol cast further doubt on Assad’s role in the Ghouta attack. They reported in 2014 that the chemical weapons could have only been fired from rebel-held territory, with a range of up to 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles).

Chemical weapons as a deterrent

At the time of the Ghouta attack, the Syrian government had access to about 600 tons of material necessary to make sarin and mustard gas. The stockpile was to counterbalance Israel’s nuclear arsenal, Meyer said. “Israel has an estimated 200 nuclear weapons,” he said. “Chemical weapons are something of a poor man’s atomic weapon.”

The US reported these chemical stockpiles had been destroyed in 2014, although the state of confusion surrounding such a war zone makes that hard to confirm.

Al Qaeda’s role

No one can say how the situation has evolved since the DIA’s assessment in 2013 of the Nusra Front’s weapons. The al Qaeda affiliate is today the most significant rebel group in the northern Syrian province of Idlib, Meyer said. Along with other jihadi extremists, it has turned itself into the “de facto ruler of Idlib.”

Assad has not hesitated to use ruthless means to stay in power. In confronting the most recent use of chemical weapons in Syria, credible questions remain as to why Assad would bring world opinion against him at a time when his continued rule is beginning to be accepted.

Putin believes US attack on Syria violates international law – spokesman

April 7, 2017

RT

President Putin “regards the strikes as aggression against a sovereign nation,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, noting that the president believes the strikes were carried out “in violation of international law, and also under an invented pretext.”

Peskov also insisted that “the Syrian army doesn’t have chemical weapons,” saying this had been “observed and confirmed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a special UN unit.”

Putin sees the US missile strike on Syria as an attempt to distract attention from civilian casualties in Iraq, Peskov added.

“This step deals significant damage to US-Russian ties, which are already in a deplorable state,” Peskov said.

The US has been ignoring the use of chemical weapons by terrorists and this is dramatically aggravating the situation, in Putin’s opinion, his spokesman said.

On Friday night, the US launched 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian military airfield that Washington claims was used on Tuesday to conduct a chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town in Idlib province. The missile strike has been condemned by Russia and Iran and sparked debate among US senators.

Moscow suspended its memorandum of understanding on flight safety in Syria with the US following the missile strike, calling the attack “a demonstration of force.” The Russian military has supported the Syrian government’s version of the events in Idlib, saying that Damascus attacked an arms depot where chemical weapons had been stockpiled by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front militants.

Trump Betrays Trumpism: Syria in the Crosshairs

Are we going to war based on fake intelligence?

April 7, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

President Donald Trump has launched an attack on a Syrian air base in retaliation for the alleged sarin gas attack supposedly carried out by Bashar al-Assad’s government on Islamist rebels in Idlib. The irony is this contradicts every statement he ever made about Syria in the presidential campaign. Furthermore, this attack takes place barely 72 hours after the alleged incident, with no clear evidence that Assad was responsible.

In ordering this strike – more than 50 missiles launched by US ships in the Mediterranean Sea – Trump has blown up a basic tenet of Trumpism to smithereens.

One of my vivid memories of the 2016 campaign is the look on Bill O’Reilly’s face when Donald Trump answered his question about intervening militarily in Syria and the Russian role in that country:

“O’Reilly: “Once Putin gets in and fights ISIS on behalf of Assad, Putin runs Syria. He owns it. He’ll never get out, never.

Trump: “Alright, okay, fine. I mean, you know, we can be in Syria. Do you want to run Syria? Do you want to own Syria? I want to rebuild our country.”

Trump campaigned against precisely the kind of intervention that he is now launching. At a news conference in the Rose Garden, with King Abdullah of Jordan looking on, he said:

“I now have responsibility. It crossed a lot of lines for me. When you kill innocent children, innocent babies – babies, little babies – with a chemical gas that is so lethal … that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line…. I do change and I am flexible. That attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me. Big impact. It was a horrible, horrible thing. It’s very, very possible that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”

Twenty-four hours after the alleged incident – with the United Nations still refusing to say whether there had been a gas attack, or, if so, who is responsible – the President of the United States does a complete turnaround, ditches a campaign promise, and takes us to the brink of a greatly expanded war in Syria.

For a little extra irony, those who have been smearing him as a “Russian agent” and are trying to destroy his presidency are the very same people who have been urging him to “act presidential” and launch an attack on the government in Damascus.

Welcome to Bizarro World, where up is down, left is right, and the biggest enemy of Trumpism is … Trump.

I’ve pinned a tweet to the top of my Twitter profile, one that you might take as a sort of journalistic credo, and it says simply this: “Where’s the evidence?” So what’s the evidence that the Syrian military, on the brink of victory against both the Islamist rebels and their allies in ISIS and al-Qaeda – and days away from a conference that was to have decided Syria’s fate – used sarin gas against a village in the Idlib region?

The only such evidence is coming from the Syrian rebels, radical Islamists who are ideologically indistinguishable from ISIS and who have committed endless atrocities in their battle to overthrow Assad. They claim that dozens of children, women, and other civilians are the victims of a deliberate attack by Syrian government forces.

In a court of law, the record of a witness is a crucial matter. If it can be proved that the witness has lied, the judge can and usually does tell the jury to disregard their testimony. In the case of Syria’s Islamist rebels, their record of serial fabrications speaks for itself. I wrote about this in detail in 2013:

“Those rollicking jihadists, the Syrian rebels, love a joke: although they can be deadly serious – such as when they’re eating the internal organs of their enemies – what they enjoy more than anything is a really good prank. There was the time they claimed the Assad regime was killing babies in incubators – not very original, but hey, it worked for the Kuwaitis! Then there was the ‘massacre’ at Houla, which was alleged to have killed 32 children and over 60 adults: a photo started appearing in the mainstream media, documenting the slaughter. The state-supported BBC was first to run with it – until it was discovered the supposedly incriminating photo was taken in Iraq during the recent war. The photographer was justifiably furious, the story was withdrawn, and the Syrian rebels went back to the drawing board.

The photo was supplied to the BBC by the rebels.

This record alone is enough to condemn them out of their own mouths, but here’s a list some of the other hoaxes they’ve tried to pull off:

  • In 2013, Islamist rebels claimed the Assad government had dropped chemical weapons on civilians in the city of Aleppo. It turned out to be tear gas or a similar substance used for riot control.
  • That same year, the rebels claimed Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons in the town of Ghouta, but this was debunked by UN war crimes official Carla del Ponte, who supervised the Hague investigation into crimes committed during the Kosovo war. Del Ponte said it was the rebels, not the Syrian government, who were responsible for the gas attack. Award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh pointed his finger at the Turks and the rebel group known as al-Nusra as being behind what was a false flag attack.
  • When President Obama was about to authorize an attack on the Assad regime in response to the alleged poison gas attack on Ghouta, he was brought up short by DNI James Clapper, as Jeffrey Goldberg reported in The Atlantic:

“Obama was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who interrupted the President’s Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each morning from Clapper’s analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a “slam dunk.” He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a ‘slam dunk’ in Iraq.”

  • And don’t forget the case of “Syria Danny,” whose on-camera antics were exposed as he staged a Syrian army “attack” for the benefit of CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
  • Fake videos are a favorite ploy utilized by both sides in the Syrian civil war. Here’s a compilation, along with an account of how easily Western reporters were fooled.

Phil Giraldi, a former intelligence official, tells our very own Scott Horton that the “military and intelligence personnel,” “intimately familiar” with the intelligence, say that the narrative that Assad or Russia did it is a “sham,” instead endorsing the Russian narrative that Assad’s forces had bombed a rebel storage facility containing some sort of chemical weapons. Giraldi’s intelligence sources are “astonished” at the government and media narrative and are considering going public out of concern over the danger of making a bad situation even worse.

Are we really going to war based on dubious “intelligence” like this? Remember the last time we did that?

The alleged chemical attack occurred in Idlib, where “al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Turkish-backed Salafi” are in control. These are the “rebels” whose word the Trump administration is taking as gospel – the same people who took down the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon on 9/11.

What is going on here?

Let’s look at the larger picture. US intelligence agencies have been conducting a war of attrition against the Trump administration, leaking classified information compiled by Obama era officials and spearheading an investigation into alleged “Russian influence” on the 2016 election. These same spooks have been working with the Islamist rebels for years, alongside the Saudis and the Gulf emirates, in an effort to overthrow Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Trump’s past opposition to their efforts is undoubtedly a big factor in their campaign to discredit the President. Could Trump’s capitulation and sudden turnaround on this issue be an effort to “make a deal” with the intelligence community?

The Syrian attack also has domestic political value to Trump in that it shows him being “tough” on Russia. As the investigation into his alleged “collusion” with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign proceeds, he’s no doubt hoping that some of the pressure may be taken off. In my view, it’s a vain hope – but he’ll learn that lesson soon enough.

There’s no such thing as “foreign policy” – it’s all about domestic politics. Leaders make decisions based not on the facts on the ground but on their calculation of how one course will redound to their benefit while the other course will hurt them on the home front. Trump, for all his claims that he’s “not a politician,” is acting just like they all do in this case.

But will this about-face on Syria really benefit him politically?

Millions of Americans voted for him because he promised to abjure “regime change” operations like the one that backfired so badly in Libya, not to mention Iraq. Indeed, it was Trump who stood before a group of Republicans in the South Carolina presidential debate and declared that the Bush administration had lied us into the Iraq war – and then proceeded to win that state’s primary handily, going on to get the nomination and win the election.

The paradox of Trump’s November victory is that he has provided anti-interventionists with the ammunition they need to shoot down his arguments for intervening in Syria. It’s only necessary to cite his many pronouncements on the subject, all of them inveighing against the “regime change” policies favored by Hillary Clinton and her supporters, and ask: what’s changed?

Trump’s base opposes meddling in Syria to oust the Assad government. They can be mobilized to oppose this new madness – and there are millions of them. Trump has laid the basis for his own undoing. If he goes ahead and follows the advice of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, escalates the war on Assad, and saves the Syrian Islamists from defeat, his base will defect in droves. And they are already disaffected, what with the failure of the healthcare bill, the apparent demotion of chief Trumpian ideologist Steve Bannon, and the stalling of much of Trump’s agenda. Is starting another war in the Middle East supposed to be evidence that this is a President who “gets things done,” as the administration likes to boast? I don’t think so.

The danger is that what is being described as a “limited strike” will escalate into a much wider conflict. The Russians are on the ground in Syria: so are thousands of American soldiers, along with the Turks, the Iranians, the Israelis, and Hezbollah. Retaliation against American forces from either the Syrians, or the Russians – if Russians are killed or injured in the strikes – is entirely possible. We are on the brink of a regional explosion.

Now we’ll have to endure the cries of the War Party that Trump has “grown in office” and given up his “isolationist” views when faced with the “reality” of “American global leadership.” Lunatics like John McCain are calling for stopping the Syrian air force from flying, increasing sanctions on Russia, and even going to war with Russia – as McCain did, when he said “I don’t give a damn” when asked what happens if we kill Russian soldiers. “We will win a war with Russia,” said McCain, “because we’re superior.” This is certifiable craziness – but that’s the kind of world we live in now.

One more thing: the airfield that was bombed is said to be the site of Assad’s store of sarin gas. Yet you’ll remember that Syria was supposed to have surrendered the entirety of its chemical weapons, and this was certified by the United Nations, the Russians, and the Obama administration. So what chemical weapons are we talking about? Stay tuned for the next act in this drama, as demands for the inspection of this site are raised. What happens if – or when – the inspectors are let in and there’s nothing to be found?

Is Trump Going to Commit the Next Great American Catastrophe in Syria?

It would be foolhardy to take military action before we know the details of the recent horrific gas attack.

April 5, 2017

by Vijay Prashad

AlterNet

At the United Nations Security Council on April 5, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley held up pictures of children killed by a gas attack in Khan Shaykhun, south of the Syrian city of Idlib. Estimates suggest about 50 to 60 people died in this attack. The United States, the United Kingdom and France placed a resolution before the Security Council condemning the attack and asking for an investigation of it. There is no call for armed action against anyone because the Council is divided on who perpetuated the act.

Strikingly, Ambassador Haley then said, “We don’t yet know about yesterday’s attack,” meaning nobody had definitive intelligence about the attack. Yet, there was a hasty dash to judgment in the West that the perpetrator was the government of Bashar al-Assad—perhaps with Russian assistance.

How do we know what happened in Khan Shaykhun? The sources for the Western media outlets are mainly “opposition activists,” as BBC put it in one of its early reports. A BBC story from April 4 (Syria Conflict: ‘Chemical attack’ in Idlib kills 58) lists the various sources it has relied upon:

  1. Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Founded in 2006, SOHR is based in the United Kingdom and receives funding from the European Union and—most likely—the United Kingdom. It relies upon a network of opposition activists across Syria to provide raw information, which its director, Rami Abdul Rahman, then digests. SOHR is openly anti-Assad.
  2. Khotwa (Step) news agency. Founded by opposition activists in late 2013, Khotwa—as they say—aims to “bring the world’s attention to the suffering of the Syrian people.” Its 40 correspondents are mostly based in rebel-held areas. In 2014, its director, Mohammad Hrith, was in the news in Turkey due to a fracas between Hrith and the Prime Minister of the Syrian interim government Ahmed Touma. Touma’s people suggested Hrith came to demand funds from them.
  3. Local Co-ordination Committee (LCC) of the town. The LCC is part of a network of local groups emerged to coordinate protests after 2011. They represent the politics of the area in which they are established. Their general tenor is anti-Assad.
  4. Hussein Kayal, a photographer with the pro-opposition Edlib Media Center. Kayal and the Edlib Media Center are part of a network of journalists including those involved with the Aleppo Media Center. They are affiliated with the Syrian Expatriate Organization, led by Mazen Hasan, who is a leading figure in the Syrian opposition that is based in the West and a key person in the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition for a Democratic Syria. The Coalition has been urging U.S. armed action to overthrow the Syrian government.
  5. An AFP news agency journalist (unnamed). Some of the main photographs from Idlib came from two Agence France-Presse photographers, Omar Haj Kadour and Mohamed al-Bakour. Both offered vivid pictures from the hospital in Maaret al-Numan and Khan Shaykhun. Omar Haj Kadour’s Twitter account shows he is decidedly on the side of the opposition. The account by the stringer al-Bakour seems utterly sincere. He says, “My job is to take pictures. To cover this attack. To show this horrendous crime to the world.”

Neither of the AFP reporters confirms who used these weapons on the civilians, many of them young children. They merely document the act. They are not experts. Their evidence includes foam at the mouth of one of the victims and the smell (“The first thing that hits you is the smell”). Most nerve agents are odorless. The photographers describe what they experience. To analyze their information would take a great deal more time on the ground. The others quoted by BBC do not hesitate. They point their fingers at Assad. Those with the densest relationship to the armed opposition are the first to claim that this attack was done by the government.

Investigation

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which had previously worked in Syria to destroy all banned chemical weapons, now says it will investigate the attack in Khan Shaykhun. The OPCW has announced that the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) is already in “the process of gathering and analysing information from all available sources.” The FFM has had a very controversial history since its establishment on April 29, 2014.

Scholars Karim Makdisi and Coralie Pison Hindawai have authored an important study of the U.N. role in the investigation of chemical weapons in Syria. In this study, they write that the FFM was from its inception seen by many well-regarded people in the U.N. as “highly political.”

That the FFM was sent into Syria, led by Malik Ellahi, to find out about chlorine use was itself a problem, Makdisi and Hindawai write, since “investigating allegations of use [of chlorine] would prove extremely challenging at best, and the actual use almost impossible to establish scientifically.” The FFM’s work was criticized for lacking in professionalism and for its methodology.

At any rate, the main point here was that the West seemed to want to push these investigations, knowing full well the difficulty involved in ascertaining use of chlorine, in order to create a narrative of chemical weapons use. The FFM’s reports became the basis for the U.N. Security Council Resolutions 2209 (2015) and 2235 (2015), both of which threated Syria with Chapter VII (armed) action by member states of the UN.

Denials

During the debate on UNSC resolution 2235 in August 2015, the Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin voted for the resolution. However, Churkin raised the “question of who had used chemical weapons.” He hoped an investigation would keep these questions alive and not begin with the assumption that the government had used these weapons. The Russian military intervened in Syria the next month. Between August 2015 and April 2017, with the Russian forces in Syria, there has been no serious allegation of chemical weapons use against the government.

Syria’s ambassador to the U.N., Bashar Ja’afari, said at the August 2015 meeting that his country had “warned the Council of the danger of chemical weapons use by terrorist groups, some of which were affiliated with al-Qaeda.” He pointed his finger at the Khan al-Assal incident of July 2013, which was not taken seriously in the West. SOHR posted a video which showed Syrian soldiers on the ground, as if gassed. Both the al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Ansar al-Khalifa brigade had conducted this attack. No investigation was held.

In June 2016, in eastern Ghouta, the Syrian army said its soldiers had been hit with toxic gas. The Saudi proxy in the area, Jaish al-Islam, denied the use of any chemical weapons. But video evidence suggested that there was some kind of atmospheric weapon used against the soldiers.

Russia and the Syrian government now suggest that there was perhaps a stockpile of such weapons in Khan Shaykhun, which combusted perhaps by a Syrian Air Force strike. There is no confirmed evidence of any such warehouse, although the Russian Defense Ministry says that this information is “fully objective and verified.” Whether aerial bombardment can have this effect on gas housed in a warehouse will need to be investigated.

The Politics of the Moment

The Syrian armed opposition was disheartened at the Geneva V talks. The Syrian Army and its Russian and Iranian allies have made gains across the country. The armed opposition’s political leadership in Geneva openly called for U.S. intervention to help them. They feel utterly isolated.

A few days later, the administration of Donald Trump said plainly what had been clear since the Russian intervention of September 2015: that regime change in Damascus was off the table. This had been the policy of the Obama administration for the past two years, but it did not directly say so. Trump’s people acknowledged reality: with Russia and Iran in the picture, removal of Assad would take a fierce international conflict far greater than the tragedy that has befallen Syria.

With Turkey now drifting toward the Russian-Iranian narrative and Jordan dragged into chaos by the refugee crisis, easy borders to resupply the rebels are no longer available. The defeat of the armed opposition, including the al-Qaeda proxies and others, in Aleppo was the greatest blow.

For the Syrian government at this time to use chemical weapons in such a public way would not only be foolhardy, it would invite a U.S. attack. It seems only an utterly arrogant and blind leadership in Damascus would have committed such a crime. But the leadership in Damascus has shown it is crafty, using openings of all kinds to ensure its survival. This is not to say it would not have necessarily done such an attack. Eagerness to end the war before it can impose a political settlement on the rebels could have led to the use of such weapons. But this is not considered likely.

Over half a million Syrians are dead. Half the population is displaced. There is sadness across Syria, from one side of the firing line to another. Aerial bombardment by the Americans, the Russians, the Syrians and others continues to devastate Syria and Iraq. The Americans recently admitted to a major atrocity in Mosul, where 200 civilians have been killed. That attack did not seize the Security Council or bring forth fulminations from the Western press. Hypocrisy is central to the morals at the Security Council. This does not mean one should not be horrified by what has happened at Khan Shaykhun.

But more than anything, the international community must urge a thorough investigation of these events before rushing either to a forensic judgment about what happened and to a response—particularly a military response—in retaliation. Sober heads need to prevail. War is rarely the answer. Particularly when we don’t as yet know the question.

Did Assad use chemical weapons on Khan Shaikhoun to score an own goal in the international arena?

April 7, 2017

by Elijah J. Magnier

AntiWar

The first news came from Reuters, framed accusingly: “Syrian government chemical attack,” and quoting, as usual, rebel sources. The world stood by instinct against the regime in Damascus following the images of the victims of this attack, an atrocity against civilians which included many children. Khan Shaikhoun, a northern Syrian city in rural Idlib, is a core al-Qaeda (along with other jihadists and rebels) stronghold. Why would the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attack eastern Khan Shaykhoun with chemical weapons?

Correspondents in Beirut, Amsterdam, Ankara, Istanbul, Brussels, Geneva, Holland, Washington and the United Nations wrote the Reuters article . Most of them have never been to Syria in the last few years and their source is “rebels” in al-Qaeda held territory and “information” from other social media accounts. But this is not the only influential media source that writes about Syria and has clearly never been to the country at any time during the last 6 years: the Washington post also does the same. The UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs (and a UK diplomat) doesn’t share the media “insightful information”.

Is journalism concerned with looking for the truth, or is it more important to follow a specific “newspaper policy” ? In fact, American media and analysts have been angry – not only with Assad – but above all with their newly elected President Donald Trump, watching every step or political move he makes since he took over in order to be able to to criticise him. Assad is simply a pawn in this US  political media game.

Assad avoided the US war by agreeing to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons programme to launch years later a chemical attack? We should look at who would benefit from the use of Sarin gas against civilians at this particular moment in Syria.

Several weeks ago, the al-Qaeda  (under the name of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) Emir in Syria, Abu Mohamad al-Joulani, supervised the advance of his forces – along with other jihadists and US vetted groups under Al-Qaeda command – on Jobar (the Damascus outskirts) and Hama. Al-Qaeda and its allies managed to occupy considerable territory, surprising the Syrian Army. Following weeks of fighting, Damascus and its allies not only recovered all the lost territory in Jobar, but also advanced further in Al-Gabone, an area never reached for over 4 years. In Hama also, the Syrian Army managed to absorb the shock wave of the first attack and counter-attacked, recovering almost 90% of the lost territory. As in Aleppo, Joulani supervised the offensive to break the siege of the Syrian northern capital, supervising the military operations room and finally losing the battle, leaving behind hundreds of his militants dead on the battlefield.

In the north-eastern rural Aleppo, the Syrian Army is advancing into ISIS (the “Islamic State” group) occupied territory and has reached the Euphrates limit where the US forces draw the “red lines”, marking the beginning of “Kurdistan Syria” or the “Kurdish Federation” or canton in what the US military command promotes as “the right of the people in north Syria to self-determination”. The US forces enjoy the use of two main airports at the moment: one in Kobane (Ayn al-Arab) and one at Tabqa (with 2 runways under restoration at the moment by American engineers). This is the “safe zone” that President Trump spoke about concerning his intentions in Syria, a term which camouflages a new US occupation of land in the Middle East.

At the same time, the Russian and Syrian forces stopped the advance of Turkey toward ISIS territory and prevented Ankara’s forces and their Syrian proxies from attacking the Kurds in Manbij and Afrin-  to the dissatisfaction of President Erdogan.  Damascus can live with the Kurds – who are Syrian citizens and part of Syria – because these have roots in another part of the country, in north-west Afrin and in Aleppo. The Kurds need Damascus’s continuing collaboration. Damascus is determined to make life difficult for the US forces if these remain in the country and build military bases. The Syrian President doesn’t see an existential threat from the Kurdish side and considers al-Qaeda the real danger to eliminate. ISIS is not mentioned because it is fading away: only insurgents will be left in Bilad al-Sham which is not the case for al-Qaeda, well established in Syria.

On the political side, Assad enjoys a privilege position today, experiencing international support he never had in 6 years of war in Syria: the US, France and the UK all announced (prior the Khan Shaykhoun attack) that their objective is no longer to remove Assad from power. This announcement triggered outrage from the Syria opposition and the western media who saw in this message another opportunity to attack Trump. Even the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was “shocked” by the “deliberate attacks on Syrian civilians”. Attacking innocent civilians must have been quite a surprise for the Israeli government.

Finally, there is an ongoing negotiation between Qatar (representing al-Qaeda) and Iran (representing the Syrian government) which relates to the besieged cities of Fua-Kefraya (surrounded by al-Qaeda and its allies) and Zabadani-Madaya (surrounded by Hezbollah and the Syrian Army). The negotiation consists in initiating a demographic exchange where 8,000 civilians (out of approximately a total of 23,000 on each side) would leave on both sides to be relocated. The Fua-Kefraya inhabitants would settle in Quseyr, and the Zabadani-Madaya in the area left by the Alawites in northern Syria. This exchange was due to start on Wednesday-Thursday this week but was postponed for another week due to the “Sarin attack”.

The Fua-Kefraya versus Zabadani-Madaya exchange may not be straightforward. When Aleppo was reconquered by the Syrian government forces, the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians was linked to the evacuation of only 1,250 civilians from the besieged city of Fua. Ahrar al-Sham militants, jihadist rebels, burned the buses but later allowed the exchange to take place. There are serious differences within al-Qaeda where many militants oppose this exchange. Nevertheless, it is in the advantage of Damascus and its allies to see the deal reach a positive outcome.

So all circumstances work against Assad if he uses chemical weapons against Khan Shaykhoun or against any other place in Syria: the consequences would be entirely to his disadvantage on all fronts, military, political, and international.

It is certainly true that the use of chemical weapons in Duma in the last years of the Syrian war facilitated the accusations against Assad this time. The Russian Defence Ministry said that the poisonous gas had leaked from a rebel chemical weapons warehouse in Khan Shaykhoun hit by Syrian Air Force strikes.

So why did the world media rush to condemn Assad (prior any official investigation) and every voice rejecting the idea of a regime change? Is it because the mainstream media and “born again Syria analysts” have become, in their own eyes, an entity per se with the right to “judge, condemn and pretend that decision makers should listen to their recommendations and do what experts believe it is right”? Those “Syria experts” – whose feet have never touched the soil of Syria (some have never even travelled to the Middle East, let alone experienced one of its many wars in these last decades) – gather their so-called “expertise” from following social media and “breaking news” very closely, just as if they were themselves part of a well established news agency or, like this author, journalists on the ground and really on the spot.

Resurrecting the Unholy Trinity

Torture, Rendition, and Indefinite Detention Under Trump

by Rebecca Gordon

TomDispatch

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched their forever wars — under the banner of a “Global War on Terror” — they unleashed an unholy trinity of tactics. Torture, rendition, and indefinite detention became the order of the day. After a partial suspension of these policies in the Obama years, they now appear poised for resurrection.

For eight years under President Obama, this country’s forever wars continued, although his administration retired the expression “war on terror,” preferring to describe its war-making more vaguely as an effort to “degrade and destroy” violent jihadists like ISIS. Nevertheless, he made major efforts to suspend Bush-era violations of U.S. and international law, signing executive orders to that effect on the day he took office in 2009.  Executive Order 13491, “Ensuring Lawful Interrogations,” closed the CIA’s secret torture centers — the “black sites” — and ended permission for the Agency to use what had euphemistically become known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

On that same day in 2009, Obama issued Executive Order 13492, designed — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, the site of apparently endless detention without charges or trials. In 2015, Congress reinforced Obama’s first order in a clause for the next year’s National Defense Authorization Act that limited permissible interrogation techniques to those described in the U.S. Army Field Manual section on “human intelligence collector operations.”

All of that already seems like such ancient history, especially as the first hints of the Trump era begin to appear, one in which torture, black sites, extraordinary rendition, and so much more may well come roaring back. Right now, it’s a matter of reading the Trumpian tea leaves. Soon after the November election, Masha Gessen, a Russian émigrée who has written two books about Vladimir Putin’s regime, gave us some pointers on how to do this. Rule number one: “Believe the autocrat.” When he tells you what he wants to do — build a wall, deport millions, bring back torture — “he means what he says.” Is Gessen right? Let’s examine some of those leaves.

Torture Redux

It should come as no surprise to anyone who paid minimal attention to the election campaign of 2016 that Donald Trump has a passionate desire to bring back torture. In fact, he campaigned on a platform of committing war crimes of various kinds, occasionally even musing about whether the United States could use nukes against ISIS. He promised to return waterboarding to its rightful place among twenty-first-century U.S. practices and, as he so eloquently put it, “a hell of a lot worse.” There’s no reason, then, to be shocked that he’s been staffing his administration with people who generally feel the same way (Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis being an obvious exception).

The CIA was certainly not the only outfit engaged in torture in the Bush years, but it’s the one whose practices were most thoroughly examined and publicized. Despite his enthusiasm for torture, Trump’s relationship with the Agency has, to say the least, been frosty. Days before his inauguration, he responded to revelations of possible Russian influence on the U.S. election by accusing its operatives of behaving like Nazis, tweeting: “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

He quickly appointed a new director of the CIA (as hasn’t been true of quite a few other positions in his administration). He chose former Congressman Mike Pompeo, whose advice about torture he has also said he would consider seriously. A polite term for Pompeo’s position on the issue might be: ambiguous. During his confirmation hearings, he maintained that he would “absolutely not” reinstate waterboarding or other “enhanced techniques,” even if the president ordered him to. “Moreover,” he added, “I can’t imagine that I would be asked that.”

However, his written replies to the Senate Intelligence Committee told quite a different, far less forthright tale. Specifically, as the British Independent reported, he wrote that if a ban on waterboarding were shown to impede the “gathering of vital intelligence,” he would consider lifting it. He added that he would reopen the question of whether interrogation techniques should be limited to those found in the Army Field Manual. (“If confirmed, I will consult with experts at the Agency and at other organizations in the U.S. government on whether the Army Field Manual uniform application is an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country.”)

In other words, as the Independent observed, if the law prohibits torture, then Pompeo is prepared to work to alter the law. “If experts believed current law was an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country,” Pompeo wrote to the Senate committee, “I would want to understand such impediments and whether any recommendations were appropriate for changing current law.” Unfortunately for both the president and him, there are laws against torture that neither they nor Congress have the power to change, including the U.N. Convention against Torture, and the Geneva Conventions.

Nor is Mike Pompeo the only Trump nominee touched by the torture taint. Take, for instance, the president’s pick for the Supreme Court. From 2005 to 2006, Neil Gorsuch worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the wellspring for John Yoo’s and Jay Bybee’s infamous “torture memos.” Gorsuch also assisted in drafting Bush’s “signing statement” on the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. That act included an amendment introduced by Senator John McCain prohibiting the torture of detainees. As the White House didn’t want its favorite interrogation methods curtailed, Gorsuch recommended putting down “a marker to the effect that… McCain is best read as essentially codifying existing interrogation policies.” In other words, the future Supreme Court nominee suggested that the McCain amendment would have no real effect, because the administration had never engaged in torture in the first place. This approach was the best strategy, he argued, to “help inoculate against the potential of having the administration criticized sometime in the future for not making sufficient changes in interrogation policy in light of the McCain portion of the amendment.”

In his brief tenure at the Office of Legal Counsel, Gorsuch provided further aid to the supporters of torture by, for example, working on government litigation to prevent the exposure of further “Darby photos.” These were the shocking pictures from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison that came into the possession of U.S. Army Sergeant Joe Darby. He then passed them up the chain of command, which eventually led to the public revelation of the abuses in that U.S.-run torture palace.

Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is also a torture enthusiast. He was one of only nine senators to vote against the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. The Act limited the military to the use of those interrogation methods found in the Army Field Manual. In 2015, he joined just 20 other senators in opposing an amendment to the next year’s military appropriations bill, which extended the Field Manual rules to all U.S. agencies involved in interrogation, not just the military.

Reviving the Black Sites?

So far, President Trump hasn’t had the best of luck with his executive orders. His two travel bans, meant to keep Muslims from entering the United States, are at present trapped in federal court, but worse may be in the offing.

Trump promised during the campaign to reopen the CIA’s notorious black sites and bring back torture. Shortly after the inauguration, a draft executive order surfaced that was clearly intended to do just that. It rescinded President Obama’s orders 13491 and 13492 and directed the secretary of defense and the attorney general, together with “other senior national security officials,” to review the interrogation policies in the Army Field Manual with a view to making “modifications in, and additions to those, policies.” That would mean an end run around Congress, since it doesn’t take an act of that body to rewrite part of a manual (and so reinstitute torture policy).

It also called on the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, and the attorney general to “recommend to the president whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such program should include the use of detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.” In other words, they were to consider reopening the black sites for another round of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

As in so many such documents, that draft order included a cover-your-ass clause, in this case suggesting that “no person in the custody of the United States shall at any time be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, as proscribed by U.S. law.” As we learned in the Bush years, however, such statements have no real effect because, as in a 2002 memo produced by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, “torture” can be redefined as whatever you need it to be. That memo certified that, to qualify as torture, the pain experienced by a victim would have to be like that usually associated with “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” In other words, if he didn’t die or at least come close, you didn’t torture him.

After the recent draft executive order on these subjects was leaked to the media and caused a modest to-do, a later version appeared to drop the references to black sites and torture. While no final version has yet emerged, it’s clear enough that the initial impulse behind the order was distinctly Trumpian and should be taken seriously.

As soon as the draft order surfaced in the press in late January, the White House disclaimed all knowledge of it and no version of it appears on current lists of Trump executive actions since taking office. But keep in mind that presidents can issue secret executive orders that the public may never hear about — unless the news spills out from an administration whose powers of containment so far could be compared to those of a sieve.

Déjà Vu, Rendition Edition

Notably, neither of Obama’s Inauguration Day executive orders addressed extraordinary rendition. In fact, this was a weapon he preferred to keep available.

What is extraordinary rendition? Ordinary rendition simply means transferring someone from one legal jurisdiction to another, usually through legal extradition. Rendition becomes “extraordinary” when it happens outside the law, as when a person is sent to a country with which the United States does not have an extradition treaty, or when it is likely (or certain) that the rendered person will be tortured in another country.

In the Bush years, the CIA ran an extraordinary rendition machine, involving the kidnapping of terror suspects (sometimes, as it turned out, quite innocent people) off the streets of global cities as well as in the backlands of the planet, and sending them to those brutal CIA black sites or rendering them to torturing regimes around the world. Rendition continued in a far more limited way during Obama’s presidency. For example, a 2013 Washington Post story described the rendition of three Europeans “with Somali roots” in the tiny African country of Djibouti and of an Eritrean to Nigeria. The article suggested that, in part because of congressional intransigence on closing Guantánamo and allowing the jailing and trial of suspected terrorists in U.S courts, rendition represented “one of the few alternatives” to the more extreme option of simply killing suspects outright, usually by drone.

Recently, there was news that a Trump associate might have been involved in planning a rendition of his own. Former CIA Director James Woolsey told the Wall Street Journal that, last September, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn discussed arranging an extralegal rendition with the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. At the time, he was serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign. He later — briefly — served as President Trump’s national security adviser.

The target of this potential rendition? Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric who has lived for decades in the United States. President Erdogan believes that Gulen was behind a 2016 coup attempt against him and has asked the U.S. to extradite him to Turkey. The Obama administration temporized on the subject, insisting on examining the actual evidence of Gulen’s involvement.

Flynn’s foray may have been an instance of potential rendition-for-profit, a plan to benefit one of his consulting clients. At the time, Flynn’s (now-defunct) consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, was working for a Dutch corporation, Inovo, with ties to Erdogan. The client reviewed a draft op-ed eventually published in the Hill in which Flynn argued that Gulen should be extradited, because he is a “radical cleric” and Turkey is “our friend.” In addition to lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the election campaign, it turns out that Flynn was probably working as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkish interests at that time.

Mike Pompeo also appears to be bullish on renditions. In his written testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he indicated that under him the CIA would probably continue this practice. When asked how the Agency would avoid sending prisoners to countries known to engage in torture, his reply could have come straight from the Bush-Cheney playbook:

“I understand that assurances provided by other countries have been a valuable tool for ensuring that detainees are treated humanely. In most cases other countries are likely to treat assurances provided to the United States government as an important matter.”

Asking for such assurances has in the past given the U.S. government cover for what was bound to occur in the prisons of countries known for torture. (Just ask Maher Arar rendered to Syria or Binyam Mohammed rendered to Morocco about what happened to them.)

We’ll Always Have Guantánamo…

“We’ll always have Paris,” Rick reminds Ilsa during their bittersweet goodbye in the classic film Casablanca. Our Guantánamo lease with Cuba (which reads, “for use as coaling [refueling] or naval stations only, and for no other purpose”) is a permanent one. So it looks like we’ll always have Guantánamo, with its memories of torture and murder, and its remaining 41 prisoners, undoubtedly stranded there forever.

As it happens, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s fingerprints are all over the Bush administration’s Guantánamo policy, too. While at the Office on Legal Counsel, he helped the administration fight a major legal challenge to that policy in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In that case, the government argued that detainees at Guantánamo did not have the right of habeas corpus, that the president has the authority to decide not to abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that detainees could be tried by military “commissions” in Cuba rather than by U.S. courts. Given that history, it’s unlikely he’d rule in favor of any future challenge to whatever use President Trump made of the prison.

While on the campaign trail, Trump made it clear that he would keep Guantánamo eternally open. In a November rally in Sparks, Nevada, he told a cheering crowd:

“This morning, I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantánamo Bay, which by the way, which by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open… and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.”

In mid-February, Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer reiterated his boss’s affection for the prison, when he told the White House press corps that the president believes it serves “a very, very healthy purpose in our national security, in making sure we don’t bring terrorists to our seas.” Perhaps Spicer meant “our shores,” but the point was made. Trump remains eager to keep the whole Guantánamo prison system — including, we can assume, indefinite detention — up and running as an alternative to bringing prisoners to the United States.

It seems that the head of the Pentagon agrees. In December 2016, retired Marine General (now Secretary of Defense) James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that any detainee who “has signed up with this enemy” and is captured wherever “the president, the commander-in-chief, sends us” should know that he will be a “prisoner until the war is over.” Given that our post-9/11 military conflicts are truly forever wars, in Mattis’s view, pretty much anyone the U.S. captures in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, or who knows where else will face at least the possibility of spending the rest of his life in Guantánamo.

Reading the Tea Leaves

As far as we know, President Trump has yet to green-light his first case of torture or his first extraordinary rendition, or even to add a single prisoner to the 41 still held at Guantánamo. All we have for now are his ominous desires and promises — and those of his underlings. These are enough, however, to give us a clear understanding of his intentions and those of his appointees. If they can, they will resurrect the unholy trinity of torture, rendition, and indefinite detention. The future may not yet be inscribed in Trumpian gold anywhere, but on such matters we should believe the autocrat.

What are the End Days? A study in deception

July 12, 2013

by Frederick Norris, Lt. Cmdr USN ret

‘Armageddon’ is actually purported to be a battle. According to Pentecostal interpretations, the Bible states that Armageddon will be a battle where God finally comes in and takes over the world and rules it the way it should have been ruled all along. After this vaguely-defined battle of Armageddon, Pentecostals firmly believe that there will follow 1000 years of peace and plenty which, according to their lore and legend, will be the sole lot of their sect and no other.

The actual scene of the fictional battle is referred to by Pentecostals as being clearly set forth in Revelation 16:14-16.

It is not.

The specific citation reads, in full:

  • “14. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.
  • “15. Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.
  • “16. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”

This sparse mention of Armageddon has given rise to the elaborate but entirely fictional legend of the Final Battle between the forces of good and evil. There is no mention in Revelations 16: 14-15 whatsoever of Parusia or the second coming of Jesus, the apocryphal Anti-Christ, the Rapture or the many other delightful inventions designed to bolster the Pentecostal elect and daunt their adversaries. These adversaries consist of all other branches of the Christian religion with especial emphasis placed on Jews and Catholics. The Pentecostals also loathe Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, and an endless list of anyone and everyone whose views clash with theirs, such as scientists and any academic who views the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel as anything but tissues of lies.

The Antichrist

The Antichrist is described by Pentecostals as the “son of perdition” and the “beast”!

They claim that this interesting creature will have great charisma and speaking ability, “a mouth speaking great things”.

The Antichrist, they allege, will rise to power on a wave of world euphoria, as he temporarily saves the world from its desperate economic, military & political problems with a brilliant seven year plan for world peace, economic stability and religious freedom.

The Antichrist could well rise out of the current chaos in the former Soviet Union. The prophet Ezekiel names him as the ruler of “Magog”, a name that Biblical scholars agree denotes a country or region of peoples to the north of Israel. Many have interpreted this to mean modern day Russia. It could also be Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, perhaps one of the Baltic States or even the lewd and dissolute Socialist Sweden.

His power base will include the leading nations of Europe, whose leaders, the Bible says, will “give their power and strength unto the beast.”

The Bible even gives some clues about his personal characteristics. The prophet Daniel wrote that the Antichrist “does not regard the desire of women.” This could imply that he is either celibate or a homosexual. Daniel also tells us that he will have a “fierce countenance” or stern look, and will be “more stout than his fellows”–more proud and boastful.

Unfortunately, the so-called Book of Daniel was written during the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, not many decades earlier as its proponents claim, and has been extensively modified by early Christian writers to predict the arrival of their personal Messiah, or Christ, on the Judean scene. The so-called “wonderful” prophetic statements put into the mouth of Daniel are absolutely and wondrously accurate…up to the reign of Nero and then fall as flat as a shaken soufflé afterwards

It is well known that Pentecostals loathe homosexuals, among many other groups not pleasing to them, and would like nothing better than to shove them into a bottomless pit filled with Catholics, rock and roll fans, teenaged mothers, Communists, gun control advocates, Tarot card readers, Christian Scientists, abortionists, Wayne Newton fans, Asians, Jews, African-Americans and Latino Surnamed Hispanics.

The seven year peace-pact (or covenant) that is engineered by the Antichrist is spoken of a number of times in the Bible, and may even have already been signed in secret. The historic peace agreement signed between Israel and the PLO at the White House on September 13, 1993, vividly illustrates how dramatically events in the Middle East are presently moving in this direction eager Pentecostals, awaiting their Celestial Omnibus, will inform anyone who is interested and a greater legion of those who are not.

Under the final terms of the fictional Covenant, Jerusalem will likely be declared an international city to which Judaism, Islam and Christianity will have equal rights. Scripture indicates that the Jews will be permitted to rebuild their Temple on Mt. Moriah, where they revive their ancient rituals of animal sacrifice.

The world’s military forces will be able to commit human sacrifice.

According to modern prophecy the Antichrist will not only be a master of political intrigue, but also a military genius. Daniel describes several major wars that he fights during his seven-year reign, apparently against the U.S. and Israel, who will oppose him during the second half of his reign.

For awhile, most of the world is going to think the Antichrist is wonderful, as he will seem to have solved so many of the world’s problems. But, three-and-a-half years into his seven year reign he will break the covenant and invade Israel from the North.

At this time he will make Jerusalem his world capitol and outlaw all religions, except the worship of himself and his image. The Bible, according to the Pentecostals, says that the Antichrist will sit in the Jewish Temple exalting himself as God and demanding to be worshipped. If this passage, and many others of its kind, actually appears in the King James Version of the Bible, no one has ever been able to find it

It is at this time that the Antichrist imposes his infamous “666” one-world credit system.

It must be said that the Antichrist does, in point of fact exist. He can be seen on a daily basis on the walls of the Cathedral at Orvieto, Italy in the marvelous frescos of Lucca Signorelli. He looks somewhat like a Byzantine depiction of Christ with either a vicious wife or inflamed hemorrhoids .

Pentecostals strongly believe that U.S. public schools “departed from the faith” when in 1963 the Bible and prayer were officially banned. Now, Pentecostals believe with horror, thousands of these same schools are teaching credited courses in “the doctrines of devils”–the occult and Satanism.

Even a cursory check of curriculum of a number of American public school districts does not support this claim but then the Pentecostals have stated repeatedly that they represent 45% of all Protestants in America. The actual number, excluding the Baptists, is more like 4%.

What they lack in actual numbers they more than compensate for by their loud and irrational views so that at times it sounds like the roar of a great multitude when in truth, it is only a small dwarf wearing stained underwear and armed with a bullhorn, trumpeting in the underbrush

Frantic Pentecostals estimated that according to their private Census for Christ there are over 200,000 practicing witches in the United States and allege there are literally millions of Americans who dabble in some form of the occult, psychic phenomena, spiritualism, demonology and black magic. Their statistics claim that occult book sales have doubled in the last four years.

What is seen by terrified Pentecostals as The Occult today is no longer the stuff of small underground cults. They believe that many rock videos are an open worship of Satan and hell that comes complete with the symbols, liturgies, and  rituals of Satanism, and the Pentecostals firmly and loudly proclaim to anyone interested in listening, that “millions of young people” have been caught in their evil sway.

Popular music is termed “sounds of horror and torment” that Pentecostals firmly believe is literally “driving young people insane and seducing them into a life of drugs, suicide, perversion and hell.” It is forgotten now but the same thing was once said about ragtime and later, jazz. If this had been true, perhaps the real reason behind the First World War, the 1929 market crash, the rise of Franklin Roosevelt and the lewd hula hoop can be attributed to Scott Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald.

It is also to be noted that the immensely popular Harry Potter series of children’s books are loudly proclaimed as Satanic books designed to lure unsuspecting children into the clutches of the Evil One. Any sane person who has read these delightful fantasy books will certainly not agree with these hysterical strictures. In point of fact, it would be exceedingly difficult to locate any person possessing even a modicum of sanity who would believe any of the weird fulminations of the Pentecostals.

Outraged Pentecostals now firmly state that in the beginning years of the Twenty First Century, “even the most shameless acts of blasphemy and desecration are socially acceptable.”

“Acts of blasphemy and desecration” sound like human sacrifices carried out on nuns at bus stops during the noontime rush hour or lewd acts with crucifixes performed by drug-maddened transvestites on commercial airlines.

In his weird Book of Revelation the lunatic John of Patmos claimed he foresaw that in the last days the world would turn away from God in order to worship and follow Satan.

Such a prophecy would have seemed believable to previous generations, but not so in our more enlightened and secular humanist day. Hard-core Satanism has been called by rabid Pentecostals noise-makers as: “the fastest-growing subculture among America’s teens”, and the revival of witchcraft & the occult is “one of the World’s fastest growing religions!”

Just as Pentacostals must have a fictional enemy to unify, so also do American leaders need their own fictional enemy to unify. They have chosen Russia but what deluded the masses into fervent support in the past is now long gone and the leaders, desperate to justify higher taxes, will have to perform false flag operations to boost their image and create a fictional necessity.

Comment: They just did. ed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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