International Law? What’s That? U.S. Violates Another Nation’s Sovereignty- Again

The American media and government are ballyhooing the kidnapping of a guy they claim “masterminded” the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Africa, in 1998. The Libyan government wasn’t told. There was no extradition request. A gang of U.S. commandos, FBI agents, and CIA officers swooped down in the middle of Tripoli, Libya, and grabbed a Libyan off the street by the name of Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, now known as Abu Anas al-Liby. (You’ve heard of him, I’m sure. The FBI was dangling a reward of $5 million for turning him in, so you probably had your eye out for him.) [1]

Gee, I wonder if the U.S. would mind if a Libyan commando squad grabbed an American off the streets of Washington, D.C. and spirited him away to a secret torture cell? (For now, apparently a Navy brig on a ship in the Mediterranean.) [This occurred on October 5^th, the same day another U.S. mission didn’t go as well. See “Invincible U.S. Navy SEALs Repulsed ByAl-Shabab.”]

Yet another U.S. violation of another nation’s sovereignty- and thus of international law, the body of law the U.S. so thunderously invokes when condemning enemy nations. So what’s new? The U.S. overthrows governments it doesn’t like. It assassinates presidents. (The U.S. state-within-a-state even assassinated the American president in 1963.) It sabotages economies, poisons crops, spreads diseases. [2]

U.S. Secretary of State John “Swiftboat” Kerry brayed “He can run, but he can’t hide,” cribbing a hoary line of boxers’ trash talk.

Can’t hide? How come you couldn’t get him for 15 years? Sure he can hide- just not indefinitely.

Besides, he wasn’t even hiding, but living openly now. Apparently he got complacent and overconfident. Guess he forgot the warning, Don’t Mess With The U.S. They don’t forget. They hunt down AWOL American soldiers DECADES later, as they recently did with one in Spain. (The Spanish told the U.S. to shove off, he’s a Spanish citizen now.) There are other cases, such as in Sweden. The FBI is still trying to find the bones of airline hijacker D.B. Cooper, who parachuted out of the jet with a suitcase full of ransom money in 1971. The government is still picking at the scab of the 3 prisoners who escaped Alcatraz in 1962 in a homemade rubber raft, trying to determine definitively if they made it to shore or drowned. Later it emerged that a raft was found on an island and a car stolen in the vicinity. The U.S. Marshall’s service is going to investigate until the escapees’ 100^th birthdays. (How’s that for Javert-like fanaticism?)

The power-mad can’t stand it when someone escapes their clutches.

Of course, the U.S. decided it couldn’t trust the Libyans not to tip off their prey, same as they couldn’t trust the Pakistanis when they sent the SEALs to assassinate bin Laden.

But it’s not as if the U.S. hasn’t seized anyone involved in the embassy bombings. Is slacking the thirst for revenge worth trampling on international law and cordial relations with other nations? (I guess so.)

According to the New York Times, al-Liby’s seizure ends a 15-year manhunt- i.e. one starting in 1998. And they said he was indicted in New York in 2000. (“U.S. Commando Raids Hit Terror Targets in 2 Nations,” Sunday, October 6, 2013, p.1.)

So- what right did they have to hunt him in the two years prior to his indictment? And what were they trying to do in those two years- assassinate him? (The U.S. media keeps referring to U.S. Military seizures of people as “arrests.” Soldiers aren’t police, so they can’t “arrest” anyone. The use of the word “arrest” is to legitimize illegitimate seizures, since the U.S. refuses to call its military prisoners prisoners of war- even though they claim to be in a “war on terrorism.”)

1998 was a year of the Clinton Reign. Clinton initiated the current practice of secret kidnappings and hiding prisoners in torture cells outside the U.S.- aka “rendition.” But illegal kidnapping goes even farther back in U.S. history; for example, “atomic spy” Morton Sobell was kidnapped from Mexico by FBI agents and dragged to the U.S. for show-trial.

The U.S. has issued its usual opaque and vaguely ominous statement that their prey is being held “in a secure location” outside Libya. That is, he’s in their clutches, (probably on a ship in he Mediterranean), and being subjected to Torture Lite (since they plan on staging a show trial in New York for him, they’re going easy on him). And he has no right to remain silent and no right to an attorney, in the weeks (or months) before they finally haul him into a U.S. Courtroom for faux due process.

They’ll say he “waived” his “rights,” of course. Why wouldn’t a hardened terrorist, a fanatical enemy of the U.S., voluntarily waive his rights and willingly tell his enemy interrogators everything they want to know? Perfectly plausible! And stop that chatter about “human rights!” This is no human being, this is a “terrorist.” Same as anti-war activists, environmentalists, and the Occupy Movement are! Just ask the FBI! And Thanks to Barack Hussein Obama, Carl Levin, and the U.S. Congress, they are subject to indefinite imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay or any other military dungeon in the global U.S. gulag at the whim of the president of the U.S. under U.S. Law. But that’s OK! Because it’s legal! Just like Nazi persecution of Jews was legal- under duly enacted Nazi law.

The point is, don’t ever confuse legal with legitimate, moral, or just.

Hey, if a guy commits a crime in Kenya, and Tanzania, shouldn’t he be tried in Kenya and Tanzania? Oh never mind, when one country rules the world, that country’s law applies everywhere. [3]

The boilerplate U.S. statement after the kidnapping also said, rather defensively and apparently to preempt objections, that it was “legal.” I suppose that’s because, as Nixon said, “when the President does it, it’s legal.” Which in turn is merely following the legal precedent set earlier by the Third Reich, the Fuhrerprinziple, which stated that the word of Adolf Hitler was law, according to German legal experts. That’s the same kind of legal expertise that serves power as demonstrated during the regime of Bush the Younger by John Yoo, James Bybee, and Alberto Gonzales.

A few words are in order here about those embassy bombings. About two hundred African passersby were killed, and around a thousand wounded, some maimed for life. Eight American government personnel were killed. That’s a huge amount of “collateral damage” for a mainly symbolic attack. It demonstrates the contempt for human life that al-Qaeda has, and the ruthlessness and monomaniacalness with which it pursues its goals. And of course its ultimate ends- to impose a hyper-repressive, hyper misogynist and male supremacist social order on unwilling people, and to rule in totalitarian fashion- is evil, anti-human. So I don’t have sympathy for the al-Qaeda members and their ilk per se. What is alarming is the superpower U.S. systematically destroying human rights. Because those rights are indivisible. Either everyone has them, or no one has them. All that is left is privileges for the shrinking number of the favored few. The privilege of not being tortured, of having a lawyer, of having a genuine trial, of not being convicted based on secret “evidence,” and so forth. Privileges can be taken away at the whim of those in power. And as we see, anyone the repressive U.S. government and its numerous reactionary secret police agencies and military don’t like can be branded “terrorist” (the replacement for the older demonizing words “communist,” and before 1917, “anarchist.”)

[1] Funny thing about FBI “rewards” for mega-terrorists, those luridly-presented comic-book-type super-villains. No one ever turns any of them in to collect the rewards. The U.S. was teasing people with a $20 million reward for Obama bin Laden, with no takers, and there are other multi-million dollar “rewards” that no one seems interested in claiming.

Just as well for potential claimants. The U.S. wouldn’t bother protecting whoever turned in the terrorists, so they’d likely be killed sooner or later. And here’s a dirty secret about FBI rewards- they don’t really pay them, certainly not in full.

2] All done to Cuba, among other nations. I recall reading the boasts of a professor who invented an oil for the CIA that instead of lubricating, destroyed motors, wearing them out ten times faster than normal, which was infiltrated into Cuba and used for sabotage.

3] But it doesn’t work the other way. Other nations can’t try people for crimes committed in the U.S., or snatch people off U.S. territory and drag them back to their own dungeons. And people outside the U.S. victimized by corporations can’t sue in U.S. courts, generally. Ditto most victims of U.S.-backed torture regimes. The U.S. has what is know as a Double Standard Heads We Win Tails You Lose legal code. Glenn Greenwald just wrote a book that naively stumbled across this fact, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Greenwald’s focus is on the blatant class bias of the U.S. legal system, not the political persecution of dissidents and various enemies. The facts he lays out are important enough that you should familiarize yourself with them.

Greek Bourgeoisie Show It's Not So Hard To Crack Down On Fascists After All

During Greece's ongoing Great Depression, induced by the irresponsibility, feckless mismanagement, corruption and criminality of the Greek political elite, two tried-and-true capitalist responses to economic crisis have arisen: a resort to fascist violence, and scapegoating of victims of the economic crisis as the culprits for that crisis. In Greece over the last year and a half this has meant the emergence of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn fascist party, which has followed Hitler's playbook of simultaneously employing two different and parallel routes to power: vigilante street violence and participating in electoral politics. The scapegoat of choice has been immigrants (rather than Jews).

Two weeks ago, Golden Dawn apparently overplayed its hand. One of its goons stabbed to death a well-known Greek anti-fascist hip-hop artist. [1] This apparently struck a nerve in the country (unlike the fascist terror group's long-running campaign of violence and intimidation against non-European immigrants, and the spectacle of a Golden Dawn legislator punching out two female left-wing parliamentarians on television).

Greek anti-terrorist police arrest head of Golden Dawn and several others. The fascist terrorist organization's boss was charged with forming a criminal organization. Two senior members of the “security services” and several high-ranking cops resign or are suspended because of their links to the fascist terrorist Golden Dawn group.

Typically for fascists, one of Golden Dawn’s arrested parliamentarians, Yiannis Lagos, is involved in various criminal rackets, including prostitution, “protection” (i.e. extortion under threat of violent assault), blackmail, and money laundering, according to secret service documents leaked to the Greek press. He placed a call to the G.D. Big Boss Nikos Michaloliakos a half hour after the murder. (Strange, if what the G.D. bosses are claiming is true, that the murderer wasn’t a Golden Dawn member. By the way, the slayer claims G.D. membership and was decked out in their regalia.

Golden Dawn has18 members of Parliament (out of 300). The Greek Constitution bars banning a political party. Hence the new designation of G.D. as a criminal organization. [2]

Before this murder, the Greek power establishment ignored the slaying by Golden Dawn stormtrooper-types of two immigrants and beatings and other attacks on another 250 (those are just the reported ones- police backing of Golden Dawn no doubt discouraged many other victims from going to the police, as well as fear of deportation). [3]

Well, Greece is still better than the U.S. It doesn't matter how many doctors anti-abortion terrorists murder or how many bombs they plant- there's never a crackdown on their movement, their aiders and abetters and material supporters are never prosecuted, or even jailed for refusing to testify before Grand Juries (Grand Juries are never tasked with investigating them at all). In the U.S., if a fascist killed a leftist, the leftist would be called a suicide, or blamed for their own death- just as when the FBI planted a bomb in the car of anti-logging activist Judi Bari, she was charged with making and transporting the bomb that almost killed her herself! (Eventually that frame-up fell apart, and the Oakland Police, the FBI's co-conspirators, lost a civil suit brought by Bari. But the deep state won in the end, as the CIA murdered Bari with breast cancer.)

1] Pavlos Fyssas, who was 34. The New York Times described him as a “hip-hop artist and anti-fascist,” “Party Leader In Greece Is Returned To Custody,” Oct. 4, 2013, p.A4.

2] BBC World Service radio news broadcast.

3] Ibid.

Nairobi, Kenya Westgate Mall Terrorist Slaughter: The Aftermath

Like zombies in a horror movie, or Freddy Krueger in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies, every time we're told that the Somali Islamofascist group al-Shabab (“the Youth”) is on the ropes, they suddenly lash out with maximum surprise, striking from the grave, attacking the court building in Mogadishu (Somalia's capital) where they killed two dozen people, hitting the UN, hotels, restaurants, anywhere where people are trying to live normal lives. [1]

Now they did it again, more spectacularly than ever, with the murderous assault on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. An estimated 12-15 thugs jumped out of vehicles and immediately started slaughtering shoppers and people socializing. So far, the official death toll is over 60, with an equal number missing and possibly killed, plus a couple hundred wounded, ranging in age from 2 to 78. (Maybe “the Youth” should change their Brand Name to “No Mercy!”)

The BBC carried a story based on an interview with a witness who described a young child shot by the terrorists, who then quizzed his sister and mother on some bit of Muslim trivia. They answered correctly, and then the Shabab butchers killed them anyway. When the boy screamed WHY?, they replied that they objected to their dress. (Well that's a good reason.)

Throughout the four day atrocity and seizure by the al-Shabab terrorists of Somalia, starting on the second day the Kenyan rulers issued daily claims that the battle was over. These assertions proved to be, shall we say, premature. There were also various claims about Americans and Brits being among the assailants, and one or more women. There was reason to be suspicious of the claims about American and British terrorists, due to the lack of specifics presented, and the obvious desire of the Kenyan elite to enlist more support from the U.S. and Europe.

Recently-elected Kenyan President Kenyatta* (who is under indictment at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, along with his deputy president) asserted that forensic experts (Kenyan ones? or foreign?) would examine the corpses of the terrorists to determine their identities, blurring earlier assertions by Kenya’s foreign minister that Americans and a Briton were involved in the siege.

“Intelligence reports had suggested that a British woman and two or three American citizens may have been involved in the attack,” Kenyatta* said. “We cannot confirm the details at present but forensic experts are working to ascertain the nationalities of the terrorists.” Well maybe you could at least determine their genders? How hard could that be? [2]

Kenyatta* mentioned that three floors of the mall had collapsed, without explaining how or why.

Kenyatta* also claimed that five terrorists were killed and eleven others were in custody. He left murky if the eleven were attackers or accomplices rounded up elsewhere, as has been suggested by media reports.
Various witnesses reported that some terrorists managed to escape by blending into fleeing crowds. “Western security officials” also thought this may have happened. If so, that is indicative of grossly incompetent policing and lack of control of the crime scene. [3]

Kenyan official ineptness has been on jarring display throughout the terrorist siege. Like something out of a lurid Hollywood agit-propaganda movie, a handful of terrorists (no more than 15 at the top end of estimates) seized a 5 story mall including 80 stores, killed probably 130 or so people once the full death toll is properly tallied, and held off hundreds of “elite” Kenyan soldiers (with their Israeli, American, British, and French advisers in the background to hold their hands) with armored personnel carriers and helicopters, for four days. And not because hostage-rescue teams were conducting negotiations. It was combat all the way. What a pathetic performance by the Kenyans.

No surprise there: this is a country that recently had a fire at its international airport that civilians with buckets of water had to put out since the airport lacked even a single fire engine. Typical African country ruled by a selfish, feckless, greedy elite. (But all the blame goes to Western Imperialism, don't you know.)
Nor can this attack really be considered a surprise, as various secret police agencies have known for several years that Westgate Mall was a potential terrorist target, and had been scouted by the terrorists previously. [The CIA has a large station in Nairobi.]

And there have been plenty of previous terrorist attacks in Kenya, such as the truck-bombing of the U.S. embassy in 1998 attributed to al-Qaeda, which killed 200 people (almost all Kenyans), a 2002 attack on an Israeli hotel in Kenya, and a failed attempt to shoot down an El Al airliner with a surface to air missile. (The Shabab also like to attack churches and mosques in Kenya. That's because they're very religious, you see. Other ways the Shabab and their ilk prove how religious they are is by murdering people who they deem out of conformity with their dress code, cutting off the hands of musicians, destroying all art, and burying teenage girls up to their necks and throwing rocks at their heads until they're dead. And they're big on chopping off people's heads, just like their Saudi paymasters- and Wahhabism, the official religion of Saudi Arabia, is the ideological wellspring of jihadism.) [4]

It's obvious that two things the Islamofascists would like to totally extirpate from all of our lives are pleasure and freedom.

Al-Shabab also punished Uganda for contributing troops to the African expeditionary force in Somalia, with multiple bombings of the crowds gathered to enjoy the World Soccer Cup in 2010, killed 76 people. (A fine way to prevent people from enjoying sports. Sports are “UnIslamic” anyway.)

One of the people al-Shabab murdered in the Mall Massacre was the leading poet of Ghana- a great “victory” for them, in their eyes, I suppose. (Maybe they heard of Hermann Goering's quip “Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun,” and took it to heart.)

“Kenya will not get peace unless they pull their military out of Somalia,” ranted Ali Mohamoud Rage, the all-too-appropriately-named Shabab spokesman, in a screed broadcast over the radio. Al-Shabab has also been blasting out giddy boasts via Twitter about their terrorist massacre at the Mall. (Despite their hatred for modernity, and a desire to recreate their demented version of an eighth century society, the various Islamofascists are perfectly happy to avail themselves of such modern technologies as radio, the Internet, automatic firearms, powerful explosives, internal combustion engine motor vehicles, jet planes, and so on- all things that if goons like them had been running the world all these centuries, wouldn't even exist. But one item of modern technology they do reject- vaccines. And in Pakistan for example they enforce a ban on them by murdering health care workers.)

At the same time, President Kenyatta called the terrorists “cowards,” an absurdity parroted by his fellow-ICC-defendant, deputy president William Ruto. (We heard the same inanity in the U.S. after the airliner kamikaze attacks on 9/11/01. What, aren't words like terrorist or monster or evil scum insulting enough? Is “coward” the worst thing someone can be? Anti-human nihilist is much worse, in my book.)
They are certainly no heroes to any normal human being, as they are not admirable, but obviously they did not lack courage, unfortunately. I wish they had been cowards, in which case they would have been unable to pull off their four day long carnival of carnage.

Both Kenyatta and al-Shabab declared themselves victors. That's a matter of perspective. (To the rest of us, neither look good.) But there's no question who the losers are in this round: humanity, decency, civilization are. [5]

* I wonder, will we ever have an American president named Americaman?

[1] The current New Yorker has a poignant article about a Somali chef who left a successful life in London (where he owned restaurants and has a wife and children) to return to Somalia to open restaurants and a hotel there to return life to the country. Needless to say, his businesses have been bombed repeatedly and al-Shabab has announced their intention to murder him. (“Letter From Somalia: Now Serving,” New Yorker, Sept. 30, 2013.)

[2] “Kenya’s President Says Mall Attackers Are ‘Defeated,’” New York Times, September 24, 2013.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “Gunmen Kill Dozens in Terror Attack at Kenyan Mall,” New York Times, September 21, 2013.

[5] If we refer to the notional terrorist playbook the terrorism “experts” like to cite, I guess we have to chalk this one up as a win for the terrorists. Using a small number of attackers, they caused great economic damage to Kenya, striking its tourism industry, probably scaring off investment, and also scoring a political blow, making the Kenyan government appear weak and unable to defend the country. The terrorists appear strong, able to strike at will, in a fashion that generates great worldwide publicity for them. So they maximize their impact with a small, expendable force, upending an entire nation.

Time to wipe them out already. But pay compensation when you kill the wrong people with your drones or whatever, U.S.! That's both the moral thing to do and the pragmatic thing to do, if you really want to win your “War on Terror”^TM and not multiply your enemies, like in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. You see how “realism” and morality are generally one and the same, in the long term, on the fundamental level?

McCain's Broadside At Putin Also Applies To The U.S.

GOP Senator John McCain was mightily peeved by Vladimir Putin's New York Times op-ed piece, planted there with the help of the US “public relations” (private propaganda) firm Ketchum. (Then again, McCain The Cranky is easily peeved. You might say he's chronically peeved, except when he's downright enraged.)

Putin actually put forth a strong argument against U.S. military action against the Assad regime in Syria. I don't agree with it, but the U.S. establishment has chosen to respond in the main not with refutation and counterargument but with dismissive contempt. McCain took it up a notch with a personal attack on Putin. [1]

Thus, McCain didn't bother refuting Putin's points. McCain just wanted to blast Putin for being a tyrant (and I'm not a Putin fan because I'm not a fan of autocrats, period). But ad hominem attacks don't refute the arguments of one's opponent. (At least not if one applies the rules of logic and reason, which are rarely applied, so I guess they don't count.) [2]

Big McC says that Putin “has made her [Russia] a friend to tyrants and an enemy to the oppressed, and untrusted by nations that seek to build a safer, more peaceful and prosperous world." Arguably true. [I wonder what “nations that seek to build safer, more blah blah blah world” The Cainster had in mind? Give you one guess.]

But doesn't Honest John McCain's description of Russia exactly describe the U.S.? Its friends are different tyrants, to be sure. And certainly other nations mistrust the U.S., especially after its conquest of Iraq, based on lies, and now the exposé of the extent of NSA spying on everybody, from presidents to average citizens.

And the awful truth is that globally, no nation in the modern era has been a greater enemy to the oppressed than the U.S. The examples are too numerous to mention, the record of the details stretching to thousands of pages, so I will just cite a few salient examples to make the point here. (We'll leave aside the blindingly obvious examples of slavery, and genocide against the American Indians.)

It is standing U.S. policy to side with rich elites in every country it meddles and intervenes in, against the interests of the poor majority. Haiti is a perfect example of this U.S. behavior. Then we have invasions (such as Dominican Republic in 1965) and coups (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, for example) designed to overthrow leaders and destroy governments that threaten to use a nation's resources for the benefit of the population of that nation. There are the numerous military juntas the U.S. has backed- what is more oppressive than that? The U.S. thinks propaganda is more powerful than facts, and all its politicians and propagandists have to do is prattle endlessly about their love and devotion to freedom and democracy and human rights and all that good stuff. But actions speak louder than words.

The truth is, the U.S. works globally on behalf of the rich against the poor. It systematically works to sabotage progressive politicians, activists, labor organizers, and scholars, even arranging their assassinations. It works to prevent the rise to power of progressive politicians wherever and whenever it can. (When they do manage to come to power, they are immediately treated as enemies, such as with Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, and Morales in Bolivia, among others. And look what they did to Allende in Chile! Arbenz in Guatemala got off easy by comparison- his life was spared, but not those of 250,000 and counting of his countrymen since 1954.)

McCain The Pain also thundered in his indictment that Putin and his regime "punish dissent and imprison opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media. They harass, threaten, and banish organizations that defend your right to self-governance. To perpetuate their power they foster rampant corruption in your courts and your economy and terrorize and even assassinate journalists who try to expose their corruption."

Again, that's pretty close to a word for word description of the state of affairs in the U.S., with some caveats. Just dealing with the Obama regime: the Punish dissent and imprison opponents part is obvious. (In the imprison category, John Kiriakou, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, Barrett Brown, Edward Snowden if they can get their hands on him, and numerous dissidents unknown to the general public, and they would have locked up Internet activist Aaron Swartz if he hadn't committed suicide first. In the punish category, many more dissidents, such as Occupy Movement protesters, are subjected to beatings, pepper-sprayings, secret police stalking and persecution, and whistle-blowers are subjected to FBI raids and close brushes with imprisonment such as Thomas Drake and William Binney.) Or just review the history of the 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, and earlier periods. [In fact read some books on the subject- here's a link to some.]

Election rigging? McCain's own party has done plenty of that, via the fixed voting machines foisted on us by the Republican-owned companies that make them, and most notoriously the stolen 2000 Presidential election. [3]

Media control? True, the U.S. government doesn't control the media. But the Obama regime has broken new ground in attempts at intimidation and spying targeting the corporate establishment media itself. It has run massive electronic spying campaigns against the AP and Fox News (and those are just the ones we know about!) and menaced journalists with criminal investigations (and a sealed indictment against Julian Assange, and who knows who else).

Harass, threaten and banish organizations that defend your right to self-governance? When has the U.S. not done that? The secret police in the U.S. systematically attack any group that threatens established power. Again, the fate of the Occupy Movement is a recent example. Anti-war groups are targeted not just by the FBI, CIA, local and state police, and others, but even by the military, which infiltrates, spies on, and disrupts them. The U.S. is ruled by corporate oligarchs who control both the national and various state legislatures.

How about Foster corruption in the courts and economy?

Too many examples here- thousands, at least- to list, so let's just name a few: Ever hear of the dirty deals done to deregulate the financial industry? Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury secretary, helped orchestrate that, and subsequently went to his reward (don't call it a bribe!)- a multimillion dollar a year sinecure at Citigroup.

We have just come through a period of systematic fraud by banks and credit rating agencies that created mortgages for deliberately overvalued homes issued to borrowers who would obviously never be able to repay them, rated the resulting “securities” Triple-A (the highest, “safest” rating) and fobbed them off on chump institutional investors. After that, there was an (ongoing) period of fraudulent foreclosures, with thousands of fictitious signatures on legal filings with courts, which looked the other way. (That's a twofer- corruption of the courts AND of the economy.)

Corruption of the courts: take the Inslaw scandal, referenced below. Or the systematic theft of billions of dollars in resource royalty payments owed to Indian tribes by the U.S., which went on for decades, including under Clinton (and probably continues today).

Meanwhile, people like Maher Arar can't even sue the U.S. Arar is the Canadian that the U.S. seized off a plane as he was flying home. (He was not even entering the U.S. but merely in transit back to Canada from a vacation.) He was falsely branded a terrorist by the “Royal” Canadian Mounted Police, so the U.S. secret police shipped him off to Syria for a year of torture and imprisonment in an underground grave. The U.S. merely had to intone the magic words “National Security” and the U.S. courts said he couldn't sue. Meanwhile, the corrupt Tom DeLay has just had his criminal conviction overturned on appeal. Funny how it always works out that way. (I could fill a lengthy tome with more examples.)

Then there's a “secret” court, the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” court, which rubber-stamps warrant requests by the secret police- something like 36,000- while rejecting about a dozen, during its existence. Sounds fair, right? No one ever knows what it does, or who it spies on (everyone, we have learned from Edward Snowden's exposé of the NSA), or why.

Finally we come to “terrorize and even assassinate journalists” who threaten to expose those in power. We have a very recent example of that: the murder of Michael Hastings by elements of the deep state. Apparently lured to a meeting under false pretenses, his car was taken over by hacking into its computer system at 4:30 in the morning and driven at high speed into a tree, but apparently after a bomb planted inside exploded, leaving the engine 200 feet behind the wrecked car. (The laws of physics would dictate that if it flew out of the car after hitting the tree- which it couldn't, since the tree would be in the way- it would have continued forward, just as JFK's head snapping violently backwards in Dealey Plaza in Dallas proves a bullet struck him from in front, fired from the grassy knoll.)

Danny Casolaro was investigating the Inslaw scandal (an unbelievable example of corruption in the U.S. Federal Judiciary and Executive branch- read about it at the link) when he suddenly turned up dead in a hotel bathtub with his wrists slit, baffling his family and friends. This was a murder by the deep state made to look like a suicide. But don't take my word for it; "I believe he was murdered," no less than former Attorney General Elliot Richardson wrote in the NewYork Times. (Casolaro received numerous threatening phone calls prior to his death.)

We have the unresolved case of the “suicide” of Gary Webb. Webb wrote a series about the CIA's use of drug smuggling to fund the contra terrorists attacking Nicaragua during the Reagan regime of the 1980s. (A standard CIA practice since its very founding, since illegal drugs provides the CIA with untraceable, “off the books” funds, thus cutting Congress completely out of the loop and creating a state within a state with its own treasury department in effect.) Webb published these articles in the San Jose (California) Mercury-News, a second or third-tier newspaper in the U.S. media hierarchy.

Despite the fact that the story was absolutely true (and in fact reported earlier in the “alternative” media) the high priests of truth like the New York Times and Washington Post savaged the series and Webb's paper repudiated his work and fired Webb, in cowardly fashion. Webb was blacklisted by the establishment media and thus couldn't find employment in his profession. Ultimately he committed “suicide,” supposedly.

It is an open question whether, driven to despair by the media turning him into a pariah, he killed himself, or whether once again a vengeful CIA exercised its specialty of murder-made-to-look-like-suicide. (Easy for them to do, and they've had plenty of practice.) Either way, the power establishment bears the brunt of responsibility for Webb's death.

Much of the terrorism against journalists takes the form of legal terrorism, with threats of imprisonment for not revealing sources (as NY Times reporter James Risen is currently facing) or for “criminal conspiracy” with whistle-blowers for revealing “classified” information. Of course murdering journalists is also a good way to terrorize the rest of them. As the Chinese saying goes: “Kill one, frighten a thousand.”

But we also have to look at the systematic, ongoing murder of journalists in U.S.-backed regimes in Honduras and Colombia. That is also on the U.S. ledger. And Mexico, one of the most dangerous places on earth for journalists, is also supported by the U.S. There journalists are either murdered by drug cartels protected by the police and state, which are indifferent or complicit in these murders, or murdered directly by state actors. The numbers slaughtered in these U.S.-allied nations vastly outnumber the handful assassinated in Russia.

Russia even has multiparty elections and a legislature, just like the U.S. And there is a small independent media (just as there is a small one in the U.S.) and visible dissidents (again, like the U.S.).

There is an important difference between Russia and the U.S.: in Russia, billionaires can be crushed by the state. That can never happen in the U.S.

Obviously we would be naïve to take at face value the honeyed words of Putin in his civilized, reasonable mode, or the pumped up moral indignation of a Vietnam War criminal and reactionary militarist like McCain.

But perhaps we should take heart in the fact that nowadays, imperialists and oppressors of all stripes feel compelled to talk as if they're democrats and friends of human rights. If hypocrisy is indeed the tribute that vice pays to virtue, it seems that the power-wielding oppressors must now make regular payments.

1] Putin marred what would have been a strong brief for his case by repeating the insulting and grotesque canard that it was the rebels who gassed their own enclave. That aside, his arguments were, in brief: 1) the UN was established to make sure that matters of war and peace would be decided by consensus. This has underlain international stability after World War II; 2) when “influential” [read: powerful] countries bypass the UN, it risks turning it into another League of Nations, that is, impotent and doomed; 3) a U.S. attack is widely opposed, including by the Pope, would create innocent victims, and would lead to regional chaos and terrorism, make more difficult resolutions to the Iranian nuclear question and Israeli-Palestinian problem, and undermine international law and stability; 4) the battle in Syria isn't about democracy, but a battle for power by many factions, and foreign jihadists are present, presenting a danger to Russia and other nations as they migrate out of Syria; 5) a U.S. strike without UN sanction would violate international law, and ; 6) U.S. unilateralism has led to bad outcomes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Oh, and 7) the U.S. isn't “exceptional,” it's just another nation among others, because remember, “ God created us equal.” (The neo-Czar has discarded the official atheism of the “Marxist”-Leninist Soviet Union and re-embraced the reactionary and authoritarian Russian Orthodox Church, a natural ally, just as the Roman Catholic Church has proven a reliable ally of fascist and reactionary regimes the world over. These are examples of what I call authoritarian symbiosis.)

Putin also offered a teaser of “cooperation on other international issues” if the U.S. plays ball on Syria, no doubt to put in there to get the Obama regime salivating in anticipation of Russian help on Iran and other matters. [“Give Us The Head Of Edward Snowden!” I can envision the U.S. demanding, again.]

[“A Plea for Caution From Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria,” by Vladimir V. Putin, New York Times, September 11, 2013. Also there was an interesting commentary about Putin's piece in the Guardian, “Vladimir Putin: arch manipulator with a mission to check US will,” 14 September 2013. The article isn't totally correct, however: for example it uses the phrase “U.S.-democracy promotion” without quotes, as if such a thing exists as anything more than verbal and ideological camouflage for actual U.S. aims, and an idiotic David Rohde quote to the effect that Putin “probably fears” he'll be overthrown if Assad is. Maybe if he's clinically paranoid, he does.]

[2] McCain also objected to being called "an active anti-Russian politician," asserting that "I am pro-Russian, more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today." Hey John, maybe now you know how it feels to people who criticize U.S. policies and its socio-economic status quo when they're branded “anti-American,” including by guys like you. Or even called “traitors” for performing public services, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea (neé Bradley) Manning.

And speaking of regimes that are enemies of their own people, there's nothing like the NSA in Russia that monitors and stores ALL the communications of ALL its citizens, surreptitiously, and passes what it finds to the FBI and CIA and DEA and IRS and god knows who else for laundering and use in bringing criminal cases and harassment and persecution against domestic “enemies,” NOT “terrorists.” (Although the secret police routinely brand their enemies, like the Occupy Movement, environmentalists, and anti-war activists, “terrorists.”) In fact, no other nation on earth, not even North Korea, or China (that we know, although, inspired by the U.S. example, they might try it) does to its citizens what the NSA is doing .

[“John McCain aims broadside at Vladimir Putin with reply editorial,” the Guardian, 19 September 2013.

3] And 2004 too. Ohio was stolen for Bush that year, giving him the Electoral College votes he needed to “win.” The Democratic VP nominee, John Edwards, wanted to fight it, but John Kerry, the Presidential nominee, said no. Later Edwards was retaliated against with a fraudulent criminal case brought by the Federal government falsely claiming a campaign contribution violation- Edwards won at trial- and a never-ending media vilification of Edwards over his sexual affair while his wife had breast cancer. Why, what a beastly cad! As usual in the U.S., any politician with progressive tendencies (such as Edwards) must be neutralized, marginalized, or destroyed as a threat to the reactionary system.

Assad Regime's Latest Taunting Tease of Obama

As I mentioned yesterday, Syrian Tyrant Bashar al-Assad's deputy prime minister actually declared a stalemate in the civil war/insurrection there, and called for a ceasefire.

That ploy lasted all of one day, it would seem. Today the BBC had a regime apparatchik on to explain how a deputy PM could be calling for a truce, and declaring a stalemate in the civil war, when that flies in the face of the dictator Assad's position. True to form for Assad regime gang members, what he said was absurd. It was that the deputy PM wasn't speaking for the government, he was speaking as a member of his party. You see, Syria isn't a dictatorship, it's a multiparty democracy! Who knew?

I'll bet nobody realized that before, since the deputy PM neglected to mention it when he pulled this latest pathetic, time-wasting, mind-fucking ploy of the regime he serves.

The Assad regime is going to jerk Obama's chain every day now, for however many months or years Obama wants to play along with Assad's transparent artifice. (Given how the sleazy con man and rip-off artist Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has kept the U.S. gravy train going for over a decade now, playing the Americans for saps, I'm not very optimistic about a quick end to the Syrian charade.) Actually Obama wants the Syrians to stall, the better for people to gradually forget or lose interest in the chemical weapon slaughter and Obama's “red line.”

Truth be told, Obama has some of the blood of those gassed children he professes such concern for on his hands. (We can gauge how much he really cares by what he's done about it so far- nothing. He let his Secretary of State [John Kerry] make a fool of himself by threatening an imminent attack, and then pulled the rug out from under him, announcing he'd get a Congressional authorization first, and now he's even abandoned that, in favor of letting the Russians jerk the U.S. around for the next six months or a year or however long, by which time the “issue” will be “old.”) Had he not in effect dared Assad to use gas by drawing a “red line,” Assad may never have used the gas. A dictator has to appear strong to his followers, or risk a coup. Assad was practically compelled to test Obama when Obama ordered him not to use chemical weapons. So he started with a small test attack. Obama pretended he didn't know Assad did it- talking as if he needed proof beyond a reasonable doubt to enforce his “red line”! (If only such proof, or any evidence at all, was required for the thousands in the U.S. military gulag.) [1]

By the way, Obama now has the brass to claim that it's “not my red line.” It's “the world's.” Oh. Except it was Obama who declared it, and Obama who pretended he was going to finally act, (sending the hapless Kerry on a very public fool's errand) after his previous inaction emboldened Assad to kill another 1,429 people (by the U.S.' count). And for good measure, firebomb some schoolkids a couple of days later, with one of his jets, which Obama should have destroyed by now. (If indeed the U.S. is “a force for good,” as its high-ranking apparatchiks and nomenklatura members are so fond of declaring.)

Well, I guess we shouldn't allow our hopes to rise when it looks like the U.S. might use its power for good. That only happens once in a blue moon. [I.e. rarely.] To be fair, Obama did fake us out this time. Who could have guessed that after making it seem that he was going to order a strike, he'd just slink off into some political miasma. And the U.S. did use air assets to save the Libyan uprising from being smashed by Qaddafi. (Much to the chagrin of various leftists, some of whom positively pine for the days of Qaddafi. I'm not exaggerating.)

Of course Obama was reluctantly pushed into that one- remember “leading from behind”? How does he come up with those flippant, fatuous slogans to camouflage and dignify his awkward, oddball behavior? Does he invent them himself or does his staff brainstorm them?

Obama seems to think he can outsmart his political opponents, domestic and foreign, whether it's Bashar al-Assad, Hamid Karzai, or Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, with not much more than verbiage. (He'd be great at academic politics.) His record is mixed at best, at least in power. (He certainly proved adept at getting elected, however, handily out-manipulating Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mitt Romney on that particular playing field, the one of U.S. electoral politics.) But I don't think his intellectual intelligence is the right kind of intelligence for the foes he's faced in power. And if you look at the assets and positions of those first four foes I named, you'd think a clever President of the United States, one with a great deal of popular support, could get the better of them, rather than vice versa.

So as compensation, he personally picks people to die by drone, and increases the domestic repression in the U.S., spying on journalists and treating them as criminals and constructing the most nightmarishly all-encompassing secret police hyper-surveillance state anywhere, ever, by far.

Well, where does that leave us? Another decade, another mini-holocaust, this time in Syria, while the rest of the world's population looks on as spectators. What is wrong with this species? That is the deeper question, a question that is deeper than mere politics. It's a psychological, an ontological, an existential, a biological, and a meta-political question, which also has profound social and cultural dimensions that must be analyzed. Such a question requires more than a brief essay to do justice to it.

1] Speaking personally, gassed children- adults too, for that matter- bothers me enough that if I had the power to do something about it to punish, weaken, and deter the perpetrators, I would. Like the kind of power the President of the United States has.

But then we get the deeply disingenuous argument from the “anti-war” crowd (by the way, isn't there a war in Syria right now? Why don't these clowns demonstrate outside the Syrian embassies and consulates in protest? Just asking) that “what difference does it make how someone is killed?” Isn't that as much- if not more- an argument for intervention as for standing off to the side with one's hands in one's pockets and bleating for “dialogue” and “negotiations”? (Yes, it is. There, I answered my own rhetorical question.) And I think Assad has shown what he thinks of dialogue and negotiations when he answered unarmed protesters by gunning them down in the streets, when he dealt with teenagers writing graffiti against him by having them tortured, murdered, and handing their mutilated bodies to their families with gangster threats to keep quiet about it. Or when he gave not one, but two UN mediators in a row the runaround, blowing his insulting lies in their faces. Or when he's spent the past two and a half years reducing cities to rubble, targeting hospitals, clinics, and medical workers, sniping at civilians, and using the heavy weaponry of a military designed to fight other nations against a trapped civilian population, all in order to cling to power at all costs. Doesn't look like he's interested in that “negotiated solution,” the heirs of Neville Chamberlain keep blathering on about.

Speaking of “war,” Syria has shot down a Turkish jet, and has shelled Turkish towns, killing Turkish citizens. It's also set off car bombs at the border. I don't hear the “no war!” crowd (careful you don't shout yourselves horse, dearies) saying Syria is “at war” with Turkey. (And Turkey just shot down a Syria helicopter it claimed was over its airspace.) Is firing a single bullet, say, a “war”? A limited military strike is not a “war.” It can be construed as an act of war, if the target nation so chooses.

This is a semantical game, a rather dishonest one, with double standards aplenty deployed by its advocates. There are two types of characters involved in it: 1) Assad agents, and 2) people allergic to Western, especially U.S., power, but who have no problem with the worst tyrants and despots and aggressors provided they aren't allied with the U.S. bloc.

Real principled.

If the latter group were actually motivated by humanitarian principles, they would not manifest this double standard. They should try being consistent. (Something they demand from the U.S.)

And it's not that most of them are pacifists, either. Most apparently regard fighting fascism in World War II as a righteous cause, for example, and romanticize the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War against the traitor Franco's fascist uprising. (An exception is the late Howard Zinn, who went around late in life lecturing that neither the American Civil War nor World War II should have been fought by the U.S. His People's History of the United States still stands as an important, clarifying work, but he sure had his head far up his ass later on.)

I just think it is a sign of having an ideological cement block for a brain if you think the U.S. is ALWAYS wrong in EVERY situation, and whoever it happens to be opposing is in the right. (That seems to be in practice the Noam Chomsky view of the world these days, at least the first half, although he would deny it.)

Yes, the U.S. is an imperialist power. So is Russia (for centuries), so was Iraq under Saddam Hussein (a failed one, to be sure), so are or have been lots of nations. It is simplistic, black and white thinking, and intellectually lazy (and morally feckless, if not worse) to just put a black hat on the U.S. and see all conflicts in that light. I take a backseat to no one in denouncing U.S. crimes, but that doesn't make everything the U.S. does criminal, and the U.S. is not the sole source of evil in the world. Far from it. (But it's so much easier to act as if it is. You don't have to think and deal with complexities that way!)

Assad Willing To “Talk About” Handing Over His Chemical Weapons

Gee, that's odd. I thought that “framework” worked out by the U.S. and Russia meant he was going to hand them over, not “talk about” it.

He also called the UN chemical weapons inspectors' report “unrealistic,” as if it was something from Mars. (After all, it was the rebels' who gassed their own enclave, don't you know. Even Russia agrees!)

Assad says the most outrageous things as if he's being totally reasonable. He's willing to talk! Reasonable guy!

As long as all you want from him is listening to his sick bullshit, he's quite accommodating.

Actually he did put a price tag on the handover: One Billion Dollars. And it will take a year. (Not a week, as Kerry demanded in his off-the-cuff comment that started this disarmament scheme ball rolling. (Or do we have to put “off-the-cuff” in quotes now? Are we to believe this was all prearranged? If so, it's bizarre.) Assad also had one of his lackeys claim they want a “cease fire.” So peace-loving! His stooges in the West (both leftists and rightists) will take that one and run with it, for sure. Reminds me of Hitler constantly claiming to want “peace” while extracting concession after concession from his appeasers. Gangster methods don't change much.

And Russian neo-Czar Vladimir Putin is keeping up the disgusting lie campaign of pretending the Syrian rebels gassed their own area.

To make matters worse, the fanatical foreign jihadists are now opening waging war on the Syrian rebels; today they drove them out of a town on the Turkish border. So by sitting on its hands, the U.S. has helped come to pass what it feared, and why it sat on its hands- the growing strength of the Islamofascists. Way to go, Obama. I repeatedly inveighed against this stupid strategy starting way back. Obviously the way to prevent that would have been to strengthen the indigenous rebels. Now the Islamofascists are better armed than the original rebels. (Saudi Arabia is partly to blame for that, of course. Some “ally.” The U.S. keeps invading all the wrong countries. It should have invaded Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, if it wanted to fight Islamofascist terrorism. It should have invaded Pakistan, not [or in addition to] Afghanistan to root out the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The U.S. doesn't seem to know what it's doing. Meanwhile, under the pretext of “fighting terrorism,” it steals all the communications of everyone it can, including all Americans.)

Anyway, Obama is too busy building the edifice of a total surveillance state, brick by brick, to do anything decisive about Syria. Pay no attention to his blather about the vital importance of upholding “international norms” and protecting “our children” and international law and blah blah blah. He's been bloviating in high-falutin' fashion at least since his national debut at the Democratic Party Convention in 2004, where he retrod already well-trod rhetorical ground with a “progressive” speech. (Right-wing Democratic Goveror of New York State Mario Cuomo was doing that for years, before Obama, as have many other Democratic Party con men. It's a standard trick in the Democratic Party's bag of deceit, deception, and manipulation.) Unfortunately there are millions of willing dupes who should know better by now who eagerly swill the vile Kool-Aid, because they want change but are too cowardly to actually oppose the system, even if only to vote for Ralph Nader or the Green Party. Even something that tame is too “radical” for the Democratic Party's useful idiots.

Obsene Russian-Syrian Charade Gets More Grotesque

The UN chemical weapons inspectors just turned in their report to the Secretary General on their investigation of the August 21 sarin gas slaughter in Syria. Even though, as per their instructions, they do not say who launched the attack, but merely present the evidence they gathered, it is clear that Assad did it. The rockets carrying the gas were launched from his military's positions, the rocket fragments recovered were his munitions.

So today the Russians are insisting they have "evidence" that the rebels did it. They're still on that. (What evidence? They don't say. These are the same guys who were recently demanding that the U.S. produce its evidence that Assad did it, which he obviously did.)

So much for this bullshit "framework" under which the lying scum of the Assad regime and their ultracynical Russian enablers are supposed to hand over Assad's chemical arsenal. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

Meanwhile, Assad has plenty of useful idiots in the West on both the left and the right (including the far left and the far right in the good ole U.S. of A.) running interference for him to stave off any military attack by the U.S., which they call "war." As if there isn't a real war going on in Syria right now.

By the way, the U.S. has employed limited military force hundreds (if not thousands) of times in the past two centuries, almost never with a Congressional declaration of war. The third President of the U.S., Thomas Jefferson, sent a naval fleet to the Mediterranean to wage a war against the Barbary pirate states that had been seizing ships and their crews for ransom. Congress didn't "authorize" it or declare war that time, either. And as far as "international law" is concerned, if it is illegal for the U.S. to destroy Assad's air force, then let the UN police come and arrest the U.S. and put the U.S. in jail.

The main "law" of global affairs is the law of the jungle, Might Makes Right. It should be on a more civilized level than that, but it isn't yet. So if a sadistic beast like Assad can commit atrocities, the U.S. or whoever can make him pay for it, if they feel like it. People who have a problem with that have their heads up their asses morally speaking, at best. (However many of the defenders of course are active agents of the Assad regime, which is a type of creature even worse.)

Too bad John Kerry isn't president. He at least talks like he'd actually strike, if he had his druthers.

Do Russia and the U.S. Share a Goal in Syria?

Another day, another event in the fast-moving saga of Syria's poison gas arsenal.

Now the sadistic Assad regime that rules that benighted land has announced that it's on board with the Russian-U.S. “framework” (it's not an “agreement” until the UN Security Council votes for it) to neutralize Assad's chemical weapons arsenal- in conformity with what the UN Security Council is going to cook up. We don't know several things: 1) to what extent is the Assad regime really going to live up to whatever requirements the UN sets and relinquish control of the toxic arsenal; 2) what, if any, enforcement mechanism is Russia going to allow the UN Security Council to impose, since it rules out force, and 3) how much of the Assad regime's apparent cooperation (so far only verbal, plus beginning the process of joining the Chemical Weapons Ban treaty) is due to Russian pressure on it, and how much due to the regime's calculations of its own self-interest. [1]

Russia has a motive in taking away Assad's gases. Like the U.S., it fears Islamic jihadists, the Chechen versions of which commit terrorist attacks in Russia and Russian-controlled territory. Like the U.S., it may well fear chemical weapons eventually falling into the hands of jihadists in Syria. [2]

So it has cunningly found a way to kill two birds with one stone. Get the chemical weapons out of Syrian hands, and block a U.S. military attack on the Assad regime, which it supports. (Assuming their scheme ultimately works.)

And Obama is practically indebted to the Russians for getting him off the hook. He didn't want to launch that military attack he kept threatening, especially with Congress set to vote against it. Incredibly, this intelligent man, this clever politician, systematically painted himself into a corner, first by drawing a “red line” barring Assad from using chemical weapons, then by letting Assad get away with the first testing-the-waters chemical attack, which revealed Obama's lack of resolve, then after the large attack in August by promising retaliation, then by ineptly trying to wiggle out of his own threat by kicking the ball over to Congress in order to shift responsibility, which backfired. And he made only pro forma attempts to rally the country to respond to the Assad atrocity. (He's never been interested in trying to do anything politically hard. He generally takes the paths of least resistance. He's a political surfer, riding the waves, not a mountain climber willing to tackle uphill challenges.)

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has just weighed in (after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry scurried to Israel to brief him BEFORE going to Paris to huddle with the British and French) demanding that Syria be “stripped of all chemical weapons.” He said the whole region would be safer. (Given the Assad regime's attacks on Turkey, and Jordan's fearfulness, and the Assad habit of setting off car and truck bombs in Lebanon and much other evil mischief there, Netanyahu has some evidence in support of his statement.)

1] We are already seeing how this might play out, with Kerry threatening vague “consequences” for Syrian non-compliance, and invoking Article 7 of the UN charter, implying authorization of military force. The U.S. position is that no further UN Security Council action would be required. The Russian position is that it would be. Thus while the words written down are agreed by the U.S. and Russia, each puts its own, mutually-conflicting, interpretations on the words. This is a common phenomenon in international affairs. So while this vital difference on the use of military force is papered over in the agreement, and elided in public statements, it lurks ominously just below the surface, like a landmine.

2] In fact Vice President Joseph Biden spelled out the shared U.S.-Russian interest in preventing the chemical weapons from falling into other hands, in Iowa on Sunday, September 15^th. He also claimed that Obama earlier had made this pitch to Russian President (and neo-Tsar) Putin, which supposedly laid the groundwork for the Russian-U.S. demarche. We don't know if this is a face-saving falsehood or something based in fact. It doesn't jibe with the apparently off-handed comments Kerry made in response to a reporter's question (Q: What could Assad do to avoid a U.S. strike? A: He could give up all his chemical weapons in week. Turn them all in. But that's not possible.) which the Russians then seized on. I think there would have been a more formal public proposal by either the Russians, the U.S., or both, if there had been a prior agreement. And why wouldn't U.S. officials have been publicly making the point earlier that “Russia has the same interest as we and the international community have in ridding Syria of chemical weapons”?