At CIA ‘secrecy … used to conceal malfeasance, systemic corruption and intelligence shortfalls’

David Ignatius writes: One conclusion that emerges from The Post’s revelation Thursday of the secret “black budget” for intelligence activities is that the United States doesn’t have many secrets anymore — not in the age of WikiLeaks and omnipresent whistleblowers. It’s only because of the forbearance of Post editors that all 178 pages of this top-secret “Talent-Keyhole” document were not blasted to the world.

The demonstrated inability of the U.S. government to keep secrets causes obvious problems for the intelligence agencies, which exist to steal other peoples’ classified goodies and protect their own. But it’s not so clear that this world of leaks threatens the security of the American republic. That’s because the very meaning of secrecy is changing in a world of transparent social media, where it must be assumed that every keystroke and GPS location may be captured by someone.

I write this reluctantly, as someone who favors a strong intelligence community for the United States that can protect the country against real threats from abroad. But if one theme emerges from these documents, it’s that the United States has been spending an awful lot for intelligence, especially at the CIA, without getting enough in return. What’s needed is better management, rather than more secrecy.

“Secrecy, compartmentation and overclassification today are used to conceal malfeasance, systemic corruption and intelligence shortfalls,” argues John Maguire, a career CIA operations officer who retired several years ago. I hear similar criticisms from other former officers who think a leaner, better-managed CIA would be more effective. [Continue reading…]

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NSA spied on Al Jazeera

Der Spiegel reports: Arab news broadcaster Al Jazeera was spied on by the National Security Agency, according to documents seen by SPIEGEL. The US intelligence agency hacked into protected communication, a feat that was considered a particular success.

It makes sense that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) would be interested in the Arab news broadcaster Al Jazeera. The Qatar-based channel has been broadcasting audio and video messages from al-Qaida leaders for more than a decade.

The United States intelligence agency was so interested, in fact, that it hacked into Al Jazeera’s internal communications system, according to documents from former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden that have been seen by SPIEGEL.

One such document, dated March 23, 2006, reveals that the NSA’s Network Analysis Center managed to access and read communication by “interesting targets” that was specially protected by the news organization. The information also shows that the NSA officials were not satisfied with Al Jazeera’s language analysis.

In addition to cracking the airline reservation services for Russian airline Aeroflot, accessing “Al Jazeera broadcasting internal communication” was listed as a “notable success,” the document shows. The NSA said these selected targets had “high potential as sources of intelligence.”

The encrypted information was forwarded to the responsible NSA departments for further analysis, according to the document, which did not reveal to what extent the intelligence agency spied on journalists or managers of the media company, or whether the surveillance is ongoing. [Continue reading…]

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How the NYPD launched a spy shop to rival CIA

From Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman:

[CIA Director George] Tenet sent [David] Cohen packing for New York, a plum pre-retirement assignment that made him the CIA’s primary liaison with Wall Street titans and captains of industry. After three decades in Washington, he had become one of the most unpopular and divisive figures in modern CIA history. He left feeling that the agency was hamstrung by the people overseeing it. The White House micromanaged operations, slowing down everything. And Congress used its oversight authority to score political points. The CIA was stuck in the middle, an impossible position.

Now [Police Commissioner Ray] Kelly was offering a chance to start something new in the New York Police Department, without any of the bureaucratic hand-wringing or political meddling. The World Trade Center attacks had changed the world. Cohen was being given an opportunity to change policing in response.

He didn’t need a couple days to think about it. He called Kelly back two hours later and took the job.

[Mayor] Bloomberg and Kelly introduced Cohen as the deputy commissioner for intelligence at a city hall press conference on January 24, 2002. Cohen spoke for just two minutes, mostly to praise the NYPD. He had been raised in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood, and though he’d been gone for decades, he still spoke with a heavy accent.

“We need to understand what these threats are, what form they take, where they’re coming from, and who’s responsible,” Cohen said.

The new deputy commissioner offered no specifics about what he had planned. Weeks before his sixtieth birthday, he even declined to give his age, telling reporters only that he was between twenty-eight and seventy. The brief remarks from behind the lectern would amount to one of Cohen’s longest media appearances ever.

“I look forward to just getting on with the job,” he said.

Cohen’s appointment was not front-page news. The New York Times put the story on page B3. The Daily News ran a 165-word brief on page 34. It was four months after 9/11, and the country was focused on doing whatever it took to prevent another attack. Nobody questioned the wisdom of taking someone trained to break the laws of foreign nations and putting him in a department responsible for upholding the rule of law. [Continue reading…]

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If Obama wants to deter future chemical attacks, then he should focus on deterrence instead of punishment

President Obama announced this afternoon that he has decided to launch an attack on Syria but will not move forward until Congress has had an opportunity to debate the issue and has voted to authorize the attack.

Earlier this week, Politico reported:

As President Barack Obama moves closer to calling for military action against Syria, a powerful ally that could help him win over skeptics is staying quiet.

The Israel lobby, including the high-profile American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other Jewish groups, isn’t pushing for intervention even as evidence emerged this week that the Assad regime used chemical weapons against its citizens.

The silence could be a problem for Obama, since the Jewish groups are connected across the political spectrum, wielding influence from the far right to liberal Democrats on issues critical to the Middle East — especially when it comes to the use of military force.

And while Obama has been willing to strike a foreign country without Congress’s approval — as he did in Libya — this time he not only faces a reluctant Congress, but a vocal chorus of Republican and Democratic lawmakers publicly advocating against entanglement.

Since AIPAC and the rest of the lobby have thus far remained silent, will they now start lobbying on behalf of the White House? Possibly, but it seems just as likely that they will not want to be held responsible for pushing Congress to make an unpopular decision.

As for what Congress will do, Obama is taking a gamble, but not as big a gamble as Britain’s prime minister David Cameron took when he got defeated in parliament. Chances are, Congress will bloviate on the issues, tip their hats in the direction of a president who was polite enough to ask their opinions and then, since they don’t really have any, they’ll mostly line up behind him support his decision and sing the praises of the men and women of America’s armed services.

Since Obama has introduced an element that up until now was not part of the debate — that this attack once authorized could come at any time at all — there is another course of action that the White House should consider and that might actually make more sense even to those who remain mesmerized by the supposed utility of America’s military strength: use it as an ongoing deterrent rather than an instrument of punishment. In other words, once Obama has been given the green light from Congress, U.S. battleships can then hold their positions off the coast of Syria indefinitely ready to strike without warning.

If the goal is simply to prevent further use of chemical weapons, the threat of an attack of indeterminate scope is likely to have much more impact on Assad’s calculations than the memory of an attack his forces managed to survive.

Obviously, there are more constructive courses of action that America and its allies should pursue that would not involve either the threat or use of military strikes, but since strikes themselves are the focus of the current debate, then it’s surely preferable to think about using that particular form of power in the most intelligent way possible.

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Opposing military strikes without dishonoring those who died in the Damascus chemical attacks

This may be the one and only time I ever quote Infowars, but at least on this occasion it’s worth pointing out why in the following instance (and no doubt too many others), it’s a boneheaded operation.

During his State Department speech today [Friday], Secretary of State John Kerry grossly misrepresented the facts about the chemical attack at Ghouta near Damascus.

“The United States government now knows that at least 1,429 Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least 426 children,” Kerry said. “I’m not asking you to take my word for it. Read for yourself, everyone… the evidence from thousands of sources, evidence that is already publicly available,” he added.

According to the international aid group Doctors Without Borders, however, 355 people were killed, not the wildly exaggerated figure cited by Kerry.

To inflate 355 deaths to 1,429 would certainly be a wild exaggeration. But did Doctors Without Borders report that just 355 people were killed?

No.

This is what they said:

Three hospitals in Syria’s Damascus governorate that are supported by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have reported to MSF that they received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013. Of those patients, 355 reportedly died.

That’s 355 people who survived the attack, were taken to one of the three hospitals referred to, and then died.

A lethal dose of sarin can kill someone in one minute. The majority of the children who died in the attack most likely died before they could even crawl out of bed. The 3,600 people who reached a hospital were those who had suffered less exposure. Most of the dead probably didn’t get outside their homes.

When I say Infowars is a boneheaded operation, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt. I’m assuming their analysis is stupid and not purposefully deceptive.

And as I’ve said repeatedly over the last week, there are many good reasons to oppose the imminent U.S. military strikes on Syria. But those who minimize the scale of the chemical attack, or based on minimal evidence insist that it must have been launched by the opposition, do two things:

1. They undermine their own credibility.
2. By arguing from what is increasingly exposed as a false position they thereby empower those they are arguing against.

If the Obama administration sounds more credible in its assessment of what happened on August 21, then more Americans will be inclined to accept the administration’s determination of an appropriate response to the attacks.

What the administration has utterly failed to do and has not even attempted, is to explain why anyone should expect or have any confidence that the strikes it has planned will actually have their intended effect — to deter any future chemical attacks.

Since President Obama has already made it clear that neither he, nor the Pentagon, nor most Americans have any appetite to enter a broader military intervention in Syria, the punitive strikes that seem likely to take place in the coming hours, may prompt the Assad regime to plan and carry out yet another chemical attack.

The follow-up attack may be smaller than the one on August 21. It may again occur with conflicting assertions about who is responsible and yet it will almost certainly accomplish its strategic objective: to confront the United States with an impossible choice — to either ignore the attack and thereby demonstrate that the first “punishment” was less than ineffective; or, to get drawn into a cycle of escalation that almost every American wants to avoid.

And just in case anyone thinks that’s a piece of wild conjecture I plucked out of thin air, in fact it comes from the former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker.

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Obama’s missiles of impunity

Rami G Khouri writes: It is quite stunning to experience for the sixth time in a decade a global debate about whether Western powers should use their military superiority to attack Arab countries in order to get those Arab countries to conform to “international norms.” After the experiences of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Mali, and the global use of drones to attack suspected Al-Qaeda militants, we are now witnessing heartfelt debates across the world about the wisdom, efficacy and legitimacy of an American-led attack against Syrian targets.It is heartening to see the best aspects of Western democracy in practice, in the British parliament’s rejection of Prime Minister David Cameron’s request to join the U.S. attack on Syria, and in the skepticism that many American congressmen and women express about the validity of the administration’s case for the attack. Not surprisingly, President Barack Obama’s administration is making the case that it does not need congressional approval for an attack, and seems determined to go ahead with it, with or without Western partners or Congressional support.

So in the coming days we are likely to see a few dozen American missiles smashing into selected Syrian targets, accompanied by passionate arguments for and against this action. Since we have witnessed this scenario several times in the past decade, and are likely to encounter it again in the years ahead (Iran? Sudan? Afghanistan and Pakistan again?), this might be a good moment to step back a bit from the din and haze of battle and focus for a moment on the core issues at hand that matter to all sides.

I see those issues very clearly as two sides of the same coin: What do we do about the criminal use of armaments by a government against its own people, especially when such action breaks prevailing global norms and conventions? And what do we do about the criminal use of armaments by a government against other countries – even ones whose governments kill their own people – in the absence of legitimate international support for such action?

Our prevailing global media- and entertainment-based society does not like to discuss such issues in a symmetrical manner that juxtaposes the criminal actions of the Syrian president against the criminal actions of the American president. Yet we must do so if we wish to reduce the recurring incidents of Western attacks against Arab or other regimes in the global South that kill their own people with impunity.

The cautious Barack Obama has now shifted into a common policy mode for American presidents who are confronted with the need to respond to a complex foreign policy issue somewhere far away and largely alien to them. This is the policy that, in political science terms, should best be called the “kicking ass policy.” It uses the United States’ massive advantages in military technology and force projection to unleash powerful missiles against virtually defenseless targets in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen, and now perhaps Syria. It aims to teach those people over there a lesson they will never forget, and push them to comply with norms of civilized behavior, but it also almost always happens without Washington fully calculating or understanding the consequences of such a policy. [Continue reading…]

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Experts fear U.S. plan to strike Syria overlooks risks

The New York Times reports: Supporters of the president’s proposal contend that a limited punitive strike can be carried out without inflaming an already volatile situation. But a number of diplomats and other experts say it fails to adequately plan for a range of unintended consequences, from a surge in anti-Americanism that could bolster Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, to a wider regional conflict that could drag in other countries, including Israel and Turkey.

“Our biggest problem is ignorance; we’re pretty ignorant about Syria,” said Ryan C. Crocker, a former ambassador to Syria and Lebanon, who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.

The American strike could hit President Assad’s military without fundamentally changing the dynamic in a stalemated civil war that has already left more than 100,000 people dead. At the same time, few expect that a barrage of cruise missiles would prompt either side to work in earnest for a political settlement. Given that, the skeptics say it may not be worth the risks.

“I don’t see any advantage,” said a Western official who closely observes Syria.

In outlining its tentative plans, the Obama administration has left many questions unanswered. Diplomats familiar with Mr. Assad say there is no way to know how he would respond, and they question what the United States would do if he chose to order a chemical strike or other major retaliation against civilians.

That would leave the United States to choose between a loss of credibility and a more expansive — and unpopular — conflict, they said. “So he continues on in defiance — maybe he even launches another chemical attack to put a stick in our eye — and then what?” Mr. Crocker said. “Because once you start down this road, it’s pretty hard to get off it and maintain political credibility.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. spy agencies mounted 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011

The Washington Post reports: U.S. intelligence services carried out 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, the leading edge of a clandestine campaign that embraces the Internet as a theater of spying, sabotage and war, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Washington Post.

That disclosure, in a classified intelligence budget provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, provides new evidence that the Obama administration’s growing ranks of cyberwarriors infiltrate and disrupt foreign computer networks.

Additionally, under an extensive effort code-named GENIE, U.S. computer specialists break into foreign networks so that they can be put under surreptitious U.S. control. Budget documents say the $652 million project has placed “covert implants,” sophisticated malware transmitted from far away, in computers, routers and firewalls on tens of thousands of machines every year, with plans to expand those numbers into the millions.

The documents provided by Snowden and interviews with former U.S. officials describe a campaign of computer intrusions that is far broader and more aggressive than previously understood. The Obama administration treats all such cyber-operations as clandestine and declines to acknowledge them.

The scope and scale of offensive operations represent an evolution in policy, which in the past sought to preserve an international norm against acts of aggression in cyberspace, in part because U.S. economic and military power depend so heavily on computers. [Continue reading…]

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UK asked New York Times to destroy Edward Snowden documents

Reuters reports: The British government has asked the New York Times to destroy copies of documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden related to the operations of the U.S. spy agency and its British partner, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), people familiar with the matter said.

The British request, made to Times executive editor Jill Abramson by a senior official at the British Embassy in Washington D.C., was greeted by Abramson with silence, according to the sources. British officials indicated they intended to follow up on their request later with the Times, but never did, one of the sources said.

On Friday, in a public statement, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said his newspaper, which had faced threats of possible legal action from British authorities, on July 20 had destroyed copies of leaked documents which it had received from Snowden.

Rusbridger said that two days later, on July 22, the Guardian informed British authorities that materials related to GCHQ had made their way to the New York Times and the independent investigative journalism group ProPublica.

Rusbridger said in his statement that it then took British authorities “more than three weeks before anyone from the British government contacted the New York Times.

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How Egypt’s military rulers are exploiting the power of conspiracy theories

The Economist reports: Amid the tempest over Syrian chemical weapons, an irony stands out. After two decades of bloody struggle between the West and al-Qaeda’s global jihadist franchise, those bitter adversaries suddenly find themselves fighting on the same side. As Western countries threaten retaliatory strikes against Bashar Assad’s regime for its apparent use of poison gas, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch also promises a “volcano of revenge”.

Just another shake of the pieces in an increasingly baffling Middle East puzzle? No, says the pro-government press in Egypt, where conspiracy theorists have grown ever more strident since the coup in July that toppled Muhammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood. The apparent surprise-realignment over Syria, they claim, simply tears the veil from a long-standing Zionist-American-Muslim Brotherhood plot, exposing a diabolical plan to divide and weaken Israel’s most powerful Arab neighbours, one by one.

First, of course, say the conspiracy theorists, was Iraq, where the crippling result of America’s 2003 invasion is plain. Now Syria, riven by sects and falling to pieces, awaits air strikes set to deliver the coup de grâce. But the big prize for the wicked West in league with al-Qaeda is, beyond a doubt, Egypt.

Here, the cabal of Israeli, Western and Islamist plotters set out to foment sectarian strife, and to install a Muslim Brotherhood government that would divide the country into two, perhaps four, weakened micro-states. Only the Egyptian army’s timely intervention and the strong hand of the police and intelligence services have saved the ancient nation from a dismal fate. But the plotters have not given up: Egypt remains under threat. [Continue reading…]

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The Egyptians who believe Obama has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood

Max Blumenthal writes: On July 26, a cable news host leaned across his desk, stared into the camera and let his audience in on what he believed was the Obama administration’s deepest, darkest secret. “The issue is not whether Obama is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or not,” he declared. “The issue is that it is a fact that Obama used the help of the Muslim Brotherhood in his administration.”

Reading from notes in a tone of total omniscience, the host began to name names. He cited six figures, all Muslim American activists or intellectuals, accusing them of operating a Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cell inside the White House. They were Mazen Asbahi, Arif Ali Khan, Eboo Patel, Salam Marayati, and Mohamed Elibiary.

“Write these names down,” the host told his audience, “look them up during the break and when I come back let me know if what I say is right or wrong.”

Though he sounded like Glenn Beck or any other Tea Party-style Islamophobe, the host was not American and did not even speak English. He was Yousef El-Hosseini, a popular and famously reactionary personality on the private Egyptian cable network, ONTV. Founded by Egypt’s wealthiest man, Naguib Sawiris, a key financial backer of the forces behind the overthrow of the country’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsi, ONTV has emerged as one of the country’s central instruments for spreading pro-military propaganda.

Since Egyptian security forces commanded by strongman Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi began massacring supporters of Morsi, arresting and disappearing activists in droves, and shutting down unsympathetic news outlets, the Obama administration has ratcheted up its criticism, canceling a joint military maneuver with Egypt while stopping just short of suspending aid. Fearing that external pressure could lead to a crisis in internal morale, Egypt’s military regime has cranked up its Mighty Wurlitzer.

During the past two weeks, pro-military networks like OnTV have begun blending footage of Egypt’s glorious security forces waging a “war on terror” with the kind of conspiratorial screeds familiar to far-right members of Congress like Michele Bachmann and Islamophobia hustlers like Pamela Geller. The propaganda blitz has successfully reinforced the view of many average Egyptians that if Obama cannot respect the heroic Sisi’s war on “terror,” it is because he is caught in the invisible tentacles of the Brotherhood – or perhaps he is an undercover Brother himself. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt bans Al-Jazeera, detains journalists, raids outlets

Committee to Protect Journalists: Egyptian security forces continue to detain and harass journalists working for news outlets critical of the military-led government, particularly Al-Jazeera and its affiliates. Journalists also still face physical threats from protesters, as tensions persist between the government and supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

“The Egyptian government is widening its censorship campaign against critical media in Egypt to undermine coverage of Muslim Brotherhood protests,” said Sherif Mansour CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa coordinator. “Like their predecessors, authorities apparently fail to grasp that the attempted suppression of dissenting voices only compounds the dissent.”

The Ministry of Investment on Thursday said it would ban Al-Jazeera Mubashir, the network’s Egyptian affiliate, because it lacked the required legal permits, according to news reports. The statement accused the channel of “spreading lies and rumors damaging to Egyptian national security and unity.” Today, the Ministry of Interior issued a statement saying it had confiscated two broadcasting cars and equipment from Al-Jazeera Mubashir.

On Tuesday, Egyptian security forces detained without charge four staff of Al-Jazeera English, including correspondent Wayne Hay, cameraman Adil Bradlow, and producers Russ Finn and Baher Mohammed, the station reported. Al-Jazeera Arabic correspondent Abdullah al-Shami and Al-Jazeera Mubashir cameraman Mohamed Bader had been arrested earlier this month while covering protests and held under charges of “threatening national security” and “possessing weapons,” respectively. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt widens crackdown and meaning of ‘Islamist’

The New York Times reports: Having crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian authorities have begun cracking down on other dissenters, sometimes labeling even liberal activists or labor organizers as dangerous Islamists.

Ten days ago, the police arrested two left-leaning Canadians — one of them a filmmaker specializing in highly un-Islamic movies about sexual politics — and implausibly announced that they were members of the Brotherhood, the conservative Islamist group backing the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi. In Suez this month, police and military forces breaking up a steelworkers strike charged that its organizers were part of a Brotherhood plot to destabilize Egypt.

On Saturday, the chief prosecutor ordered an investigation into charges of spying against two prominent activists associated with the progressive April 6 group.

When a journalist with a state newspaper spoke publicly about watching a colleague’s wrongful killing by a soldier, prosecutors appeared to fabricate a crime to punish the journalist. And the police arrested five employees of the religious Web site Islam Today for the crime of describing the military takeover as a coup, security officials said.

Police abuses and politicized prosecutions are hardly new in Egypt, and they did not stop under Mr. Morsi. But since the military takeover last month, some rights activists say, the authorities are acting with a sense of impunity exceeding even the period before the 2011 revolt against Hosni Mubarak. [Continue reading…]

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New generation of genetically engineered crops found to drastically increase use of toxic pesticides

Center for Food Safety: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has quietly approved the first of a new generation of GE crops resistant to more toxic herbicides. The first crop to pass the low regulatory bar was a Bayer soybean variety genetically engineered to withstand direct application of the herbicide isoxaflutole (IFT), which according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is a “probable human carcinogen.”

Center for Food Safety (CFS) projects at least a four-fold rise (.PDF) in national use of this toxic herbicide thanks to these new GE soybeans, and a host of related human health and environmental harms. Additional scientific detail about this and other new GE crops can be found here.

“Bayer’s new GE soybeans represent the next wave in agricultural biotechnology – crops that dramatically increase famers’ use of and dependence on toxic herbicides,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at Center for Food Safety.

Dubbed FG72, these GE soybeans were developed by Bayer CropScience, the second-largest agrichemicals firm in the world.

EPA has designated IFT as a “probable human carcinogen” based on animal tests in which it triggered liver and thyroid tumors in rats. IFT and its major breakdown product persist in surface waters, and despite its limited use at present is frequently detected in tests. It is also toxic to aquatic organisms, wild plants and important crops (e.g. vegetables.). IFT is so toxic that three states – Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota – rejected the Bayer-EPA label for this herbicide as insufficiently protective of human health, the environment, and neighboring crops. [Continue reading…]

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Cooling Pacific has dampened global warming, research shows

The Guardian reports: Cooling waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean appear to be a major factor in dampening global warming in recent years, scientists said on Wednesday.

Their work is a big step forward in helping to solve the greatest puzzle of current climate change research – why global average surface temperatures, while still on an upward trend, have risen more slowly in the past 10 to fifteen years than previously.

Waters in the eastern tropical regions of the Pacific have been notably cooler in recent years, owing to the effects of one of the world’s biggest ocean circulatory systems, the Pacific decadal oscillation.

Many people are aware of the El Niño and La Niña weather systems, which affect the Pacific and bring hotter and stormier or cooler weather in cycles of just a few years, and can have a strong effect on global weather. But few are aware that both of these systems are just part of the much bigger Pacific decadal oscillation, which brings warmer and cooler weather over decades.

The system is now in a cooling phase, scientists have noted, which could last for years. The last such phase was from the 1940s to the 1970s. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military officers have deep doubts about impact, wisdom of a U.S. strike on Syria

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration’s plan to launch a military strike against Syria is being received with serious reservations by many in the U.S. military, which is coping with the scars of two lengthy wars and a rapidly contracting budget, according to current and former officers.

Having assumed for months that the United States was unlikely to intervene militarily in Syria, the Defense Department has been thrust onto a war footing that has made many in the armed services uneasy, according to interviews with more than a dozen military officers ranging from captains to a four-star general.

Former and current officers, many with the painful lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan on their minds, said the main reservations concern the potential unintended consequences of launching cruise missiles against Syria.

Some questioned the use of military force as a punitive measure and suggested that the White House lacks a coherent strategy. If the administration is ambivalent about the wisdom of defeating or crippling the Syrian leader, possibly setting the stage for Damascus to fall to fundamentalist rebels, they said, the military objective of strikes on Assad’s military targets is at best ambiguous.

“There’s a broad naivete in the political class about America’s obligations in foreign policy issues, and scary simplicity about the effects that employing American military power can achieve,” said retired Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, who served as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the run-up to the Iraq war, noting that many of his contemporaries are alarmed by the plan.

Marine Lt. Col. Gordon Miller, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, warned this week of “potentially devastating consequences, including a fresh round of chemical weapons attacks and a military response by Israel.”

“If President [Bashar al-Assad] were to absorb the strikes and use chemical weapons again, this would be a significant blow to the United States’ credibility and it would be compelled to escalate the assault on Syria to achieve the original objectives,” Miller wrote in a commentary for the think tank. [Continue reading…]

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