How consciousness works

Michael Graziano writes: Scientific talks can get a little dry, so I try to mix it up. I take out my giant hairy orangutan puppet, do some ventriloquism and quickly become entangled in an argument. I’ll be explaining my theory about how the brain — a biological machine — generates consciousness. Kevin, the orangutan, starts heckling me. ‘Yeah, well, I don’t have a brain. But I’m still conscious. What does that do to your theory?’

Kevin is the perfect introduction. Intellectually, nobody is fooled: we all know that there’s nothing inside. But everyone in the audience experiences an illusion of sentience emanating from his hairy head. The effect is automatic: being social animals, we project awareness onto the puppet. Indeed, part of the fun of ventriloquism is experiencing the illusion while knowing, on an intellectual level, that it isn’t real.

Many thinkers have approached consciousness from a first-person vantage point, the kind of philosophical perspective according to which other people’s minds seem essentially unknowable. And yet, as Kevin shows, we spend a lot of mental energy attributing consciousness to other things. We can’t help it, and the fact that we can’t help it ought to tell us something about what consciousness is and what it might be used for. If we evolved to recognise it in others – and to mistakenly attribute it to puppets, characters in stories, and cartoons on a screen — then, despite appearances, it really can’t be sealed up within the privacy of our own heads.

Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. How does a brain generate consciousness? In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? The philosopher David Chalmers has claimed that the first question, how a brain computes information about itself and the surrounding world, is the ‘easy’ problem of consciousness. The second question, how a brain becomes aware of all that computed stuff, is the ‘hard’ problem.

I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. The sheer scale and complexity of the brain’s vast computations makes the easy problem monumentally hard to figure out. How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to Kevin and the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time. [Continue reading…]

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Obama plays down U.S. intervening in Syria, a year after calling chemical weapons a ‘red line’

The Associated Press reports: President Barack Obama on Friday played down the prospect of speedy U.S. intervention in Syria, stressing the difficulty of ordering military action against the Assad government without a strong international coalition and a legal mandate from the United Nations.

While his administration weighed military responses to this week’s claims of a large-scale chemical weapons attack near Damascus, Obama spoke as cautiously as ever about getting involved in a war that has killed more than 100,000 people and now includes Hezbollah and al-Qaida.

He made no mention of the “red line” of chemical weapons use which he marked out for Syrian President Bashar Assad a year ago and which U.S. intelligence says has been breached at least on a small scale several times since.

“If the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a U.N. mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it — do we have the coalition to make it work?” Obama said Friday. “Those are considerations that we have to take into account.”

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Independent of GCHQ?

When a newspaper report appears with four names in the byline, it’s either an indication that the depth of the reporting required a team, or perhaps the opposite — that the report was so suspect, no one person was willing to take responsibility.

Kim Sengupta’s lack of confidence in his own reporting in an “exclusive” for The Independent is evident in the fact that he felt it needed to be backed up with an op-ed. The op-ed itself, while filled judiciously with caveats, amounts to a resounding expression of confidence in the work of Britain’s intelligence services, its “highly professional” employees and their ability to protect the British people “against the ravages of terrorism.”

That GCHQ — Britain’s arm of the NSA which operates nominally under the authority of the British government — having built a massive surveillance center in the Middle East presents no moral dilemmas, according to Sengupta.

People would expect them to do so in a region enmeshed in so much turmoil, which had been the source, at times, of bombings in this country.

By “people”, Sengupta presumably means British people — not the people whose communications are being monitored. The fact that this center has been built with the consent of a host government that most likely is unelected — that presents no moral dilemmas? How about this one: that such a government will expect strong support from the UK and the U.S. if threatened by a homegrown democracy movement? Providing land for a massive GCHQ operation sounds like the kind of insurance policy that many an Arab autocrat would view as a sound investment.

Given that Sengupta positions himself as a fairly unambiguous cheerleader for GCHQ, why would he now being exposing some of its most sensitive operations? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that this is simply a case of: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

Intelligence sources provided The Independent with enough details for the paper to stitch together an exclusive and in return the paper launched an insidious multipronged attack on The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden. The Guardian is presented as kowtowing to the demands of the British government, Greenwald as a potential threat to Britain’s national security, and Snowden as the purveyor of information that could put lives at risk — and all of this comes right at the time that Scotland Yard is conducting a “terrorism investigation into material found on the computer of David Miranda,” Greenwald’s partner.

At a time when journalism itself is under threat, it might not be surprising yet it is nevertheless depressing that there are so many journalists willing to sell out their own profession.

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Obama’s says events in Syria ‘require America’s attention’

“As difficult as the problem is, this is something that is going to require America’s attention and hopefully the whole international community’s attention.”

“America’s attention” — these are not fighting words. The use of chemical weapons on a large scale — an event that would breach the “red line” Obama drew a year ago — would now (if confirmed) be “troublesome.”

The war-fearmongers need to step down. The United States is not about to enter another war.

As for the false-flag conspiracy theorists, you seem to have a feedback loop stuck in your brains that won’t stop running. The U.S. and its allies have been itching for military intervention in Syria for over two years — they just needed to find that perennially elusive pretext. We’ve had one false flag after another, and another, and another, and another.

If the West was looking for a pretext to invade Syria, wouldn’t 130,000 people killed, four million internally displaced, 1.7 million refugees having fled Syria including one million children, many cities reduced to rubble, and the long-reported existence of chemical weapons stockpiles — wouldn’t all of that add up to a pretext?

Apparently not. And given that human misery on such a vast scale has thus far not led to Western military intervention, what reason is there to believe that the latest in so many events that have swiftly been trumpeted as triggers of war will turn out to be the real thing? How many times can this story keep re-running?

(1 minute 34 second clip preceded by 30 second commercial.)

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Syria deaths: powerful asphyxiant in strike was probably sarin, say experts

The Guardian reports: Expert opinion is hardening behind attributing the deaths on Wednesday of hundreds of people in Damascus to a nerve agent such as sarin, with regional and western governments expecting to receive smuggled biological samples from the site in the coming days.

Chemical weapons specialists, who have studied footage showing the dead and dying victims of the attack, said several symptoms offered strong evidence that a nerve agent was used; it would be the worst such attack anywhere in the world in the past 25 years.

Stefan Mogl, a Swiss chemical weapons expert and former arms inspector, said: “There’s a significant number of videos of children’s faces and of adults who seem to have been exposed, that show typical symptoms of acetylcholinesterase inhibition poisoning, which coincides with a nerve agent.”

Mogl told the Guardian it was very likely the agent used was sarin. “The significance is, it’s not a single case. One person with constricting of the pupils, or with excessive salivation, or with spasms, or gasping for air, one single incident is not very significant, but … I came to the conclusion that there is a likelihood of nerve agent poisoning and this should be thoroughly investigated. You see children dying, people with very severe effects. I’ve seen a lot of people with uncontrolled muscle movement.”

Alastair Hay, another former weapons expert, who investigated the aftermath of the Halabja attack, when up to 5,000 people were gassed in Iraqi Kurdistan by Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1988, said: “I’m struck by the appearance of the victims and the absence of any signs of trauma. This suggests some powerful asphyxiant. Many of the victims have individual signs suggestive of exposure to an organophosphate agent. Nasal and lung secretions are very evident in many of the victims. These are just some of the signs consistent with [such] exposure.” [Continue reading…]

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One million Syrian children are refugees

EA WorldView: One million Syrian children are now registered as refugees, the United Nations said Friday.

UN latest figures show that of the one million Syrian refugees under the age of 18, around 740,000 are under 11.

Children now make up half of all refugees from the Syrian conflict. Syrians have sought refuge in neighboring Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon as well as in Egypt. Others have fled to Europe and North Africa.

UNHCR High Commissioner António Guterres expressed the situation in stark terms: “What is at stake is nothing less than the survival and wellbeing of a generation of innocents. The youth of Syria are losing their homes, their family members and their futures. Even after they have crossed a border to safety, they are traumatized, depressed and in need of a reason for hope.”

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Pentagon continues to update military options on Syria

The Wall Street Journal reports: Officers at the Pentagon on Thursday were updating target lists for possible airstrikes on a range of Syrian government and military installations, officials said, as part of contingency planning should President Barack Obama decide to act after what experts said may be the worst chemical-weapons massacre in more than two decades.

As the Pentagon worked on its options, Secretary of State John Kerry talked by telephone with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and the foreign-policy chiefs of Turkey, Jordan and the European Union, as well as with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, officials said.

The Syrian government denied allegations it gassed its own people, backed by new statements from regime allies Iran and Russia accusing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s international foes of conspiring against him. U.S. officials said they have seen “strong indications” that chemical weapons were used but that more work was needed to evaluate and collect evidence.

The regime gave no indication, however, that it would agree to Mr. Ban’s plea to let U.N. inspectors investigate the chemical-weapons allegations, as Syrian forces pressed on with an offensive in the towns around the capital where the attacks were alleged to have occurred.

U.S. officials who described the military options being revised at the Pentagon stressed that their purpose wouldn’t be to topple the regime, but to punish Mr. Assad if there is conclusive evidence that the government was behind poison-gas attacks on Wednesday.

Making its options known could constitute a U.S. warning to Mr. Assad and his backers. It was unclear if Mr. Obama would be prepared to use the options; he has resisted getting entangled militarily in the conflict since the start.

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Returning to Cairo

Ursula Lindsey writes: The man across the aisle was reading an article headlined: “No Turning Back and No Surrender Before the Forces of Darkness.” As our plane descended over night-time Cairo, the streets were blurry in the weak city lights, and eerily empty because of a military curfew.

Coming home from a summer vacation on Wednesday evening filled me with dread. It was partly fear for my personal safety. But mostly I was worrying about whether I would recognize the place where I have lived for the past 10 years, or find it hollowed out by the latest viciousness.

I had spent the last week online, reading the essays, news reports and interviews, tweets and blog posts of colleagues and public figures, acquaintances and friends. I looked at the pictures and the videos and saw my Facebook page turn into, as one fellow-blogger put it, “an obituaries page.”

There were no lines at passport control at the Cairo airport. At customs, officials were on the look-out for journalists with satellite up-link equipment. They inspected my husband’s digital recorder. “The Western media are not telling the truth about what’s happening in Egypt,” one official told us.

That view is echoed by presidential advisers and every talking head on state television’s around-the-clock stream of “Egypt Fights Terrorism” coverage. International condemnation of the new Egyptian authorities is the product — so the argument here goes — not of shocking state violence against protesters, but of foreign journalists’ tendentious omission of the context that justifies that violence.

In truth, there has been plenty of criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its failure was made starkly clear on June 30, when millions called for President Mohamed Morsi to step down. The rot of the Islamist movement was on display in the days that led up to the massacre at Rabaa al-Adawiya — when Brotherhood leaders pushed their supporters toward “martyrdom,” and after that Islamists attacked churches and innocent bystanders across the country in retaliation.

With a few shining exceptions, Egypt’s cultural and political elite — which celebrated Morsi’s downfall — has also failed spectacularly.

There was their intellectual failure to recognize two parallel truths: That the Muslim Brotherhood was intolerant and authoritarian, but that cheering its liquidation by the police and the army would bring Egypt no closer to freedom and pluralism.

There was a moral failure: the unwillingness to acknowledge that fellow citizens, however misguided their beliefs or criminal their behavior, still have rights — foremost the right to live. [Continue reading…]

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Chas Freeman on why the Kerry initiative is dead on arrival

Chas Freeman writes: It seems to me that the structure of these talks (even if it is not built on the preposterously one-sided formulas cited in Sam’s report) overlooks and violates a basic maxim of diplomacy. An agreement that excludes and fails to address the interests of those with the capacity to wreck it is no agreement at all. All Palestine has now been divided into four parts. The Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are ignored by both the Israeli authorities and forgotten by the international community. The other three parts of Palestine are the West Bank, Gaza, and the Diaspora Palestinians driven from their homes into residence in refugee camps and foreign countries. Of these three parts, the Palestinian Authority, which the United States has appointed to represent Palestinian interests in negotiations with Israel, and which is now talking to the government of Israel under U.S. auspices is the weakest. It lacks a popular mandate, is dependent on foreign subsidies and tax revenue collected by Israel, relies on Israel’s staunchest foreign backer to extract Israeli concessions that will permit self-determination by Palestinians, polices the Jewish state’s occupation of the West Bank and isolation of Gaza, and whines ineffectually as Israel’s colonial enterprise consumes its territory and displaces its people. The PA cannot speak for Palestinians in Gaza or in the Diaspora, neither of whom would be bound by any agreement it might reach with Israel.

In January 2006, Hamas gained a popular mandate to govern all of Palestine beyond the 1967 borders of Israel. It is now besieged in Gaza by both Israel and Arab opponents of Islamist democracy. Neither Hamas nor Gazan Palestinians are represented in the so-called “peace process.” Neither will have a stake in making anything that might emerge from it work. The 7 million Palestinians who live outside their homeland have not been represented in discussions of its future since the Oslo accords created the PA. Revanchism on their part would not be cured by a deal between Israel and the PA. I don’t see how the “peace process” Kerry has contrived is a path to peace even for the fifth or so of the Palestinians (those on the West Bank) whose future it purports to address. A peace that proposes to exclude about four-fifths of Palestinians is a fatally flawed diplomatic fraud — not, of course, the first one in this arena.

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The torturer, the spy, and the journalist: How the U.S. jailed the waterboarding whistleblower

Tyler Bass writes: A decade ago, long before Edward Snowden trolled the depths of a classified government surveillance program, John Kiriakou was learning about a government practice as secret and troubling, and a lot more gruesome.

On the night of March 28, 2002, Mr. Kiriakou, then a decorated officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, led a team that raided a suspicious house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and made America’s first post-9/11 capture of a major al-Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaydah. After a shoot-out that almost killed him, Zubaydah was rushed to a hospital and nursed back to life by the CIA. During subsequent interrogations at a “black site” in Thailand and at the Guantanamo Bay prison, he was waterboarded eighty-three times.

In January of this year, the 15-year CIA veteran was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on charges of revealing classified information, including the name of a covert CIA operative. But he and his supporters claim that the government’s case against him was being built in secret since he began speaking to the press about waterboarding.

His prosecution, they say, was really payback for disclosing a secret program, and one that Kiriakou would argue was ineffective and wrong. The disclosure of a CIA officer’s name was illegal, but given numerous other leaks, he said it did not merit the government’s aggressive approach. “I’ve never believed my case was about a leak,” the father of five said in January after his sentencing. “I’ve always believed my case was about torture.”

In 2007, during an interview with ABC News, Kiriakou described Zubaydah’s initial treatment, and so became the first person to reveal the CIA’s waterboarding program. While his knowledge of the waterboarding program was second-hand, at the time he offered reluctant support, though he would discover later that he had been lied to about its efficacy. But in 2007, in his soft tenor, Kiriakou told reporter Brian Ross that Americans and Congress needed to be talking about this stuff. “Because I think as a country this is something we have to decide that we want to do as a matter of policy. It shouldn’t be secret. It should be part of a national conversation.”

Kiriakou is considered to be the sixth government employee to be charged with disclosing secret information under the Obama administration, which, despite the President’s signing of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act last year, has carried out more whistleblower indictments than any other administration in history. (Snowden was the seventh whistleblower to be charged with spilling state secrets.) [Continue reading…]

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NSA paid millions to cover Prism compliance costs for tech companies

The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency’s activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court.

The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA’s inability to separate purely domestic communications from foreign traffic violated the fourth amendment.

While the ruling did not concern the Prism program directly, documents passed to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden describe the problems the decision created for the agency and the efforts required to bring operations into compliance. The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA.

The intelligence agency requires the Fisa court to sign annual “certifications” that provide the legal framework for surveillance operations. But in the wake of the court judgment these were only being renewed on a temporary basis while the agency worked on a solution to the processes that had been ruled illegal. [Continue reading…]

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Only Assad can prove the ‘toxic gas’ claims are false

Fawaz Gerges writes: Although we do not have independent information as to whether Bashar al-Assad’s regime fired chemical weapons on the eastern suburbs of Damascus and killed hundreds of civilians, as the opposition claims, the burden of proof, morally and legally, lies squarely on the shoulders of the Syrian president.

If the regime’s counter-claims of denial are to be believed, Assad must convince the Syrian people and the world. He can do this by allowing the United Nations inspectors access to the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Ghouta, where this apparent massacre occurred. A 20-strong UN team is already in Damascus, investigating three other incidents of alleged chemical weapons attacks said to have taken place six months ago.

The UN, together with scores of nations, has called on Assad to grant permission to its inspectors and allow them to conduct a “thorough, impartial and prompt investigation”. Assad’s prompt agreement would not only show his sincerity about addressing the serious and urgent concerns of the international community, but could also forestall western military strikes. His refusal could prompt such a strike.

If proven, and given the scale of the atrocity, the “red line” established by US president Barack Obama about the use of chemical weapons has surely been crossed. Pressure is mounting on Obama at home. Some US lawmakers immediately renewed calls for the administration to intervene more decisively in the Syrian conflict.

France has already threatened to retaliate militarily against Syria after a UN security council statement failed to agree to call for UN inspectors to investigate. French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said: “If it is proven, France’s position is that there must be a reaction, a reaction that could take the form of a reaction with force.”

It is therefore in Assad’s interests – and it is his responsibility – to co-operate with the UN inspectors. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian eyewitness accounts of alleged chemical weapons attack in Damascus

The Guardian reports: Few people sleep early in Damascus, even in times of war. So when shells started to crunch into the east of the capital at around 2am on Wednesday, Um Hassan and her four children were wide awake, bracing for familiar sounds of bombs falling on buildings and the empty road below.

Soon, though, loudspeakers in the neighbourhood, some attached to mosque minarets, started blaring terrifying warnings – telling residents to leave their houses and flee.

“We were in a panic to take the children and run out of Zemalka to any nearby villages,” said Um Hassan of her area in the east Ghouta district of the capital. “People who were sleeping in their homes died in their beds because they could not feel the effects of the attack.”

Headaches and nausea quickly overcame the family as they scrambled though blackened streets towards the family car, a violent cacophony of shelling all around and the air filling with a strange, noxious odour.

“I still feel sick and drowsy with all the smoke I have breathed,” she said 36 hours after the attack, which killed hundreds of people, wounded many more, and sparked outrage around the world.

“As we were trying to [leave], I could see people coming out of their homes but they would fall down. We tried to help some of them but they died before we got them to the hospital.”

The attack seemed relentless, according to Um Hassan and other victims and first responders contacted by the Guardian via Skype onThursday. The Syrian government has acknowledged that its military launched a large operation in eastern Ghouta in the early hours of Thursday, but has vehemently denied the use of chemical weapons. [Continue reading…]

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Assad prevents weapons inspectors from viewing site of alleged chemical attack

Reuters reports: The longer chemical weapons inspectors wait in a Damascus luxury hotel for permission to drive up the road to the site of what appears to be the worst poison gas attack in a quarter century, the less likely they will be able to get to the bottom of it.

The poisoning deaths of many hundreds of people took place only three days after a team of U.N. chemical weapons experts arrived in Syria. But their limited mandate means the inspectors have so far been powerless to go to the scene, a short drive from where they are staying.

“We’re being exterminated with poison gas while they drink their coffee and sit inside their hotels,” said Bara Abdelrahman, an activist in one of the Damascus suburbs where rebels say government rockets brought the poison gas that killed hundreds of people before dawn on Wednesday.

The Syrian government denies it was behind the mass killing, the deadliest incident of any kind in Syria’s two-and-a-half year civil war and the worst apparent chemical weapons attack since Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Iraqi Kurds in 1988.

The United Nations has asked President Bashar al-Assad’s government for access to the scene, and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it should be investigated “without delay”.

Former weapons investigators say every hour matters.

“The longer it takes, the easier it is for anybody who has used it to try to cover up,” said Demetrius Perricos, who headed the U.N.’s team of weapons inspectors in Iraq in the 2000s.

“The more you cover up, the more time it takes afterwards to uncover it. So time is definitely not something that you want to take, you don’t want to do it slowly,” Perricos told Reuters.

Chemical weapons experts say there is little doubt that it was exposure to poison gas of some kind that killed the hundreds of victims, although exactly what chemicals were used could not be determined from just looking at images.

“Clearly, something has killed a lot of people,” says Dan Kaszeta, a former U.S. Army chemical officer and Department of Homeland Security expert now a private consultant. “We’re not going to know what until someone gets a sample.”

Stephen Johnson, a former British Army officer specializing in chemical, biological and nuclear warfare and now visiting fellow at Cranfield University’s forensic unit, said it was also “staggeringly effective if it is a chemical attack, which implies more than a casual rocket or two.”

Reuters also reports: Talk, notably from France and Britain, of a forceful foreign response remains unlikely to be translated into rapid, concerted action given division between the West and Russia at Wednesday’s U.N. Security Council meeting, and caution from Washington on Thursday.

Moscow has said rebels may have released gas to discredit Assad and urged him to agree to a U.N. inspection. On Wednesday, Russian objections to Western pressure on Syria saw the Security Council merely call in vague terms for “clarity” – a position increasingly frustrated Syrian rebels described as “shameful”.

The State Department said senior U.S. and Russian diplomats would meet in The Hague next Wednesday to discuss ending Syria’s civil war, in what would be the first such meeting since allegations of the chemical attack.

A senior State Department official said chemical weapons would also be discussed at the meeting. The meeting had previously been announced, but no date had been released.

On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Syria must let the U.N. team already in Damascus investigate “without delay”. He said he would send a top U.N. disarmament official, Angela Kane, to lobby the Syrian government in person.

Ban said he expected a swift, positive answer.

Obama has directed U.S. intelligence agencies to urgently help establish what caused the deaths, a State Department spokeswoman said while acknowledging it may be difficult given that the United States does not have diplomatic relations with Syria.

“At this time, right now, we are unable to conclusively determine CW (chemical weapons) use,” the State Department’s Jen Psaki told reporters. “We are doing everything possible in our power to nail down the facts,” she added.

Another U.S. official said intelligence agencies were not given a deadline and would take the time needed to “reach a conclusion with confidence.”

Don’t expect that determination to take place any time soon. The Obama administration is still trying to figure out whether a military coup took place in Egypt and if that determination is a challenge then coming to a conclusion about the use of chemical weapons in Damascus can be assumed to be well nigh impossible.

But let’s indulge the conspiracy theorists and assume that Assad has been the victim of a false flag operation. If that was the case, why would he now place a single obstacle in the way of those who could establish his innocence? Why would he ignore the advice of his loyal ally, Russia, which is to let the inspectors do their work?

The fact is, if there was some compelling evidence that this attack could be blamed on Jabhat al-Nusra or some other rebel group, there would be discreet sighs of relief in many Western capitals.

EA WorldView provides a transcript of the doctor speaking in the video above:

You call these terrorists? These are children. Four or six missiles hit Zamalka. Look. I promise you that in one other hospital there are 155 dead.

Look at them! Children. Women. “Did you try to rescue them”? No, they were killed immediately. I swear to you some families were killed entirely. Mom, Dad, kids, and grandparents killed as they lay sleeping in their homes. We just brought down from three buildings entire families killed in their sleep. You will see in a bit. We will issue names for everyone. So far we have confirmed 400-500 martyrs [deaths], even 600. That number is climbing and we have wounded people who are almost martyrs.

I swear by God. When will this Government come and give a verdict on this? When will they act like a Government? When will traitor Bashar [President Assad] own up? God curse him and his parents.

Where is [United Nations envoy Lakhdar] Brahimi? [Former UN envoy] Annan, you talk of rights of children and people. Where are you? Come and see these children now! Don’t talk on TV. Just come and see. Come! God help us…

Look at this child. Look! We don’t know who his parents are. They’re just numbers now.

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Downing Street directed Guardian hard drives to be destroyed

The Guardian reports: Nick Clegg has endorsed the government’s decision to ask the Guardian to destroy leaked secret NSA documents on the grounds that Britain would face a “serious threat to national security” if they reached the “wrong hands”.

In a statement, a spokesman for the deputy prime minister gave the first official confirmation that the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, made the request to the Guardian.

The intervention by Clegg came after Yvette Cooper said that parliament’s intelligence watchdog should investigate David Cameron’s role in asking the Guardian to surrender or destroy the NSA documents. The shadow home secretary made her call after the Daily Mail and the Independent reported that Heywood made the request to the Guardian on the instructions of the prime minister.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said that the prime minister must make a statement to MPs when parliament returns next month.

In a statement issued after the official confirmation that Heywood asked the Guardian to delete its hard drives, Vaz said: “The actions of the cabinet secretary are unprecedented and show that this issue has reached the highest levels of government. Although I am very surprised at this revelation it explains why Downing Street, the White House and the home secretary were briefed in advance about David Miranda’s detention.

“Up until now the UK government has downplayed its interest in these matters but it’s clear that they have taken a proactive stance not just in terms of the destruction of the information held by the Guardian but also the involvement of those journalists who have written about Edward Snowden. The prime minister must make a full statement to parliament on the day it returns. We need to know the full facts nothing less will do.” [Continue reading…]

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Review of U.S. surveillance programs to be led by panel of intelligence insiders

The Guardian reports: The review of US surveillance programs which Barack Obama promised would be conducted by an “independent” and “outside” panel of experts looks set to consist of four Washington insiders with close ties to the security establishment.

The president announced the creation of the group of experts two weeks ago, in an attempt to stem the rising tide of anger over National Security Agency surveillance techniques disclosed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Obama trumpeted what he said would be a “high-level group of outside experts” tasked with assessing all of the government’s “intelligence and communication technologies”.

However a report by ABC News, which has not been denied by the administration, said the panel would consist of Michael Morell, a recent acting head of the CIA, and three former White House advisers.

The list of apparent panel members prompted criticism among privacy and civil liberty advocates, who said the review would lack credibility and was unlikely to end the controversy over US surveillance capabilities.

If Obama thinks that Morell along with former White House officials Richard Clarke, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire, all qualify as “independent” “outside experts”, who else is he going to pick for this panel? Michael Hayden, George Tenet, and Dick Cheney?

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Dictators, massacres, and the media

Does Bashar al-Assad check his approval ratings? Probably not. But that’s no reason to believe that he or his government lack interest in their public image. Indeed, Assad probably pays as much attention to how he is perceived in New York and Washington, as he is in Homs or Alleppo, which is not to say he hopes to make any new American friends but rather that he has a keen interest in the extent to which he can rely on American indifference.

Having already probed the international political and media environment with some exploratory ‘minor’ use of chemical weapons and triggered no major international public or political outcry, the Syrians have likely been looking for the most propitious moment to escalate. As much as people refer to the use of chemical weapons as ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unconscionable,’ the regime quite likely sees this class of weapons as useful in several ways.

Firstly, they are very effective as instruments of terror. To avoid a cloud of dispersing poisonous gas is far more difficult than avoiding artillery fire. Since there’s really no way to take cover, the incentive to flee will be that much higher.

Secondly, if pockets of resistance can be cleared without destroying most of the physical infrastructure, then in a city such as Damascus it will be that much easier for the regime to fool itself into believing that it is avoiding destroying the city.

So, the primary obstacles to the use of chemical weapons are international law and public opinion. International law has little power if the United Nations Security Council does nothing to promote its enforcement, and in the case of Syria there is no consensus among the UNSC’s veto-wielding members.

That leaves the limited effect that public opinion can have on shaping the actions of individual governments.

If Assad wanted to run a test to see what kind of reaction the slaughter of hundreds more of his citizens might have in a world that already seems largely indifferent to the deaths of over 100,000 people, he couldn’t have been better served than he was by General Sisi’s operations in Cairo last week in which hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood protesters were gunned down.

The U.S. cancelled military maneuvers that were due to take place with their Egyptian counterparts next month. A few generals won’t be sharing cocktails together. As for the press reaction, predictably the casualties weren’t ‘Egyptians’ — they were ‘Islamists’ who, we are often led to believe, have a predilection for martyrdom.

For Assad, the signals from Cairo were all positive. Add to that America’s overriding preoccupation with the actions of the NSA and now the sentencing of Bradley Manning, and all of Assad’s advisers must have agreed that this week looked the perfect week to fire off some chemical weapons. A front-page story, but just a one-day story, was probably the assessment.

The New York Times turns out to be have been the only major U.S. newspaper that made this its lead story, yet cautious as ever it played down the casualty size and underlined the uncertainty about the causes of death: “Scores Killed in Syria, With Signs of Chemical War” and “Images of Death, but No Proof of Cause.”

The Washington Post went with “Syrian regime accused of chemical attack” — no mention of the number of casualties and the lead story was on the NSA. Likewise the Los Angeles Times kept numbers out of its headline: “Syrian rebels allege new gas attack.”

USA Today said: “Rebels say chemical attack kills hundreds” — again this ran beneath the lead on the NSA.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution consigned the story to page two.

Assad’s media advisers must be reporting back to their president: Mission accomplished. As we expected, the U.S. government doesn’t care too much about what we do and the American people care even less. The really big news today is that a young American soldier changed his name.

More sarin is on the way.

Update: As Brian Whitaker noted, there is another element in the timing of this attack: it comes on the one-year anniversary of Obama laying down his ‘red line’ on the use or even movement of chemical weapons.

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