Max Blumenthal reports: I sat inside a dimly lit, ramshackle trailer functioning as a general store for the residents of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, while a wiry, sad-eyed man named Adbel told me about the massacres that drove him from his hometown. Dragging deeply on a cigarette, Abdel described how army forces rained shells down on his neighborhood in Deir Ba’alba, a district in Homs, over five months ago, pounding the town over and over. Then he told me how government thugs barged into homes at 6am, methodically slashing his neighbors to death with long knives, leaving fields irrigated with the blood of corpses, a nightmarish scene that looked much like this. Like nearly everyone I interviewed in the camp, he described his experience in clinical detail, with a flat tone and a blank expression, masking continuous trauma behind stoicism.

As Abdel mashed his cigarette into a tin ashtray and reached to light another, a woman appeared at the shop window with three young children. She said she had no money and had not been able to purchase baby formula for three days. She had trudged to hospitals across the camp seeking help and was turned away at each stop. Without hesitation, the shop owner, a burly middle-aged man also from Homs, pulled a can of formula off a shelf and handed it over to the woman. She made no promise to pay him back, and he did not ask for one. Like so many in the camp, she left Syria with nothing and now depends on the charity of others for her survival. In a human warehouse of 120,000, the fourth largest population center in Jordan and the second largest refugee camp in the world, where few can leave and even fewer are able to enter, the woman’s desperate existence was not an exception, but the rule.

“We’re in a prison right now,” Abdel told me. “We can’t do anything. And the minute we try to have a small demonstration, even peacefully, [Jordanian soldiers] throw teargas at us.”

“Guantanamo!” the shop owner bellows.

None of the dozens of adults I interviewed in the camp would allow me to report their full names or photograph their faces. If they return to Syria with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad still intact, they fear brutal recriminations. Many have already survived torture, escaped from prisons, or defected from Assad’s army. “With all the bloodshed, the killing of people who did not even join the resistance, Bashar only wanted to teach us one lesson: That we are completely weak and he is our god,” a woman from Dara’a in her early sixties told me. “His goal is to demolish our spirit so we will never rise up again.” The woman’s sons had spent four months under sustained torture for defecting to the Free Syrian Army. She does not know where they are now, only that they are back in the field, battling Assad’s forces in a grinding stalemate that has taken somewhere around 100,000 lives.

When news of the August 21 chemical attacks that left hundreds dead in the Ghouta region east of Damascus reached Zaatari, terror and dread spiked to unprecedented levels. Many residents repeated to me the rumors spreading through the camp that Bashar would douse them in sarin gas as soon as he crushed the last vestiges of internal resistance—a kind of genocidal victory celebration. When President Barack Obama announced his intention to launch punitive missile strikes on Syria, however, a momentary sense of hope began to surge through the camp. Indeed, there was not one person I spoke to in Zaatari who did not demand US military intervention at the earliest possible moment. [Continue reading…]

A few days ago I posted the video below which recently appeared on Al Jazeera English. EA Worldview now provides additional background on the source of the footage and points out a number of inaccuracies in AJE’s reporting. EAW says: “To date, there has been no confirmed evidence of Iranian commanders overseeing Syrian military operations or of Iranian ground troops fighting on the battlefield.”

This is the Al Jazeera report based on film made by an Iranian documentary maker, Esmail Heydari, who is not identified correctly in the report:

The broadcasts by Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English exaggerated and distorted the videos when they claimed, “The Iranians are the ones calling the shots in [the] war…giving orders where to fight and when….”

Notably, Al Jazeera English does not say that Heydari is a documentary maker, and it wrongly identifies him as a “fighter”, mis-translating at least one of his statements in the raw footage. It uses him, incorrectly, in the highly exaggerated claim, “The video shows just how in control the Iranian fighters are….It is clear once again that Assad’s army has little say about what goes on.”

Later, Al Jazeera English almost certainly makes a further mistake by portraying Heydari as a “Syrian fighter”, asking Iranian officers for a holiday to boost his morale.

Al Jazeera English says a “rebel group posted this video”, but does not identify the faction to indicate why the brigade might have an interest in exaggerating the story of the Iranian presence or to give any context for the brigade’s battles with Shia fighters around Aleppo, or to report that Liwa Dawood overran the military facility where Heydari was on August 22. Al Jazeera also do not report that the group inside the facility overran by Liwa Dawood was not the Syrian Arab Army but a pro-regime Shia faction.

The original videos have been posted on YouTube by Brown Moses: video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4, video 5, and video 6.

Nick Danforth writes: “There’s nothing the Arab respects more, John, than a strong steady white hand drawing arbitrary lines betwixt there ridiculous tribal allegiances,” John Oliver said recently while dressed as a 19th-century British explorer.

[Daily Show clip preceded by 30-second commercial.]

Recently the Daily Show joined the growing consensus of commentators declaring that arbitrary, carelessly drawn imperial borders are to blame for all that’s wrong with the Middle East today. In doing so, they demonstrated that it’s easy to be incredibly funny and dangerously wrong at the same time. There’s plenty to criticize about the legacy of colonialism, but dwelling on colonial borders only increases the risk that our future interventions in the region will further undermine its already fragile states.

The idea that better borders, drawn with careful attention to the region’s ethnic and religious diversity, would have spared the Middle East a century’s worth of violence is especially provocative at a moment when Western powers weigh the merits of intervention in the region. Unfortunately, this critique overstates how arbitrary today’s Middle East borders really are, overlooks how arbitrary every other border in the world is, implies that better borders were possible, and ignores the cynical imperial practices that actually did sow conflict in the region. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Not long ago, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria seemed a remote and embattled figure, with the United States threatening airstrikes and other Arab leaders denouncing him for having used chemical weapons against his own people.

Yet in recent days, he appears, paradoxically, to have turned the crisis to his advantage, making clear to a global television audience that he aims to use President Obama’s own “red line” against him.

In exchange for relinquishing his chemical arsenal, Mr. Assad said Thursday, he will require that the United States stop arming the Syrian opposition — a demand that might seem wishful from the leader of a devastated country where civil war has left 100,000 dead, two million living as refugees and large swaths of territory beyond his control.

Mr. Assad outlined his demands on Thursday, telling a Russian TV interviewer that the arms-control proposal floated by his patron in Moscow would not be finalized until “we see the United States really wants stability in our region and stops threatening, striving to attack and also ceases arms deliveries to terrorists.”

Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a blunt response to Mr. Assad’s comments after meeting Thursday with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, saying the standard procedures for identifying and securing the weapons were too slow in Syria’s case. “There is nothing standard about this process,” Mr. Kerry said. “The words of the Syrian regime, in our judgment, are simply not enough.”

Mr. Assad, sounding relaxed and confident, hinted in his interview that the Russian proposal — which requires Syria to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention — could become a lever for endless negotiations and delays, much as Saddam Hussein delayed arms control inspectors during the 1990s. “It doesn’t mean that Syria will sign the documents, fulfill the obligations, and that’s it,” Mr. Assad said.

The state-owned Syrian newspaper Al Watan put it bluntly in a headline on Thursday: “Moscow and Damascus pull the rug out from under the feet of Obama.” [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Talks between U.S. and Russian officials on disarming Syria of its chemical weapons program broadened Friday to include how to settle the civil war and start a process of government transition.

But diplomats made clear that prospects for a larger deal, known as Geneva 2, depend on the outcome of talks under way this week over Syria’s chemical weapons and on whether warring parties in Syria are able to negotiate.

A meeting between Russian and U.S. officials on the larger government transition talks will take place late this month, when world leaders gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting, Secretary of State John Kerry said in Geneva. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration urged Syria on Thursday to come clean about its past nuclear research as well as its chemical arsenal, accusing President Bashar al-Assad of blocking access to facilities linked to a Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007.

The top U.S. diplomat to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Syria’s two-year-old civil war was no excuse for its failure to answer questions about its alleged nuclear program, which Western intelligence officials believe was on a path toward making nuclear weapons.

“It remains essential that Syria fully cooperate,” Ambassador Joseph Macmanus told a meeting of the U.N. watchdog agency’s 35-nation governing board in Vienna.

Macmanus specifically pressed for access to three sites inside Syria that he said were suspected of having a “functional relationship” to the Deir al-Zour reactor destroyed by Israeli warplanes six years ago. One of the sites has been described by U.S. officials as a pilot plant for making the reactor’s uranium fuel.

The three facilities have long been a focal point of an IAEA investigation into the size and scope of Syria’s nuclear program, which is believed to been halted by the 2007 Israeli air raid dubbed Operation Orchard. The presumed cornerstone of the program was the plutonium reactor built with North Korean help on the banks of the Euphrates River in Syria’s eastern desert.

A report Thursday by independent nuclear researchers said ancillary facilities built to support the Syrian reactor could still contain uranium and other material of potential value to terrorist groups or black-market profiteers. The Deir al-Zour reactor was still under construction at the time of the 2007 attack, and it is unclear what became of the hundreds of uranium fuel rods that would have been required to operate the facility .

“The uranium could be anywhere within government controlled areas today, if it even remains in Syria,” warned the report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nonprofit group. “Determining its fate must be a priority.” [Continue reading…]

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: Eager to forestall a U.S. intervention, Bashar al-Assad has agreed to relinquish his stockpile of chemical weapons — a stockpile that, until this week, he denied even possessing. But Syria’s president continues to deny — as he did in a recent interview with Charlie Rose — that he used such weapons on civilians in an Aug. 21 attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. That’s less surprising than the people who believe him, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary: countless Americans, including public figures from across the political spectrum who — out of opposition to war in general, or to President Barack Obama specifically — eagerly believe and spread misinformation. Call them chemical-weapons truthers.

One such group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which is comprised by former spooks and diplomats, last week wrote an open letter to Obama warning that he might be led by dubious intelligence into intervening in Syria. They claimed to have learned from “former co-workers” that “the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21.”

If true, this would be devastating to the Obama’s credibility. But skepticism of intelligence agencies notwithstanding, not everyone is likely to be swayed by the claims of anonymous informants. After all, the VIPS are also contradicting the considered judgment of the British, French and German intelligence — not to mention respected independent analysts like Eliot Higgins. Even the cautious-to-a-fault Human Rights Watch has confirmed the regime’s culpability in August’s sarin gas attack.

VIPS insists its detailed account of the attack came from “a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East.” These have confirmed, they say, that the “chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters.” Based on “some reports,” they allege, “canisters containing chemical agent were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened.” They forcefully reject the notion that “a Syrian military rocket capable of carrying a chemical agent was fired into the area.”

I asked three of the signatories about their sources. They proved curiously evasive. But one VIPS member, Philip Giraldi, has since published an article in The American Conservative — and the reason for their hesitation has become obvious. The sources for VIPS’ most sensational claims, it turns out, are Canadian eccentric Michel Chossudovsky’s conspiracy site Global Research and far-right shock-jock Alex Jones’s Infowars. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: Signaling a possible thaw in long-frozen relations, the Obama administration and the new leadership in Iran are communicating about Syria and are moving behind the scenes toward direct talks that both governments hope can ease the escalating confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear program.

President Obama reportedly reached out to Iran’s relatively moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, through an exchange of letters in recent weeks. The pragmatist cleric is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, and after years of the United States cold-shouldering his ultraconservative predecessor, U.S. officials say it’s possible they will meet with Rouhani on the sidelines.

Beyond that, U.S. and Iranian officials are tentatively laying the groundwork for potential face-to-face talks between the two governments, the first in the rancorous 34 years since radical students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and founded the Islamic theocracy. Diplomatic relations have been broken ever since.

Both governments have issued conciliatory public statements in recent days that suggest a new willingness to scale back the tension.

Obama suggested in four TV interviews this week, for example, that Iran had played a constructive role in pushing Syrian President Bashar Assad to refrain from using chemical weapons. Iran is one of Syria’s closest allies and supplies conventional arms to Assad’s forces, so Rouhani may have considerable leverage in the Russian-led effort to disarm Syria of its toxic weapons. [Continue reading…]

Vladamir Putin writes: Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.

No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.

The world reacts by asking: if you cannot count on international law, then you must find other ways to ensure your security. Thus a growing number of countries seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This is logical: if you have the bomb, no one will touch you. We are left with talk of the need to strengthen nonproliferation, when in reality this is being eroded.

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

Responding to Obama’s address to the nation on Tuesday, Putin challenges the president’s wisdom in invoking the supposed virtue of American exceptionalism:

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

Even if Putin makes a number of highly questionable assertions, the main thrust of his argument is hard to challenge: the United States has a responsibility to abide by international law. It can’t credibly claim that it is defending the international norm which prohibits the use of chemical weapons, while acting in a way that undermines the authority of the primary institution for upholding international law: the United Nations.

Some of the New York Times’ readers are taking exception to the fact that op-ed space was made available to a foreign head of state in order to challenge U.S. foreign policy. Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s public editor devoted a column to explaining the Times’ decision. She could have explained it in four words: this is free speech.

Questions could more appropriately be fired at the White House, such as: where is Obama’s op-ed?

If the administration has had trouble articulating its policy maybe it’s because it’s making it up as it goes along. Maybe they prefer videos, interviews, briefings and televised statements in the hope that few Americans bother reading the transcripts or try and analyze the content.

A picture is worth more than a thousand words when you don’t have a thousand words to offer.