The attack on the Syrian airfield has sent the polls for President Donald Trump into a sharp rise and he has been praised by various Democrats. Others have called for the commitment of thousands of troops. No one seems interested in speaking of the absence of congressional authorization. Indeed, when Sen. Rand Paul objected to the lack of congressional consent, Sen John McCain denounced him as a non-entity in the Senate who does not listens. Below is my column on the mounting attacks on Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI) from Democrats after she called for the release of evidence on the culpability of the Syrian government in the recent gas attack on a village. Even though some (including a recent MIT professor) have questioned the evidence, Gabbard’s desire to see the evidence was viewed as inexcusable. It appears that war, like Saturn, devours its young.
Washington is back to business as usual this week with both parties pounding war drums over Syria and some demanding thousands of troops be sent to expand our latest undeclared war. What is most notable is how fast top Democrats dropped their post-Sanders rhetoric over war powers and have again adopted the pro-interventionist stance embodied by Hillary Clinton.
Before the attack, Clinton was back in public chiding President Trump on how she would have long ago bombed every airfield and started a major campaign against the Syrian military. Not one air field, mind you, all airfields. She received rapturous applause for the comments at the Women in the World Summit in New York.
Indeed, Democrats have turned on a congressional member who had the audacity to ask for proof as a precursor for war. The Democrats have shown once again that a party hell-bent on war will like Saturn devour even its own. However, even if our own history with the Vietnam war or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is not instructive enough, they might consider Greek mythology before they start to nosh on the kinder.
The fact is that Washington loves wars and neither party wants to be on the wrong side of a popular war. Even for Washington, however, the shift of Democrats is notable from the recent election where everyone — even Clinton, albeit awkwardly — tried to show liberals that they were not the hair-trigger warmongers that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters claimed during the campaign.
Yet, now, leaders are denouncing Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbardafter she had the audacity to ask for proof of Syrian responsibility in the recent gas attack. Gabbard seemed to want more than a pedestrian role in war powers, while her colleagues prefer the safety of the sidelines. Playing the witness to wars avoids responsibility while reserving the right to be shocked and angry if the war goes badly.
The attacks on Gabbard “doth protest too much.” Gabbard has previously angered the establishment in Washington for the right and wrong reasons. She was legitimately criticized in January for meeting with President Bashar al-Assad. It was propaganda victory for this murderous dictator and undermined United States foreign policy.
Gabbard’s real sin however may be more political. Many Democrats are still upset with Gabbard for publicly charging (as was later supported by the Wikileaks material) that the Democratic establishment was actively engineering the primary for Hillary Clinton. She then supported Sanders against the establishment. Now, she has the audacity to demand proof before going to a war when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Hillary Clinton are all in support of a new expanded war.
However, her cited statements were surprisingly modest. She objected that the missile strikes were “short-sighted and will lead to more dead civilians, more refugees, the strengthening of al-Qaeda and other terrorists, and a possible nuclear war between the United States and Russia.”
She also called for the administration to release more evidence of Syrian guilt before pouring more troops or missiles into the conflict, adding that “if President Assad is found to be responsible after an independent investigation for these horrific chemical weapons attacks, I’ll be the first one to call for his prosecution and execution by the International Criminal Court.”
The response from Howard Dean and others was shock and disgust. In a Trump-esque tweet, Dean declared, “This is a disgrace. Gabbard should not be in Congress.” Democratic leaders were outraged that a member would be “skeptical” about the action of the United States. Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden called on Hawaiians to dump Gabbard and asked, “People of Hawaii’s second district, was it not enough for you that your rep met with a murderous dictator? Will this move you?”
The Washington Post expressed shock that Gabbard’s statements “reveal her striking departure from the consensus that Assad’s government launched the attack.” However, at least in the initial days, that “consensus” was based largely on the conclusory statements of named and unnamed sources in the government.
The reaction to Gabbard’s call for evidence brings back troubling memories of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. On Aug. 10, 1964, the Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to give President Lyndon Johnson full authority to go to war in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. It was based on the Gulf of Tonkin incident involving an alleged attack on the destroyer USS Maddox.
The government reported two attacks that are now considered highly questionable. The government claimed that on Aug. 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats harassed the destroyer. When the Maddox fired three warning shots, the government claimed that the boats attacked with torpedoes and machine guns. The Maddox showed only a single bullet hole.
The government then claimed a second attack on Aug. 4, 1964. Historians have questioned these accounts and most notably former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted that there was actually no response to the Aug. 2 attack and thus no “sea battle” as claimed at the time. He further admitted that the second attack never occurred. None of that mattered of course because few members wanted to hear at the time that these “sea battles” were hokum.
There is every indication that the evidence will support the United States, which has been releasing more information in the last week. It is notable that, while Russia and Syria have called for investigations of responsibility for the gas attack, Russia just blocked a United Nations resolution demanding Syrian cooperation with just such an investigation.
Russia has claimed that a bombing raid hit ISIS chemical weapons and that this is a pretext for the expansion of the war. Yet, Syria has previously used chemical weapons and Russia is now hindering efforts for such an investigation.
In the end, Gabbard is right about the need for the release of evidence before we expand this undeclared war. The administration may indeed be moving in that direction with the leaking of intercepted communications from the field.
Which brings us back to Saturn. Saturn, or Cronus to the Greeks, was obsessed with a prophecy that he would be overthrown by his children — a sense of panic not unlike the Democratic establishment with the rise of Sanders and his young supporters. As a result, Cronus, a Titan, devoured each child when born including Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon.
His son, Zeus, however, was hidden (Rhea, his mother, gave Cronus the “Omphalos Stone” wrapped in swaddling clothes to trick him). Later, Cronus was given an emetic as a trick and he threw up the children. Zeus and his siblings then rose up and overthrew the Titans, including Cronus. For his part, according to Homer, Cronus was left to languish in the Tartarus, or a deep abyss of pain and torment.
For most politicians, the Tartarus is the abyss called life out of public office. However, before the Democrats start to swallow members like Gabbard whole, they might want to consider how the youth can reappear with a vengeance.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.
@desperatelyseekingsusan/sasquatch, April 19, 2017 at 2:36 pm
“Ken Rogers fancies Chomsky / Herman are to be treated as authoritative on political matters, which is rather grossly amusing.”
Intro to Reading Comprehension 2.0 for you, Desperate Seeker. I merely cited an essay whose author had in turn cited a review of Manufacturing Consent, Herman’s and Chomsky’s empirical study of US media, and nothing more. You are, consequently, grossly amused by your own fevered imagination.
As you’ve brought it up, however, based on what I’ve read by you and what I’ve read by Chomsky, he should sit like a child at your feet to imbibe what he can of your encyclopedic wealth of political wisdom.
How he ever became the most quoted public intellectual in the world while you’ve remained a public non-entity is a deep mystery and would be grossly amusing were it not so painfully tragic.
Perhaps, notwithstanding your making Chomsky look like a mental pygmy, the answer resides in how you’ve branded yourself. Can you entertain the possibility of changing your name to something that sounds, well, umm, less desperate? If so, I daresay that it wouldn’t be long (assuming you could also somehow mask your authoritarian tendencies and war lust) before people would be citing you, rather than that know-nothing, do-gooding, fecklessly idealistic, and soft-on-terrorism Chomsky.
To get you started in your thinking, how about something like Troglopol or EnhancedAnswerSeeking?
@desperatelyseekingsusan/sasquatch, April 19, 2017 at 6:28 pm
“In introduction to reading comprehension, you’ll notice he insisted we’d ‘leveled the Mediterranean rim’, which of course we hadn’t.”
By way of introducing you to reading comprehension, I was responding to your statement that “We haven’t leveled anything on the Mediterranean rim or anywhere else.”
Please try to at least pay attention to what you write.
Bombings and boots on the ground in Somalia
@desperatelyseekingsusan, April 19, 2017 at 2:36 pm
“You can hardly manage to utter an honest word, can you?
“We haven’t leveled anything on the Mediterranean rim or anywhere else.”
Desperate, are you saying that all the human deaths and injuries caused by the USG since 1945 were effected by neutron bombs that left standing the landscapes and infrastructures of the 37 countries in which the US Government has intervened since the end of World War II?
https://www.sott.net/article/273517-Study-US-regime-has-killed-20-30-million-people-since-World-War-Two
I’m confident that, as a shameless apologist for the American Imperium, you’ll dispute the casualty figures, but can you persuasively deny the number of foreign countries in which successive administrations of the US have intervened?
And please spare us any additional arrogantly obtuse, evidence-free assertions as though you’re another of those authoritarian psychics without portfolio that one reads about here.
Desperate, are you saying that all the human deaths and injuries caused by the USG since 1945 were effected by neutron bombs that left standing the landscapes and infrastructures of the 37 countries in which the US Government has intervened since the end of World War II?
In introduction to reading comprehension, you’ll notice he insisted we’d ‘leveled the Mediterranean rim’, which of course we hadn’t. We haven’t had combat operations in 37 countries either.
https://twitter.com/theintercept/status/854790087481208832
Been replaced by men that grab the women politics….Trump’s comrade Bill O’Reilly bit the dust today. Hopefully more of these old p grabbin dudes will find their way into the courtroom and out of the boardroom.
At the first rally of their national tour DNC Chair Tom Perez gets boo’d. Bernie Sanders then says in an interview “I am not a Democrat.” Good times.
https://twitter.com/asamjulian/status/854620593022521344
They need to spray their faces ORANGE.
https://twitter.com/TheDailyEdge/status/854772248724615171
anon – it seems that there is a month for everything. April is also National Peeps Month.
lol, I don’t like peeps or pervs.
anon – how can you not like Peeps? That is Un-American!!!! You punch holes in the wrapper of the Peeps box and let them sit for a week, then eat them. Ah, such joy. 🙂 They are sooooo chewy. 🙂
Was disappointed when I saw Peeps in my Easter basket.
But you were excited about having Bill Clinton back in the White House?
anon – at least you got an Easter basket. 😉
Don’t forget BILL CLINTON…the worst of the bunch.
@anonymous, April 18, 2017 at 4:28 pm
“The role of an honest press corps should be to apply skepticism to all official stories, not carry water for ‘our side’ and reject anything coming from the ‘other side,’ which is what The New York Times, The Washington Post and the rest of the Western mainstream media have done, especially regarding Middle East policies and now the New Cold War with Russia.”
—————————-
For readers here who are interested in much of the empirical research documenting the propagandistic nature of the oligarchic US Corporate Media (CM), the link below is to a website that lists, comprehensively and in depth, with excerpts and editorial analysis, multiple major studies of the CM by journalists, political scientists, media analysts, and other scholars and observers:
Even a casual perusal of the voluminous evidence presented at the website should brightly illuminate for anyone with a half-way open mind, the central role played by the CM in “manufacturing consent,” i.e., the controlling of the masses by the financial and political elite, whom the sociologist C. Wright Mills characterized as the “Power Elite.”
Here are three examples from the website, mediamonitors.net:
1) “ ‘ [Ed] Herman of Wharton and [Noam] Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument that America’s government and its corporate giants exercise control over what we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that they contend make the national media propagandistic – the major three being the motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media’s close links to and often ownership by corporations, and their [stenographic] acceptance of information from biased [e.g., government] sources.
” ‘In five case studies, the writers show how TV, newspapers and radio distort world events… Extensive evidence is calmly presented, and in the end an indictment against the guardians of our freedom is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news system that panders to the interest of America’s privileged and neglects its duties when the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at stake.’
2)“ ‘Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.’ [My emphasis]
3) “Nevertheless, the vast extent of the manipulation of the media under the sway of business interests has been harshly revealed in the statement of John Swainton, Chief of Staff of TheNew York Times. ‘There is not one of you who would dare to write his honest opinion,’ he reprimanded his colleagues at his retirement party in September.
“ ‘The business of a journalist now is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, fall at the feet of Mammon and sell himself for his daily bread. We are tools, vessels of rich men behind the scenes, we are jumping jacks. They pull the strings; we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are the properties of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes.’ “*
http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq32.html#_ednref17
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts’ frequent (and apt) term for corporate journalists is “presstitutes.”
Edward Herman was a banking law maven. Noam Chomsky a linguist. They produced a string of polemical books jointly written. A critic of their work summed up their thesis on American politics thus: the general public have been Jedi-mind tricked to value things and assess things in ways divergent from that of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. One of Noam Chomsky’s misadventures was to write an article in 1977 denying that the ongoing autogenocide in Cambodia was happening, so it’s probably a good thing the rest of the world isn’t using their fun house mirrors.
Newsflash. Business commonly form limited-liability corporations, including media concerns. Uttering ‘Corporate Media’ is a rhetorical game, and one that fools people in your ilk, not normal people.
So, why did you say we’ve leveled most of the Muslim rim of the Mediterranean and killed hundreds of thousands? That was Chomsky’s fault. Right?
You can hardly manage to utter an honest word, can you?
We haven’t leveled anything on the Mediterranean rim or anywhere else. There are large swaths of wrecked physical capital in Syria and northern Iraq, but the combatants there are in the business of killing each other. We’ve been in the business of killing Saddam’s army, ISIS, al Qaeda, and the Taliban, all flagitious armed forces whose prosperity is beneficial to precisely no one.
Ken Rogers fancies Chomsky / Herman are to be treated as authoritative on political matters, which is rather grossly amusing.
@desperatelyseekingsasquatch, April 19, 2017 at 12:39 am
“I know you fancy stringing words together makes you seem knowledgeable and perspicacious. It is an illusion.”
The words I “string together” refer to concrete, verifiable phenomena in the real world. Do you fancy that your feeble personal jibes do anything but call additional attention to your pronounced intellectual sloth and vacuity?
Ken Rodgers…
– You said that the U.S. Deep State is invisible.
And that you refer to “concrete, verifiable phenomena in the real world”.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, but what how is a perceived “Invisible Deep State” also subject to verification with concrete evidence?
refer to concrete, verifiable phenomena
“American imperium’ and ‘corporate media’ are not ‘concrete and verifiable phenomena. They are elements of a rhetorical game.
@ anonymous, April 18, 2017 at 4:28 pm
“The role of an honest press corps should be to apply skepticism to all official stories, not carry water for ‘our side’ and reject anything coming from the ‘other side,’ which is what The New York Times, The Washington Post and the rest of the Western mainstream media have done, especially regarding Middle East policies and now the New Cold War with Russia.”
As the Corporate Media, consisting in the main of six (6) corporations, are in point of fact the Public Relations/Propaganda Apparatus of the US Government (visible) and the US Deep State (invisible), one shouldn’t expect anything other than strident apologias for the agenda of the US Oligarchy, which controls both.
Just as the American public was subjected to unrelenting, monolithically integrated USG propaganda regarding the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein before he could deploy his horrific WMD across the waters, the effort is now under way by the Ministry of Truthiness to launder the public’s brains so as to make most of them at least passively agreeable to illegally effecting the removal of the latest fly in the Empire’s Ointment and Adolf Hitler impersonator, Bashar “The Animal” Assad.
They don’t need no stinking investigation, Holmes.
As the Corporate Media, consisting in the main of six (6) corporations, are in point of fact the Public Relations/Propaganda Apparatus of the US Government (visible) and the US Deep State (invisible), one shouldn’t expect anything other than strident apologias for the agenda of the US Oligarchy, which controls both.
I know you fancy stringing words together makes you seem knowledgeable and perspicacious. It is an illusion.
DesparatelySeekingSelfByThesaurus: Look who’s calling the kettle black.
What’s next from you? More wisdom from Howard Zinn?
You’re so mean! I just wish we could harness it by putting you in boots and shemagh in northeastern Afghanistan to fight against the tribal horde for God, corps, and country!
You are correct*.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
*Which proves that even a broken clock is right sometimes.
Here’s a very well-written and historically informative blog from Paste Magazine, entitled “The American Empire Has Tulsi Gabbard in Its Crosshairs” for her having the insane temerity to call for an investigation of the alleged chemical attack on April 4th, before more Syrians are killed by righteous retaliatory strikes of Humanitarian Intervention:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/the-american-empire-has-tulsi-gabbard-in-its-cross.html
If it has a nonsense term like ‘the American Empire’ and conceives of it as an agent, it’s not the least bit informative. Its another set of rhetorical games.
Robert Parry:
NYT Mocks Skepticism on Syria-Sarin Claims
April 18, 2017
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/18/nyt-mocks-skepticism-on-syria-sarin-claims/
But Kessler has no way of actually knowing what the truth is regarding Syria’s alleged chemical weapons use. He is simply repeating the propagandistic groupthink that has overwhelmed the Syrian crisis. Presumably he would have given four Pinocchios to anyone who had doubted the 2003 claims about Iraq hiding WMD because all the Important People “knew” that to be true at the time.
What neither Rutenberg nor Kessler seems willing or capable of addressing is the larger problem created by the U.S. government and its NATO allies investing heavily in information warfare or what is sometimes called “strategic communications,” claiming that they are defending themselves from Russian “active measures.” However, the impact of all these competing psychological operations is to trample reality.
The role of an honest press corps should be to apply skepticism to all official stories, not carry water for “our side” and reject anything coming from the “other side,” which is what The New York Times, The Washington Post and the rest of the Western mainstream media have done, especially regarding Middle East policies and now the New Cold War with Russia.
The American people and other news consumers have a right to expect that the Western media will recall the old adage that there are almost always two sides to a story. There’s also the truism that truth often resides not at the surface but is hidden beneath.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
@Jill, April 17, 2017 at 6:40 pm
“This is also a good look at the real motivation behind Trump’s attacks on Syria. There’s a very long history going on there and we have a large chunk of the documents to show what is really going on:”
For an excellent historical overview of the USG’s machinations against Syria for almost a decade, see this video presentation by a self-described “Conservative Republican” who is a combat veteran who worked in the Pentagon and who has met with Assad and his wife while touring Syria:
Everything regarding Syria must be seen in the light of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeyRwFHR8WY
Hi Ken,
Thank you for posting this. I think the speaker has a too rosy view of Assad (who was so good at torture that we rendered people from the US to there) and for the freedoms of the people of Syria. However, he makes many good points. He is willing to bring up the very real consequences of Assad’s otherthrow. I like that he talks about this being a US plan for a long time. He also is very honest about the USG and CIA supporting “moderate” rebels and makes the case for how chemical weapons ended up being used in the city. It’s also interesting to note Turkey’s part in the mess, part of why Trump was so thrilled to congratulate one more dictator today!
Interesting perspective on Assange https://mg.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch#9620625310
“The fact is that Washington loves wars and neither party wants to be on the wrong side of a popular war. ”
Wars ARE popular with the 1% and uninformed citizens. Gabbard knows that the attacks was a false flag operation. Jared Kushner Israel wants Syria divided, and the pedophile Saudis want to run a natural gas pipeline thru Syria. The M.I.C. wants a war there, and Trump needs a distraction and a bump to deflect his betrayals of the voters who elected him.
FWIW: One young guy Dims are not devouring is Jon Ossoff – running for Tom Price’s seat in the special election tomorrow in GA’s 6th district. Ossoff is an Establishment Dem, protegee of John Lewis, Pelosi, Albright, etc.and has raised 8.3 mil – mostly from outside the state including Hollywood actors.
I am very curious to see if he can pull it off.
You would not want President Trump to be disappointed.
And Ossoff doesn’t even live in that district – don’t forget that little nugget.
“Yet, Syria has previously used chemical weapons and Russia is now hindering efforts for such an investigation.”
When and where did Syria previously use chemical weapons? Or was “Syria” used in order to suggest Assad without really saying it?
If that is the case is Turley doing exactly what he is decrying, assigning truth to mere rumors and disguising it with a slight of hands
Excellent. An analysis of the machinations emanating from the swamp viewed through the explicating prism of Greek mythology. Outstanding.
Here is a whole set of people who were correct before on who had what weapons, telling why they do not believe this was Assad. The include Scott Ritter: “Former U.N weapons inspector Scott Ritter warned before the start of the Iraq war that claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction were false.
Sunday, Ritter wrote that current claims that the leader of Syria launched a chemical weapons attack was false:
Some sort of chemical event took place in Khan Sheikhoun; what is very much in question is who is responsible for the release of the chemicals that caused the deaths of so many civilians.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/04/intelligence-military-sources-warned-iraq-war-say-assad-not-launch-chemical-weapon-attack.html
David B. I certainly agree with your statement above.
Sunday, Ritter wrote that current claims that the leader of Syria launched a chemical weapons attack was false:
Ritter’s information base is precisely zero.
DDS: Can you lay out your evidence with which to conclude that it was the Syrian government which used the nerve agent in Khan Sheikhun? I’d like to be able to refer back to it every time you take glib, conclusory jabs at intellectual honesty.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/syrias-latest-chemical-attack/story?id=46617872
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/13/middleeast/syria-chemical-attack-uk/index.html
Not my trade. I’m pointing out the obvious. Ritter’s information base is 20 years old, and it’s pretty silly to be quoting him as authoritative.
And what exactly is your trade?
I’m just pointing out the obvious.
HRC is certainly a war monger. And shame on Howard Dean.