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In an international spat between Washington and Moscow this Russian response to U.S. measures will be widely applauded:

Russia on Saturday named 18 Americans banned from entering the country in response to Washington imposing sanctions on 18 Russians for alleged human rights violations.

The list released by the Foreign Ministry includes John Yoo, a former U.S. Justice Department official who wrote legal memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques; David Addington, the chief of staff for former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney; and two former commanders of the Guantanamo Bay detention center: retired Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Adm. Jeffrey Harbeson.

The move came a day after the United States announced its sanctions under the Magnitsky Law, named for Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested in 2008 for tax evasion after accusing Russian police officials of stealing $230 million in tax rebates. He died in prison the next year, allegedly after being beaten and denied medical treatment.

I can think of a lot more names Russia and others should put on such lists. How about McChrystal and Petraeus for running the torture campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about any Senator who voted for the Iraq war? How about those editors and journalists that cheered for those wars?

The current Russian measure is exactly the right one. Dear U.S., do your really think you have any credibility when it comes to human rights? Here is the mirror. Just take a look.

The international public will give Putin three full points for this response.

In case you do not know the Ding Dong song here is a video and these are the lyrics:

Each Sunday BBC Radio 1 has a chart show with the top 40 singles of the week. The number 1 song of the week is, of course, played in full length.

Not this week though. For the first time since 1967 the top song will not be played:

[W]e will play a brief excerpt of it in a short news report during the show which explains to our audience why a 70-year-old song is at the top of the charts. Most of them are too young to remember Lady Thatcher and many will be baffled by the sound of the Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz.

I would have expected more from the BBC. Where is all that British humor gone to? It seems the witch killed that to.

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the head of Al Qaida in Iraq, announced yesterday that his organization and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria are one and the same. He also confirmed that his organization was involved in the uprising from the very beginning just like the Syrian government has claimed:

According to the Al Qaeda leader, there were already jihadist cells in Syria before the conflict erupted. These cells were “awaiting the chance” to expand their operations and when the civil war started Abu Muhammad Al-Julani was dispatched along with other Iraqi jihadists to establish al-Nusra and to set strategy. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been splitting its funds with al-Nusra, he says.

Al-Baghdadi's announcement was a surprise for the head of Jabhat al-Nusra:

The head of Syria's jihadist Al-Nusra Front on Wednesday pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahri in an audio message, but distanced his group from claims it had merged with Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

"The sons of Al-Nusra Front pledge allegiance to Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri," Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani said in the recording.

But, he added, "we were not consulted" on an announcement on Tuesday of a merger of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Al-Nusra Front.

That little spat is about the marketing name of the organization will not make any difference in the U.S. plan to intensify the conflict:

To try to counter the rising influence of Jabhat al-Nusra and other Islamic extremists in the civil war, the U.S. and its allies have boosted their support for rebel factions deemed to be more moderate.

As McClatchy provided that this idea is not working. Weapons that are supposed to go only to U.S. vetted "secular" groups have been seen in the hands of Jihadi groups that fight along with them.

These new weapons are not decisive. They only intensify the fight and will lead to more destruction. Instead of an announced attack by the foreign supported insurgents on Damascus the recent weeks have seen a counteroffensive by the Syrian government that cleared much of the Damascus countryside:

Cont. reading: Syria: Recent Developments

Updated below

There are dozens of recent reports which assert that China's new president has somehow rebuffed North Korea's stand up against the U.S. driven campaign against it. A close reading of Xi's speech shows that these reports are wrong. Xi was clearly talking about  U.S. aggressiveness, not about North Korea's. The misreading of Xi's speech is characteristic for a U.S. centered media. They never seem able to understand that U.S. action in the world is perceived much different than what the selfish U.S. propaganda they distribute says.

The culprits:

Reuters: China rebukes North Korea, says no state should sow chaos

China's leaders issued thinly veiled rebukes to North Korea for raising regional tensions, with the president saying no country should throw the world into chaos and the foreign minister warning that Beijing would not allow mischief on its doorstep.

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No country "should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain", President Xi Jinping told a forum on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. He did not name North Korea but he appeared to refer to Pyongyang.

Cont. reading: Misreading Xi On North Korea

On August 31 2012 a new IAEA report on Iran provided that Iran had converted parts of its 20% enriched Uranium into fuel plates it needs for the Tehran Research Reactor.

On September 28 2012 Israels prime minister Netanyahoo came to the United Nations with a cartoon bomb that depicted a spurious “red line” that, he said, Iran should not be allowed to cross.

Today a Washington Post editorial warps that timeline:

[T]he Israeli leader’s explicit setting of a “red line” for the Iranian nuclear program in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September appears to have accomplished what neither negotiations nor sanctions have yielded: concrete Iranian action to limit its enrichment.

A host of commentators both in the United States and Israel scoffed at what they called Mr. Netanyahu’s “cartoonish” picture of a bomb and the line he drew across it. The prime minister said Iran could not be allowed to accumulate enough 20 percent enriched uranium to produce a bomb with further processing, adding that at the rate its centrifuges were spinning, Tehran would cross that line by the middle of 2013.

Iran, too, dismissed what its U.N. ambassador called “an unfounded and imaginary graph.” But then a funny thing happened: The regime began diverting some of its stockpile to the manufacture of fuel plates for a research reactor.

Funny indeed. We had pointed to an early Wall Street Journal piece that had made the same false claim.

This warping of the factual reality leads to false arguments, conclusions and, in the end, war. In this case it is also used to imply a Netanyahoo “success” where none has been made. It is just another sorry example of why the Washington Post is about to die.

One of Thatcher’s legacies in a tweet:

Reuters Top News @Reuters

British PM Cameron cutting short visit to Europe to return to Britain after death of Thatcher: spokesman

What a bitch. Great that Nelson Mandela outlived her.

The NYT publishes an excerpt of a new book about the U.S. drone war in Pakistan. The drone war started with the killing of one of Pakistan's restive Pashtun gang leaders, not of an Al Qaeda fighter. The killing was the "payment" for being allowed by Pakistan to use further drone strikes to go after alleged Al Qaeda fighters.

But the story includes a very sorry excuse for launching these drone strikes. It presents the drone war as an alternative to the CIA's torture prisons and is thereby justifying it in a false choice:

As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.

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The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation.

By presenting the drone war as an alternative to torture prisons it is explained as a lesser evil even though there were many other alternatives the CIA could have chosen.

For one there was no need to torture. Why not just put the wanted people into a regular prison? Why not put them in front of a court? Why not, instead or killing them and their families and thereby creating more "terrorists", remove the grievances that make them fight in the first place?

By presenting the problem as false choice the author is making a sorry propaganda excuse for an evil program.

Most of those who voted for Obama will be quite disappointed with his attempts to pass the Republicans at their right. But they have no reason to be disappointed. This is exactly what he had announced in several of his speeches before the election: cuts to Social Security, cuts to medicare/aid and higher regressive taxes. Here they come:

Besides the tax increases that most Republicans continue to oppose, Mr. Obama’s budget will propose a new inflation formula that would have the effect of reducing cost-of-living payments for Social Security benefits, though with financial protections for low-income and very old beneficiaries, administration officials said. The idea, known as chained C.P.I., has infuriated some Democrats and advocacy groups to Mr. Obama’s left, and they have already mobilized in opposition.

As Mr. Obama has before, his budget documents will emphasize that he would support the cost-of-living change, as well as other reductions that Republicans have called for in the popular programs for older Americans, only if Republicans agree to additional taxes on the wealthy and infrastructure investments that the president called for in last year’s offer to Mr. Boehner.

Mr. Obama will propose other spending and tax credit initiatives, including aid for states to make free prekindergarten education available nationwide — a priority outlined in his State of the Union address in February. He will propose to pay for it by raising federal taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products.

A chained consumer price index is based on idea that price changes should not be measured as inflation when they result in behavior changes that compensate for the price change. You like to eat beef. Beef and other meat go goes up 10%. As you do not have more money you change to pork which now costs as much as beef once did. Measure in the regular CPI inflation is 10%. Measured in a chained CPI inflation is zero percent. Next year meat prices go up another 10%. As your c-CPI adjusted income does not increase you will again have to change your consumption behavior. You replace pork with cheaper chicken. The regular CPI again shows 10%, the chained CPI would still be zero. Next year prices go up again and you will have to change to cat food.

Adjusting Social Security cost-of-living payments with a chained CPI will lead to constant downward pressure on the recipients standard of living. They will have to do with less and less. Not even a republican would have dared to offer such a proposal.

Starting new wars, "signature" drone strikes on people because the "behave like terrorists", extreme secrecy, Guantanamo still open, no prosecution for any Wall Street crime and now the destruction of the New Deal as an "offer" to the republicans.

The good news: When Obama is finished with his turn it will be hard to come up with a worse U.S. president.

News, views and whatever …

Purposely leaked form the Obama administration to the Washington Post:

The United States and Jordan have stepped up training of Syrian opposition forces that may be used to establish a buffer zone along Syria’s southern border, according to U.S. and Jordanian officials.

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Jordanian security officials said a previous timetable to complete training of about 3,000 Free Syrian Army officers by the end of June has been moved up to the end of this month in light of the border victories.

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“Buffer zones on the Syrian side of the border is the only way to keep the conflict away from Jordan,” said Mahmoud Irdaisat, head of the Amman-based Center for Strategic Studies at the King Abdullah II Defense Studies Academy

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Rebel officials who say they have taken part in the U.S.-Jordanian training at a Jordanian military base say they are being prepared to maintain the zones using surface-to-air missiles and heavy artillery without military invention from outside forces.

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Several senior Israeli military officials have voiced support for buffer zones.

The leak to the Post is message to AIPAC and other hawks who are increasingly impatient with the progress in Syria. The U.S. is training its own gang for creating safe zones in Syria on behalf of Israel and Jordan who do not want the conflict to further cross their borders.

The U.S. hopes to have vetted those gang members enough to trust them with manpads. Good luck with that. How these troops are to handle heavy artillery without a very capable logistic chain is not yet clear. Heavy artillery is notorious for using very large amount of resources for often dubious military gain.

There are of course many other gangs in Syria and the Post’s David Ignatius is trying to sort them:

The biggest umbrella group is called the Jabhat al-Tahrir al-Souriya al-Islamiya. It has about 37,000 fighters …

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The second-largest rebel coalition is more extreme and is dominated by hard-core Salafist Muslims. Its official name — Jabhat al-Islamiya al-Tahrir al-Souriya — is almost identical to that of the Saudi-backed group […] Rebel sources estimate about 13,000 Salafist fighters are gathered under this second umbrella.

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A third rebel group, known as Ahfad al-Rasoul, is funded by Qatar. It has perhaps 15,000 fighters.

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The most dangerous group in the mix is the Jabhat al-Nusra, which is an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq. By one rebel estimate, it has grown to include perhaps 6,000 fighters.

Idriss and his Free Syrian Army command about 50,000 more fighters, rebel sources say.

Realistically, the best hope for U.S. policy is to press the Saudi-backed coalition and its 37,000 fighters, to work under the command of Idriss and the Free Syrian Army.

If one adds those Ignatius numbers up there are 65,000 in three big Islamist groups, 50,000 under Idriss and 6,000 Jabhat al-Nusra Jihadists. In total an army of some 120,000 men.

That sounds impressive but, as Aron Lund points out, is completely wrong.

Idriss does not have any troops at all. The first and second group Ignatius mentions are nominally under his command, take the money and weapons he offers but otherwise do not care what he says. The third group Ignatius mentions does not really exits. If one adds the still dubious numbers  after correcting for Ignatius (willful?) errors the total is 50,000 plus the 6,000 al-Nusra Jihadists, less than half the force size Ignatius claims.

My best guestimate for the real numbers is less than half of Ignatius’ corrected numbers. These are roving gangs that sometimes work together for a while to create a temporary Schwerpunkt and to attack and take this or that small military base. Another type of their action is to take some town or city block and fight from there until they get kicked out again. Rinse, repeat. There isn’t that much manpower needed do those two type of action and we have seen little else. All the insurgencies “brigades” are actual the size of small companies, some 100 to 120 men. Their “battalions” are little more than platoons. Then one has to account for the insurgency’s combat losses which are significant.

Without U.S. air support the new gang trained in Jordan will have problems to hold any larger area. The safe zones will be anything but safe. U.S air support will not be coming. The BRICS countries have taken a clear position and the U.S. is not willing to, again, piss off more than half of the world for little gain.

The numbers in play and movements under way still very much favor a positive outcome for the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad.

There is a concept of “strategic messaging” used to let the public know how it is supposed to think about this or that policy or country. There are problems with such messaging. It often exaggerates or even invents “facts” and thereby turns into propaganda lies. It also creates an echo chamber where the strategic messengers over time comes to believe their own bullshitting.

When a senior aid to president Bush said:

”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

He was right in a specific way. The Bush administration, through its propaganda, created its “own reality” especially with regard to Iraq. But that reality was not the reality of other actors. Especially not the reality of Iraqi resistances. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner was his reality while the reality of the besieged U.S. occupation of Iraq looked much different. When more and more people became aware of that Bush political position sank to record lows. One can created one’s own reality but it is to one’s own peril.

Such “strategic messaging” disease has captured Washington with regards to Syria as well as to North Korea. Claims that Assad is about to fall or that Kim Jong Un is crazy does not turn such assertions into facts. But repeat them often enough and people, especially those doing the messaging, may come to believe them. These politicians then themselves react as if their propaganda assertions were true. The White House believed its own rhetoric that Assad would fall as soon as protests started and tried to plan for his immediate downfall. It took a quite for that view to change and even now there is only little of alternative planing. Empty but calculated threats from North Korea are seen as serious danger because “everyone knows” that North Korea is “crazy” and are therefor answered with risky military provocations.

A piece in today’s Wall Street Journal seems to confirm that a similar disease is growing with regards to Iran.

Iran converts its 20% Uranium to fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor. It does so because, as is well known, that reactor is indeed in dire need of fresh fuel and because many cancer patients’ lives depend on the medical output of that reactor.

The “strategic messaging” U.S. administrations have done with regard to Iran are full of lies. False claims are made that Iran would want to rush to a nuclear weapon. False claims are made about the 2009 election. False claims are made that Iran is concerned over the threat of an Israeli attack.

Thus we now get this piece which attributes Iran’s conversion of 20% enriched Uranium to all the false claims made about Iran but not to its indisputable real-live motivation:

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has decided to keep Iran’s nuclear program within limits demanded by Israel for now, according to senior U.S., European and Israeli officials, in a move they believe is designed to avert an international crisis during an Iranian election year.

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Seeking to ward off international pressure, Iranian nuclear officials have kept the country’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 20% purity below 250 kilograms (550 pounds). Iran would need such an amount—if processed further into weapons-grade fuel—to produce one atomic bomb, experts believe. It is also the amount Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations in September that the world should prevent Iran from amassing, through a military strike if necessary.

Iran did convert the Uranium because it needed it. It didn’t convert it because of “international pressure”. It did not convert it because Netanyahoo made a cartoon performance at the UN. It didn’t convert it because Iran will soon have another election. There is no real data that would support any of the assertions made in the WSJ piece. There is real data that says Iran needs the fuel.

It is difficult to detect where the “strategic messaging” turns against its own creators. The point where people start to believe their own propaganda is not always clear. The WSJ journal piece has a tone to it that lets me fear those “senior U.S., European and Israeli officials” are near or already in a state where their self created “reality” makes the blind for the real one. If that is the case the danger for miscalculations and in the end war has increased.

April 1 story or real?

Accusations US contre les Russes de préparer l’ assassinat de l’émir du Qatar

As I do not find the story on the English version of the site some excerpts per auto-translate:

U.S. accusations against the Russians preparing the assassination of the Emir of Qatar:

According to Russian intelligence sources quoted by the website ArabiPress the Kremlin investigate the involvement of Russian parties private plot in Doha and Jeddah the triple murder of the Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa and Minister of Foreign Affairs Hamad bin Jassem, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

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Such assassinations would be a creative way to change the current situation in the Middle East, especially on Syria. But I doubt that Putin would condone such a plot.

Do these rumors true have some truth in them or are they an April fool joke?