“As the Obama administration beats the drum for yet another military engagement, here are three reasons we shouldn’t go to war with Syria.”
“How about consulting the open source record of serial hoaxes by the Syrian rebel propaganda team? First they did a replay of the old ‘incubator babies’ hoax, only this time instead of Saddam Hussein being cast in the role of baby-killing mad dictator it’s Assad. When that didn’t fly, they claimed the village of Houla had been the site of a massacre by government forces: the evidence they offered turned out to be a photo of taken in Iraq during the US invasion. They fooled the BBC – which ran it over stories about the alleged ‘massacre’ – until the photographer took umbrage at his work being misused in the service of war propaganda and angrily exposed the fraud.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/08/29/the-return-of-the-dodgy-dossier/
“Tthe United States government has lost its credibility throughout the world and will never regain it, unless the Bush and Obama regimes are arrested and put on trial for their war crimes. Obama’s destruction of US credibility goes far beyond diplomacy. It is likely that this autumn or winter, and almost certainly in 2014, the US will face severe economic crisis. When the proverbial hits the fan, the incompetent and corrupt Federal Reserve and the incompetent and corrupt US Treasury will have no more credibility than Obama and John Kerry. How long will it be before American citizens are shot down in their streets by ‘their’ government as occurs frequently in Washington’s close allies in Egypt, Turkey, Bahrain?”
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/08/30/america-totally-discredited-paul-craig-roberts/
“Recently, the Turkish government shot down in the streets more of its own people–peaceful protesters, not imported mercenaries trying to overthrow the Turkish government–than were killed in the alleged use of chemical weapons by Assad. No country regards the criminal states of Turkey and Israel as cover for a war crime. If Obama is pushed by Susan Rice and the evil neocons, who are strongly allied with Israel, into going it alone and conducting a military strike on Syria, Obama will have made himself an unambiguous War Criminal under the Nuremberg Standard created by the US Government. Unprovoked military aggression is a war crime under international law.”
“Why this rush to war? Why the hysteria? Why the panic? Syria and Assad will still be there two weeks from now or a month from now, and we will know far more then about what happened last week. Understandably, Obama wants to get the egg off his face from having foolishly drawn his ‘red line’ against chemical weapons, and then watching Syria, allegedly, defy His Majesty. But saving Obama’s face does not justify plunging his country into another Mideast war. Does Obama realize what a fool history will make of him if he is stampeded into a new war by propaganda that turns out to be yet another stew of ideological zealotry and mendacity?”
http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2013/08/29/will-boehner-stop-our-rogue-president/
“US President Barack Obama on Friday slammed the ‘incapacity’ of the UN Security Council to act on Syria and warned the world must not be ‘paralyzed’ on responding to a chemical weapons attack. ‘What we have seen so far at least is an incapacity at this point for the Security Council to move forward in the face of a clear violation of international norms,’ Obama said, as he met Baltic leaders at the White House Obama said he understood that there was widespread war fatigue both in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, but that did not absolve nations of their responsibilities.”
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-slams-incapacity-un-security-council-syria-190745970.html
“The war-making power belongs solely to Congress. It cannot be delegated to the Executive Branch, in any blanket way, through any kind of war powers act. If you fail to restrain the President, then you will be complicit in the President’s crimes. His planned actions violate the Constitution. They also break other written laws. This makes them inherently criminal. The President is trying to fix something that cannot be solved by outsiders dropping bombs. This will not protect innocent people. It will kill innocents. Their blood will be on the President’s hands, and on your hands, unless you use your powers to resist. I am doing what I can to resist. I do not want these criminal acts committed in my name.”
http://www.downsizedc.org/blog/oppose-war-with-syria
“The Civilian Marksmanship Program was administered by the United States Army from 1916 through 1996 when it was changed to the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice & Firearms Safety, a 501(c) (3) organization federally chartered by the U.S. Congress. There are no data indicating any of the weapons involved in homicide were imported surplus military rifles. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s homicide crime statistics, rifles accounted for only 323 deaths out of 12,664 homicides in 2011, the most recent data set provided by the FBI. The rifles that the Executive Order would affect are typically from U.S. allies and are pre-Vietnam era.”
“White House aides meanwhile shied away from the question of whether Iraq was better off, 10 years after the United States launched an invasion on the grounds of eradicating weapons of mass destruction which were never found. ‘I think historians have to make the judgment,’ White House spokesman Jay Carney said. ‘I think that ridding the world of Saddam Hussein was a welcome development for the world and for Iraq, but again, the president opposed the policy, as candidate, of invading Iraq and as a candidate for president as well.’ US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel acknowledged the huge human toll the conflict had taken on the Iraqi people.”