Truthout has the report How Intelligence Was Twisted to Support an Attack on Syria by Gareth Porter.

That pattern was particularly clear in the case of the intelligence gathered by covert means. The summary claims, “We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on August 21 and was concerned with the U.N. inspectors obtaining evidence.”

That seems to indicate that U.S. intelligence intercepted such communications. But former British Ambassador Craig Murray has pointed out on his blog August 31 that the Mount Troodos listening post in Cyprus is used by British and U.S. intelligence to monitor “all radio, satellite and microwave traffic across the Middle East … ” and that “almost all landline telephone communications in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage [and] picked up on Troodos.”

All intelligence picked by the Troodos listening post is shared between the U.S. and British intelligence, Murray wrote, but no commmunictions such as the ones described in the U.S. intelligence summary were shared with the British Joint Intelligence Organisation.  Murray said a personal contact in U.S. intelligence had told him the reason was that the purported intercept came from the Israelis. The Israeli origin of the intelligence was reported in the U.S. press as well, because an Israeli source apparently leaked it to a German magazine.

There has to be a certain amount of paranoia to believe this report, but it also seems that a bit of paranoia is driving the U.S. intelligence agencies interpretation of what they see.

The intelligence community is rightly used to assessing the worst-case scenario for the evidence they find.  (I presume that to give their bosses a range of options, they also think of the best-case scenario, which analysis we are not seeing.)

However true risk analysis does not only consider worst-case scenarios of what could happen.  Risk analysis must also consider fail-safe responses to the worst-case scenario.  In other words, you need to consider the safest way possible to respond to the worst-case event, especially if there is a possibility of misinterpreting the incoming information about what is going on.  The true worst-case scenario might be misinterpreting the data, the situation occurring is not actually the situation you think it is, and responding in such a way that more damage is caused than if you had  done nothing.

This is the trouble with the worst-case assumption that Assad carried out the nerve gas attack.  Perhaps, the truly worst-case situation is that the rebels perpetrated the attack to draw us in, and in response to our first weak retaliations, they will carry out bigger attacks in order to draw a bigger retaliation.

In testimony today, John Kerry used the fact that Assad is acting irrationally in carrying out the initial attack, if he is equally irrational in responding to us, he may carry out a bigger attack.  Kerry and General Dempsey indicated that they had already chosen further targets in case such an eventuality happened.

One could equally assume that Assad is rational and did not carry out the first attack.  You could assume the rebels were being rational by faking an attack or carrying out a real one to draw us in.  If we announce that will will attack other targets if another gas attack is carried out, we are telling the rebels that there first attack was a partial success and another attack would draw more responses from us.  So we have given the rebels a road map in how to manipulate us.

I think Kerry testified that it would be irrational to assume the rebels carried out the gas attack.  I don’t think he gave any reason why that would be irrational.  Seemed pretty rational to me, though.  Especially since the symptoms displayed in the videos did not seem consistent with a real nerve gas attack.  It could have been staged, just like the moon landing was staged.  (I threw in that last phrase just to see if  you were paying attention.)

The Real News Network has the video and transcript for the interview Wall Street Eager to See Larry Summers Nominated Fed Chair.

POLLIN: I think it is. And here’s the reason. Larry Summers was a crucial figure in the late 1990s at the end of the Bill Clinton administration supporting the repeal of the financial regulatory system that we had in place, the Glass-Steagall system that was created in the wake of the 1930s depression, the last massive economic crisis. We did put in place a financial regulatory system that was reasonably effective.

Now, over time, of course, Wall Street and others lobbied against this year after year after year. But it took a Democratic president, a Democratic administration, Clinton, to pass a law to repeal the previous regulatory law. And who was Treasury Secretary of the United States at the time of the repeal of Glass-Steagall? Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

And Larry Summers plays this crucial role. Not only is he a public official, but he is a very well known, sophisticated economist. And on top of that, he had been, in his academic writing, in support of financial regulations. Once he became a public official under Clinton, all of a sudden he became a very aggressive deregulator, such that even the person who was the head of one of the regulatory agencies, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who argued–her name was Brooksley Born–she argued on behalf of regulating derivatives, the most dangerous financial products, and Summers was vehement in opposing it. So, actually, if you had to trace the collapse of the 2007-2009 financial crisis on one person–and, of course, you can’t really trace it to one person–but if you did, I think you could make a fair argument that Larry Summers is more to blame for the financial crisis that we experienced than any other person. So why in the world are we putting him in charge as the government’s top financial regulator to implement these rules that are coming out with Dodd-Frank? Clearly the reason is that Wall Street is fighting like mad to put Larry Summers in so the government will go soft on Wall Street and we still won’t have good financial regulations.

I don’t know how he knows that this is clearly what Wall Street wants, but it wouldn’t be hard to believe.

Hannah Allam and Mark Seibel of the McClatchy Washington Bureau have written the article To some, US case for Syrian gas attack, strike has too many holes.

The Obama administration’s public case for attacking Syria is riddled with inconsistencies and hinges mainly on circumstantial evidence, undermining U.S. efforts this week to build support at home and abroad for a punitive strike against Bashar Assad’s regime.

They have done an excellent job of reporting that does not just echo what one side has  to say about the attack in Syria.  They even identify some of the holes that I have not mentioned in my previous blog posts.

One of my arguments all along has been that we should not be making life and death decisions when there are so many holes in the argument.  If the Obama administration justifies retaliation with claims that the intelligence supports their conclusions, then they are going to have to shows us a lot of the actual evidence.  If they would prefer to keep the evidence secret, then they are just going to have to accept the fact that they cannot use these secrets to justify what they want to do.  It is up to Obama to decide which is more important, keeping secrets or taking action.