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.
Well, I have heard that the Republicans want to tie action on Syria to the debt ceiling fight and their requests for cuts to the social safety net.
Yes, good questions, Steve. We certainly need better independent verification, and a better laying out of scenarios of what could happen. Oh well, congress is sure to screw it up anyway, like bringing in an Obamacare defunding as solution? ha ha
Mardy, I’m with you. It’s not that I believe in any other particular scenario than the one Obama has proposed. Given the NSA fiasco and all the initial lies that Obama told us about that, I am not about to take on faith what he has to say about this important issue. I want independent verification.
I’d also like to know what he plans to do if whoever did the initial attack does another one after we retaliate for the first one.
Thanks for this link, Steve. I just read the article and some of the comments. There’s enough doubt about what really happened that no action should be taken, in my opinion. I even doubt that the US government really knows what happened. I’m not a conspiracy theory buff because I’d rather believe nothing than just about anything under the sun.