Reader Supported News had the article by Dennis Kucinich Top 10 Unproven Claims for War Against Syria.  I don’t want you to think I have suddenly gone soft on my problems with bombing Syria.  You’ll have to read the article to see what Kucinich says about these claims.

Claim #1. The administration claims a chemical weapon was used.

Claim #2: The administration claims the opposition has not used chemical weapons.

Claim #3: The administration claims chemical weapons were used because the regime’s conventional weapons were insufficient

Claim #4: The administration claims to have intelligence relating to the mixing of chemical weapons by regime elements

Claim #5: The administration claims intelligence that Assad’s brother ordered the attack

Claim #6: The administration claims poison gas was released in a rocket attack

Claim #7: The administration claims 1,429 people died in the attack

Claim #8: The administration has made repeated references to videos and photos of the attack as a basis for military action against Syria

Claim #9: The administration claims a key intercept proves the Assad regime’s complicity in the chemical weapons attack

Claim #10: The administration claims that sustained shelling occurred after the chemical weapons attack in order to cover up the traces of the attack

Mother Jones has the article Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math.

Kahan’s data suggest the opposite—that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy.

When reading my blog, keep in mind that I think I have advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy.

So, if you want unbiased reporting, only read blogs by liberal arts majors.

Now that I think about it, there are instances where I pick apart a faulty argument that is in support of my political beliefs. I don’t find it helpful to make easily refuted arguments for what I believe. I don’t want other people to make those arguments for what I believe either.

However, I don’t think what I have just said  negates what the above study says.  It is probably true that I am more likely to pick apart a study that disagrees with my point of view than I am to do it to a study that agrees with me.

McClatchy news has the story Intercepted call bolsters Syrian chemical-weapons charge, Germans say.

According to Der Spiegel, one of the parties in the intercepted phone call was a “high-ranking member of Hezbollah,” the militant Lebanese movement that’s sent fighters to support the Assad government. That Hezbollah member told the Iranian that “Assad had lost his temper and committed a huge mistake by giving the order for the poison gas use,” according to the magazine’s account.

Apparently this is a different phone call from the one intercepted by Israeli intelligence and passed on to the U.S.A.  Perhaps the evidence will show that the Obama administration is correct in its assessment of who perpetrated the gas attack.  There are other details in the article to add to your store of possible (mis)information about what happened.

I found the coverage of How Senate Foreign Relations Committee members voted on Syria on Politico.

At least Ed Markey did not vote yes, perhaps for the right reasons.  He is reserving final judgment partially because he wants to see more evidence.

Editor:

In the pictures and videos of the victims of the Syrian nerve gas attack people do not behave as would be expected of such victims. The reported death toll rate is far below what one would expect of such an attack.

So let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Bashar al Assad was not the perpetrator of these attacks.  Even John Kerry said that it would be irrational for Assad to have done so.

The rebels themselves could have perpetrated the attacks or at least staged the videos to make it seem as if there were an attack.  The UN has already determined that some previous attacks have been perpetrated by rebels.  There are reports that the Aug 21 incident was an accident caused by the rebels.  Further reports say that Saudi Arabia is supplying the rebels with chemical weapons.

John Kerry says that it would be irrational to assume the rebels did it, but offers no reasons for such a conclusion.

After President Obama announced his red line, the rebels knew what it would take to drive the U.S.A to action.  Now that the Senate hearings have elicited testimony that there could be further retaliation if the first one does not prevent another nerve agent attack, the rebels know exactly what they have to do to get us to make further attacks.

Is it irrational to think that the rebels now have control of how we manage our response to the Syrian civil war?  Is this kind of control something that we want them to have?

So, if we must respond to the use of chemical weapons, let us make sure we punish the perpetrators rather than rewarding them with the response they seek.  Let us at least wait for the report from the UN inspectors. If we do not get this right, we may be promoting the use of chemical weapons.

/Steven Greenberg

I wonder what President Obama is willing to risk to get his desired resolution from Congress.  Is he willing to promise to resign if it turns out the intelligence analyses he is depending on are wrong? Is anybody in the CIA hierarchy willing to make such a promise?

The Wall Street Cheat Sheet has the article Here’s Buffett’s Billion-Dollar Advice to the Washington Post.  There is a lot more in the article that is worth reading to understand Warren’s advice, but here is a fact we all ought to consider.

Writing Graham in 1975, Buffett began by saying that, “There are two aspects of the pension cost problem upon which management can have significant impact: 1. maintaining rational control over pension plan promises to employees and 2. increasing investment returns on pension plan assets.” While this may seem intuitive to some, it has become clear that both the private and public sector are bad at managing pensions. Very, very bad.

Both private pension plans and Social Security ought to take note of what Buffet is saying.

Since at least 2005, I have been pushing for reforms that would heed Warren Buffet’s advice.

See previous posts Social Insecurity – Investment Rules Need Rethinking, Author’s Response to Social Insecurity – Investment Rules Need Rethinking, and Why a Pay-As-You-Go System (Social Security) is not like a Ponzi scheme.

Even before I started this blog in its current form, I was promoting this solution.

I wrote the following in response to a comment on Facebook by reader DavidF.   I decided to turn it into a post because it clarifies what I think the Congress needs to demand before they make a decision.

Obama is just following the Bush model. Bush went to Congress and got authorization for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. If only the Congress had taken their responsibility more seriously back then, we probably wouldn’t be facing half the situations we are facing now.

Yesterday, I think Kerry made a plausible case for why we need to take action if it turns out that Assad is responsible for the attacks. However, he keeps assuming that Assad did it, even while he says it would be irrational for Assad to have done it. He states without explanation that it is irrational to assume the rebels did it.

I think it is irrational to think that anybody but the rebels did it. Perhaps he does have some evidence to prove his case, but if so, it is so classified that the public will never hear it. I hope the Senators press him on this issue in the classified hearings, and accept nothing short of definitive proof.

Also Kerry’s reasons for not waiting for the UN report are not good enough. If he is so sure that the results will not tell us anything we don’t already know, then he should have no worry about waiting. The problem for me is that the videos of the victims cast severe doubt on some of Kerry’s assumptions. That is why I need to hear the UN report before I would be comfortable making a decision. The Congress ought to tell this to Kerry in no uncertain terms. “No decision until the UN reports.”  If Obama insists on a decision right now, then “No” is the answer.

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.