You liked the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Vietnam War, the Kuwaiti incubators and the first Gulf War, the Racak massacre and the war in Kosovo, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the second Gulf War and the threats to Benghazi and the Libyan war? You will just love the gassing of civilians in Ghouta and the bombing of Syria.

In a statement released by the White House, the U.S. Director of Intelligence, James Clapper, said that 1,429 people were killed in a massive chemical attack on a dozen localities, August 21, 2013 in the suburbs of Damascus [1] .

The French services were unable to conduct an on-site victim toll, according to the declassified notes of intelligence coordinator Alain Zebulun [2]. However, they saw about 281 victims on videos, while the French "non-governmental" organization, Doctors Without Borders, counted 355 in hospitals.

Allied services all refer to videos. So, the Americans have collected a hundred on YouTube, while the French have only found 47. Washington and Paris consider them all as authentic. However, some of them were posted at 7:00 am, Damascus time (which explains why they are dated August 20th on YouTube, which is based in California), but with an almost midday sun, which implies they were filmed in advance [3].

All observers have noted the high proportion of children among the victims. The United States has counted 426, or more than a third. Some observers, but neither those of the US nor their French counterparts, were intrigued to find that victims were almost all of the same age and they had no families to cry over them. Stranger still, the gas would have killed children and adult men, but would have spared women.

The wide distribution of satellite channel images of victims allowed Alawite families near Latakia to recognize their children who had been abducted two weeks prior by the "rebels." This identification was long in coming because there are few survivors of the massacre by the allies of the United States, the United Kingdom and France in loyalist villages where more than a thousand bodies of civilians were discovered in mass graves.

Following the broadcasting of the images of the massacre in Ghouta, distributed by the Free Syrian Army and relayed by US and French services, Alawite families from Latakia have filed a complaint for murder.

Some of these videos were filmed and posted on Youtube before the events they picture [1].

They show children suffocating from a chemical intoxication that can't possibly be sarin gas (the latter provokes yellow drool, not white drool).

The children do not correspond to a sample of the population: they are all almost of the same age and have light hair. They are not accompanied by their grieving families.

They are in fact children who were abducted by jihadists two weeks before in Alawite villages in the surroundings of Latakia, 200km away from Ghouta.

Contrary to the sayings of the Free Syrian Army and the Western services, the only identified victims of the Ghouta massacre are those belonging to families that support the Syrian government. In the videos, the individuals that show outrage against the ''crimes of Bashar el-Assad'' are in reality their killers.

[1] « About the videos of the August 21st massacre », Voltaire Network, August 30th 2013.

Christian televangelist Pat Robertson is threatening legal action against a Canadian documentary team over their film alleging that Robertson used a bogus charity as a supply line for his diamond mining business in Africa. Right Wing Watch reported Friday that Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network are threatening to sue Lara Zizic and David Turner, whose film Mission Congo is set to premiere this weekend at the Toronto Film Festival.

"Mission Congo," according to the Guardian, details how Robertson reportedly used aid money donated to his foreign ministry program Operation Blessing International to provide mining equipment and other services to his diamond-mining operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Robertson also used images of doctors and tents provided by the international medical aid group Médecins sans Frontières (MSF aka "Doctors Without Borders") to promote Operation Blessing, saying that his group had provided the tents and the doctors and that donor money from his Christian empire was the main source of aid to the war-torn region.

Operation Blessing, says the film, still pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, money that Robertson is using to enrich himself and his family. The film contains damning testimony from former Operation Blessing workers, who say that humanitarian mission flights were routinely diverted hundreds of miles off course to deliver mining equipment and other supplies to Robertson's diamond mining operation in Kamonia.

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, I researched, wrote and circulated a document to members of Congress which explored unanswered questions and refuted President Bush's claim for a cause for war. The document detailed how there was no proof Iraq was connected to 9/11 or tied to al Qaeda's role in 9/11, that Iraq neither had WMDs nor was it a threat to the U.S., lacking intention and capability to attack. Unfortunately, not enough members of Congress performed due diligence before they approved the war.

Here are some key questions which President Obama has yet to answer in the call for congressional approval for war against Syria. This article is a call for independent thinking and congressional oversight, which rises above partisan considerations.

The questions the Obama administration needs to answer before Congress can even consider voting on Syria:

Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex ~ Frank Zappa

Recently, Maria Rodale, the CEO of the publishing company Rodale, Inc., wrote an open letter to President Obama regarding Syria, urging him to reconsider his position to press for a military strike against Syria.

While there is nothing unusual about Maria's anti-war sentiment, with a recent Washington/ABC poll finding nearly six in 10 Americans oppose military action as a response to the Syrian government's alleged use of chemical weapons, her reference to biotech companies like Monsanto poisoning our children and environment with the president's support and encouragement, and her claim that the viral Facebook meme below contributed to her realization, caused the mainstream media to fume with reactionary waves of criticism and character assault.

All of this, of course, distracts from the underlying context of the coming war in Syria, which is a war (like most wars in modern history) spurred by the geopolitical machinations of 'resource procurement,' and which like most wars, are many years in the making. All else, as Frank Zappa pointed out, has strictly entertainment value.

The government is manipulating facts. There's no credible evidence on Syria. Why is the Times pretending otherwise?

The conflict between democracy at home and empire abroad has beset this nation since the Spanish-American War, a brief interlude of imperial display in the spring of 1898. Empire did not win merely the day: It won the century, the one America named after itself.

Anyone who doubts the thesis can consider it at intimate range as the Obama administration prepares to send missiles into Syria. What we witness in Washington now is no more or less than a scratchy rerun. We must be thankful there is still any such conflict between democrats and those given to imperial reach, however feebly the fight gets fought. It is better than nothing - if marginally, under the circumstances.

President Obama's announcement last weekend that he would submit his decision to attack Syrian military installations to Congress has been called numerous things. It was surprising. (We have an imperial presidency. Why ask for congressional assent?) It was politically daring. (What if Congress says no?) It was the democratic thing. ("We act better when we are unified," as Secretary of State Kerry has put it often this week.)

Can something be quaint and frightening at the same time? The thought tempts. The incessant murmurs of patriotism in Washington this week will comfort a few foolish hearts, but they are part of what makes the current scene in our capital disturbing. Cast Obama's plans for Syria in history and you see how America the ever-changing nation does not change. We have a government manipulating facts. We have hypocrisy of motive: Humanitarian compassion is not the issue; the issues are vanity and the projection of power. We have perniciously misbehaving media, the clerks of the political class at this point (if ever they were other).

This is 1898 redux. Good historians eventually nailed the poseurs, weaklings and paranoids who then pretended to heroism. So take heart: The bunch prescribing cruise missiles for Basahr al-Assad will someday get their revisionists, too.

There is one quite essential difference between our moment and the days when Teddy Roosevelt charged up hills in Cuba. A century and a bit ago Americans were jingoists almost (not quite) to a one. It did not take much other than a few shrieking newspapers, salivating along with TR for brown people's blood. (It was precisely so.) There was consensus - conjured, yes, but not with much exertion.

Now there is no consensus.

The Russian navy has sent four more ships to the eastern Mediterranean, near the Syrian coast, as the United States considers launching a military offensive against the Arab country.

The SSV-201 Priazovye reconnaissance ship, escorted by two landing ships, Minsk and Novocherkassk, had already passed through Turkey's Bosphorus Strait, Russia's Interfax news agency quoted a source from the Saint Petersburg-based central naval command as saying on Friday.

The alleged chemical weapons use in Syria is a provocation carried out by the rebels to attract a foreign-led strike, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the G20 summit.

There was no 50/50 split of opinion on the notion of a military strike against the Syrian President Bashar Assad, Putin stressed refuting earlier assumptions.

Only Turkey, Canada, Saudi Arabia and France joined the US push for intervention, he said, adding that the UK Prime Minister's position was not supported by his citizens.

Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Italy were among the major world's economies clearly opposed to military intervention.

President Putin said the G20 nations spent the "entire" Thursday evening discussing the Syrian crisis, which was followed by Putin's bilateral meeting with UK Prime Minister David Cameron that lasted till 3am Moscow time.

Russia "will help Syria" in the event of a military strike, Putin stressed as he responded to a reporter's question at the summit.

"Will we help Syria? We will. And we are already helping, we send arms, we cooperate in the economics sphere, we hope to expand our cooperation in the humanitarian sphere, which includes sending humanitarian aid to support those people - the civilians - who have found themselves in a very dire situation in this country," Putin said.

Hours before President Obama arrived here to lobby world leaders to support a planned military strike against Syria, the Pentagon had to clarify Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's assertion that Russia provided chemical weapons to Syria and Russia President Vladimir Putin accused Secretary of State John Kerry of lying about al Qaeda's links to Syrian rebels.

Obama will seek more certain footing in the city that Peter the Great founded in 1703 and that is hosting its second global economic summit in seven years.

All five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council -- the U.S., Great Britain, France, China and Russia -- are attending the summit. Upon Putin's arrival Thursday, he and Obama shared a brief handshake and exchanged smiles during their only scheduled meeting during the summit. After Russia granted NSA leaker Edward Snowden asylum in July, Obama canceled a planned bilateral meeting with Putin that was to take place during Obama's visit to Russia.

On Friday's CBS This Morning, Mark Phillips all but hinted that Pope Francis had "taken sides" with Russia's Vladimir Putin and against President Obama in the international debate over military strikes in Syria. Phillips proposed that the Pope's letter to Putin "must have been music to the Russian president's ears."

The journalist also turned to a "Vatican historian" who once publicly attacked Francis' predecessor, Benedict XVI, as a "dictator", and likened him to Islamists. He also labeled the Pope's upcoming prayer and fasting vigil for peace in Syria a "religious street protest." [audio available here;]


Phillips led his report by noting that "popes have urged peace before. Remember, John Paul II was firmly against the Gulf War. This pope, Francis, is now actively arguing against military action against Syria. And the question is, does it matter?"