© State Department photoSecretary of State John Kerry departs for a Sept. 6 trip to Europe where he plans to meet with officials to discuss the Syrian crisis and other issues.
Exclusive: Despite the Obama administration's supposedly "high confidence" regarding Syrian government guilt over the Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus, a dozen former U.S. military and intelligence officials are telling President Obama that they are picking up information that undercuts the Official Story.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Is Syria a Trap?
Precedence: IMMEDIATE
We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as "plausible denial."
We have been down this road before - with President George W. Bush, to whom we addressed
our first VIPS memorandum immediately after Colin Powell's Feb. 5, 2003 U.N. speech, in which he peddled fraudulent "intelligence" to support attacking Iraq. Then, also, we chose to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, thinking he was being misled - or, at the least, very poorly advised.
Comment: That list of countries also happen to be U.S. client regimes and most repressive in the region. Coincidence?
You have to laugh in horror when you hear that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, the biggest regional exporters of terrorism - culturally, materially, and financially - are doing all this under the pretext of 'fighting terrorism'.