Barack Obama's Illegal Covert War in Syria

Barack Obama and his administration's secret war against Assad in Syria will always be framed in a different light.  The coup in Libya under the guise of the 'responsibility to protect doctrine' or R2P and the resulting chaos in Libya has been a disaster for the entire middle east.  The attack on the Special Mission in Benghazi and the transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria, via Turkey, exposed Obama's secret and unconstitutional war long ago. Just as Turkey is using the war on ISIS as an opportunity to attack the Kurds, Obama is now using the war on ISIS to target Assad. 

 This RAT LINE of military arms from Libya directly and indirectly aided ISIS in Syria, a group that Obama has done little to confront and who the POTUS called the 'jayvee team'.  ISIS, a group that this administration uses to fight Assad.  Obama's ISIS army only became a problem for him when they streamed into Iraq when the POTUS withdrew our troops, thus surrendering the territory to ISIS and Iran.

The Obama administration's power under the AUMF to conduct war in Syria have been questionable from the beginning and the actions under Article 2  now are politely described as ' blurry' as the following story excerpted from TheHILL describes. 

White House Legal Strategy for ISIS Fight Gets Blurry

President Obama has shifted his legal rationale for justifying military force to defend Syrian rebel forces battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as the prospect has increased that they could come into conflict with Syria’s government.

The administration had been using a 2001 authorization approved by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks to justify air strikes against ISIS.

But the administration now says it will also rely on Article II of the Constitution as the legal backing for air strikes against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s forces if Assad attacks the rebel groups.

“If Syrian government forces attack the Syrian fighters we have trained and equipped while they were engaging ISIL, the President would have the authority under Article II of the Constitution to defend those fighters,” a senior administration official told The Hill, using another acronym to describe ISIS.

The legal shift comes as the Syrian rebels are beginning to deploy back into Syria from their training sites.

This is raising the prospect that they will come into conflict with Assad’s forces, prompting the need for a U.S. response.

And the U.S. is not only protecting the rebels they've vetted and trained, but the entire groups that they were recruited from and return to — many of which the U.S. has not vetted.

In fact, a U.S. official said, the U.S.-led coalition already is providing those groups with air support against ISIS – even though they do not yet have U.S.-trained rebels embedded with them.

Continued:

The diplomatic official said some of the groups may target Assad — which would bring the U.S. closer to war with the regime.

Already, things have not gone as planned. Although the rebels were trained to fight ISIS, the first rebels to return almost immediately came under attack by al Nusra — an al Qaeda affiliated group, prompting coalition airstrikes. 

The administration maintains the U.S. can defend the rebels from al Nusra — al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria — using the 2001 AUMF.

So far, there has been no conflict with Syrian forces.
Both the expansion of the fight, and the shifting rational for its legality has drawn criticism from Congress.

Continued: 

Legal scholars said using Article II to justify defensive actions as protecting the rebel groups from Assad is a stretch.
“That means nothing. That’s pretty bad when you have to cite Article II…You have to be more specific than that,” said Louis Fisher, scholar in residence at the Constitution Project and former Congressional Research Service researcher.

He and other legal experts say Article II has been interpreted to allow a president to “repel sudden attack” against U.S. troops, the U.S.mainland, and its interests.

Using it to defend Syrian rebels would not fit under that previous interpretation, he said.
“Invoking Article II is question-begging,” agreed Stephen Vladeck, law professor at American University.

Vladeck said Article II has also been interpreted to allow the U.S. to defend its “assets.”
However, he said “by that logic any person or piece of military equipment used by anyone on a side of a conflict with which we agree is all of a sudden covered by Article II. And that cannot be right.” 

As recently as last month, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. did not have the authority to conduct airstrikes against the Syrian regime. 

“My understanding is that we don't have the legal authority at this time to go after the Assad regime. And it's also the policy of the administration not to go after the Assad regime militarily,” he said at a hearing on July 7. 

The administration now is saying it will conduct “offensive” strikes against ISIS that would be justified by the 2001 AUMF, use the same AUMF to justify “defensive” strikes against al Nusra, and use Article II to justify “defensive” strikes to defend the rebels against the regime.
Some lawmakers are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the blurred lines, one year after the airstrikes against ISIS first began.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama and his administration has wanted to directly attack Assad for years and only when they sought political cover by involving Congress at the last minute was this averted. The reasons for opposing Obama's 'intervention' in Syria were numerous and the public opposed his actions as well. 

The Obama administration has never been honest about Syria. In fact, they have always lied about Syria at every opportunity. The claims that the Assad regime solely using chemical weapons against the Syrian people and was a cause for war or Obama and his administration claiming they destroyed Assad's chemical weapons arsenal and enforced the chemical weapons treaty are lies. Further 'blurring' the lines of Constitutional power really isn't a problem for this corrupt and dishonest administration.

John Kerry 'Absolutely Certain' Assad Using Chlorine Attacks on his People

The Obama administration isn't credible on any issue or in the eyes of our foreign adversaries. Syria is another great example of this.  Chlorine gas attacks in Syria have been going on for years now, with only bluster and B.S. coming out of this administration in Washington D.C.

An excerpt from The Hill from 06/16/2016
John Kerry 'absolutely certain' Assad using chlorine attacks on his people

Secretary of State John Kerry is “absolutely certain” that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has launched chlorine attacks on its own people is currently compiling evidence to support it, he told reporters Tuesday.  

“I am absolutely certain, we are certain that the preponderance of those attacks have been carried out by the regime,” Kerry said Tuesday during a surprise appearance at the State Department’s daily press briefing, noting that it’s possible that some members of the opposition could have used chlorine in attacks as well. 

“It has been significantly documented; it’s dropped from airplane. The opposition isn’t flying airplanes or helicopters,” he said. 

“And you can go through a certain sort of tracking of the delivery system and delivery approach. It’s frankly not that hard to pin down in the end, and that’s some of what we will lay out at the appropriate time.” 

Kerry added that he’s discussed the findings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and, while he’s confident the Russians will raise the issue with Syria again, patience is “wearing thin” over the “extraordinary depravity” of the weapons Assad is allegedly using against his own people. 

“We are not simply sitting there and allowing this to happen without any efforts to see if there is a way to stop it,” Kerry said. “Thus far, it has not been stopped and it is only increasing the international community’s anger at the Assad regime.”

In April 2014 the State Dept. responded to reports of Assad using chlorine gas, a prohibited weapon by their agreement with Assad.



Barack Obama downplays the use of Chlorine on civilians......


Barack Obama claims to have disposed of Syrian Chemical Weapons.......


Barack Obama and his administration armed ISIS in Syria and overlooked the use of chemical weapons for years now. Obama's claim to have destroyed Syria's WMD is just further proof that Putin and Assad outplayed the amateur, Barack Obama, at every turn.  .

 The following article appeared in Politico on June 22,2014. While Barack Obama will never be held accountable for any malfeasance, malpractice or major miscalculations by the biased media, the sixth year into the Obama administration means Blaming Bush no longer works.  After 6 Years, the President cannot hide from HIS record and the current results of HIS actions and reactions /

The Man Who Broke the Middle East

By ELLIOTT ABRAMS

June 22, 2014

There’s always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story. But unfortunately for the Obama narratives, the president had about as much as to do with Tunisia’s turn toward democracy as he did with the World Cup rankings. Where administration policy has had an impact, the story is one of failure and danger.

The picture has been modified for editorial purposes  ..... 

The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.

How did it happen? Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam—knowledge “rooted in my own experience” because “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” But President Obama wasn’t speaking that day in an imaginary location called “the world of Islam;” he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power. “As a boy,” Obama told his listeners, “I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.” Nice touch, but Arab rulers were more interested in knowing whether as a man he heard the approaching sound of gunfire, saw the growing threat of al Qaeda from the Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula, and understood the ambitions of the ayatollahs as Iran moved closer and closer to a bomb. 

Obama began with the view that there was no issue in the Middle East more central than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Five years later he has lost the confidence of both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and watched his second secretary of state squander endless efforts in a doomed quest for a comprehensive peace. Obama embittered relations with America’s closest ally in the region and achieved nothing whatsoever in the “peace process.” The end result in the summer of 2014 is to see the Palestinian Authority turn to a deal with Hamas for new elections that—if they are held, which admittedly is unlikely—would usher the terrorist group into a power-sharing deal. This is not progress. 

The most populous Arab country is Egypt, where Obama stuck too long with Hosni Mubarak as the Arab Spring arrived, and then with the Army, and then the Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi, and now is embracing the Army again. Minor failings like the persecution of newspaper editors and leaders of American-backed NGOs, or the jailing of anyone critical of the powers-that-be at a given moment, were glossed over. When the Army removed an elected president, that was not really a “coup”—remember? And as the worm turned, we managed to offend every actor on Egypt’s political stage, from the military to the Islamists to the secular democratic activists. Who trusts us now on the Egyptian political scene? 

No one.

But these errors are minor when compared to those in Iraq and Syria. When the peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad was brutally crushed, Obama said Assad must go; when Assad used sarin gas, Obama said this was intolerable and crossed a red line. But behind these words there was no American power, and speeches are cheap in the Middle East. Despite the urgings of all his top advisers (using the term loosely; he seems to ignore their advice)—Panetta at CIA and then Defense, Clinton at State, Petraeus at CIA, even Dempsey at the Pentagon—the president refused to give meaningful assistance to the Syrian nationalist rebels. Assistance was announced in June 2013 and then again in June 2014 (in the president’s West Point speech) but it is a minimal effort, far too small to match the presence of Hezbollah and Iranian Quds Force fighters in Syria. Arabs see this as a proxy war with Iran, but in the White House the key desire is to put all those nasty Middle Eastern wars behind us. So in the Middle East American power became a mirage, something no one could find—something enemies did not fear and allies could not count on. 

The humanitarian result has been tragic: At least 160,000 killed in Syria, perhaps eight million displaced. More than a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon (a country of four million people, before Obama added those Syrians), about a million and a quarter Syrian refugees in Jordan (population six million before Obama). Poison gas back on the world scene as a tolerated weapon, with Assad using chlorine gas systematically in “barrel bombs” this year and paying no price whatsoever for this and for his repeated attacks on civilian targets. Both of the key officials handling Syria for Obama—State Department special envoy Fred Hof and Ambassador Robert Ford—resigned in disgust when they could no longer defend Obama’s hands-off policy. Can Samantha Power be far behind, watching the mass killings and seeing her president respond to them with rhetoric?  

The result in security terms is even worse: the largest gathering of jihadis we have ever seen, 12,000 now and expanding.They come from all over the world, a jihadi Arab League, a jihadi EU, a jihadi U.N. Two or three thousand are from Europe, and an estimated 70 from the United States. When they go home, some no doubt disillusioned but many committed, experienced and well trained, “home” will be Milwaukee and Manchester and Marseille—and, as we see now on the front pages, to Mosul. When Obama took office there was no such phenomenon; it is his creation, the result of his passivity in Syria while Sunnis were being slaughtered by the Assad regime.

Continue 
Read Page 2 at Politico Magazine 

Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. He served as a deputy national security adviser in the administration of George W. Bush.


Blame Bush for the Iraq War?  What about Bush implying that Iraq had WMDs?
Democrat and former president Bill Clinton will enlighten us in he next video.  

Other prominent Democrats held strong views about Iraq and WMD. Take A look (video below)

New Analysis of Rocket Used in Syria Chemical Attack Undercuts U.S. Claims

BERLIN — A series of revelations about the rocket believed to have delivered poison sarin gas to a Damascus suburb last summer are challenging American intelligence assumptions about that attack and suggest that the case U.S. officials initially made for retaliatory military action was flawed.

A team of security and arms experts, meeting this week in Washington to discuss the matter, has concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered sarin in the largest attack that night was too short for the device to have been fired from the Syrian government positions where the Obama administration insists they originated.

Separately, international weapons experts are puzzling over why the rocket in question – an improvised 330mm to 350mm rocket equipped with a large receptacle on its nose to hold chemicals – reportedly did not appear in the Syrian government’s declaration of its arsenal to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and apparently was not uncovered by OPCW inspectors who believe they’ve destroyed Syria’s ability to deliver a chemical attack.

Neither development proves decisively that Syrian government forces did not fire the chemicals that killed hundreds of Syrians in the early morning hours of Aug. 21. U.S. officials continue to insist that the case for Syrian government responsibility for the attack in East Ghouta is stronger than any suggestion of rebel involvement, while experts say it is possible Syria left the rockets out of its chemical weapons declaration simply to make certain it could not be tied to the attack.

Obama "Cherry-Picked" Intelligence on Syrian Chemical Attack to Justify U.S. Strike  Video

“That failure to declare can mean different things,” said Ralf Trapp, an original member of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and a former secretary of the group’s scientific advisory board. “It can mean the Syrian government doesn’t have them, or that they are hiding them.”

In Washington, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said its assertion of Syrian government responsibility remains unchanged.

“The body of information used to make the assessment regarding the August 21 attack included intelligence pertaining to the regime’s preparations for this attack and its means of delivery, multiple streams of intelligence about the attack itself and its effect, our post-attack observations, and the differences between the capabilities of the regime and the opposition. That assessment made clear that the opposition had not used chemical weapons in Syria,” it said Wednesday in an email.

But the authors of a report released Wednesday said that their study of the rocket’s design, its likely payload and its possible trajectories show that it would have been impossible for the rocket to have been fired from inside areas controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

In the report, titled “Possible Implications of Faulty U.S. Technical Intelligence,” Richard Lloyd, a former United Nations weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argue that the question about the rocket’s range indicates a major weakness in the case for military action initially pressed by Obama administration officials.

The administration eventually withdrew its request for congressional authorization for a military strike after Syria agreed to submit to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the weapons. Polls showed overwhelming public opposition to a military strike, however, and it was doubtful Congress would have authorized an attack.

Lloyd and Postol’s report is the most recent installment in a months-long debate among rocket and weapons experts, much of it carried out in detailed papers posted on the Internet, about the nature of the munitions used in the Aug. 21 attack on rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus.

The report’s authors admit that they deal only with one area of the attacks, the eastern suburb of Zamalka, where the largest quantity of sarin was released that night. They acknowledge that smaller rockets likely used in areas southwest of the capital could have come from government-controlled territory.

Relying on mathematical projections about the likely force of the rocket and noting that its design – some have described it as a trash can on a stick – would have made it awkward in flight, Lloyd and Postol conclude that the rocket likely had a maximum range of 2 kilometers, or just more than 1.2 miles. That range, the report explains in detail, means the rockets could not have come from land controlled by the Syrian government.

To emphasize their point, the authors used a map produced by the White House that showed which areas were under government and rebel control on Aug. 21 and where the chemical weapons attack occurred. Drawing circles around Zamalka to show the range from which the rocket could have come, the authors conclude that all of the likely launching points were in rebel-held areas or areas that were in dispute. The area securely in government hands was miles from the possible launch zones.

In an interview, Postol said that a basic analysis of the weapon – some also have described as a looking like a push pop, a fat cylinder filled with sarin atop a thin stick that holds the engine – would have shown that it wasn’t capable of flying the 6 miles from the center of the Syrian government-controlled part of Damascus to the point of impact in the suburbs, or even the 3.6 miles from the edges of government-controlled ground.

He questioned whether U.S. intelligence officials had actually analyzed the improbability of a rocket with such a non-aerodynamic design traveling so far before Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Sept. 3 that “we are certain that none of the opposition has the weapons or capacity to effect a strike of this scale – particularly from the heart of regime territory.”

“I honestly have no idea what happened,” Postol said. “My view when I started this process was that it couldn’t be anything but the Syrian government behind the attack. But now I’m not sure of anything. The administration narrative was not even close to reality. Our intelligence cannot possibly be correct.”

Lloyd, who has spent the past half-year studying the weapons and capabilities in the Syrian conflict, disputed the assumption that the rebels are less capable of making rockets than the Syrian military.

“The Syrian rebels most definitely have the ability to make these weapons,” he said. “I think they might have more ability than the Syrian government.”
Both said they were not making a case that the rebels were behind the attack, just that a case for military action was made without even a basic understanding of what might have happened.

For instance, they said that Kerry’s insistence that U.S. satellite images had shown the impact points of the chemical weapons was unlikely to be true. The charges that detonate chemical weapons are generally so small, they said, that their detonations would not be visible in a satellite image.

The report also raised questions whether the Obama administration misused intelligence information in a way similar to the administration of President George W. Bush in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Then, U.S. officials insisted that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had an active program to develop weapons of mass destruction. Subsequent inspections turned up no such program or weapons.

“What, exactly, are we spending all this money on intelligence for?” Postol asked.
As for the failure of the Syrians to list the rocket in its chemical weapons inventory, experts are undecided on what it means and leery about discussing it in public.
A spokeswoman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in Damascus declined to comment on what was listed in the declaration. It would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention for anyone who has read the declaration – it’s distributed to all nations that have joined the treaty – to reveal its contents.

Knowledgeable experts said discussion of the apparent omission has been muted because no one wants to say anything that would disrupt what appears to have been the successful dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Some say they are worried that the failure to declare one delivery system may also mean that other items went undeclared.

“The most likely explanation for some of the delivery systems not showing up on the chemical declaration is that Assad doesn’t want to incriminate himself or his regime,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association.

Jonathan S. Landay in Damascus, Syria, and Hannah Allam and Anita Kumar in Washington contributed to this report.