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Mission Creep Hits Syria Targeting, Training Before First Tomahawks Fly

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Even while Barack Obama and John Kerry are busily lobbying for a positive vote in Congress for their Not-War in Syria, it appears the Defense Department isn’t waiting for a pesky thing like Congressional approval or even the official start (as opposed to already ongoing but covert) of US actions to begin their usual process of mission creep that is undoubtedly to be followed by cries of “Just six more months and victory will be ours!”. The mission creep on targeting threatens the propaganda push that so far has been centered on selling the action as limited. We have New York Times articles this morning stating that Israel goes along with the idea of limited strikes but definitely doesn’t want to go all the way to regime change where radical Sunni groups might seize power, while at the same time we have the Pentagon claiming they’ve been tasked with expanding the number of targets for the strike. From the latter:

President Obama has directed the Pentagon to develop an expanded list of potential targets in Syria in response to intelligence suggesting that the government of President Bashar al-Assad has been moving troops and equipment used to employ chemical weapons while Congress debates whether to authorize military action.

Mr. Obama, officials said, is now determined to put more emphasis on the “degrade” part of what the administration has said is the goal of a military strike against Syria — to “deter and degrade” Mr. Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons. That means expanding beyond the 50 or so major sites that were part of the original target list developed with French forces before Mr. Obama delayed action on Saturday to seek Congressional approval of his plan.

For the first time, the administration is talking about using American and French aircraft to conduct strikes on specific targets, in addition to ship-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles. There is a renewed push to get other NATO forces involved.

See? It’s the fault of all those dirty hippies insisting on following an old piece of paper and forcing the President to get a permission slip from Congress before taking action. That delay is why we have to expand the number of targets.

We are left to ponder just how it will be possible to magically target and kill Syrian forces tasked with moving chemical weapons around without actually hitting those weapons–which the forces are in the process of hiding. What could possibly go wrong here?

But I want to focus more fully on this AP article. Marcy had just read it when she sent out this tweet:

That, along with the title: “US officials: US considers training Syria rebels”, suggests that the article is an expansion of the effort I outlined earlier in the week, where Barack Obama is trying to change both the date and the size of the first CIA-trained death squads to enter Syria, most likely because they are somehow tied up either as targets of the chemical weapons attack or as perpetrators of a false flag operation.

Diving into the article, though, we see that this is about adding to the death squad training by expanding into a much larger operation where US troops are directly involved in training a large force (for the Afghanistan analogy, this proposal is to move beyond the CIA training Afghan Local Police–the militias who become death squads–for our military to train the actual Afghan National Army, which is about ten times larger): Read more →

Iran Kills Six Pakistanis in Latest Border Incident; Iran Silent (Updated)

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CIA's map of Pakistan

Six more Pakistanis have been killed by Iranian border agents. The incident has been noted widely in the press in Pakistan, but I find no reports on the incident originating in Iran. This latest incident follows three fishermen killed by Iran around December 7 (although at least one report says there were four killed by Iran in the incident) and three Iranian border guards crossing into Pakistan on January 2 to kill a Pakistani national they were chasing. The guards were detained by Pakistan and released on January 15 after Iran paid blood money to the family of the victim.

The fishing incidents of course were in the coastal waters around the southernmost part of the Iran-Pakistan border and the latest incident was also near the southern end of the border. The January 2 incident was a bit farther north, about halfway to the southern edge of Afghanistan.

In the December 7 incident, the fishermen, who were from Sindh province, appear to have been fishing illegally:

At least three Pakistani fishermen were gunned down, while two others were injured, by Iranian security forces when they wandered into Iranian territorial waters in the Pasaband area, about 40 kilometres off the Jewani coast in Pakistan.

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District Police Officer Gwadar Liaquat Baloch confirmed the incident and said the bodies are yet to be handed over to Pakistani officials.

“The trawler, Al-Mariam, entered into Iran’s territorial waters when Iranian security forces opened fire on them, killing three crew members on the spot, while injuring another two,” he added.

Station Officer of Jewani Imam Baksh said that there were 20 to 25 people onboard Al-Mariam, which was engaged in illegal fishing.

A later report in the Baloch press says the fishermen were Baloch and that four were killed:

Iranian Naval forces indiscriminate firing on fishermen’s boat in Jiwani area of district Gwadar in Balochistan Read more →