We can’t have neocon wet dreams of regime change thwarted!

Typical of the incoherence now common among U.S. foreign policy pundits discussing the Syrian crisis is Jeffrey Lewis, who took to the pages of the prestigious journal Foreign Policy to venture his opinion. He started out reciting the usual “group think” narrative about the need to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and denounced Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for stepping up support for the Syrian military in the face of gains by Sunni terror groups.

But Lewis, who is billed as an arms-control specialist at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, then admitted that he doesn’t have a clue what to do, which at least is an improvement over all the other “experts” who say the U.S. must do something – anything! – to counter Russian intervention.

Lewis begins his article with a lot of scary talk about satellite photos confirming that Russia is expanding an air base near Latakia with the goal of increasing military aid to the evil Bashar al-Assad so as to give his doddering regime another lease on life.

“The satellite image shows far more than prefabricated housing and an air traffic control station,” Lewis observed. “It shows extensive construction of what appears to be a military canton … designed to support Russian combat air operations from the base and [which] may serve as a logistical hub for Russian combat forces.”

U.S. officials, he said, “believe Russia will base combat aircraft at the site.” The photos show that “construction crews have completed a taxiway that connects the runway to the construction area,” which in turn “means aircraft shelters for Russian aircraft.” Bottom line: “Russia is substantially expanding its involvement.”

In other words, the Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! After all, alarmism and drumbeating are de rigueur nowadays for U.S. pundits, so Lewis was doing what he had to do to remain in good standing with an increasingly bellicose – and delusional – foreign-policy establishment.
Continue reading “Oh dear” →

From the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Last week CCR yet again urged the court to release Tariq Ba Odah, filing a reply brief and supplemental expert declarations renewing our argument that Tariq – who has been hunger striking to protest his unjust detention since 2007 and is “on the precipice of death” according to three medical experts – must be released on humanitarian grounds. Tariq has been detained at Guantánamo for over 13 years, despite never having been charged with any crime and having been cleared for release more than five years ago. And despite being brutally force fed 2,600 calories a day, he weighs just 74 pounds now. In its opposition to our June motion for Tariq’s release, the Department of Justice, shockingly, trotted out Bush administration arguments about how he was not covered under the Geneva Convention and does not have prisoner-of-war status. Tariq’s case has come to epitomize the incoherence and dysfunction of the Obama administration’s Guantánamo policy and has garnered major media attention as a result.

Meanwhile, for CCR client Zaher Hamdoun, who like Tariq has been detained at Guantánamo for over 13 years, it is his soul rather than his body that has been crushed nearly to death by injustice. In a heart-rending letter to his attorney, CCR’s Pardiss Kebriaei, he writes:
I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don’t belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantánamo.