Michael Rubin's false and mendacious statements about me.

Contrary to Michael Rubin's suggestion in "Commentary" I was not among Sy Hersh's sources for his excellent LRB story on Syria and gas.  I am, however, pleased to know that the Ziocons still care about me.  pl

Download CompleteCV

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/04/07/seymour-hershs-latest-conspiracy-theory/

19 Minutes and 20 seconds into this podcast.

http://www.johnbatchelorshow.com/podcasts/2014/04/07/fourth-hour

pl

Comments

[question]

Sir,

Why does Hersh ignore all the news stories at the time about Israel providing the bulk of White House intelligence on Ghouta? Remember all those stories about Israeli intercepts?

[samuelburke]

Great stand Col, the Ziocons as you call them really need to be made to look like the Israel firsters that they are. They like to smear and disqualify anyone who can pose a threat to their strategically controlled narrative. I salute you.

"Let’s hope the source isn’t Lang, because if it was, Hersh should certainly have noted (as he neglected to previously) that Lang had registered with the Foreign Agents Registration Act in order to work with a pro-Syrian Lebanese politician. Given Hersh’s previous mistakes in this regard, he cannot be given the benefit of the doubt."

below is a quote from an article by Justin Raimondo at antiwar dot com, Israel does really seem to try to get the U.S to do their fighting for them.

"At the height of the war hysteria, you’ll recall, we were told Israel’s Unit 8200 electronic counterintelligence task force had intercepted the internal communications of the Syrian army commander on the scene and Damascus headquarters – and that the transcript proved conclusively the Syrian government had ordered the attacks. Yet an article by Kenneth Timmerman in the Daily Caller last year claimed those transcripts were "doctored," although the piece kept mum on the question of who did the doctoring."

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/04/06/who-was-behind-the-syrian-sarin-false-flag-attack/

[turcopolier]

question

I dunno. Ask him. pl

[shepherd]

Amazing. A comment in which Rubin alleges a conspiracy theory contains an honest-to-God conspiracy theory. "I have no information that Patrick Lang gave him the story, but if he did, well, he once worked for a Syrian, and we all know what that means." Garbage.

[Anna-Marina]

The pernicious dam is cracking and the knowledge is becoming available for those with the brains and hearts:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/07/why-is-the-us-honoring-a-racist-rabbi/

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/2.209/the-king-s-torah-a-rabbinic-text-or-a-call-to-terror-1.261930

[Harper]

Michael Rubin's smear job obviously went through a small army of lawyers before publication to add the caveats that probably put it this side of libel perse. But that said, I am reminded of the rumor, circulated in the late 1070s, that the two leading neoconservative "think" journals at the time--Commentary and Dissent--were going to merge and the new publication would be called Dissentary. The more worrisome factor is that the neocons are already gloating that Obama has become such a hate object that there is a real chance that the GOP will take a narrow majority in the Senate and retain control of the House in November. They are already writing out their consulting contracts and planning their vacations in the south of France. Things have reached such frictions with both Russia and China that, this time around, these lunatics would likely get us into a world war. Already, their Obama Administration princess, Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert Kagan) has done a masterful job of screwing up things in Ukraine. There is no telling what kind of revenge Wolfowitz, Perle, Ledeen, Kagan and company would exact if given a change to come back again. Obama is their savior--in more ways than one.

[The Twisted Genius]

PL,

As my old friend and mentor, MSGT Albert H. Rivers, told me when we got thrown out of a gin mill, "If they bar ya, they're thinking about ya." You must still scare the hell out of the likes of Rubin and his ilk.

[Bobo]

What a piss-ant this Rubin is, he should be flogged for his insinuations. To think this idiot was schooling our military leadership at one time. You would think we would have standards. Nothing but a Crass Hatchet job that requires an eventul gutting.

[D]

All-
Can someone direct me to any source that will give a current, fairly complete and honest report on the situation in Syria, region by region or city by city.

[David Habakkuk]

All,

Michael Rubin says:

“But the international community seems to have conducted a great deal of forensic work about what happened in East Ghouta, and that evidence reportedly pointed overwhelmingly at the Assad regime.”

From an e-mail I wrote on 2 September last year in response to a query from a contact about what looked like a peculiarly dubious story in the ‘Express’:

‘What does strike me is that we have now had three different version of supposedly clinching SIGINT evidence. The first was reported to be from Unit 8200 [the Israeli SIGINT unit], and referred to conversations between high ranking regime officials. The second was supposedly collected by U.S. intelligence, and referred to panicked phone calls between a Syrian Ministry of Defence official and the leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers. We know have the Troodos facility [the British SIGINT facility on Cyprus] supposedly recording a regional commander threatening the commander of an artillery battery with the firing squad, the clinching evidence supposedly divulged by a senior RAF officer.

‘…until I see some details of the phone calls, or a convincing explanation as to why it cannot be presented, they make me more sceptical not less. This looks to me like an incompetently managed infowars operation.’

According to Hersh, much of the support for the claim that the Ghouta atrocity was a Turkish ‘false flag operation’ came ‘from the Turks themselves, via intercepted conversations in the immediate aftermath of the attack.’

Of course, it is conceivable that Hersh may have been the victim of a disinformation operation, or indeed, could be perpetrating disinformation himself. But before concluding this, one needs something more than an asseveration that ‘forensic work’ conducted by the ‘international community’ produced ‘evidence’ that ‘reportedly pointed overwhelmingly at the Assad regime.’

What one needs is a single iota of evidence, produced in public, that does this.

The term ‘liberal’ is often used, in American contexts, in ways alien to more traditional British meanings. I am quite fond of the sense in which it is used in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Lord Action, who is described as an ‘English Liberal historian and moralist, the first great modern philosopher of resistance to the state, whether its form be authoritarian, democratic, or socialist.’

(See http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/4647/John-Emerich-Edward-Dalberg-Acton-1st-Baron-Acton )

Anyone who asks us simply to take on trust claims made by intelligence agencies, when they do not produce credible evidence in support of these claims, or any reason why they cannot produce such evidence, demonstrates conclusively that they are not, in this sense, a liberal. Probably, indeed, such people do not understand what it means to believe in ‘resistance to the state, whether its form be authoritarian, democratic, or socialist.’

[steve]

A real hack job. Nothing but personal attacks with no argument presented on the substance or merits of Hersh's report.

[Tyler]

You kick over rocks and the roaches are running scared now.

[WP]

All-
So, who does Rubin work for? What is his connection to Israel?

[Thomas]

In my reading of the article, the source appears to have been recently in the chain of command through military or government service. It shows that honorable people are still around, a very grave threat to the Trotsky Tribe as Rubin's reaction shows.

[Max]

Try Josh Landis' "Syria Comment"

[Thomas]

Just as Obama used the Iraq war fiasco to come into the presidency, so could an Independent use a clean break from the Neocon's stupid and suicidal strategy of all war all the time to earn the office in 2016.

Though I believe things are coming to a head now. Today, Eastern Ukrainians are using the NED playbook to take Govt buildings in Kharkov and Donetsk.

[Andrew]

How bizarre, is this not the same Michael Rubin that was so sure that Saddam was all up with WMD. Is he not the same visibly deranged gimp ranting about how Iraq was in on 9/11 or was a threat to the Western world. When this man speaks people should just burst out laughing.

IMHO, the poison gas Syria stuff looks like a co-production starring Turkey as the street walker (foot soldiers)and featuring Israel as the pimp(stage direction-creative intel., with cameos by Rubin and Pletka et al as the 'pissers in da soup.

[optimax]

WP

Rubin is a neocon with the American Enterprise Institute and has BS degree in journalistic innuendo.

[oofda]

In Rubin's own CV this is noted:

Rubin currently provides academic instruction on regional issues for senior U.S. Army and Marine officers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wonderful- and he was in the Pentagon working for Feith 2002-4. Totally not to be believed

[georgeg]

Whatever qualified him to be a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School.....wet behind the ear in military affairs is an understatement. His personal attack on Col. Lang is unforgivable....

[Fred]

Michael Rubin, spent exactly zero years in the armed forces of the Republic; but he did spend many years at the tip of the pen, supporting Ahmed Chalibi. Lets not forget what a wonderful provider of advice he was to the Great L. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Shouldn't we be asking what Michael Rubin knows about false flag operations in Syria, when he know it and how he came about such information? He's got a great track record given all his wonderful experience.

http://www.peterdalescott.net/iraqje.html

http://www.thenation.com/blog/mind-boggling-stupidity-michael-rubin#

[toto]

The funny thing is, Rubin's piece is pretty much the only mention of Hersh's piece that I've seen outside of SST. The reaction to Hersh's piece so far has been the proverbial "deafening silence".

So in a sense Rubin is actually promoting Hersh by drawing attention to him.

[Ryan]

Col,

I laughed when I read this post of yours about Rubin. I laughed even more when I read his post at Commentary. What he is accusing others of he is guilty of himself. These people really do need to take a good hard look in the mirror.

To further entertain myself I followed the link he provided regarding you and was rewarded with this gem:

"W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, 'The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.'”

Wow, this is damnable. Too bad for Rubin and his ilk it also happens to be true.

My compliments to you for pissing this arrogant moron off.

Incidentally, I've noticed that Rubin has crawled out from under the rock he has resided for a long time. Recently, he made a number of cable tv and neocon talk radio appearances complaining about Putin and proposing idiotic ideas to oppose him.

[Ryan]

Hersh on "Democracy Now":

http://antiwar.com/blog/2014/04/07/sy-hersh-on-democracy-now-discussing-turkish-role-in-syria-chemical-weapons-incident/

One other thing, col. You have a very impressive C.V., to say the least. Unlike Rubin, who only served a certain foreign power and himself, you served the nation.

[ikonoklast]

The passive-aggressive croaking of the toadie Rubin is, if not beneath notice, certainly beneath contempt.

However, as an observation, I'd like to offer some anecdotal evidence that the efforts of OGH, and those of other like minded persons here and elsewhere, may be beginning to bear fruit. Commenters at popular message boards like Yahoo and YouTube are hardly noted for their acuity as to foreign policy. (I've seen them commonly referred to as "bottom feeders in the stinking cesspools of internet discourse." Yeah. Harsh.) But a sea change seems to be occurring.

Increasingly, there are questions on those sites as to why we should bow to the will of the Likudniks, or support their policies. Or about how further foreign adventurism is in the national interest. On the questions of Syria and Ukraine the sentiment is "How is this America's business? We don't need to get our military involved."

So, anecdotal as I said, but it's a hopeful sign at least. The uninvolved and perhaps uninterested public are beginning to take notice. A reason to keep up the good fight.