The world is a madhouse

Mail call. Okay, I knew that the way he handled that email was pretty scummy (see preceding post), but I did not know this: Trey Gowdy had...

fabricated a redaction to Clinton’s emails to make it look like she’d endangered a spy, and the CIA had busted her. Gowdy even mimicked intelligence community vernacular, designating the redaction as undertaken to protect “sources and methods,” without disclosing that he was the redactor or that the CIA had cleared the name he redacted for release.

The redacted name was that of former Libyan foreign minister Mousa Kousa, now living in the UK, who had spoken to Hillary's friends of his own free will. The guy was not an American and not a CIA operative. He was, of course, free to talk to whoever he wanted to.

Everyone is starting to comprehend that email-gate was ginned-up from the start. This realization is probably the single most important reason fro Hillary's rising poll numbers.

Brennan. I'm a little surprised that more people aren't commenting on the obvious parallel between the fake Clinton scandal and the very real scandal involving CIA Director John Brennan's AOL account, which was hacked by a "stoner" who calls himself cracka.

At the Twitter account @phphax, the hacker posted hundreds of email addresses he claims were stripped from Brennan's contacts, as well as spreadsheets with the names of current and former national security officials that appear to include social security numbers that the hacker crossed out.

If you want the full story, hit Wired.

Here is cracka's Twitter feed...

Bombing Syria's power infrastructure. Moon of Alabama has published evidence that the United States -- which is supposed to be taking care of ISIS -- is actually destroying the electrical infrastructure of Syria.

But last night the U.S. coalition bombed the Aleppo thermal power plant and destroyed parts of it:

A military source told SANA that warplanes of the Washington alliance violated Syrian airspace and attacked civilian infrastructure in Mare’a, Tal Sha’er, and al-Bab in Aleppo countryside on Sunday.

The source added that the warplanes attacked the biggest electric power plant that feeds Aleppo city, which resulted in cutting off power from most neighborhoods in Aleppo city.

Just a week ago U.S. air attacks had attacked another power station and a big distribution transformer al-Radwaniye also east of Aleppo.

The electricity generation and distribution system is civil infrastructure. It is used and useful to everyone no matter what side of the conflict. After the first U.S. attack on a power station a week ago the Russian president Putin was asked about the strikes. He called them "strange":

"On Sunday, the American aviation bombed out an electrical power plant and a transformer in Aleppo. Why have they done this? Whom have they punished there? What’s the point? Nobody knows," the president said at a meeting with the Russian government members.

The Russians and the Syrians are sure that it were F-16 planes from the U.S. coalition that bombed the power infrastructure even though the coalition reports do no mention the attacks. Why are these bombings not mentioned in the U.S. coalition reports?

The real story. If you are looking for one post that sums up what's really going on in Syria -- how it started, when it started, and who started it -- Check out this piece by blogger David Swanson.

The Arab Spring in Syria was made violent almost immediately, with support for violence from one side coming from the United States and its Gulf dictatorship allies, and from the other side from Iran and Hezbollah and Russia. The Free Syrian Army became one player in a civil and proxy and regional war, recruiting fighters from around the region of "liberated" disaster states. Al Qaeda became another player, as did the Kurds. The U.S. government, however, remained focused on overthrowing the Syrian government, and took no serious steps to halt support for al Qaeda and other groups from U.S. Gulf allies or Turkey or Jordan (steps such as cutting off the flow of weapons from the United States, imposing sanctions, negotiating a cease-fire or arms embargo).

In 2012, Russia proposed a peace-process that would have included President Bashar al-Assad stepping down, but the U.S. brushed the idea aside without any serious consideration, suffering under the delusion that Assad would be violently overthrown very soon, and preferring a violent solution as more likely to remove the Russian influence and military -- and perhaps also due to the general U.S. preference for violence driven by its weapons industry corruption. Meanwhile the Iraqi government was bombing its own citizens with weapons rushed to it by the U.S., violently fueling the coming ISIS assault. And the U.S. had "ended" its military occupation of Iraq without ending it.