Claims of Obama that the Syrian government used chemical weapons are unverifiable. They cannot be trusted. Even if there were no UN inspectors saying this, the degree of trust in U.S. government statements, especially those related to war, has rationally to be very, very low. It is entirely rational to believe that the U.S. government is lying, exaggerating, making a false case, drawing false conclusions, using tainted “evidence”, in order to create a pretext for supplying arms to Syrian rebels or other war-making actions of its choosing.
The U.S. government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, as a pretext to make war in Vietnam. The NSA has admitted this. The declassified document is here.
In 2002-2003, 38 years later, the U.S. lied repeatedly in order to generate a pretext for invading Iraq. Just two years ago, Obama lied about Gaddafi’s “bloodbath” in order to have a pretext for invading Libya.
If a state lies in order to make wars, which involve making “legal” the darkest deeds that human beings can engage in on a mass scale, and if it does this repeatedly, it cannot be trusted. If a government seeks to keep secret information that should be public (as in the Secret War in Laos), or if one branch of government seeks to conceal vital information from another branch (as in claims of executive privilege), this reinforces the same conclusion. If a state lies about its torture and kidnappings and if it breaks its solemn commitments in these and other areas of rights, that state provides still further marks that it is untrustworthy.
5:00 am on June 23, 2013
