Group items tagged

The United States has cut off northern Syrian moderate rebel groups from non-lethal aid, with an al-Qaeda advance in northern Syria physically blocking the aid’s dispersal, as the Obama administration continues to ‘disengage’ itself from Syria.Daily Hürriyet’s Washington representative, Tolga Tanış, reported that the Obama administration commenced its ‘disengagement’ from Syria on Oct. 2, laying out three conditions to the moderate rebels, should they wish for the resumption of aid.

On Oct. 2, U.S. State Department officials conferred and decided on sending three messages to the moderate rebels. Citing an unnamed source who attended meetings, Tanış said the first one was that the U.S. would not repeat the same mistake in Afghanistan where supported groups were radicalized; instead, Washington would wait for moderate groups to distance themselves from radicals. The second one was that the U.S. would not resume its provision of aid until Turkey reopens its border gate and the moderate rebels took control of the northern Syrian town of Azaz. The third and final one was that the U.S. would not allow for any further developments until positive indications were observed from the rebels.

A U.S. official advised yesterday that the aid to rebels had officially ceased. “ISIS has blocked the dispersal of part of the aid. The border gate is closed and we cannot distribute necessary supplies,” he said. Another source familiar with the matter commented on the new U.S. policy, saying it has caused quite the stir within the CIA, including the resignation of a high-ranking official in September.

A Justice Department prosecutor said Thursday that ordering the immediate end of bulk surveillance of millions of Americans’ phone records would be as hasty as suddenly letting criminals out of prison. “Public safety should be taken into consideration,” argued DOJ attorney Julia Berman, noting that in a 2011 Supreme Court ruling on prison overcrowding, the state of California was given two years to find a solution and relocate prisoners. By comparison, she suggested, the six months Congress granted to the National Security Agency to stop indiscriminately collecting data on American phone calls was minimal. Ending the bulk collection program even a few weeks before the current November 29 deadline would be an imminent risk to national security because it would create a dangerous “intelligence gap” during a period rife with fears of homegrown terrorism, she said.

The argument came during a hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon on plaintiff Larry Klayman’s request for a preliminary injunction that would immediately halt the NSA program that tracks who in the United States is calling who, when, and for how long. The bulk telephony metadata program, which the NSA said was authorized under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, was closed down by Congress in June with the passage of new legislation—the USA Freedom Act. However, the new bill allowed for a grace period of six months in which the government could set up a less all-inclusive alternative..

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in May ruled that the bulk telephony program was illegal. Judge Leon ruled in Klayman’s favor in 2013, calling the government’s spying “almost Orwellian.” When Berman made her analogy to releasing prisoners en masse, Leon responded: “That’s really a very different kind of situation, don’t you think?”. And Berman was unable to cite any evidence that the bulk collection prevented any sort of terrorist attack, or that ending it now would be a serious threat. “That’s a problem I had before—wonderful high lofty expressions, general vague terms…but [the government] did not share a single example,” Leon said. Klayman, whose arguments consisted mostly of accusing the government of lying and violating the law, decided by the end of the hearing that he actually wanted the entire USA Freedom Act stricken from the books—because he insisted that Congress, in allowing an unconstitutional program to proceed, had violated the Constitution itself. Judge Leon promised a ruling “as soon as possible.”

Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent. The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on the locations of their customers to deliver calls and other services to them. Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people’s travels over days, weeks or longer, according to company marketing documents and experts in surveillance technology.

The world’s most powerful intelligence services, such as the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ, long have used cellphone data to track targets around the globe. But experts say these new systems allow less technically advanced governments to track people in any nation — including the United States — with relative ease and precision.

It is unclear which governments have acquired these tracking systems, but one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive trade information, said that dozens of countries have bought or leased such technology in recent years. This rapid spread underscores how the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar surveillance industry makes advanced spying technology available worldwide. “Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world,” said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, a London-based activist group that warns about the abuse of surveillance technology. “This is a huge problem.”

Reports, including photographic evidence reveal that Israel is using an energy weapon to attack targets in Gaza. The destructive beam, thought to be a high energy laser, is emitted from a plane identified as a Boeing KC707 “Re’em,” originally configured for Electronic Warfare. Those observing the attacks cite a beam from a 4 engine jet hitting a target which immediately turns “white hot.” After these attacks, the target area is then hit with either bombs or artillery to destroy evidence of the use of an American designed and built energy weapon illegally given to Israel. BACKGROUND The weapon used is identified as part of the YAL 1 system, a COIL laser (chemical, oxygen/iodine laser), originally intended as an aircraft mounted system to shoot down ICBMs. Boeing approached the Department of Defense in 2002 and by 2004 had mounted its first system on a 747/400 previously flown by Air India. Boeing had convinced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that this system, mounted on as many as 7 aircraft, could fly 24 hours a day around Iran and defend “the free world” against nuclear tipped ICBMs that Rumsfeld believed Iran was planning to use. Please note that it was Rumsfeld that told television audiences that Afghanistan was “peppered” with underground cities serviced by rail links that supported division sized Al Qaeda units that, after ten years, no one was able to locate.

Boeing tested the system in 2007. The Department of Defense claimed the system could shoot down low earth orbit satellites and that in tests conducted in 2010, destroyed multiple test missiles. There is no reliable confirmation of this other than a press release from then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. CANCELLATION AND MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE The Center for Strategic Studies, in an interview with then Defense Secretary Gates published the following: “I don’t know anybody at the Department of Defense who thinks that this program should, or would, ever be operationally deployed. The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire.” So, right now the ABL would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase. And if you were to operationalize this you would be looking at 10 to 20 747s, at a billion and a half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate. And there’s nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept.”

After $5 billion was spent, the functioning prototype only capable of being fired directly at nearby targets, a system very capable of acquisition and destruction of ground targets with no air defense protection only, was said to have been flown to a scrap yard. The plane itself is still there, at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, with other failed dreams and nightmares. However, the weapons system disappeared, only to reappear in Israel as a “missile defense” project, an adjunct to the “Iron Dome” system. Israel’s Rafael Defense had been trying to develop laser weapons on its own to intercept rockets being fired from Gaza. It was never able to neither deploy a laser powerful enough nor develop a radar system able to be effective.

The Times goes on to say that Moussaoui’s testimony, if found to be factually accurate, could change our understanding of Saudi Arabia and its relationship to 9/11: [T]he extent and nature of Saudi involvement in Al Qaeda, and whether it extended to the planning and financing of the Sept. 11 attacks, has long been a subject of dispute. *** That may be so, but the Times, like the rest of the traditional media, has ignored earlier evidence of deep Saudi royal ties to the 9/11 attacks—evidence that isn’t dependent on a man whose sanity has been questioned. Back in 2011, a small non-profit news outfit in South Florida, the Broward Bulldog, which does primarily local stories, published an article that also appeared in a major traditional newspaper, the Miami Herald. Despite the story’s explosive content, it was widely ignored.

That article revealed that a well-heeled Saudi family, living in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida, had direct connections to the hijackers. Phone records documented communication, dating back more than a year, between this Saudi family and the alleged plot leader, Mohammed Atta, his hijack pilots and 11 of the other hijackers. In addition, records from the guard house at the gated community showed Atta and other hijackers had visited the house.

The family left the country abruptly just before the 9/11 attacks. Family members abandoned enough valuable possessions—such as three cars—to testify to the speed of their departure. The article also revealed that the FBI had quietly investigated the family and documented numerous interactions between them and the alleged hijackers. They, however, neglected to tell Congressional investigators and the evidence didn’t appear in the 9/11 Commission Report. You might think these revelations would attract widespread attention, considering that 15 of the 19 purported hijackers were Saudi citizens. Yet the Bulldog story generated barely a blip.

An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history. If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.

BRUSSELS — Amid a growing outcry over American snooping on foreigners that threatens to cloud European-U.S. trade talks and President Barack Obama’s visit to Berlin, the European Union’s top justice official has demanded in unusually sharp terms that the United States reveal what its intelligence is doing with personal information of Europeans gathered under the Prism surveillance program revealed last week.

Viviane Reding, the Union’s combative commissioner of justice, told Attorney General Eric Holder in a letter sent on Monday evening that individual citizens of European countries had the right to know whether their personal information had been part of intelligence gathering “on a large scale.” In the letter, seen Tuesday by the International Herald Tribune, she also asked what avenues were available to Europeans to find out whether they had been spied on, and whether they would be treated similarly to U.S. citizens in such cases. “Given the gravity of the situation and the serious concerns expressed in public opinion on this side of the Atlantic, you will understand that I will expect swift and concrete answers,” Mrs. Reding wrote.

Speaking for a continent where snooping carries ghastly echoes of fascist or communist regimes, Mrs. Reding challenged Mr. Holder to answer a list of detailed questions by Friday, when they are expected to speak face-to-face in Dublin at a ministerial meeting scheduled before the Prism spy operation came to light. In Berlin, where Mr. Obama will speak next week before the Brandenburg Gate, privacy is a highly sensitive political issue and the Prism revelations have stirred a furor. “You can be sure that this will be one of the things the chancellor addresses when President Obama is in Germany,” said Steffen Seibert, spokesman for Angela Merkel, who grew up in the former Communist East.

In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network. According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters. At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment. What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.” Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t. “In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said. “For access.”

But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later, four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.” Narus was formed in Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.

During an investigation of President Barack Hussein Obama’s political appointees and White House aides, FBI agents discovered secret government email accounts they say were used as primary means for Obama’s staff to interact with IRS officials for day-to-day business.

Texans are having nightmares of a Niger Delta nature, and while they have always been the friends of Big Oil, TransCanada is changing the rules of the game in a legally-aided land grab that will test just how tough Texans are.

The lawsuits against TransCanada are piling up to the dismay of the Keystone XL pipeline project, which has been beleaguered by political, socio-economic, environmental and legal woes at every step from its US origins in Montana to its final destination point in south Texas. No one thought Texas would be part of the problem: Texans love their pipelines. Why the change of heart, then? The simplest answer is that Texans love their pipelines because Big Oil has been paying big bucks for the privilege of running them through Texas farmland, but TransCanada is bullying them out of their fair share. This is how it works: TransCanada makes an unacceptably low offer for the land it needs; the landowner rejects the offer; TransCanada gets the land condemned in court; then it legally acquires the land for a fraction of its original offer. Condemning land is not a new tactic by Big Oil, but while US oil companies have traditionally kept this to a minimum, TransCanada has taken far too much advantage of this legal loophole to get what it wants. According to CNBC.com, the Canadian company has so far condemned over 100 tracts of land out of the 800 tracts it has acquired for the pipeline in Texas.

Since Texans are being forced to give up their land for peanuts for the bigger picture “common good”, let’s look at why they aren’t buying it and why they don’t feel any less patriotic for their opinion. (Common good in this case meaning “national interest”)

In response to the U.S. Senate’s unanimous vote to allow 9/11 victims’ families to sue Saudi Arabia in federal court, a report published in the London-based Al-Hayat daily, by Saudi legal expert Katib al-Shammari, claims that the U.S. masterminded the terror attacks as a means of creating a nebulous “enemy” in order garner public support for a global war on terror. The report by al-Shammari, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), claims that long-standing American policy is “built upon the principle of advance planning and future probabilities,” which the U.S. has now turned toward the Saudi regime after being successfully employed against first the Taliban and al-Qaeda, then Saddam Hussein and his secular Baathist controlled Iraq. Al-Shammari claims the recent U.S. threats to “expose” documents implicating the Saudi government are simply the continuation of a U.S. policy, which he refers to as “victory by means of archive.” He highlights that during the initial invasion of Iraq, under George H.W. Bush, Saddam Hussein was left alive and in power to be used as “a bargaining chip,” but upon deciding that he was “no longer an ace up their sleeve” Washington moved to topple his government and install a U.S.-backed ruling party.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 are now the “ace up the sleeve” of the U.S. government, according to al-Shammari. “September 11 is one of winning cards in the American archives, because all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyze the images and the videos [of 9/11] agree unanimously that what happened in the [Twin] Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the U.S. Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings… Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing [into them] only gave the green light for the detonation – they were not the reason for the collapse. But the U.S. still spreads blame in all directions. [This policy] can be dubbed ‘victory by means of archives.” The impetus behind the attacks, writes al-Shammari, was to create “an obscure enemy – terrorism – which became what American presidents blamed for all their mistakes” and that would provide justification for any “dirty operation” in any nation. According to al-Shammari’s report in Al-Hayat: “On September 11, the U.S. attained several victories at the same time, that [even] the hawks [who were at that time] in the White House could not have imagined. Some of them can be enumerated as follows:

1. The U.S. created, in public opinion, an obscure enemy – terrorism – which became what American presidents blamed for all their mistakes, and also became the sole motivation for any dirty operation that American politicians and military figures desire to carry out in any country. [The] terrorism [label] was applied to Muslims, and specifically to Saudi Arabia. 2. Utilizing this incident [9/11], the U.S. launched a new age of global armament. Everyone wanted to acquire all kinds of weapons to defend themselves and at the same time battle the obscure enemy, terrorism – [even though] up to this very moment we do not know the essence of this terrorism of which the U.S. speaks, except [to say that] that it is Islamic… 3. The U.S. made the American people choose from two bad options: either live peacefully [but] remain exposed to the danger of death [by terrorism] at any moment, or starve in safety, because [the country’s budget will be spent on sending] the Marines even as far as Mars to defend you.” The Saudi press has been in a frenzy since the unanimous Senate vote to allow for the House of Saud to be held liable in U.S. federal court for the 9/11 attacks, with the U.S. being accused of being in alliance with Iran – to press warnings that passage of the “Satanic” bill would “open the gates of hell,” as reported by Breitbart.

Wikileaks’ releases of the now infamous “Podesta Emails” have become such a regular occurrence, it’s becoming difficult to keep up. 11 “batches” have been released so far, bringing the total to 17,510 with an estimated 32,000 left to go before the US election takes place on November 8th. Though True Activist covered many of the earlier leaks, including the transcripts of Clinton’s private speeches and Clinton’s admission that the Saudis are funding ISIS, many other potentially damning revelations have since come to light. Here are the top 5 newest revelations from the last 3 email releases (#9 to 11).

4. Wall Street Handpicked Obama’s Entire 2008 Cabinet Though most of the leaks thus far have been focused largely on Clinton and her campaign, some of the released emails have shed light on corruption within the Obama administration. In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, an executive from CitiGroup emailed John Podesta one month before Podesta was named chairman of Obama’s 2008 transition team. CitiGroup, at the time, was the largest company and bank in the world by assets. The email from CitiGroup executive Michael Froman is titled “Lists.” The lists within, naming prospective candidates for cabinet positions, matches Obama’s 2008 Cabinet almost exactly. They also suggest choosing candidates of various ethnic minorities as a political tactic (see #3 above). The email proposed: Robert Gates as secretary of Defense; Eric Holder as attorney general; Janet Napolitano as secretary of Homeland Security; Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff; Susan Rice as United Nations ambassador; Arne Duncan as secretary of Education; Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services; Peter Orszag as head of the Office of Management and Budget; Eric Shinseki as secretary of Veterans Affairs; and Melody Barnes as chief of the Domestic Policy Council. Froman offered Podesta with three possibilities for the position of Secretary of the Treasury: Robert Rubin and his close disciples Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama ultimately chose Geithner, who was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner, along with Bush Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson and then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, were those chiefly responsible for organizing the Wall Street bailout.

New questions were raised Thursday about whether FBI Director James Comey will be able to keep his job after the Justice Department’s internal watchdog opened an investigation into his handling of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server.The investigation by the department’s inspector general will examine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to follow appropriate procedures and improperly released information about the Clinton probe -- renewing scrutiny of one of the most contested developments of the 2016 election campaign.

In fact, the pedophile allegation has little to do with Assange’s plight that has kept him in the embassy in London, which involves incidents in Stockholm in the summer of 2010.

Rather, it is a bizarre tale involving a Houston-based dating website and its global and well-funded efforts to discredit Assange around the globe. The byzantine saga involves disconnected telephones and mystery websites. The website, toddandclare.com, launched and ramped up its efforts against Assange during the U.S. presidential campaign, as WikiLeaks released hacked emails related to the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.Whoever is behind the dating site has marshaled significant resources to target Assange, enough to gain entry into a United Nations body, operate in countries in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, conduct surveillance on Assange’s lawyer in London, obtain the fax number of Canada’s prime minister and seek to prod a police inquiry in the Bahamas.The dating site’s campaign sought to thwart WikiLeaks’ efforts and discredit Assange, who played a role in a presidential campaign season that deeply divided the U.S. electorate and illuminated Russia as a major cyber adversary of the U.S. government.One part of toddandclare’s two-pronged campaign put a megaphone to unproven charges that Assange made contact with a young Canadian girl in the Bahamas through the internet with the intention of molesting her. The second part sought to entangle him in a plan to receive $1 million from the Russian government.

WikiLeaks claims the dating site is “a highly suspicious and likely fabricated” company. In turn, the company has lashed out at Assange and “his despicable activities against American national security,” and warned journalists to “check with your libel lawyers first before printing anything that could impact or endanger innocent people’s lives.”For nearly two months after the October allegations, toddandclare.com went off line. But it recently reappeared, repeating charges about the 8-year-old Canadian girl. The website did not immediately respond Thursday to a new query from McClatchy, and no respondent in the past has given a name or allowed telephone contact.The online company paints itself as all-American. Online material says its founders, Todd and Clare Hammond, “are an average American couple from Michigan, who met in the eighth grade.” In 2011, the company says, the Christian couple started an email dating service, and “have married 3,000 couples to date.” Their online network began in 2015, and a statement it filed to a U.N. body says it has “100,000+ female singles” in six countries. The company’s operating address is a warehouse loading dock in Houston. Its mail goes to a Houston drop box. Its phone numbers no longer work. WikiLeaks says Texas officials tell it the entity is not registered there either under toddandclare.com or a parent company, T&C Network Solutions.A person who answered emails to the website in November declined to identify him or herself.

Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.

Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8. There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province. But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid. One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.

The source said the Trump national security team split between the President’s close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a protégé of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus. White House Infighting In this telling, the earlier ouster of retired Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser and this week’s removal of Bannon from the National Security Council were key steps in the reassertion of neocon influence inside the Trump presidency. The strange personalities and ideological extremism of Flynn and Bannon made their ousters easier, but they were obstacles that the neocons wanted removed. Though Bannon and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said, they shared the belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria, revealing the Obama administration’s CIA analysis that a fatal sarin gas attack in 2013 was a “false-flag” operation intended to sucker President Obama into fully joining the Syrian war on the side of the rebels — and the intelligence analysts’ similar beliefs about Tuesday’s incident. Instead, Trump went along with the idea of embracing the initial rush to judgment blaming Assad for the Idlib poison-gas event. The source added that Trump saw Thursday night’s missile assault as a way to change the conversation in Washington, where his administration has been under fierce attack from Democrats claiming that his election resulted from a Russian covert operation. If changing the narrative was Trump’s goal, it achieved some initial success with several of Trump’s fiercest neocon critics, such as neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, praising the missile strike, as did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The neocons and Israel have long sought “regime change” in Damascus even if the ouster of Assad might lead to a victory by Islamic extremists associated with Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State.