Sequester Partially Undone + Seymour Hersh's "Whose Sarin?"

The House and Senate budget conference led by Representative Raul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, and Senator Patty Murray, Washington Democrat, yesterday revealed its budget deal. It undoes the deep cuts that went into effect at the beginning of the year when the sequester kicked in and it averts a January 15 repeat of the government shutdown fiasco we went through in October. The reliable Jonathan Weisman has the particulars this morning in his story, "Capitol Leaders Agree to a Deal on the Budget":

The agreement, which would finance the government through Sept. 30, 2015, would eliminate about $63 billion in across-the-board domestic and military cuts. But it would provide $23 billion in deficit reduction by extending a 2 percent cut to Medicare providers through 2023, two years beyond the cuts set by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

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Under the agreement, military and domestic spending for the current fiscal year that is under the annual discretion of Congress would rise to $1.012 trillion, from the $967 billion level it would hit if sequestration spending cuts were imposed next month. Spending would inch up to $1.014 trillion in the 2015 fiscal year. 

The figure for this year is about halfway between the $1.058 trillion passed by the Senate this spring and the $967 billion approved by the House. 

Military spending would be set at $520.5 billion this fiscal year, while domestic programs would get $491.8 billion. The $63 billion increase over the next two years would be spread evenly between Pentagon and domestic spending, nearly erasing the impact of sequestration on the military. Domestic programs would fare particularly well because the 2 percent cut to Medicare health providers would be kept in place, alleviating cuts to programs like health research, education and Head Start. 

The increase would be paid for in part with higher airline fees that underwrite airport security. Higher contributions from federal workers to their pensions would save about $6 billion. Military pensions would see slower cost-of-living increases, a $6 billion savings over 10 years. Private companies would pay more into the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. 

States receiving mineral revenue payments would have to help defray the costs of managing the mineral leases, saving $415 million over 10 years. Deepwater, natural gas and other petroleum research programs would end. 

Democrats gave up their demand that the deal extend unemployment benefits that expire at the end of the month, but they hope to press for an extension in a separate measure.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't like giving up the sequester cuts without a grand baragin on Medicare and Social Security spending; Heritage Action and the Koch's Americans for Prosperity have come out against the deal. One wonders how many rank-and-file Tea Party Republicans in the House will follow suit. It will be an interesting indication of whether the Tea Party is solely focused on making government dysfunctional or whether they want to add to their House majority and possibly recapture the Senate. Clearly if Republicans keep their heads down and bide their time waiting for the reality of Obamacare to sink in they stand to reap the rewards in the 2014 mid-term elections. As Weisman notes,

For Republicans and their negotiator, Mr. Ryan, the deal should mean the political focus can remain on Mr. Obama’s health care law and not on another round of budget brinkmanship next month with the government moving to another possible shutdown.

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If you haven't had a chance to check out Seymour Hersh's article, "Whose Sarin?" in the London Review of Books it's worth taking the time. Moon of Alabama posted on it over the weekend. Hersh makes the argument that the Obama administration was engaged in the same type of cherry picking of intelligence as Bush in the run up to the invasion of Iraq; that plenty of evidence of existed pointing to Al Nusra Front having the capability to produce sarin, and that evidence was and continues to be suppressed.

What I found compelling was the refutation of the azimuth data that the New York Times and Human Rights Watch used at the eleventh hour to argue that "smoking gun" proof existed that Syrian government forces launched the August 21 chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta suburb:

Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.

Why is this important? Because those of us who took the time to dispute the official narrative being trotted out by John Kerry and Samantha Power, that the Syrian government had to be responsible for the gas massacre in the Ghouta because none of the rebel groups had access to the missiles or the chemicals used in the attack, that rather than being merely marginal, knee jerk conspiracy junkies tapping out keyboard fantasies of salafis with sarin, we were actually in line with a substantial body of expert opinion. Next time the war drums begin to pound it will be no different. The obvious, the sensible will be crowded out of the media. Just remember the missing WMD in Iraq and Obama's phony casus belli against Syria.