Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Come on, man.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

You are here: Home / Politics / America / Pentagon Press Briefing On Syrian Air Strikes Live Feed

Pentagon Press Briefing On Syrian Air Strikes Live Feed

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Here’s the live feed for the 10:00 PM EDT Pentagon press briefing on the US, British, and French air strikes on Syrian targets.

From Spencer Ackerman’s February 20, 2018 reporting at The Daily Beast, here are the details on the legal justifications that the Trump Administration produced to justify today’s strikes on Syria.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson informed a senator in a recently-revealed letter that President Trump considers himself to possess inherent constitutional authority to launch military action without any act of Congress, a sweeping assertion that appears to resurrect from the early George W. Bush years the most imperial notions of the presidency.

Now a group comprised mostly of former Obama administration attorneys is suing to force disclosure of a seven-page Justice Department document they believe codifies the broad legal claim. As they await a judge’s verdict, they believe the secret opinion they seek provides a blueprint for the presidency to put the final nail in the long-constructed coffin for Congress’ own constitutional authority over American war.

Last April, Senator Tim Kaine watched Trump launch a cruise-missile fusillade against a Syrian airbase firmly under the control of regime dictator Bashar Assad. Trump publicly justified attacking the airbase as a means to impose costs on Assad for his chemical weapons attack.

Significantly, doing so bore no relationship to any congressionally-authorized war—not any adversary targetable under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF)—nor any defense of the U.S., its allies or its articulable interests. Kaine wondered: what was the administration’s legal basis for striking the Shayrat airfield?

It took until October for Kaine to get an answer. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, provided a three-sentence explanation in writing for a hearing on the AUMF; The Daily Beast acquired it after Kaine referenced it in a letter to Tillerson last week. Tillerson pointed to an asserted constitutional authority.

 “The April 6 U.S. missile strike on Shayrat airfield in Syria was not based on the authority of the statutory authorizations for use of military force that we have been discussing at this hearing,” Tillerson told Kaine.

“The President authorized that strike pursuant to his power under Article II of the Constitution as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to use this sort of military force overseas to defend important U.S. national interests. The U.S. military action was directed against Syrian military targets directly connected to the April 4 chemical weapons attack in Idlib and was justified and legitimate as a measure to deter and prevent Syria’s illegal and unacceptable use of chemical weapons.”

The document, according to Office of Legal Counsel attorney Paul Colborn, is the product of attorneys across multiple federal agencies “providing advice and recommendations to the president and/or other senior Executive Branch officials regarding the legal basis for potential military action.” The undated document was apparently written on or around April 6, the day of the Syria strike. A Justice Department official declined to comment or explain the document further.

Citing the filings, Kaine on Friday raised warnings in a follow-up letter to Tillerson, first reported by NBC, that the authorities the administration claimed risked an end-run around Congress to “become precedent for additional executive unitary action, including this week’s U.S. airstrikes in Syria against pro-Assad forces or even an extremely risky ‘bloody nose’ strike against North Korea.” Tillerson last month declared that U.S. troops will remain in Syria indefinitely, for missions beyond the anti-ISIS mission that itself has only a tenuous connection to the 2001 AUMF.

Much more at the link!

Stay frosty!

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

84Comments

  4. 4.

    Cermet

    Every single bomb and missile did no harm to their chemical weapons, delivery systems or stocks thanks to telling them so far in advance we would attack. Utter joke like the orange fart cloud – waste of many millions of dollars in hardware. The wagging tail is all that is left of that dog.

  6. 6.

    Ruckus

    Why is Sen Kaine asking a probably illegally elected dictator under what authority he can do whatever the hell he wants?
    Five days, Bolton gets his war. It isn’t supposed to work this way.

  9. 9.

    danielx

    Good thing that warmonger Hillary didn’t elected. Really dodged a bullet with that one, didn’t we?

  11. 11.

    Omnes Omnibus

    President Trump considers himself to possess inherent constitutional authority to launch military action without any act of Congress

    He is basically wrong. After Pearl Harbor, FDR could direct the military to take action. Then he needed Congressional approval. This is not a Pearl Harbor situation.

  18. 18.

    lamh36

    @NBCNews
    Follow Follow @NBCNews
    More
    US Defense Sec. Mattis says US attack is one-time shot to dissuade Syrian President Assad from chemical weapons attacks; further US response will depend on Assad regime response.

    Sec. Mattis says “we have no reports” of US losses during Syria attack as of now.

    US Joint Chiefs chairman says US military saw surface-to-air retaliatory action from Syrian regime during the attack, and US military targeting operations are complete.

  19. 19.

    Gin & Tonic

    Can one hammer the final nail into one’s own coffin? Because that’s what Congress seems to have done in abdicating clear Constitutional authority.

  20. 20.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Cermet:

    This was all about the pretense of being tough on Putin.

    Anyone who died tonight was murdered. This was a war crime.

  21. 21.

    danielx

    @Baud:

    Always money available for breaking things and hurting people. It’s those pesky other costs that are a problem. One of my best friend’s kids is aboard the Harry S. Truman, which departed Norfolk for the Med on Wednesday. Fleet carriers are great big targets.

  23. 23.

    Adam L Silverman

    And we’re done for the evening:

    Actually, we’re done:

  25. 25.

    Baud

    @lamh36: i hope it works. Why can’t Assad just kill his people in the old fashioned way? Trump’s election means he’s won if he just plays it smart.

  28. 28.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Baud: Actually we’ve pretty much stated that as long as Assad only uses conventional measures, we don’t care. Every time we’ve threatened to intervene or intervened has only ever been regarding chemical weapons usage.

  36. 36.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Adam L Silverman: Yeah, Mattis said “of course not” when asked about chemical agent release. There’s no way to be that sure about that now, unless they know there were minimal amounts of agents stored there. Which may well be the case after the disarmament actions.

  37. 37.

    Mandalay

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Because that’s what Congress seems to have done in abdicating clear Constitutional authority.

    How did they “abdicate” authority? What could they have done to stop Trump going ahead anyway?

    Besides, I suspect an awful lot of them (apart from Rand Paul and Barbara Lee) don’t want to have to have their vote on the record for something like this. They’ll cravenly wait to see which way the wind is blowing before registering their outrage or support for Trump’s action.

  38. 38.

    mike in dc

    @Adam L Silverman: That being said, we’ve now hit Syria twice–this time at a greater scale than the first–over chemical weapons use. Aren’t we going to be creeping towards a decapitation strike if the Syrians flip us off and continue using chemical weapons in attacks on civilian areas?

  39. 39.

    jl

    @lamh36: We don’t know precisely who Dunford meant by ‘we’. Donny worked as an independent actor here. There could have been a bargain between Trump and Putin and our military didn’t have to do anything. T and P may have conducted a corrupt, dangerous, irresponsible and potentially disastrous deal to coordinate, but we are talking Trump and Putin here, so what do they know or care?

  42. 42.

    Adam L Silverman

    @mike in dc: I don’t know as I’m not privy to the various discussions on this stuff. Good, bad, or otherwise this is fortunately not something I’m working on.

  43. 43.

    Peale

    Beginning to think that we d need an amendment to the constitution to abolish the commander in chiefbusiness and take the military out of the executive branch and only let them have it when congress says so.

  45. 45.

    Adam L Silverman

    This is good news:

    Also, from what Gen Dunford stated at the press briefing, this was a very limited set. So I think we’ll find that the reports of striking Hezbullah sites are erroneous. Pretty much this was a very minimalist targeting set. If what Gen Dunford has indicated is correct, then Bolton lost on this. Bigly!

  46. 46.

    marv

    My take – everything old is new again… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXrV8fOgzMM Notice how the “riot” stops with the playing of the national anthem. This would happen 60 years ago when I was a child and a fight would break out at a sporting contest. The band would play the national anthem with the idea people would stop whatever and salute

  47. 47.

    jl

    @Peale: I’ve been thinking about that too. Now that we know a criminal fool like Trump can become president, the current arrangement is too dangerous now. There is nothing worth fighting WWIII over now (assuming for sake of the argument that there ever was one), but demons of the past are still there and ready to launch, and we are using archaic methods to deal with that legacy.

  49. 49.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @eemom: I was watching a retired general complain that the defense budget is too small.

    So I looked it up: the US has 71 nuclear submarines – the Russian have 6; US budget is $700 billion – the Russian budget is $70 billion. Throw in NATO and the resource disparity makes the Russian Bear looks more like a tiny, infant cub.

  51. 51.

    PeakVT

    @David Koch: 1) Not a lot of civilians out and about at that time, and 2) it allows for a full day of remote sensing to assess damage and reaction. Just guessing, though.

  52. 52.

    Adam L Silverman

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: The issue isn’t comparative to the Russians. The issue is what the US military is tasked to do. In comparison to anyone else’s military, our defense budget is way out of line. In regard to what the US military is actually tasked to do, our defense budget is far, far, far to small.

  53. 53.

    Gravenstone

    @Baud: The sad/stupid thing is, Assad. has zero issue slaughtering his people the ‘old fashioned’ way. For some reason he feels compelled to toss terror attacks via chemical weapons into the mix occasionally. Thus, here we are.

  54. 54.

    Adam L Silverman

    @jl: I’m not so sure. They hit the labs/research centers and the precursor stockpiles. The air base where the Syrian Hinds have been flying from on their barrel bombing runs. And we appear to have hit the Syrian Republican Guard (Assad’s brother’s command), the 4th Tank Corps (the Syrian Tigers), and near the Presidential Palace. Basically the message was: stop doing this or we will reach out and touch you even worse. And where you live.

  55. 55.

    Sean

    @Cermet: I’m sure it did some damage – just won’t be much of a deterrent in the long run. They gave advance warning to avoid any Russian collateral damage.

  56. 56.

    Adam L Silverman

    And now a word from the home office:

  57. 57.

    Sam

    @Adam L Silverman: he can’t know that. This operation has inherent risks of collateral releases. Bombs, even thermovaric bombs, don’t destroy this stuff completely. The precursors themselves are highly toxic.

  59. 59.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: OK, maybe. We’ll see. If the US military brass presented Trump with a constructive option (given the current miserable choices) and over ruled Bolton, then I’ll give them credit. If it was a few holes in an empty airfield then it is an outrage, and I’d be happy to see Trump impeached convicted and removed from office over it (which is no big deal since he should be anyway, even though for the time being he won’t be).

    I do have a bigger point in the back of my mind which I haven’t articulated well, probably. I don’t think the US has been able to formulate, let alone attempt to execute, any feasible policy solutions for Syria, both for good (it is hard) and bad (political BS and national security pundit credibility fairy constraints) reasons. But IMHO, we haven’t even tried (Trump sure as hell hasn’t), which renders dangerous and costly military actions like these more likely. Which, IMHO, is a bad thing.

  60. 60.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Sam: I’m aware. I was just putting the information that was coming out into comments as it was coming out.

  62. 62.

    Ladyraxterinok

    @Peale: Yet remember when Obama ‘did nothing’ and GOP congress was ready to bomb…whatever? 1 person or a committee? GOP should NEVER be making these decisions!

  64. 64.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: Thanks, I’ll read it. A quick glance reveals that the writer thinks Trump might be using Syria to squeeze some cash out of the Saudis, so looks like the writer understands how Trump thinks. Might be informative.

  65. 65.

    Jeffro

    @Adam L Silverman:

    If what Gen Dunford has indicated is correct, then Bolton lost on this. Bigly!

    I have a feeling that the military brass are using every trick in the book – leaving out large-scale options, overstating potential casualties, minimizing the projected number of accessible targets, and slow-walking EVERYTHING – in order to keep this tepid instead of hot.

  66. 66.

    Another Scott

    @Mandalay: What could Congress have done? Simple. Pass a bill with veto-proof majorities:

    “The President and the Secretary of Defense shall not spend any appropriated funds on any military activities in Syria without an explicit authorization by the United States Congress.”

    It can be done.

    Congress has refused to use its power to control the military actions of the President since 9/11/2001 and it’s high time they started doing their job.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  67. 67.

    Adam L Silverman

    @jl: These are, I think, the important bits:

    Fears that the United States had intended to cede the territory it liberated from the “caliphate” back to the regime that enabled the reification of that grim project in the first place have proved unfounded. If Washington pursues the the carefully wrought policy hammered out over the last year, as opposed to Trump’s off the cuff version, it will embark upon a far more ambitious project to create a de facto American protectorate in eastern Syria encompassing a sizable part of the Turkey-Syria border and the entirety of the Syria-Iraq border. And to do this, U.S. troops will remain in Syria indefinitely.

    The end-game of this approach, as one senior U.S. official explained to us, is to keep Assad isolated diplomatically and paralyzed economically, confined to a precarious rump state, which will eventually prove prohibitively expensive for him to maintain and increasingly burdensome for his two state patrons, Iran and Russia, to underwrite.

    As the original White House thinking went, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are not in Syria for charity. Both are looking to capitalize on the success of their client-state rescue mission. Putin seeks a permanent military presence in the Levant, a regime that can once again be self-financing instead kept afloat by foreign “loans” and oil shipments. Meanwhile, Khamenei and his powerful expeditionary military commander Qassem Soleimani want a direct line of communication for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its manifold Shia proxies, the “northern arch” to which Tillerson alluded, sometimes also known as an Iranian “land-bridge” meant to stretch from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean coastline. The mullahs’ expansionism exercises Israel, Turkey and the Gulf Arab states far more than the proliferation of Sunni jihadism in Syria, which is viewed as far more containable and a non-existential threat to them.

    The officials who originally crafted Trump’s policy, which he may now be trashing, wanted to ensure that the victory against terror in Syria remains a permanent one, unlike in Iraq where the U.S. withdrawal in 2011 enabled jihadists to snatch stunning victories in 2014 from what should have been a strategic defeat. It also seeks to block Moscow and Tehran from recouping their long-sought spoils, reflecting the Pentagon’s new defense doctrine, which has de-prioritized the global war on terror and emphasizes twentieth-century-style great power struggle as America’s foremost security challenge.

    Thus, the detailed Syria policy marked an ironic coda to a 15-year-old campaign against a single foe. Where the George W. Bush administration ventured into Iraq to create an American sphere of influence, only to discover itself fighting a war of counterinsurgency, the Trump administration has inherited a war of counterinsurgency, which it now seeks to parlay into an American sphere of influence albeit absent the dreaded “nation-building” or messiness of an Iraq-style occupation.

    Does such a policy stand a chance under favorable geopolitical and domestic circumstances, let alone the current ones? Even if it is allowed to continue, vital psychological elements will be hugely undermined by the confusion Trump has created.

    Tribal “Afterglow”

    Just by announcing an indefinite U.S. troop deployment to Syria the administration had created unique momentum for building lasting trust and security relationships with the Sunni Arab tribes of the Euphrates River Valley, the bellwether constituency without whose support no occupying state or non-state power stands a chance.

    Syria’s tribes can best be understood as confederations of families spread across a wide geographical area which form clan-based networks and practice consensus politics. Nationwide they account for 30 percent of the Syria’s population but inhabit more than 60 percent of its territory, including the most oil-rich region. The tribes have their highest concentrations in four provinces, Deraa, Deir Ezzor, Hasaka, and Raqqa, the last three of which will be incorporated into this budding American protectorate. In every one of the four provinces tribes constitute around 90 percent of the population, meaning they will be the human capital that America will have to invest in most heavily.

    Tribes are famously conservative, cautious, and fickle. They deal with whichever power is seen to be both the dominant one and the most amenable to their long-term interests. Thus for centuries they have been crucial to colonial or native governments in rallying local support (or hostility), establishing credibility (or hatred) for civil and military administrations and, more recently, acting as either a bulwark against (or accelerant for) jihadist infiltration of their communities.

    ISIS understood this anthropological reality all too well. Tribal alliances are not static, however, as demonstrated by the swift shift of Raqqa’s fealty from Assad in 2011 to the Syrian opposition in 2013 to ISIS in 2014, and now to the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. For this reason, Assad has begun making his own overtures to the Jazira, east of the tableland of desert towns, villages and cities east of the Euphrates River Valley.

    In October 2017, the regime began to court and co-opt the tribes of Deir Ezzor with offers that included local autonomy for self-policing – an attempt to address the reluctance by tribal families to send their children off to join the badly attrited and incompetent Syrian army. Similar to the Iranian bankrolled and armed militias, which are technically beholden to the Syrian Defense Ministry but given enormous tactical latitude, tribal militias would, in theory, look after their own with little or no interference from Damascus, provided they stayed politically subservient to it.

    It was a shrewd move. Three well-placed tribal sources we spoke to who are currently working with the Syrian Democratic Forces said they found such a deal attractive and would be amenable to joining with the regime if it actually came to pass.

    But that was before America displayed a willingness to hang around, these same sources have told us, saying they’d much prefer to cut a deal with Washington than with Damascus. One U.S. military commander described this phenomenon as “tribal afterglow” following the fall of ISIS in (much of) eastern Syria. Yet such sentiments will prove fleeting if the relationship isn’t nurtured beyond the near term through a combination of diplomacy and military support, or if the president signals, as he did in Ohio, that are bets are off. We have seen no indications that the White House has got a coherent plan, even in the original design, for how to keep the tribes of the Jazira on board.

    At a minimum, the Pentagon and State Department will need to establish their own tribal outreach mechanisms similar to those it employed in Iraq during the sahwa, or “Awakening,” which codified at the national level what local U.S. brigade commanders in the Sunni triangle witnessed of tribal caprices and opportunities. The Abu Risha tribe of Anbar province, for instance, went from facilitating the anti-American insurgency one week to partnering with the Americans to hunt down and kill the insurgents the next – not out of some romanticized sense of nobility but out of brute pragmatism. The Abu Risha came to judge the foreign jihadists an overweening and too-vicious partner. What gains were made from sahwa, solidified through the Petraeus-led U.S. troop surge, were then squandered owing to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s refusal to integrate the tribal militias into the Iraqi security establishment, as he’d promised, and the U.S. inability to force Maliki to make good on that promise.

    In Syria, the good news is that there is no shaky sovereign power in the Jazira with which the U.S. must negotiate. The “legitimate local civil authorities” which Tillerson referenced in his speech will be, and already are, localized governing councils without a central government to answer to. The bad news is that the longevity of a Syrian sahwa will necessarily be determined by American actors who will have a host of other problems to contend with, not least of which is a teetering alliance with a crucial NATO ally.

  69. 69.

    Peale

    @Adam L Silverman: I know, but is not working. And Tom Cotton’s statements make me think Congress shouldn’t have the keys either. So that leave the courts. Or just an amendment giving the keys to Canada. Or require sacrifices of cows and liver readings of some sort.

  71. 71.

    Jeffro

    @Cheryl Rofer: I think Iran just learned that if they can maybe get a lil’ bit of that ol’ North Korean rocket action, they might not have to put up with this kind of crap from the Orange Imbecile.

    Waiting for the theatrical and completely ineffective show response from Russia per the tweet Adam noted at #56…

  72. 72.

    Mandalay

    @Cheryl Rofer: O/T….in the previous thread you posted that you hoped that the report of the attack on the palace of Bashar al-Assad was not accurate.

    Why is that? Is it a complete no-no to do that kind of thing according to norms of warfare? Or is it simply counterproductive because it might really anger a large chunk the Syrian population?

    (Not that I care either way about Assad or his palace.)

  73. 73.

    Jeffro

    First national Dem to explain to Trumpov (and the US public at large) that we see right through his “OK RUSSIA HERE WE COME!!!…btw, perhaps, with just a little understanding, we could be BFFs xoxo” bullshit wins the New Hampshire primary. It’s fucking ridiculous. And amateurish! I mean, he does it in the same sentence! And with such earnestness (but only in the second part of the sentence).

    He has a man-crush on Putin bigger than the moon, laws yes, P-U-T-I-N, that spells ‘moon’. It’s nuts.

  75. 75.

    jl

    @Mandalay: I’ll throw in my two cents, but will check back for CR’s response.

    Two reasons:

    Going after Assad would threaten Russia’s and Iran’s perceived interests in the region so much the risks of this blowing up into a major confrontation between Russia and West would be too high.

    Gong so far and so clearly outside current authorization for unilateral military action would be another big and obvious crack in our supposed Constitutional order. Don’t want too many Constitutional crises at once (even if no one would give a particular shit about this one, at least in Congress, for the time being).

    Edit: CR beat me to the punch. Ever the realist, CR didn’t mention Constitution and the sissy rule of law and responsible democratic governance foo-faw. Am I wrong on that second point?

  76. 76.

    Mandalay

    @Another Scott: Gotcha. But surely Trump would (will) argue that this was an emergency involving chemical weapons that required immediate action, and he couldn’t afford to wait for approval from Congress.

    I’m not arguing against the idea of Congress doing that, but as a practical matter any president – I don’t just mean Trump – will find enough wiggle room to act alone if they think it is justified.

    Of course it’s all hypothetical anyway, because as G&T pointed out earlier, Congress would really prefer not to be held accountable on wars anyway.

  77. 77.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @jl: I’m not closely enough acquainted with the wording of the current AUMF to judge on that sissy rule. I’d put it second to enticing the Russians in or actually killing Assad. In one sense, the world would be better off without him, but the Syrian mess would become more intractable.

  78. 78.

    jl

    @Mandalay:

    ” required immediate action, and he couldn’t afford to wait for approval from Congress. ”

    I think that has been a presidential racket in the US at least since the time of James K. Polk.

  79. 79.

    eemom

    eedad, who generally knows his shit about this stuff, says the Russians were given advance notice and the whole thing was a “camera trick.” So we’re not all gonna die, at least not tonight.

  81. 81.

    Mandalay

    @eemom:

    the Russians were given advance notice and the whole thing was a “camera trick.”

    I’d also read that Assad’s troops had relocated to the Russian bases to be safe from attack (thanks to the advance notice provided by Trump’s motor mouth).

  82. 82.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Adam L Silverman:
    I’m reading from all this that the military and career state department are running themselves, and just convincing Trump to sign off when they want something. Possible addition that Trump makes a hash of their plans by asking permission from Moscow first.

  83. 83.

    Procopius

    Just wondering if a candidate, running on the Democratic ticket, could get a plank on cutting back the unitary executive and restoring the constitutional limits on Presidential power.

    Hahahaha! What was I thinking. Of course not.

    Oh, by the way, the Russian Foreign Ministry says they have “irrefutable” proof that the gas attack in Doufa was done by the British. Other fragmentary reports are that they succeeded in capturing some SAS soldiers who were involved. Wonder if we’ll see any of that on Rachel Maddow’s show.

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