Trump advisor Bolton coordinated US strike on Syria with Israel

According to Haaretz, the White House was in touch with Jerusalem ahead of the overnight airstrikes on Syria.

US President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, John Bolton, spoke in the last few days with his Israeli counterpart, Meir Ben Shabbat, to coordinate details of the US-led attack on Syria.

Bolton was one of the key forces behind George W Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq. While Bolton himself dodged the Vietnam draft, he has been overly eager to commit US troops to foreign battlefields. As a top neoconservative, he believes that regime change is good for American foreign policy.

Bolton was also the only US ambassador to the United Nations never to have been confirmed by the US Senate. The Senate – both Democrats and Republicans – had refused to confirm someone as unqualified and dangerous as Bolton for the UN post.

Former chief of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) Carl W. Ford, testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Bolton was in fact a “a serial bully” and unfit for the job.

While Bolton was still serving as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, he is believed responsible for outing secret agents and putting them at risk because they questioned Bush’s spurious claim that Iraq had received “yellow cake” uranium from Niger.

In 2005, Senator Christopher Dodd revealed during Bolton’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee UN ambassador nomination hearing that Bolton had requested transcripts of NSA intercepts, apparently for no valid reason.

Bolton’s multiple requests for NSA “raw SIGINT” or signals intelligence also on Syria, worried then-NSA director Michael Hayden, who noted in an internal NSA memo:

“(U) US law and policy present more serious issues. EO [Executive Order] 12333 recognizes that electronic surveillance is so intrusive that we have established very specific rules to prevent unreasonable intrusion into privacy. EO 12333 tells us that information derived from electronic surveillance is not to be shared unless two criteria are met: US person information has been minimized so as to uphold 4th Amendment protections from unreasonable search and the information provided is of inherent intelligence value.

(U//FOUO) Much of the above would delight many of those who have been clamoring for more extensive access to our databases and other SIGINT derived information. These folks usually couch such views in the form of a request for ‘raw SIGINT’—a formulation that usually connotes little knowledge about our discipline and even less likelihood that any kind of sharing with them would lead to something useful!”

While serving as an attorney for USAID contractor International Business & Technical Consultants Inc. (IBTCI), Bolton threatened a female USAID contractor who was working in Kyrgyzstan. According to the contractor, Melody Townsel, Bolton made her life “hell”.

Townsel told the Dallas Observer in May 2005: “Generally, he [Bolton] was behaving like a madman.” She called his behavior “not just unforgivable, it was pathological” and added: “I cannot believe that this is a man being seriously considered for any diplomatic position, let alone such a critical posting to the UN.”

Bolton, according to divorce papers served by his ex-wife, allegedly forced his wife to engage in group sex activities despite her objections. Court records show that the first Mrs. Bolton’s conduct raises the presumption that she eventually fled the family home out of fear for her safety.

The US and its allies France and the UK launched an overnight strike on multiple Syrian targets, in response to fake reports of a chemical attack by Syrian President Bashar Assad only days after Bolton entered the White House again.

The targets strangely included “research centers in Damascus believed to have produced chemical weapons” the Israeli paper noted. If that had been the case, the attack would have released deadly chemicals into the atmosphere.

Trump said the US was prepared to “sustain” pressure on Assad. In a statement released Saturday evening, Netanyahu reaffirmed Israel’s support of Trump’s airstrikes.

“A year ago, I declared Israel’s full support for Trump’s decision to take a stand against the use and spread of chemical weapons. President Trump’s resolve and Israel’s support remain unchanged,” Netanyahu said.

Russia and Iran warned of “consequences” after the strike. “The US – the possessor of the biggest arsenal of chemical weapons – has no moral right to blame other countries,” the Russian embassy in the US pointed out in a statement.