As the world awaits military intervention in Syria and we are treated to idle theorizing about how the Ghouta chemical massacre was a "false flag" attack by the rebels, comes a grimly amusing analogue from Central Africa. Rwanda on Aug. 29 accused government forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo of shelling its territory, killing a woman and wounding her baby. (BBC News) Open war between Rwanda and the DRC suddenly looms, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has appealed to Rwanda's President Paul Kagame for restraint. (BBC News) The shelling comes as DRC troops and the UN's new "intervention brigade," dubbed MONUSCO, have been battling the M23 rebels in Congo's east. (BBC News, Radio Australia) The DRC government has denied responsibility, and says it was actually the rebels that shelled Rwanda's territory—a claim backed up by MONUSCO. (Reuters) Now, since the M23 is said to be intimately directed by Rwanda's defense minister, Gen. James Kabarebe, who has apparently even sent military commanders to lead the rebel force, this basically means that Rwanda is bombing itself. Indeed, Congo Planet tells us the DRC is charging that Rwanda's government used the M23 rebels to shell its own territory, as a provocation to justify a direct military intervention in eastern Congo. 

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights posted to its Facebook page Aug. 21 claims, based on witness reports, of a chemical gas attack on the eastern Damascus suburbs. Dozens were reported killed and hundreds injured in the towns of Erbin, Zamalka, Ein Terma and East Ghouta. Al Jazeera puts the death toll at "at least 100," and notes that Syrian authorities dismissed the reports as "baseless." The Syrian National Coalition is apparently putting the toll at 650 lives. The claims coincide with a visit to Syria by a 20-member UN team to investigate three sites where chemical weapons were allegedly used over the past year. Al Jazeera and Russia Today report Moscow's rejection of the claims. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the timing of the claimed attack "makes us think that we are once again dealing with a premeditated provocation." Ministry spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich charged that "biased regional media have immediately, as if on command, begun an aggressive information attack, laying all the responsibility on the government."

Man, it just gets worse every damn day. All the lefties are cheering on Alice Walker for urging Alicia Keys to cancel her upcoming concert in Israel, calling on the singer to honor the boycott and visit Gaza instead. (Ha'aretz, May 29) But just a few days earlier, asked by a BBC reporter what book she would take with her to a desert island, she named David Icke's Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More. Yes, David Icke—the same crypto-fascist conspiranoid freak who I was sacked from WBAI for opposing. As The Independent notes in its report on Walker's endorsement of the evil little twit, Icke's book purports that the world is secretly ruled by "shape-shifting reptilians" from outer space, that the Moon is actually a "gigantic spacecraft" which sends us a "fake reality broadcast," and that we live in a manipulated reality "in much the same way as portrayed in the Matrix movie trilogy." On her own website, Walker gushes:

Israeli missiles struck a research center near Damascus, setting off explosions and causing casualties, Syria's state news agency reported  May 5. If confirmed, it would be the second Israeli strike on targets in Syria in three days. Two previous Israeli air-strikes, one in January and one on May 3, targeted weapons reportedly bound for Hezbollah. (AP, May 5) On May 4, a former senior official in the Bush administration said the use of chemical weapons in Syria might have been an Israeli-instrumented "false flag operation." Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, told Current TV: "We don’t know what the chain of custody is. This could’ve been an Israeli false flag operation, it could’ve been an opposition in Syria... or it could've been an actual use by Bashar Assad. But we certainly don’t know with the evidence we’ve been given. And what I'm hearing from the intelligence community is that that evidence is really flakey." (JP, May 4)

Commentary on the Boston attacks is making for some strange permutations. Voices on the left are seeking to play down jihadist involvement in the Chechen struggle—or to portray it as the result of US intrigues, with the obvious analogy to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda itself. Michael Moore's website sports a piece by FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley entitled "Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons," calling out figures such as Richard Perle for backing an "American Committee for Peace in Chechnya" as a lobby for the armed struggle against Russia—the name later "sanitized" to the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus.

With Boston under "lockdown" and a manhunt underway, leaders of the Chechen insurgency issued a statement April 19 casting doubt on police claims that the two suspects in the Marathon bombing—young brothers of Chechen origin—carried out the attacks. The official media arm of the Chechen mujahedeen, the Kavkaz Center, published a blog post that suggested a frame-up as part of a "PR campaign" to discredit the insurgency. The statement mocked the "lightning speed" at which the two suspects were identified, and called the investigation "completely muddled." From a translation by NBC News: "The news that the brothers attacked police officers, carjacked a man and did an array of other things, instead of going into hiding, looks strange at the very least." The statement argued that the younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was "very far from your typical 'Islamic terrorist.' He named career and money as his main credo. What's more, he just logged onto his Russian social networking site a few hours ago." Indeed, an overview of the young man's Twitter and other social media posts on AtlanticWire notes that he listed his "personal priority" as "career and money"—but his "worldview" as "Islam." He also made some ominously foreshadowing tweets, including "I will die young."

OK, so twin bombs go off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three—including an 8-year-old child—and injuring over 100. And the Internet conspiranoia crowd, led by the indefatigable Alex Jones, jump on the attack in record time, even faster than they did with the Newtown massacre. Salon notes that on his radio show, Jones speculated the Boston blasts are linked to the price of gold: "With gold plunging, what could this signify?" He also noted that one of the 9-11 planes took off from Boston, and claimed to have predicted the attack: "I said on air that they're getting ready to blow something up. To fire a shot heard round the world like at Lexington and Concord, and then they do it at this same place on the same day!" Well, if you always predict attacks, sooner or later you're going to be right...

It never fails. Every time something ghastly happens, from the Wisconsin Sikh temple massacre to the Oslo terror attacks to the Fort Hood Shootings to (d'oh!) 9-11, lugubrious conspiranoids have got to descend like ravenous vultures with bogus theories about how it was a "false flag" job perpetrated by a "Manchurian Candidate." The horrific bloodletting at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., is, alas, no exception. And in this case, the theory has simply no basis in reality—it isn't even a distortion, contortion, embellishment or obfuscation—it is a simple invention, straight up. Yet animated partisans are plastering posts about it on my Facebook wall right and left—seemingly in all earnestness. Big ups to Talking Points Memo for rising to the tiresome ocassion of shooting down this jive: