Damascus Embassy Attack Update Thread (Bumped)
UPDATES 39+ BUMPED TO NEW POST ABOVE
UPDATE 38 (10:50 EST): And as things begin to wind down, the the BBC confirms that the numbers on the attackers is 4 total / 3 killed / 1 captured (and so we'll reiterate again our power-of-positive-thinking theme on this issue: there is nothing that will happen to you today that will make your day as bad as the next 24-72 hours of this guy's life). Other confirmations: one Syrian soldier killed, multiple other injuries including a Chinese official who was hit something (BBC says stray bullet, other reports have shrapnel). Also confirmed: 2 cars rigged to explode, 1 failed to explode. That about wraps things up, so we'll reiterate what we've learned on our 6 to 7ish hours of updating:
(1) DKos regulars are insane. Totally batshit crazy. So crazy that we, who are not overly gifted but not entirely bereft of imagination, are literally unable to make up something so insane that it won't be seriously asserted and defended. There is an excellent chance that many of them believe that they are doing the will of unicorns sent to save the future from Karl Rove. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to play with anything but those really blunt, rounded plastic scissors. The state needs step in before they hurt themselves or others. Seriously.
(2) Terrorists are stupid. Four guys launched a daylight raid against a fortified American compound with 8 foot reinforced walls. Said compound was in the heart of an authoritarian state that is not well-known for tolerating dissent in any form. In an outcome that surprises absolutely no one, three of them were killed and another was captured. They managed to kill a Syrian guard and to injure several bystanders.
(3) CNN needs to fire either their Damascus correspondent or their web editor. Most likely both. Wow, did they suck this morning.
(4) AP and Reuters will be reluctant to drop the "terrorist"/"terrorism" label on Islamists who attack diplomatic targets even if that's how the Syrian Interior Minister describes the attack. Reuters will even do one better and spend the entire morning copying and pasting the phrase "the attackers shouted religious slogans" into new stories without ever letting slip what religion those slogans were actually associated with. This is consistent with Reuters's apparent view of history, in which no significant Islamist element has been present in any attack that has ever been launched against any US embassy. Those attackers? Mostly just "militants".
(5) If AP and Reuters disagree about the details of an attack (e.g. the number of attackers) then an entire morning can be spent just tracing how robotically various media outlets stick their names on wire reports and just ship them out the door.
(6) Even if you're just making fun of yourself and you happen to mention Glenn Reynolds in order to highlight a self-deprecating comparison, Glenn Reynolds will find a way to demonstrate that your self-deprecation did not go far enough. It may not take more than 15 seconds for him to do so. The man has that kind of power.
(7) The US does indeed have an embassy in Damascus and not in Jerusalem, and there's little if anything that any of us can do about it.
(8) And finally, we learned that if there is an interesting or suggestive report dropped at the very beginning of an attack on the US embassy in Damascus - like, say, that the cars had Lebanese license plates - hoping that someone will talk about it again is just setting yourself up for disappointment.
And you thought that the only excitement this morning would be trying to keep up with Google News hits from searches on "Hamas moderation unity government".
UPDATE 37 (10:00 EST): Sticky Notes has more pics, and passes on Ha'aretz passing on Syrian state TV saying that there was a car bomb that failed to detonate. Most likely story, then, is that there were two cars rigged to explode, one of which did and one of which didn't. And so we have another appearance of the "these attackers were not exactly high quality" theme. Which is weird, because we'd expect that a group of people who mount a daylight raid on the American embassy in Damascus would be top-notch.
Conspiracy Theory 1 (which we proposed really, really sarcastically earlier this morning and then discovered to our horror was top-of-the-comment-list at DKos): Rove did it to distract from bad polling / October surprise. To begin to walk down this road is to abandon your humanity to abject stupidity.
Conspiracy Theory 2 (which we are suggesting only in the most tentative way possible, to the extent that these guys really just sucked at this attack): this attack is a diversion for something else. This theory seems dubious as well, since by now everything's been cleaned up, the bodies have been taken away, and anyone unfortunate enough not to have been killed by Syrian troops is now under the gentle care of Syrian interrogators. If AQ was going to launch an attack in the disorganized aftermath, they would have done it during the disorganized aftermath.
Which leaves only Simple Theory 1: these are dumb, incompetent fanatics who could not go one more day without a post-martyrdom eternity in paradise. Which makes sense on all kinds of levels.
UPDATE 36 (9:45 EST): And just when you think that all the journalists reporting on the embassy attack have come to grips with the need to admit that the attackers were Muslim terrorists, we give you Reuter's Chronology [of] Major attacks on US embassies. Not only do they describe this morning's attack with the "what religion could it possibly be" line that they've been using all morning ("four men shouting religious slogans"), but MR will give a t-shirt to the first reader to email us with the correct answer to this question: what religion fails to get any mention in Reuter's quarter-decade list of attacks on embassies. And by t-shirt we mean "email reply that thanks you for writing". We'd give you a t-shirt except (a) we don't have a cafe press shop and (b) you could mention any religion at all and still be right, since apparently Reuters doesn't think that religion should be mentioned as a factor in any of these attacks (in fairness to them, during the Cold War most of the terrorist attacks were probably not committed by Muslim extremists... so maybe whoever was writing this just got into a rut of not mentioning religion and then forgot to shake it off when he or she got to this century).
UPDATE 35 (9:35 EST): MR reader Eugene has a jazz station that carries AP Radio News. So much the worse for MR reader Eugene:
The local jazz station carries the AP Radio News. The 9:00 am report began with the rhetorical questions, "What happens when a state sponsor of terrorism is a target of a terrorist attack?"... Syria, of course, was not attacked this morning. The US Embassy, which is US territory, was attacked.
MR reader Eugene is of course correct, and the AP Radio News has of course made a slip, symptomatic of perhaps nothing or perhaps of their ideological predisposition to deny that terrorists are trying to attack the US. Tough to tell, really.
UPDATE 34 (9:15 EST): Eh. Will wonders never cease? CNN has finally updated that embarrassment to journalism that they've had up the entire morning. And with a filing time of 8:50 EDT. Good for CNN! Let's see - they're still putting giving numbers as 4 killed / 1 captured (which is what their web story has had all morning, although we read a blog report that said that CNN-TV was saying 4 captured alive). That still puts them at odds with the AP, which has 3 killed / 1 captured. You'd think someone would have game on this. But right there in the second paragraph, they manage to give actual news:
There was no claim of responsibility for the attack, but an al Qaeda offshoot group called Jund al-Sham - or Soldiers of Lebanon - is suspected, said Imad Moustapha, Syrian ambassador to the United States. The radical fundamentalist group has been blamed for several attacks in Syria in recent years, Moustapha said.
That puts them at least somewhat at odds with the very weird "this was too small to be Al Qaeda" statement by the British Ambassador, which happened right after the attack. But the advantage here is probably CNN: the obvious guess is that this is an Al Qaeda cell, but not one that is being controlled from very high up (i.e. no simultaneous attacks means no significant international coordination across cells). On the other hand, these could easily be wannabe wackos incubated without any actual Al Qaeda connections. Mounting a daylight raid on an absurdly well-fortified US embassy in the capital of a totalitarian regime isn't exactly MENSA material. You've got options about what you want to believe though: Syria saying it's Al Qaeda is about as reliable as DKos comment grues saying it was Rove.
UPDATE 33 (9:10 EST): Bumped above the three posts we did last night, scheduled for this morning, and forgot about. Palestinian unity government that may or may not recognize Israel but that will almost certainly get EU funding. We're positively giddy.
UPDATE 32 (9:05 EST): We will now cease reading the DKos comments section (lunatics! seriously!) and return you to our regularly scheduled updates. Four or so hours after a daylight raid on the American embassy (s-m-r-t smart!), the AP finally has a decent report filed from Damascus (which, incidentally, bumped MR off the coveted top spot on memeorandum - which is not unreasonable given that, you know, it's the AP and we're not):
Islamic militants attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy in Damascus on Tuesday using automatic rifles, hand grenades and at least one van rigged with explosives, the government said. Four people were killed in the brazen attack, including three of the assailants. No Americans were hurt, and the attackers apparently did not breach the high walls surrounding the embassy's white compound in the city's diplomatic neighborhood. But one of Syria's anti-terrorism forces was killed and at least 11 others were injured, the country's official news agency reported... A Chinese diplomat also was hit in the face by shrapnel and slightly injured while standing on top of a garage at the Chinese Embassy, China's government news agency said...
Witnesses also said the gunmen tried to throw hand grenades into the embassy compound, shouting "Allah Akbar!" or "God is great!" It was not clear if any of the grenades made it over the walls, which are about 8 feet high... The Syrian Interior Ministry, which is in charge of police, said a fourth attacker now in detention was wounded in the incident, which it called a "terrorist attack." The report, carried on state-run television, said anti-terror units brought "the situation under control" and an investigation was under way...
The attackers came in two cars and parked one that was rigged with explosives in front of the embassy but did not blow it up, state-run TV reported. Explosive experts dismantled the bomb, it said. But a witness told The Associated Press that two gunmen stopped a car on the street in front of the embassy, got out of the car, shot at the Syrian sentries in front of the building's entrance and then detonated the car.
And just like that, almost all of our speculation and snark are dashed against the AP's wall o' half-decent journalism. This seemingly confirms that whoever CNN has working in Damascus should be fired (the entire morning all they've had up is a 170ish word report that gets almost everything exactly wrong). If this very credible looking AP report is right, the numbers for the attackers are 3 killed / 1+ captured (4 killed total = 3 attackers + 1 Syrian guard). Also, the Chinese official was hit by shrapnel, not a bullet as some reports had. Other loose ends: 2 cars, only one exploded (the other failed to explode?... seems like a waste not to rig it - it's not like these people could have been thinking that this was anything but a suicide mission). As to our snark: no more making fun of AP for being oh-so-delicate and not calling the attackers what the Syrian government spokesman called them: terrorists. There's still Reuters though, which as near as we can till hasn't updated us on what kind of "religious slogans" the terrorists were screaming. Maybe Episcopalian?
Early rumors of Lebanese license plates now seem to be the only early fact that hasn't been confirmed.
UPDATE 31 (8:45 EST): See? See? This is what we're talking about. A couple people on the DKos thread say "hey, odds are that Bush and Rove weren't actually in on the attack on the US embassy in Damascus", and then the rest of them go on with the total moonbatism:
I think smirkslapper above has it...
It is all just too damned convenient, don't you think? Fits in too well with BushCo and the promotion of their agenda, and is far too 'convenient' for Republicons trying to chink the cracks in their 'security party' facade. Of course, the dust is in the air, and it will be interesting to see how things unfold, given new and added information. At this point in time, though, it is very easy to think the stench is perhaps the smell of a rat... by wgard on Tue Sep 12, 2006 at 01:02:19 AM PDT
These people use keyboards! Think about that. Keyboards! People like this shouldn't be using keyboards. They shouldn't be using anything more complicated or dangerous than really thick non-toxic crayons. That's it. Mark our words: they're going to poke someone's eye out. Seriously, aren't these people wards of some state? Have we just given up on the idea of having rules in this country?
UPDATE 30 (8:30 EST): OK. So here's what's going on right now in the blogosphere. There was this attack, and we've been posting on it for several hours now. But about an hour into it, we came across a report that linked the gunmen to Lebanon. At the time our tirades about there not being an embassy in Jerusalem, and it was before a Syrian Minister went father than the AP or Reuters were willing to do and called the attackers "terrorists". So we didn't really have much snark going, and we wrote the following (this is Update 12):
Now if we were from the "other" side of the blogosphere, we'd be talking about how these were Black Ops agents dropped into Lebanon by the CIA during the war with Lebanon who are now trying to fake an attack on the US embassy because Rove found out about bad polling numbers this morning. And we'd say that this has to be true because "no self-respecting terrorist would launch an attack in Syria - it just doesn't make sense"
And you know, we kind of wrote it just to be snarky. Harmless, right? Then a couple of hours later we followed a PJM link to an intel report on Syria. And that was the update where we moved to the new thread, so we needed something with a little cynicism and a little self-deprecation to open with. And so again:
October surprise. Obviously. Will these Orwellian fascists stop at nothing (about this time, you're wondering why you bothered clicking through on the other thread. Honestly, we have no answers for you).
Because you know, Rove. October surprise. Total moonbat stuff right? As you've already guessed, literally the top comments on DKos...
And so it begins. Could this be the start of an "October Surprise"? by smirkslapper on Tue Sep 12, 2006 at 12:51:38 AM PDT
... and:
all signs point to it being more BushCo propaganda.
come on, 9/11 five year anniversary?
congressional elections in a few months?
BushCo and/or Blair low poll numbers?
distraction from [gas prices/israel/iran/natural disaster/latest domestic political controversy]?
how much more clear could it be??
i personally won't believe ANY of these so-called "terrorist" attacks are real unless they happen at least a year before any elections scheduled in the US or Britain, and even then only if gas prices are low, Bush and Blair have high approval ratings, and neither are being criticized in the media for any reason whatsoever.
by sanjayrai on Tue Sep 12, 2006 at 03:06:05 AM PDT
Now to be fair, we're like 75% sure that the second commenter is being sarcastic about the first one, but that's the point - you can't tell any more! You just don't know, because things normal people would never say are at the very top of the comment stack! And so we want to be very clear: we do not believe that Karl Rove engineered an attack on the US embassy in Damascus in order to distract from the CNN poll demonstrating that more Americans blame President Bush than President Clinton for the 9/11 attacks.
Everyone knows that Rove reacted to the poll the way he always does: by calling Diebold and confirming that the rigged voting machines are ready to go for November.
UPDATE 29 (8:25 EST): Syria News Wire has pics and has a post from while the gunbattle was raging with this tidbit: "Suspicion the attackers are Islamist terrorists who travelled from Lebanon." That makes it the second source we've seen from during or right after the gunbattle that linked the attacks to Lebanon (several hours ago we linked to a news report quoting the BBC's Amman guy: "two men in a car with a Lebanese license plates opened fire at the building of the US Embassy in Damascus.") Two is a pattern, yeah?
UPDATE 28 (8:15 EST): And if this report is right, then CNN has been nowhere near close on what's going on this morning. TheStreet.com has the magic combination of gunmen attacking/killed at who knows / 3:
Islamic militants attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria, in a brazen attack Tuesday, the Associated Press reported. The Syrian government said the attackers were using automatic rifles, hand grenades and at least one van rigged with explosives, the AP reported. Syrian security forces killed three of the attackers.
This is why whoever is going to do the Reuters feed needs to get together with whoever is going to do the AP feed and settle on a story before either of them file. But there seems to be a consensus forming around 4 attacking, 3 killed, 1 wounded/captured/about to be disappeared. One of the cool things about the way that TCS has arranged the AP dispatches is that it's very easy to see that the AP reported almost everything that Syrian spokespeople have said, with the sole exception of identifying the attackers as terrorists.
UPDATE 27 (8:00 EST): In the "total attackers / attackers killed / attackers captured" pool, the winner is not a single journalist who had anything to do with reporting this morning:
Syrian officials said the four attackers shouted religious slogans and threw a grenade into the yard of the US embassy. Live CNN reporting from the scene says that Syrian forces have taken four men into custody in connection with this attack.
Four captured means none killed (unless you buy the story that CNN has had up for about an hour and a half now, which has five attackers and four killed... but since they're the only ones on the planet reporting five attackers - up to and including their TV reporters - it seems that this number is of dubious credibility). Four captured also means a windfall for Syrian intelligence. If they work really hard, they might even learn that they've given gunmen a green light to enter Iraq through Syria (alternative punchline: if they work really hard, they might even learn about all those weapons they've been shipping to Hezbollah).
UPDATE 26 (7:50 EST): We can now confirm what we broke over two hours ago - namely, this is a Rovian plot to win the November election. Via PJM, we found the latest news on Syria:
U.S. provocations against Syria -- the next target in Pentagon's list of adversaries -- have begun. The ground is being laid to gradually pull out U.S. diplomatic personnel, citizens, and nationals of other countries prior to a full-scale attack. Expect tensions to rise even more.
October surprise. Obviously. Will these Orwellian fascists stop at nothing (about this time, you're wondering why you bothered clicking through on the other thread. Honestly, we have no answers for you).
But speaking of fascists (the real kind), half the reports have one of the terrorists being wounded and taken in for interrogation. We wonder whether the information that Syrian intelligence extracts from him will be passed on to the United States if it includes things like "so we were hanging out with the terrorists that have been crossing into Iraq from Syria, and we got this idea that maybe we should mark 9/11 by attacking the American embassy".
UPDATE 38 (10:50 EST): And as things begin to wind down, the the BBC confirms that the numbers on the attackers is 4 total / 3 killed / 1 captured (and so we'll reiterate again our power-of-positive-thinking theme on this issue: there is nothing that will happen to you today that will make your day as bad as the next 24-72 hours of this guy's life). Other confirmations: one Syrian soldier killed, multiple other injuries including a Chinese official who was hit something (BBC says stray bullet, other reports have shrapnel). Also confirmed: 2 cars rigged to explode, 1 failed to explode. That about wraps things up, so we'll reiterate what we've learned on our 6 to 7ish hours of updating:
(1) DKos regulars are insane. Totally batshit crazy. So crazy that we, who are not overly gifted but not entirely bereft of imagination, are literally unable to make up something so insane that it won't be seriously asserted and defended. There is an excellent chance that many of them believe that they are doing the will of unicorns sent to save the future from Karl Rove. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to play with anything but those really blunt, rounded plastic scissors. The state needs step in before they hurt themselves or others. Seriously.
(2) Terrorists are stupid. Four guys launched a daylight raid against a fortified American compound with 8 foot reinforced walls. Said compound was in the heart of an authoritarian state that is not well-known for tolerating dissent in any form. In an outcome that surprises absolutely no one, three of them were killed and another was captured. They managed to kill a Syrian guard and to injure several bystanders.
(3) CNN needs to fire either their Damascus correspondent or their web editor. Most likely both. Wow, did they suck this morning.
(4) AP and Reuters will be reluctant to drop the "terrorist"/"terrorism" label on Islamists who attack diplomatic targets even if that's how the Syrian Interior Minister describes the attack. Reuters will even do one better and spend the entire morning copying and pasting the phrase "the attackers shouted religious slogans" into new stories without ever letting slip what religion those slogans were actually associated with. This is consistent with Reuters's apparent view of history, in which no significant Islamist element has been present in any attack that has ever been launched against any US embassy. Those attackers? Mostly just "militants".
(5) If AP and Reuters disagree about the details of an attack (e.g. the number of attackers) then an entire morning can be spent just tracing how robotically various media outlets stick their names on wire reports and just ship them out the door.
(6) Even if you're just making fun of yourself and you happen to mention Glenn Reynolds in order to highlight a self-deprecating comparison, Glenn Reynolds will find a way to demonstrate that your self-deprecation did not go far enough. It may not take more than 15 seconds for him to do so. The man has that kind of power.
(7) The US does indeed have an embassy in Damascus and not in Jerusalem, and there's little if anything that any of us can do about it.
(8) And finally, we learned that if there is an interesting or suggestive report dropped at the very beginning of an attack on the US embassy in Damascus - like, say, that the cars had Lebanese license plates - hoping that someone will talk about it again is just setting yourself up for disappointment.
And you thought that the only excitement this morning would be trying to keep up with Google News hits from searches on "Hamas moderation unity government".
UPDATE 37 (10:00 EST): Sticky Notes has more pics, and passes on Ha'aretz passing on Syrian state TV saying that there was a car bomb that failed to detonate. Most likely story, then, is that there were two cars rigged to explode, one of which did and one of which didn't. And so we have another appearance of the "these attackers were not exactly high quality" theme. Which is weird, because we'd expect that a group of people who mount a daylight raid on the American embassy in Damascus would be top-notch.
Conspiracy Theory 1 (which we proposed really, really sarcastically earlier this morning and then discovered to our horror was top-of-the-comment-list at DKos): Rove did it to distract from bad polling / October surprise. To begin to walk down this road is to abandon your humanity to abject stupidity.
Conspiracy Theory 2 (which we are suggesting only in the most tentative way possible, to the extent that these guys really just sucked at this attack): this attack is a diversion for something else. This theory seems dubious as well, since by now everything's been cleaned up, the bodies have been taken away, and anyone unfortunate enough not to have been killed by Syrian troops is now under the gentle care of Syrian interrogators. If AQ was going to launch an attack in the disorganized aftermath, they would have done it during the disorganized aftermath.
Which leaves only Simple Theory 1: these are dumb, incompetent fanatics who could not go one more day without a post-martyrdom eternity in paradise. Which makes sense on all kinds of levels.
UPDATE 36 (9:45 EST): And just when you think that all the journalists reporting on the embassy attack have come to grips with the need to admit that the attackers were Muslim terrorists, we give you Reuter's Chronology [of] Major attacks on US embassies. Not only do they describe this morning's attack with the "what religion could it possibly be" line that they've been using all morning ("four men shouting religious slogans"), but MR will give a t-shirt to the first reader to email us with the correct answer to this question: what religion fails to get any mention in Reuter's quarter-decade list of attacks on embassies. And by t-shirt we mean "email reply that thanks you for writing". We'd give you a t-shirt except (a) we don't have a cafe press shop and (b) you could mention any religion at all and still be right, since apparently Reuters doesn't think that religion should be mentioned as a factor in any of these attacks (in fairness to them, during the Cold War most of the terrorist attacks were probably not committed by Muslim extremists... so maybe whoever was writing this just got into a rut of not mentioning religion and then forgot to shake it off when he or she got to this century).
UPDATE 35 (9:35 EST): MR reader Eugene has a jazz station that carries AP Radio News. So much the worse for MR reader Eugene:
The local jazz station carries the AP Radio News. The 9:00 am report began with the rhetorical questions, "What happens when a state sponsor of terrorism is a target of a terrorist attack?"... Syria, of course, was not attacked this morning. The US Embassy, which is US territory, was attacked.
MR reader Eugene is of course correct, and the AP Radio News has of course made a slip, symptomatic of perhaps nothing or perhaps of their ideological predisposition to deny that terrorists are trying to attack the US. Tough to tell, really.
UPDATE 34 (9:15 EST): Eh. Will wonders never cease? CNN has finally updated that embarrassment to journalism that they've had up the entire morning. And with a filing time of 8:50 EDT. Good for CNN! Let's see - they're still putting giving numbers as 4 killed / 1 captured (which is what their web story has had all morning, although we read a blog report that said that CNN-TV was saying 4 captured alive). That still puts them at odds with the AP, which has 3 killed / 1 captured. You'd think someone would have game on this. But right there in the second paragraph, they manage to give actual news:
There was no claim of responsibility for the attack, but an al Qaeda offshoot group called Jund al-Sham - or Soldiers of Lebanon - is suspected, said Imad Moustapha, Syrian ambassador to the United States. The radical fundamentalist group has been blamed for several attacks in Syria in recent years, Moustapha said.
That puts them at least somewhat at odds with the very weird "this was too small to be Al Qaeda" statement by the British Ambassador, which happened right after the attack. But the advantage here is probably CNN: the obvious guess is that this is an Al Qaeda cell, but not one that is being controlled from very high up (i.e. no simultaneous attacks means no significant international coordination across cells). On the other hand, these could easily be wannabe wackos incubated without any actual Al Qaeda connections. Mounting a daylight raid on an absurdly well-fortified US embassy in the capital of a totalitarian regime isn't exactly MENSA material. You've got options about what you want to believe though: Syria saying it's Al Qaeda is about as reliable as DKos comment grues saying it was Rove.
UPDATE 33 (9:10 EST): Bumped above the three posts we did last night, scheduled for this morning, and forgot about. Palestinian unity government that may or may not recognize Israel but that will almost certainly get EU funding. We're positively giddy.
UPDATE 32 (9:05 EST): We will now cease reading the DKos comments section (lunatics! seriously!) and return you to our regularly scheduled updates. Four or so hours after a daylight raid on the American embassy (s-m-r-t smart!), the AP finally has a decent report filed from Damascus (which, incidentally, bumped MR off the coveted top spot on memeorandum - which is not unreasonable given that, you know, it's the AP and we're not):
Islamic militants attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy in Damascus on Tuesday using automatic rifles, hand grenades and at least one van rigged with explosives, the government said. Four people were killed in the brazen attack, including three of the assailants. No Americans were hurt, and the attackers apparently did not breach the high walls surrounding the embassy's white compound in the city's diplomatic neighborhood. But one of Syria's anti-terrorism forces was killed and at least 11 others were injured, the country's official news agency reported... A Chinese diplomat also was hit in the face by shrapnel and slightly injured while standing on top of a garage at the Chinese Embassy, China's government news agency said...
Witnesses also said the gunmen tried to throw hand grenades into the embassy compound, shouting "Allah Akbar!" or "God is great!" It was not clear if any of the grenades made it over the walls, which are about 8 feet high... The Syrian Interior Ministry, which is in charge of police, said a fourth attacker now in detention was wounded in the incident, which it called a "terrorist attack." The report, carried on state-run television, said anti-terror units brought "the situation under control" and an investigation was under way...
The attackers came in two cars and parked one that was rigged with explosives in front of the embassy but did not blow it up, state-run TV reported. Explosive experts dismantled the bomb, it said. But a witness told The Associated Press that two gunmen stopped a car on the street in front of the embassy, got out of the car, shot at the Syrian sentries in front of the building's entrance and then detonated the car.
And just like that, almost all of our speculation and snark are dashed against the AP's wall o' half-decent journalism. This seemingly confirms that whoever CNN has working in Damascus should be fired (the entire morning all they've had up is a 170ish word report that gets almost everything exactly wrong). If this very credible looking AP report is right, the numbers for the attackers are 3 killed / 1+ captured (4 killed total = 3 attackers + 1 Syrian guard). Also, the Chinese official was hit by shrapnel, not a bullet as some reports had. Other loose ends: 2 cars, only one exploded (the other failed to explode?... seems like a waste not to rig it - it's not like these people could have been thinking that this was anything but a suicide mission). As to our snark: no more making fun of AP for being oh-so-delicate and not calling the attackers what the Syrian government spokesman called them: terrorists. There's still Reuters though, which as near as we can till hasn't updated us on what kind of "religious slogans" the terrorists were screaming. Maybe Episcopalian?
Early rumors of Lebanese license plates now seem to be the only early fact that hasn't been confirmed.
UPDATE 31 (8:45 EST): See? See? This is what we're talking about. A couple people on the DKos thread say "hey, odds are that Bush and Rove weren't actually in on the attack on the US embassy in Damascus", and then the rest of them go on with the total moonbatism:
I think smirkslapper above has it...
It is all just too damned convenient, don't you think? Fits in too well with BushCo and the promotion of their agenda, and is far too 'convenient' for Republicons trying to chink the cracks in their 'security party' facade. Of course, the dust is in the air, and it will be interesting to see how things unfold, given new and added information. At this point in time, though, it is very easy to think the stench is perhaps the smell of a rat... by wgard on Tue Sep 12, 2006 at 01:02:19 AM PDT
These people use keyboards! Think about that. Keyboards! People like this shouldn't be using keyboards. They shouldn't be using anything more complicated or dangerous than really thick non-toxic crayons. That's it. Mark our words: they're going to poke someone's eye out. Seriously, aren't these people wards of some state? Have we just given up on the idea of having rules in this country?
UPDATE 30 (8:30 EST): OK. So here's what's going on right now in the blogosphere. There was this attack, and we've been posting on it for several hours now. But about an hour into it, we came across a report that linked the gunmen to Lebanon. At the time our tirades about there not being an embassy in Jerusalem, and it was before a Syrian Minister went father than the AP or Reuters were willing to do and called the attackers "terrorists". So we didn't really have much snark going, and we wrote the following (this is Update 12):
Now if we were from the "other" side of the blogosphere, we'd be talking about how these were Black Ops agents dropped into Lebanon by the CIA during the war with Lebanon who are now trying to fake an attack on the US embassy because Rove found out about bad polling numbers this morning. And we'd say that this has to be true because "no self-respecting terrorist would launch an attack in Syria - it just doesn't make sense"
And you know, we kind of wrote it just to be snarky. Harmless, right? Then a couple of hours later we followed a PJM link to an intel report on Syria. And that was the update where we moved to the new thread, so we needed something with a little cynicism and a little self-deprecation to open with. And so again:
October surprise. Obviously. Will these Orwellian fascists stop at nothing (about this time, you're wondering why you bothered clicking through on the other thread. Honestly, we have no answers for you).
Because you know, Rove. October surprise. Total moonbat stuff right? As you've already guessed, literally the top comments on DKos...
And so it begins. Could this be the start of an "October Surprise"? by smirkslapper on Tue Sep 12, 2006 at 12:51:38 AM PDT
... and:
all signs point to it being more BushCo propaganda.
come on, 9/11 five year anniversary?
congressional elections in a few months?
BushCo and/or Blair low poll numbers?
distraction from [gas prices/israel/iran/natural disaster/latest domestic political controversy]?
how much more clear could it be??
i personally won't believe ANY of these so-called "terrorist" attacks are real unless they happen at least a year before any elections scheduled in the US or Britain, and even then only if gas prices are low, Bush and Blair have high approval ratings, and neither are being criticized in the media for any reason whatsoever.
by sanjayrai on Tue Sep 12, 2006 at 03:06:05 AM PDT
Now to be fair, we're like 75% sure that the second commenter is being sarcastic about the first one, but that's the point - you can't tell any more! You just don't know, because things normal people would never say are at the very top of the comment stack! And so we want to be very clear: we do not believe that Karl Rove engineered an attack on the US embassy in Damascus in order to distract from the CNN poll demonstrating that more Americans blame President Bush than President Clinton for the 9/11 attacks.
Everyone knows that Rove reacted to the poll the way he always does: by calling Diebold and confirming that the rigged voting machines are ready to go for November.
UPDATE 29 (8:25 EST): Syria News Wire has pics and has a post from while the gunbattle was raging with this tidbit: "Suspicion the attackers are Islamist terrorists who travelled from Lebanon." That makes it the second source we've seen from during or right after the gunbattle that linked the attacks to Lebanon (several hours ago we linked to a news report quoting the BBC's Amman guy: "two men in a car with a Lebanese license plates opened fire at the building of the US Embassy in Damascus.") Two is a pattern, yeah?
UPDATE 28 (8:15 EST): And if this report is right, then CNN has been nowhere near close on what's going on this morning. TheStreet.com has the magic combination of gunmen attacking/killed at who knows / 3:
Islamic militants attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria, in a brazen attack Tuesday, the Associated Press reported. The Syrian government said the attackers were using automatic rifles, hand grenades and at least one van rigged with explosives, the AP reported. Syrian security forces killed three of the attackers.
This is why whoever is going to do the Reuters feed needs to get together with whoever is going to do the AP feed and settle on a story before either of them file. But there seems to be a consensus forming around 4 attacking, 3 killed, 1 wounded/captured/about to be disappeared. One of the cool things about the way that TCS has arranged the AP dispatches is that it's very easy to see that the AP reported almost everything that Syrian spokespeople have said, with the sole exception of identifying the attackers as terrorists.
UPDATE 27 (8:00 EST): In the "total attackers / attackers killed / attackers captured" pool, the winner is not a single journalist who had anything to do with reporting this morning:
Syrian officials said the four attackers shouted religious slogans and threw a grenade into the yard of the US embassy. Live CNN reporting from the scene says that Syrian forces have taken four men into custody in connection with this attack.
Four captured means none killed (unless you buy the story that CNN has had up for about an hour and a half now, which has five attackers and four killed... but since they're the only ones on the planet reporting five attackers - up to and including their TV reporters - it seems that this number is of dubious credibility). Four captured also means a windfall for Syrian intelligence. If they work really hard, they might even learn that they've given gunmen a green light to enter Iraq through Syria (alternative punchline: if they work really hard, they might even learn about all those weapons they've been shipping to Hezbollah).
UPDATE 26 (7:50 EST): We can now confirm what we broke over two hours ago - namely, this is a Rovian plot to win the November election. Via PJM, we found the latest news on Syria:
U.S. provocations against Syria -- the next target in Pentagon's list of adversaries -- have begun. The ground is being laid to gradually pull out U.S. diplomatic personnel, citizens, and nationals of other countries prior to a full-scale attack. Expect tensions to rise even more.
October surprise. Obviously. Will these Orwellian fascists stop at nothing (about this time, you're wondering why you bothered clicking through on the other thread. Honestly, we have no answers for you).
But speaking of fascists (the real kind), half the reports have one of the terrorists being wounded and taken in for interrogation. We wonder whether the information that Syrian intelligence extracts from him will be passed on to the United States if it includes things like "so we were hanging out with the terrorists that have been crossing into Iraq from Syria, and we got this idea that maybe we should mark 9/11 by attacking the American embassy".
