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Any US missiles fired at Syria will be shot down, launch sites targeted – Russian envoy to Lebanon

RT | April 11, 2018

The Russian military reserves the right to shoot down missiles and destroy launch sites in the event of US aggression against Syria, Moscow’s envoy to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin has warned.

Zasypkin stressed that “the Russian forces will confront any US aggression on Syria, by intercepting the missiles and striking their launch pads,” al-Manar TV website reported, citing the envoy.

Speaking to the channel, the ambassador also said that the allegations of a chemical attack were being used to justify “offensive acts” in Syria, while “the US and Western escalation against Syria will lead to a major crisis.”

The statement comes after Washington threatened a “forceful response” against Syria after an alleged chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Douma on Saturday. The US was quick to pin the blame on the Syrian government, basing its accusations on unverified data and images, including reports from the infamous, rebel-linked White Helmets ‘civil defense’ group.

On Tuesday, the UN Security Council failed to pass three consecutive resolutions calling for an investigation into the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria. A Russian-sponsored draft backing a fact-finding mission at the site by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is the latest to have been rejected by the body.

As the initiative was voted down by the US, the UK, France and Poland; Russia’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia once again called for the West to “refrain from the plans which you might be harboring with regards to Syria.”

Earlier on Tuesday, the OPCW announced that is preparing deploy its team to Douma “shortly” to investigate the reports of an attack there. Earlier, Russian specialists at the site had found no traces of chemical weapons or any victims treated for chemical poisoning.

While US President Donald Trump is weighing up options, reports emerged signaling that Washington is beefing up its forces in the Middle East. On Monday, the guided-missile destroyer ‘Donald Cook’ departed the port of Larnaca in Cyprus, reportedly heading towards Syria. Meanwhile on Wednesday, the USS ‘Harry S. Truman’ aircraft carrier, accompanied by strike groups, is scheduled to set sail for a “regular” mission to the Middle East and Europe.

Meanwhile, Eurocontrol – an EU body tasked with handling air traffic over the continent – issued a Rapid Alert Notification, warning flight operators in the Eastern Mediterranean about “the possible launch of airstrikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours.”

While the West is poised for a military response to the alleged chemical incident in Syria, Moscow is warning against further destabilization of the region. Russia hopes that all the sides will “avoid any steps which are not provoked by anything in reality and can substantially destabilize the already fragile situation in the region,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated on Wednesday.

April 11, 2018 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Nonsense about Syria gas attacks reveals US ideology of tyranny

By Stephen Gowans | what’s left | April 11, 2018

Ideologues of US power, notably those ensconced in the editorial offices of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, believe that the United States has an imprescriptible right to exercise an absolutist tyranny over the world, to define the boundary between civilization and barbarism, and that Washington is unbound by international law, but free to wield it as a tool against the barbarians. In the ideology of US despotism, the compass of civilization includes states that submit to “US leadership”, a euphemized version of “US tyranny,” while states which favor an international order based on the UN Charter’s ideal of the sovereignty and equality of states (Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela are among the supporters of this alternative, democratic, order) are relegated to the category of barbarism. Once a state has been located outside of civilization, Western legal traditions—testing accusations against evidence and the assumption of innocence until culpability is credibly demonstrated— no longer apply. The “barbaric” state becomes guilty of all acts of which it is accused, regardless of whether there exists credible evidence to corroborate the accusation.

In a 9 April editorial “In Syria, Trump faces the limits of bluster” The New York Times attributes a global leadership role to the United States, which it urges the Trump administration to exercise by creating “an independent investigation that could lead to prosecution” of the Syrian leadership “in a tribunal like the International Criminal Court,” a court the United States itself rejects and refuses to be bound by.

The New York Times’ editors lay out steps Washington ought to take if “the Syrian regime’s guilt is determined,” but conclude all the same that the Syrian government is guilty on all charges, contrary to the reality that the US State Department, British Foreign Office, and its own reporters, have acknowledged that the chemical attack allegations against the Syrian government are unverified and unconfirmed. What’s more, the sources of the allegations are the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society, partisan outfits, funded by Western governments, and allied with anti-government insurgents, who have an interest in fabricating atrocities to defame their enemy and to justify continued and even elevated Western intervention in Syria.

Additionally, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, at a 2 February news conference, admitted that the Pentagon has no evidence that the Syrian military has ever used chemical weapons. This, however, didn’t stop the New York Times’ editors from declaring that Syria has failed to honor its agreement to destroy its chemical weapons under a 2013 pact or that it is responsible “for most of the 85 chemical attacks in the country over the past five years.” A newspaper which proclaims itself to live up to the highest standards of journalism, indeed, to set the gold standard, appears to have no trouble creating facts out of thin air.

The editors lay out steps the Trump administration should take once a legal imprimatur is conferred upon a pre-judgement of guilt. Inevitably, military action is called for. “If a Russian veto prevents Security Council action, then Mr. Trump needs to work with our allies, through NATO or otherwise,” the editors counsel—a call for the US administration to violate international law (again.)

“The use of poison gas,” the newspaper of record observes one paragraph later, “is a war crime under international law,” a curious observation given the editors’ dim view of international law as evidenced by their urging Washington to act without Security Council authorization in order to exercise “America’s traditional leadership role.” It should be recalled that the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan also claimed leadership roles, to say nothing of imperial Britain and imperial France, the latter of which is eager to rehabilitate its colonial tyranny over its former Syrian mandate under the guise of punishing the “barbarian” Assad for outrages against civilization.

The Pentagon has the world’s largest stockpile of weaponized poison gas. The point of having it is to possibly use it, despite its prohibition under the very same international law the New York Times condemns Syria (without evidence) of violating. Thus, the ideologues of US tyranny reveal that international law is a matter of significance only to countries the United States defines as its enemies (the barbarians), and not to the United States itself, which is free to act as it pleases against the barbarians, according to its own laws, as the guarantor of a global moral order. Needless to say, the idea that the United States, the principle source of disorder, suffering and decay in the world, has even a soupcon of moral authority, is risible, if not a sick joke—a truth of which most of the world’s population is only too aware.

In 1970, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2625, which, inter alia, declared that “States have the duty to refrain from propaganda for wars of aggression,” a resolution of apparently no significance to the New York Times, which is only too happy to spread propaganda for wars of aggression in the service of a US tyranny which, far from exercising moral authority, continues to spread its dark wings over the whole world, led by a madman at the top of a system of global oppression and exploitation, from which has sprung a program of neo-colonial warfare and escalating confrontation with China and Russia.

April 11, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | 2 Comments

Mueller is Desperate — But For What?

By Thomas L. Knapp – The Garrison Center – April 10, 2018

On April 9, federal agents raided the office, home and hotel room of Michael Cohen, personal attorney to US president Donald Trump. Cohen has come under fire, with potential legal implications, for paying  $130k to silence adult film actress and alleged Trump paramour Stephanie Clifford, better known as “Stormy Daniels.”

That hush money seems to be the excuse for the raids, but as the Washington Post reports, they are “part of an investigation referred by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to federal prosecutors in New York …”

Poor  Mueller. After nearly a year as special counsel in the “Russiagate” probe, he has yet to accomplish either of his missions.

His putative job is to expose “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election, especially with respect to possible collusion between the campaign of now-president Donald Trump and the regime of Vladimir Putin.

His real goal, of course, is to overturn that election by “getting” Trump on something — anything will do — that Congress can treat, and that the public will accept, as  impeachable/indictable.

So far Mueller’s secured indictments of a few Trump associates on charges having little or nothing to do with his overt mission, and of a few Russians for running an Internet “troll farm” that posted some cheesy social media ads. But he has yet to put real meat on his mandate and doesn’t seem to be getting much closer to Trump himself than when he started.

Now he’s hitching his wagon to Stormy Daniels’s star. Why? There are two plausible reasons.

One is that he hopes to get Trump on something other than “collusion with Russia.” Trump has publicly denied the affair with Daniels, and has also denied knowledge of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. If he’s lying, and if the payment violated any laws, proof of that might be enough to get impeachment proceedings rolling in Congress and move a grand jury to indict.

The other possibility is that Mueller is baiting Trump to fire him, something sure to be followed by  the usual suspects crying “obstruction!” and “constitutional crisis!” then demanding Trump’s head on a platter, and possibly getting it.

No one is likely to mistake me for a Trump supporter. I wouldn’t be at all sorry to see him go. But there are larger and more troubling implications here.

If attorney-client privilege can be so casually breached versus the president of the United States, just how secure do you think it will remain for the rest of us?

And if this president is successfully removed, will there ever again be a presidential election that isn’t immediately followed by an open-ended “find something, anything” probe like Mueller’s?

The decline and fall of the American empire seems to be speeding up.

April 11, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Britain and its Deadly Chemical Games

By Martin Berger – New Eastern Outlook – 10.04.2018

There’s no arguing that recently we’ve witnessed an abrupt increase of public interest in chemical weapons and the top-secret British laboratory Porton Down due to the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the so-called Salisbury incident.

Back in 2004, the Guardian would announce that this laboratory had conducted experiments on people using weaponized chemical agents, including highly volatile ones.

In this regard, it must be recalled that the United Kingdom began using chemical weapons almost immediately after the invention of this weapon. England would unleash deadly chemical attacks during the First World War, only to take advantage of the experience it accumulated of the process to utilize mustard gas against Arab insurgents in the 1920s. Moreover, historic documents show that London had an intention of using chemical agents against Germany’s densely populated cities during the Second World War.

The First World War was the time when the UK created the top-secret Porton Down chemical weapons laboratory. Over the course of its existence, more than 20,000 people were subjects of thousands of chemical and biological agents, as well as all sorts of drugs. According to various estimates, at least 8,000 people were exposed to the effect of mustard gas, and more than 3,000 people to sarin nerve gas poisoning. A renowned British historian Ulf Schmidt would explore the story of “survivors of Porton Down” in his book “Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare.”

By 1918, a quarter of all English shells would contain poisonous substances – phosgene, diphosgene, mustard, and chloropicrin, bringing the total amount of chemical weapons that British troops had at their disposal to 25,400 tons. In 1919, the British Royal Air Force in a bid to suppress the Bolsheviks in northern regions of Russia would unload diphenylchloroarsine on their heads, a highly toxic substance that causes severe suffocation.

In 1920, Winston Churchill ordered the suppression of Muslim uprisings in Iraq with the help of mustard gas. Some analysts still remember the phrase he used in a secret memorandum :

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes…

As a consequence, Iraqi villages populated by “uncivilized” people that dared to revolt against the British Empire were wiped out with the use of mustard gas. Seventy years after these events, the survivors said that their villages were bombed three times a day. In addition to mustard gas, British troops would also deploy napalm against peaceful Iraqis along with new types of high-explosive and phosphorous bombs.

From 1930 to 1940, Britain tested the effect of mustard gas on Indian soldiers. Later these inhumane tests were dubbed “Rawalpindi experiments”, even though the area referred to in this name is now a part of the Punjab province in Pakistan. The purpose of these “experiments” was to study the effects and establish the dosages of mustard gas that could be used in combat operations. In the course of these “experiments” Indian soldiers were locked in gas chambers and then poisoned with mustard gas. After 10 years of continuous torture of Indian soldiers hundreds suffered from the consequence of severe exposure to mustard gas.

In 1942, the British developed the so-called Operation Vegetarian. They planned to scatter linseed cakes infected with anthrax spores over German pastures. The UK “baked” over 5 millions of such cakes for the attack. However, before launching it the UK decided to test their effectiveness on the Scottish Gruinard Island, the anthrax exposure was so “successful” that until 1990 any access to the island was strictly forbidden, but even today the consequences of this “experiment” haven’t been studied.

From 1939 to 1989, the United Kingdom was engaged in the development and research of new chemical warfare agents which became a pivotal part of the work done at the Porton Down chemical weapons laboratory. It was experts from this same laboratory that had subjected Indian soldiers to mustard gas exposure in the 1930s.

However, the tests of chemical agents on people within the confinements of Porton Down wasn’t something out of the ordinary. According to the El Pais newspaper, in 1963 this research center decided to test how vulnerable public infrastructure was to chemical and biological attacks. To do this, they unleashed an unknown bacteria in the London Underground, that was originally considered harmless, but later turned out to be capable of causing sepsis. However, no one was held responsible for such  inhumane “research”.

One can also recall the experiments conducted in 1963 that studied the effect of LSD drugs on British soldiers.

There’s been hundreds of former subjects of such “chemical experiments” that have demanded London to tell the truth about what is happening behind the closed doors of Porton Down, and to compensate for the harm inflicted by such “experiments”. In 2008, British authorities recognized individual facts of all sorts of harmful incidents and issued compensations to 359 of nearly 22,000 soldiers who were subjected to tests at Porton Down.

Recently, the British Medical Association (BMA) has released a report on the use of drugs as weapons, after examining the ongoing militarization of drugs. This has been a matter of grave public concern for decades now, but the highly technical nature of the above mentioned report has been kept out of the public eye.

It’s curious that according to various reports, the US Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency has been funding a number of military projects performed by the chemical weapons laboratory of Porton Down. Among them: experimental respiratory infection with Anthrax, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, Western equine encephalitis virus, and Eastern equine encephalitis virus. 

As for the latest reports about British chemical projects, it’s noteworthy that last year Syrian armed forces came across ISIS warehouses  filled with weaponized chemical substances produced by the US and UK. Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad would announce that the poisonous substances found at the said warehouses were produced by such American and British companies as Federal Laboratories, Cherming Defense UK and NonLethal Technologies. According to his reports, Syrian soldiers retrieved hand grenades and grenade launchers filled with CS and CN toxins. Such warehouses were located in the liberated city of Aleppo and the eastern suburb of Damascus.

But, in addition to the documented use of chemical weapons, Britain is well known for its false-flag provocations in this field. Among them is the so-called White Helmets organization in Syria. When Britain needs to blame Russia, Iran or the Syrian armed forces for the ongoing bombing of allegedly peaceful international radical terrorists, it orders them to destroy hospitals and schools, while using alleged chemical weapons in the process before carrying out “rescue operations” under direct supervision of British special services. Injured children are always on hand as props, with professional cameramen capturing the staged events. It is noteworthy that the founder of this group was James Le Mesurier, a British military intelligence officer with an impressive track record. He’s a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, who saw deployment in some well-known military operations, including in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. In general, he’s been everywhere the West needed to stage a humanitarian catastrophe, with a subsequent “humanitarian intervention” leading to long sought after Western geopolitical objectives. He is still in the service of Her Majesty, to be more specific –  British military intelligence.

So, after a careful examination of the role chemical weapons play in the operations ordered by the UK, including false-flag attacks, everything becomes clear. Therefore, there can hardly be any doubts about the responsibility of British special services in the staging of the Salisbury incident which was designed to be yet another anti-Russian provocation, just as false-flag Syrian attacks have been.

It is unlikely that in this regard, Britain and its ruling political elite will be able to publicly refute the facts mentioned above in any way.

April 11, 2018 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

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