The US State Department has claimed to have proof that the Syrian government was the perpetrator of an alleged chemical attack in Douma. It refused to make the evidence public, as the intelligence is “classified.”
State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said on Friday that the US has “a very high level of confidence” that it was the Syrian government that launched an alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians in Douma on April 7. Asked by AP’s Matt Lee if the US can say that it has clear evidence of the Syrian government’s culpability, Nauert responded that while she cannot speak for other nations, “it’s the assessment of the British government, the US government, the French government” that Syria was the culprit.
“I cannot speak on their behalf, but we’ve all have been having conversations and sharing information, intelligence included, and we can say that the Syrian government was behind the attack,” Nauert said. The US assertion relies on “different kind of sources,” including those of its own, she said.
It’s unclear if the strongest-worded attribution of blame by the US so far is based on some newly uncovered evidence. Pressed on whether Washington had obtained some new proof that explicitly points at Damascus’ role in the incident, Nauert did not provide any new details, saying that she is not in a position to divulge the intelligence data.
She went on to criticize “some TV shows” that are calling on the White House to offer some facts in support of the accusations: “a lot of this stuff is classified at this point. We are unable to provide all of this publicly at this moment,” she said.
At the same time, Nauert admitted that the US has, so far, failed to independently determine what substance was used in the alleged chemical attack.
“On Tuesday, when we last met, I talked how we know that it was a chemical weapon that was used in Syria. The exact kind or the mix of that [chemical weapon] we are still looking into.”
At a briefing on Tuesday, Nauert said: “we do know that some sort of a substance was used.”
She also dismissed the statement by the Russian Defense Ministry that the UK government could have pressured the rebel-linked White Helmets group, which was the primary source of the photos and videos from the site of the supposed attack, to stage a provocation in Douma.
On Thursday, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said that Moscow has “evidence that Britain had a direct involvement in arranging this provocation in Eastern Ghouta.” The UK rebuffed the accusations, calling them “grotesque.”
Nauert echoed an earlier statement by White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who said on Friday that Washington has “a very high confidence that Syria was responsible,” while accusing Russia of a “failure” to head off the alleged attack.
WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump is pushing for a broader military offensive in Syria but Defense Secretary James Mattis has resisted for fear of sparking a clash with Russia, media reported citing White House officials.
Trump in meetings with Mattis has pushed for an attack that would also hurt Russia and Iran in addition to the Syrian government in response to an alleged chemical attack in Duma, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters earlier that the National Security Council would be meeting on Friday afternoon to discuss plans for responding to the incident in Syria.
Earlier on Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry said during a press briefing that Moscow has substantial evidence confirming that the alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Duma on April 7 was a provocation staged with direct involvement of the United Kingdom. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that Russia should get ready for new and “smart” missiles that would be coming to Syria.
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Thus spake Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff in the Government of George W. Bush.
I do wish people would study Rove’s words more carefully. Judiciously study them. If they did, then whenever the next alleged atrocity occurs and the United States, together with its coalition of supine vassals, starts yelling and hollering 10 minutes later for action to be taken, on the basis of a test-tube full of washing powder, or pictures of injured women and children in a war zone, and the entire media of dutiful stenographers shrieks that “something must be done”, then perhaps we might pause and wonder if we are being played. Instead of falling into an emotional spasm, maybe we would instead reject the deafening drumbeats of war – wars that have a habit of killing immeasurably more women and children than the alleged incidents on which they are based, by the way — and ask ourselves whether “Rove’s Law” has come into play.
As an aside, the West’s interventionist wars remind me of that wonderfully cynical exchange in the film, The Man With Two Brains:
Dr. Hfuhruhurr: “The only time we doctors should accept death is when it’s caused by our own incompetence!”
Dr. Necessiter: “Nonsense! If the murder of twelve innocent people can help save one human life, it will have been worth it!”
Here’s Dr. Necessiter selling us into war in Iraq: “Nonsense! If it costs us the deaths of 500,000 people to topple the evil dictator Saddam Hussein, it will have been worth it!”
Here he is selling us bombs on Libya: “Nonsense! If turning Libya into a failed state, a terrorist’s playground, and causing a mass exodus of refugees is the price for getting rid of Gaddafi, it will have been worth it.”
And here’s Dr Necessiter again, this time trying to sell us into bombing Syria: “Nonsense! Risking a catastrophic clash with a country armed with thousands of nuclear weapons is worth it in order to respond to the alleged deaths of less than a hundred people in a totally unproven chemical weapons attack.”
Behold, the “logic” of the interventionists!
But back to Rove. What was he saying? Three things:
Number one: We – that is the Globalist Deep State, centred in Washington DC – are sovereign over the entire globe and we will do as we please.
Number two: That we don’t follow reality, we create it.
Number three: That we are prepared to do things that will make your jaws drop, your hair stand on end, and your eyes boggle as you wonder what is going on, and while your jaws, your hair and your eyes are busy doing their thing, we will have moved on to create our next reality.
In other words – we are God – and not a kind and merciful God, but a God who lords it over all peoples’, nations and tongues, who tells lies, and then tells more lies to cover up those lies and – when you poor saps are trying to work out what it is we’re really up to – before you know what has happened, those lies and those lies to cover up lies will have become the new reality. We’ll have moved on and the world with it, and the narrative we have created will have been written in the history books, which we ourselves shall write.
The cases of Sergei Skripal and the alleged chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta seem somehow to represent the zenith of this ideology.
I do not know who poisoned Sergei Skripal or for what reason. It could be that the Russian Government was behind it, although this would mean accepting the highly improbable thesis that they decided to target a has-been MI6 spy, who they released from prison eight years ago, using perhaps the dumbest assassination method in the history of the world – an ineffective, slow-operating, “military-grade” nerve agent, which could be traced back to them, and which they smeared on a door handle in rainy Salisbury –, a week or so before a Presidential election, and less than 100 days before they are due to host the World Cup. In other words, the official narrative does not rest on accepting that the Russian state is the epitome of pure evil; it rests on accepting that it is the epitome of insanity and bumbling incompetence.
I do not know what happened in Eastern Ghouta. It could be that the Syrian Government was behind what is alleged to have happened (if it indeed did happen), but this would mean having to accept the thesis that just 24 hours away from completely liberating the last pocket of resistance in Damascus, after the US, the UK and France had all warned that they would attack if chemical weapons were used, just a week or so after the US President, Donald J. Swamp, announced that the US would be pulling out of Syria (which they occupied illegally, by the way), they made the decision to use a weapon that gave them no military advantage whatsoever, but which was practically guaranteed to be used as a pretext for airstrikes against them. In other words, like the Skripal case, the theory does not stand on accepting that the Syrian state is the epitome of pure evil; it stands on accepting that it is the epitome of self-defeating stupidity on an epic scale.
But you see what I’ve done? I’ve fallen right into Karl Rove’s trap, haven’t I? I’m asking questions about whether the narratives in these cases stack up. In the Skripal case, I’ve been judiciously studying reality by asking lots of questions that ought to have occurred to anyone with a keen interest in arriving at the truth (here and here, for instance). I could do the same with the Syrian case, if I had the time.
Yet while I’m doing so, the narrative is moving on. I’m falling into exactly the trap that Karl and his disciples have laid. They want two sorts of people: those who just blindly accept that it was the Russians wot did it, or that it was Assad wot did it; and those who spend their time asking questions about the official explanations. The first group call the second group conspiracy theorists and nutters. The second group call the first group dumb sheeple. And the Globalist Deep State laughs and laughs and laughs as the two groups battle it out to make sense of what has happened, leaving it free to march on to create the next reality. Truly I tell you, these Bolsheviks have learnt their Hegelian Dialectics well.
Now, this is not to rule out that in the Salisbury and Eastern Ghouta cases the official narratives might – just might – be the correct ones. That both Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad might be the Laurel and Hardy of Geopolitics. Yet it has to be said that whatever else you think about them, neither of them tends to come across in interviews as being what you might call dumb or inept. Nor do either of them give the impression that they have sudden insane impulses to do things which have absolutely no benefit to them, but which hand their enemies massive PR victories.
But this is beside the point. The point is not whether these particular incidents are what the official narrative says they are, or whether they are provocations. It suffices for the “new reality creators” to create their realities on occasion, or perhaps to distort occurrences which they didn’t create, and before you know it you have your two groups battling over events which may be real or fake: the conspiracists – who are studying every event to try to work out the details and the inconsistencies – and the sheeple – who believe that their Government is full of good hearted, white hatted chaps and lasses who would never, ever do anything bad – unlike those orcs over in Mordor.
Rove and Co have basically created a “reality” where truth is no longer discernible, where assertions of guilt are taken as fact, and where holes in these kinds of incidents only serve to divide the people further, so that the Globalist Deep State can move on to create their next reality.
But let’s not get gloomy. The good news is that although they clearly think they can get away with it indefinitely, they can’t. No kingdom or empire built on a mountain of lies can stand indefinitely. They all fall. And can’t you start to sense the signs that the empire’s “new realities” – or what are known as lies in laymen’s terms – are reaching boiling point? Don’t you sense that they have just got too confident and in doing so have begun to get careless? They are making mistakes. And as they do, they are having to resort to bigger and bigger lies to cover up the ones they’ve already told.
Sadly for Rove and Co, but happily for the rest of us, the world doesn’t actually work the way they think it does. Reality — I mean real reality, rather than the phony reality they have created — will catch up sooner or later. I sense that it’s on its way even now. And when it finally comes, the whole rotten edifice that these “history’s actors” have tried to create will crash and burn. Bringing much rejoicing.
The Russian Defense Ministry has criticized the Western-led coalition for creating a sanitation emergency in Raqqa after it took the Syrian city from Islamic State, but failed to organize a clean-up or rebuild.
“The epidemiological situation in Raqqa remains very grave. There are still thousands of corpses rotting underneath the debris,” said Russian Ministry of Defense spokesman Igor Konashenkov, during a press briefing in Moscow.
The official outlined the difference between the reconstruction efforts in cities taken back by government forces, such as Aleppo, where “schools, hospitals and markets have reopened” and those like Raqqa, which have largely been left to their own devices.
Over two-thirds of Raqqa, the city Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) once designated its unofficial capital, was destroyed during a four-month battle that ended in October 2017. The majority of the damage, according to Konashenkov, was inflicted by US airstrikes on the city, which was previously home to around 300,000 people and is now under the loose control of Kurdish militias.
Members of the first UN Humanitarian Mission sent to the city in recent weeks wrote that they “were shocked by the level of destruction, which exceeded anything they had ever seen before.” Noting that “public services barely exist and there is no safe water or electricity,” the mission was alarmed by “widespread presence of explosive hazards, including unexploded ordnance, landmines and improvised explosive devices,” abandoned by Islamic State, and a cause of over 130 deaths between October 2017 and February 2018.
A location report from AP, published last week, said that only one bulldozer was available for excavating bodies, and that “the stench of death rises from crushed buildings” as insects swarm the streets. Locals also told the newspaper that violent crime goes unchecked, and that former IS militants are allowed to live freely among the population.
The world is being pushed to the brink of catastrophic war. US President Trump and his French and British counterparts are threatening to launch military strikes on Syria in the coming days.
Donald Trump has bragged about “smart” missiles coming. French President Emmanuel Macron says “we will strike at a time of our choosing”. Who are these madmen? What right have they to threaten world peace?
It could be all just bravado, but even the mere use of threat is completely intolerable and criminal.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has warned that any such action will precipitate a region-wide war. With Saudi Arabia and Israel saying that they will join in the actions of the above NATO trio to attack Syria, Assad’s warning of mayhem is a grimly accurate prognosis.
Iran has said it will defend its ally Syria if it comes under attack. Russia has also given notice that any US-led intervention will be responded to with force. We are thus on the cusp of an explosive war if the US and its allies proceed with their threats to launch military strikes. The risk of a devastating escalation is a clear and present danger.
American, French and British warships and warplanes are converging in the East Mediterranean within striking distance of Syria.
Russia has beseeched the NATO powers to come to their senses and back off from their war plans.
France’s President Macron says that he does not want an escalation of violence. Macron is either cynical or deluded. If the NATO powers follow through with their threats to launch strikes on Syria, then escalation is almost inevitable.
Lest we forget, the US, France and Britain are already acting illegally by their past four years of “low-level” bombing of Syria. A case can be made that the governments of these three NATO powers are already in breach of international law from their aerial bombing campaigns in Syria. Regardless of their hollow claims of fighting terrorism in that country, they stand accused of war crimes. The American destruction of the Syrian city of Raqqa last year with thousands of casualties is sufficient evidence of massive criminality.
Then there is the incontrovertible evidence that the US, Britain and France have for the past seven years covertly ransacked Syria with their clandestine support of terrorist proxies – the very groups whom they mendaciously claim to be fighting against.
The Syrian war has been all about a criminal covert war for regime change, orchestrated and fomented by the US and its allies. The fact that the terror proxies for regime change have been defeated by the Syrian army along with its allies Russia, Iran and Hezbollah is being distorted by Western media propaganda. Instead of acknowledging this historic victory, Western governments are rushing to create a pretext for direct intervention.
This week sees the Syrian army and Russia finally recapturing the last bastion of the Western-backed terror proxies in the Eastern Ghouta suburb near the capital Damascus. The war is over, or should be over. But the US and its allies are pushing for a last-ditch excuse to launch a full-on war against Syria.
And if these powers do proceed with their strike plan, it is on the back of an outrageous false-flag provocation involving alleged chemical weapons.
The UN inspectors have not even begun to carry out their investigation into what happened last weekend in Eastern Ghouta where the last-remaining terrorist groups claimed that Syrian government forces carried out a chemical weapons attack on civilians. There is no evidence of such an attack, except for videos of very dubious provenance sourced from the terror groups.
Syrian and Russian forces say there is no evidence of a chemical attack. Red Crescent medics on the ground have also said there is no evidence. The entire episode is a dubious claim sourced from dubious sources and given the usual Western media saturated, unverified coverage.
France’s Macron upped the ante this week, stating that he has “proof” that chemical weapons were used by the Syrian “regime”. Macron is recklessly raising the stakes for a joint military attack on Syria by the US, Britain and France.
But where is Macron’s “proof”. He doesn’t show any. This is typical of the illegal conduct of Western governments who make sensational claims without any substantiation. If the Syrian and Russian authorities are correct in their assessment, then Macon is a deluded liar.
The French leader – who has plenty of political woes at home with nationwide industrial strikes – is said to be goading Trump to take military action.
For the past two decades, the US, British and French have been on a bombing spree around the world, killing millions of innocents in their Neo-imperialist intrigues. The Middle East and Africa has been devastated from their illegal wars.
Yemen, to mention just one country, is being subjected to a genocidal war in which millions of children are starving from a barbaric blockade of that country by Saudi Arabia, armed and fuelled by the US, Britain and France. Yemen is a monumental war crime. And yet, grotesquely, the world is told by the war-criminal governments of the US, Britain and France that they are going to bomb Syria to “protect civilians” on the back of a lie.
World peace is being threatened by despicable rogue regimes that are telling lies with sanctimonious smirks.
Russia is right to hold firm. The rogue regimes of the US, Britain and France must not be allowed to hold the world hostage with their rampant state-sponsored terrorism. The Western powers like to talk about “red lines”. They have crossed many red lines already with the blood of millions splattered over the globe. Bombing Syria is a final red line.
Facing down Western aggression in Syria is only the beginning. The Western public must follow up by bringing their war criminals in high office to justice.
The UK appears to be pursuing a policy of “destroying evidence” in the case of the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal, the Russian envoy to the UK said during a press conference on Friday.
The accusation came from Alexander Yakovenko, as he was updating the media on the developments in the Salisbury poisoning case. He reiterated Russia’s dismay over the British government’s refusal to allow Russian diplomats access to Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who was also poisoned, saying that from Moscow’s point of view, the two Russian nationals appear to have been abducted by the British authorities.
The ambassador said London’s approach to the high-profile case followed a pattern of crimes, in which the UK chose to classify details from the public and ignore Russia’s request to disclose them.
The latest such case is the death of Russian businessman Nikolay Glushkov on March 12, after the apparent attack on the Skripals, Yakovenko said.
He confirmed Russia’s receipt on Thursday of a classified report from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which the organization sent after confirming Britain’s identification of a toxic agent used in the poisoning. Yakovenko said Moscow is studying it carefully and will make its opinion public when ready. He stressed that Russia’s criticism of the way the UK chose to engage the OPCW in the case did not amount to doubting the merits of the report.
The Russian diplomat also commented on the situation in Syria and Britain’s possible military action there. He advised the UK against taking rash steps in Syria based on a fabricated chemical weapons attack last Saturday, saying it would be similar to the misguided intervention in Iraq in 2003.
He briefed journalists on the latest development in Douma, a town in the suburbs of Damascus, where the alleged attack took place and where Russian military police have been deployed on Thursday. He suggested that the media compared the situation in Douma, which is relatively undamaged after its capture by the Syrian government forces, to that in the city of Raqqa, which was practically obliterated by the US-led coalition and its allies on the ground last year, when they took the city from the jihadist group Islamic State.
US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has told lawmakers that the US military is still “assessing the intelligence” on the alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma, and that President Trump has yet to decide whether to launch strikes against the Middle Eastern country.
“There have been a number of these attacks. In many cases, you know we don’t have troops, we’re not engaged on the ground there, so I cannot tell you that we had evidence, even though we had a lot of media and social media indicators that either chlorine or sarin were used,” Mattis said, speaking to members of the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
The defense secretary said he did believe that a chemical attack took place, but that the US was still “looking for the actual evidence.”
“We’re still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies. We’re still working on this,” he reiterated.
Warning that he was concerned that a US strike might lead to an “out of control” escalation in the Syrian war, Mattis said that Washington was “committed to ending that war through the Geneva process through the UN-orchestrated effort.”
“On a strategic level, [the issue is] how do we keep this from escalating out of control, if you get my drift on that,” he said, alluding to the prospects of a confrontation between Russian and US forces deployed in the Middle Eastern country.
No Decision Yet
According to Secretary Mattis, President Trump has yet to decide whether or not to launch an attack. “We’ve not yet made any decision to launch military attacks into Syria,” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about a specific attack that is not yet in the offing, knowing that this would be pre-decisional. Again, the president has not made that decision,” he added.
No Congressional Approval Needed
Mattis said he would discuss Syria options at a National Security Council meeting later Thursday, and promised to keep lawmakers informed if the Pentagon did decide to attack. He added, however, that the White House has the authority to conduct strikes without seeking Congressional approval.
Asked if the US was ready to mount an attack, Mattis replied that “We stand ready to provide military options if they’re appropriate, as the president determined.” … Full article
Jaysh al-Islam militants leaving Douma under the framework of an evacuation agreement were forced to give up their weapons, including Israeli-made sniper rifles and Belgian-made rockets and machineguns, a security source has told Sputnik Arabic.
3,792 people, including 1,384 militants and members of their families, are being evacuated from Douma and taken to the town of Jarabulus in northeastern Aleppo, northern Syria on 85 buses, with the withdrawal expected to stretch out over two days. Militants have also agreed to give up their heavy weapons by Thursday.
Late last month, Douma residents took to the streets urging militants to join the ceasefire. This week, civilians took over several warehouses previously used by militants to hoard food, fuel, and other supplies as a means of controlling the population.
Russian military police forces have entered the town to help ensure law and order as reconstruction begins.
The Russian Center for Syrian Reconciliation confirmed Thursday that the Syrian operation launched in mid-February to free Eastern Ghouta from a collection of Islamist groups has officially wrapped up.
“Today, a landmark event in the history of the Syrian Arab Republic took place. The state flag flown over a building… in the city of Douma marked the regained control over this settlement, and consequently over the entirety of Eastern Ghouta,” Maj. Gen. Yuri Yevtushenko, head of Russia’s center for Syrian reconciliation, told reporters.
The Syrian Army launched Operation Damascus Steel on February 18 to clear the militant-held Eastern Ghouta pocket following years of militant shelling into the Syrian capital. Prior to its liberation, the region had been held by Jaysh al-Islam, the Al-Rahman Legion, Ahrar al-Sham, and the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.
In the course of Operation Damascus Steel, the Syrian military has been finding large stocks of small arms, artillery shells, anti-tank missiles, and other supplies made in Israel, the US, and other NATO countries.
Americans desperate for news from the Syrian front, where an alleged chemical attack has prompted the Trump administration to consider a military strike against Damascus, are in for a real disappointment. Any balanced discussion of a possible military offensive against Syria, which Moscow has warned would have “grave consequences,” has been swept clean from the news slate.
On Wednesday morning, in an apparent state of wishful thinking mixed with a dash of masochism, I consulted multiple US news sites to see how the Syrian crisis was being reported. Expecting to find large-font headlines warning of a possible military offensive, not to mention World War 3, I was greeted instead with multi-layered stories on former porn star, Stormy Daniels, and her 10-year old affair with Donald Trump. I’m guessing there was a Russian connection to that salacious story somewhere, but exactly where I could not immediately say.
The lead story in the Bezos-owned Washington Post, for example, was headlined, “Investigators sought Trump lawyer’s records on two women who alleged affairs with president.” Next to that salacious piece of bozo journalism was another nothing burger, at least as far as the Syrian crisis is concerned, which discussed the current trials and tribulations of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (“Zuckerberg apologizes, promises reform during hours-long Senate grilling over Facebook’s failings”). While that may seem like important news to some, it pales in comparison with the prospect of the US launching an attack on the Syrian government.
Buried deep below that media debris and detritus was a single story devoted to Syria, headlined: “Nerve gas in Syria attack, leaving victims ‘foaming at the mouth,’ evidence suggests.” This glaringly one-sided narrative, much like the one used last month in the Salisbury ‘chemical attack’ that allegedly sickened Sergey Skripal and his daughter, is tenuous at best, a bald-faced lie at worst. Indeed, judging by an examination of the site carried out by Russian experts and the Syrian Red Cross, no trace of chemical weapons could be found.
A switch to CNN provided a near duplicate of The Post’s paucity of pickings, albeit with a slightly different twist. “Trump considering firing Rosenstein, sources say,” was the headline of the main story, which shows that the ‘Russiagate’ show trial is beginning to eat its tail, yet the media – after almost two years – just can’t resist reporting on it. Next to that show-stopper, US media consumers are provided yet another cure for insomnia with riveting details on Zuckerberg’s 5-hour grilling by the US Senate.
Finally, a CNNarticle on Syria. Yet the headline says everything we need to know as far as what the American consumer of mainstream media fare is permitted to think: “Haley says Russia chose ‘protecting a monster’ over Syrian people” (Incidentally, this is same way US political elections are carried out. There is freedom, but only a severely limited freedom that allows the populace to ‘freely’ choose between candidates that have already been carefully selected by the powers-that-be).
Below that gratuitous bugle blast for war is an open letter to the US leader, entitled, “President Trump, now is not the time for half-baked military action.” Translation: “President Trump, now is the time for full-blown military action”
Here is CNN opinionator Sam Kiley inveighing against the Syrian government, using cheap emotional imagery as a substitute for hardnosed facts: “Outrage over the images of children frozen in death, their mouths gagged with foam as the alleged victims of another Syrian government gas attack on its own people, has led Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, to call the perpetrator behind the attack “a monster.”
“Such passionate intensity is understandable,” Kiley continues, building up momentum for a hysterical Hitler analogy. “There’s something visceral about killing with gas. It recalls the Holocaust. It conjures up almost identical photographs of Saddam Hussein’s attack on the Kurds of Halabja.”
Ah, yes. The sweet sound of impartial journalism. What is so deplorable about this brand of so-called reporting is that it refuses to consider the very high probability that it was not the Syrian government that resorted to chemical weapons in Douma, but rather the rebel forces, who were suffering on every military front up until that point. Would President Bashar Assad really be so reckless to risk a chemical attack at the very moment he was bringing to an end an 8-year struggle against terrorist-infiltrated militants in his country? Common sense would say no.
It’s not that the American people are inherently stupid to believe such absurd claims; it’s that they are woefully misinformed by a media machine that is marching in lockstep – sometimes even owned – by the military industrial complex. Mark Twain summed up the Catch-22 situation confronting Americans: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
And it is not just the run-of-the-mill news sources that are serving as cheerleaders for imperialistic regime change operations. The purportedly intelligent ‘thinking man’ publications are also peddling a shameless pro-war stance, which takes the government line for granted.
In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, for example, investigative journalism is reduced to roadkill in the rush to war. In an article entitled, “The Logic of Assad’s Brutality,” it is obvious that the magazine has already predetermined Assad’s guilt. Yet the UN weapons inspectors have not even reached Syria to begin their investigative work? What kind of journalist could put his name on an article that could only be called an elaborate piece of pro-war propaganda?
And then there is the ‘conservative’ journal Foreign Policy, which argued in an article entitled ‘Macron needs to Attack Syria’: “It’s not clear whether France can count on the United States to commit to the enforcement of any red lines against the Assad regime. But this should only concentrate Macron’s mind. If the United States abstains, he should prepare, for the sake of not only his personal credibility, but French national interests, to strike alone.”
No call for restraint, no call for evidence, no suggestion that the terrorists may have been to blame. Just a reckless gunshot from the hip to settle matters, and who cares if it may trigger a global conflagration.
This only serves to prove that the United States, and its people, learned absolutely nothing from the Iraq War, which saw the same brazen disregard for legal precedent by launching an attack against Saddam Hussein in 2003, the consequences of which we are experiencing to this day. As the UN weapon inspectors were on the ground, practically screaming that they could not locate weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration shrugged off these uncomfortable truths and carried out its diabolical designs anyways.
In reality, the US did learn one valuable lesson from the Iraq War. It learned it can manipulate the opinions of the people to an astonishing degree. By using the entire media leviathan to coordinate a hate campaign against one state leader, in this case Bashar Assad, it can make the people forget legal precedent, not to mention common sense.
There is a vast industry in the United States that wants a hot war with Syria and Iran as well as increased confrontation with Russia and China. It is appropriate to refer to it as an industry because it has many components and is largely driven by money, much of which itself comes from Wall Street and major corporations that profit from war related business. Some prefer to refer to this monster as the Military Industrial Complex, but since that phrase was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961, it has grown enormously, developing a political dimension that includes a majority of congressmen who are addicted to receiving a tithe from the profits from the war economy to finance their own campaigns, permitting them to stay in office indefinitely and retire comfortably to a lobbying position or corporate directorship.
The defense industry also has spawned hundreds of so-called think-tanks whose sole business is promoting war. Some, like the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, have a clear agenda, but the most powerful rely on euphemisms to conceal what they are doing. They include the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, both of which promote a hard-line foreign policy directed against Iran and Russia, to include intensified confrontation with both in Syria.
The national media, which also benefits from the same food chain, is also complicit in the process, knowing that the public can easily be deceived by pronouncements coming from alleged experts in Washington. Leading politicians like Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain lead the pack but there is no shortage of lesser known congressmen to also raise the cry about foreign threats to national security. Regarding developments in Syria, Graham advised last weekend that Trump must attack and destroy the Syrian Air Force or “look weak” while McCain said White House talk of pulling troops out of the country had “emboldened” al-Assad.
Unenlightened self-interest prevails in the White House over the formulation of policy, with the public interest completely lost from sight as high officials jockey in support of the agendas being promoted by those with money and access to those in power. There is no other explanation for the astonishing performance last weekend, which pushed the United States closer to a new war in spite of Trump’s earlier expressed claims that he wants to exit from Syria, a comment that he quickly backed away from under pressure from the Israelis and Congress.
But now we have a dubious narrative of a horrible new chemical weapon attack in Syria and the Israelis, who have spent the past two weeks shooting two thousand unarmed demonstrators, have attacked a Syrian airbase, killing 14, pretending that they care about civilian casualties when all they really want to do is jumpstart a seven-year war which has been winding down.
Anyone could see there was something not quite right about this latest “chemical attack,” supposedly implemented by Bashar al-Assad just as his troops are about to finish off the last rebels near Damascus. But Donald Trump apparently could not appreciate that the Syrian government had no motive to use chemical weapons, while the rebels, who control the space where the attack supposedly took place, have every reason to motivate an international coalition to attack the Syrian Army.
At 8 a.m. on Sunday morning the President of the United States sent out this tweet:
Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay…
Donald Trump could not have possibly known who staged the gas attack so soon after it occurred, but he felt compelled to tweet something anyway. And it was not as if other observers hadn’t suspected that a big lie was coming. Days before the staged attack, the Russian Defense Ministry warned that a false flag incident was being prepared.
One hour later, the Sunday morning talk shows in the US were full of reports about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons. No one contradicted that narrative and the news was soon headlined in the late editions of the Sunday newspapers. “Fake news” had won out again, in spite of a complete lack or evidence or credibility. This is completely crazy. There is something very wrong with what is going on currently in the United States.
US President Donald Trump’s fateful decision on a military strike against Syria is imminent and it will impact not only Syria’s future and Middle Eastern politics but also the US’ capacity to impose its global hegemony in the emergent world order.
As expected, the day began with Trump’s tweet. He said,
Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!
Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War. There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?
Trump claims he’s about to order the attack. But it is also a Trumpean message. The second part is addressed to the Kremlin and speaks about potential US-Russia cooperation to mutual benefit. Trump offers the bait of negotiations on curbing arms race, which is a priority issue for Russia.
Trump apparently thinks he’s ‘negotiating’ a ‘win-win’ solution by dangling a carrot and expecting Moscow to stand aside and letting the US attack on Syria go ahead. It’s tragi-comic, to say the least, that US diplomacy has come to such a pass – POTUS negotiating Syria as if it’s a property deal in Manhattan.
Following the Israeli attack on the T4 air base in Syria on Monday, Putin deputed his special envoy on Syria Alexander Lavrentiev to go to Tehran on an ‘unscheduled and unexpected’ visit to meet Iran’s powerful national security czar and point person on Syria, Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani, who is the executive head of the national security council and reports directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Evidently, Russian-Iranian coordination is at a very high level.
As for Iran, it is playing its cards close to the chest, which is as it should be. Tehran understands perfectly well that the false flag operation alleging chemical attack may be used as alibi by the US to create new facts on the ground in Syria aimed at eroding the commanding position that Russia and Iran enjoy.
Putin availed of a Kremlin ceremony for the new foreign envoys’ presentation of credentials today to make an oblique reference to Trump’s war cry. Putin said,
The state of world affairs invokes nothing but concerns, the situation in the world is becoming more chaotic. Nevertheless, we still hope that common sense will eventually prevail and international relations will enter a constructive course, the entire world system will become more stable and predictable.
The remark can be construed as an appeal to Trump’s ‘common sense’. But then, Putin also stressed that Moscow will continue to advocate strengthening of “global and regional” security, and will fully adhere to its “international responsibilities and develop cooperation with our partners on a constructive and respectful basis.”
Earlier in the day, at a media briefing, the Kremlin presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov was explicit. He said, “We are not participating in ‘Twitter-diplomacy’. We are supporting serious approaches. We still firmly believe that it is important to abstain from taking steps, which may be detrimental to the already fragile situation (in Syria).”
In reality, Trump finds himself in an unenviable situation. Russia has made it abundantly clear that it will counter any US attack on Syria and, God forbid, if there is any loss of Russian lives in the American attack, all hell will break loose. On the other hand, if Trump backtracks, it will dent his credibility. This is not like calling Kim Jong Un a “Little Rocket Man” and getting away with it.
Is there an exit door available for Trump? Yes, there is. The US Defence Secretary James Mattis said today that the work to assess the intelligence on the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria’s Douma is still in progress. To quote him, “We’re still assessing the intelligence – ourselves and our allies. We’re still working on this.” Mattis said this when asked pointedly whether there is sufficient evidence to accuse the Syrian government of using chemical agents in Douma.
To my mind, the chances of the western intelligence giving a ‘Nil’ report are fairly good. (The First Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff’s Main Operations Department Lieutenant General Viktor Poznikhir told reporters in Moscow today that the notorious White Helmets, which is an ‘NGO’ outfit of intelligence agencies collaborating with terrorist groups in Syria, had staged and filmed a chemical weapons attack on civilians in the town of Douma.)
Indeed, if the Russian general’s assessment of a false flag operation is upheld, Trump might heave a sigh of relief. After all, if there was no chemical attack, why should there be retribution?
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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