“… I was very cautious in saying any opinion regarding him before he became President and after. I always say let’s see what he’s going to do, we wouldn’t comment on statements. So, actually, this is the first proof that it’s not about the President in the United State; it’s about the regime and the deep state or the deep regime in the United States is still the same, it doesn’t change. The President is only one of the performers on their theatre, if he wants to be a leader, he cannot, because as some say he wanted to be a leader, Trump wanted to be a leader, but every President there, if he wants to be a real leader, later he’s going to eat his words, swallow his pride if he has pride at all, and make a 180 degree U-turn, otherwise he would pay the price politically. …”
Marcello Ferrada de Noli, one of the leaders of the Swedish Doctors for Human Rights non-governmental organization (SWEDHR), said Wednesday he and his colleagues has been receiving threats following the release of their article exposing a purportedly staged video by White Helmets group, a volunteer rescue service operating in Syria.
In the beginning of March, the SWEDHR released an article claiming that the White Helmets’ video of a child reportedly treated after a chemical attack showed fake treatment, including an intracardiac injection done with an empty syringe, which would have killed a child if the baby had not already been dead.
“The threats I receive are anonymous, somewhat non-specific. I see them on Twitter, on social networks, my colleagues also receive them. I feel a lot of discomfort because of this. But I hope that my article, despite all this, will be seen by many people,” de Noli told Rossiya 24 broadcaster.
The professor said that he was simply making public his conclusions that he could prove openly and honestly.
De Noli added that the SWEDHR would continue its work.
The UN, not the unilateral bombing of Syria should have been the first stop for US diplomacy, says whistleblowing former CIA analyst John Kiriakou. As for evidence the American politicians claim they have; he says “they are making this stuff up.”
On Wednesday Russia vetoed a UN resolution backed by the US and other Western powers, condemning the Khan Shaykhun incident on April 4 as a chemical attack and demanding Syria open up its military bases to inspections.
After the vote, Russia’s representative said the action taken by the US before an investigation had been held, was a violation of international law.
RT asked John Kiriakou, former CIA analyst, and whistleblower, whether supporters of Washington’s resolution will try to push for it again.
“I think they will. They usually do. The problem here though is that the UN should have been the first stop for US diplomacy. Rather than acting unilaterally and firing 59 cruise missiles, the State Department should have engaged the UN Security Council from the very beginning,” he said.
As to why the UN voted on the resolution without any clear evidence of Assad’s culpability for the Idlib incident and the logic behind it, Kiriakou opined “they were afraid of the conclusion.”
“There are professional intelligence officers on every side of this issue who are saying that everybody needs to slow down and look at the source of these chemicals. There are people on the ground, who are telling many of us that these chemicals were in a storage facility that is controlled by ISIS, that the Syrian military launched a conventional attack, and hit the storage facility – this was not a chemical attack by the Syrian government. We frankly don’t know what the facts are. We don’t know because it just simply hasn’t been investigated. I think the US and its allies on the Security Council need to slow down, need to send in UN inspectors to take a look, get the facts on the ground, and then report back to the Security Council. This bombing should never have taken place,” he said.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Rex Tillerson was meeting with Russia’s Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin while on his first official visit to Russia as US Secretary of State.
He reiterated that the US are “quite confident” that the “chemical weapons attack carried out in Syria was planned, and directed, and executed by Syrian regime forces.” Earlier, the US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said “We saw the evidence. The President saw the evidence. All of that is naturally classified.”
Kiriakou doesn’t rule out though that American politicians “are making this stuff up.”
“If they’ve already heard from their intelligence assets inside Syria – wow, they must have incredible assets inside Syria, because this [incident in Idlib] just happened. This whole story hasn’t even played out yet. So, how they’ve already got all the intelligence and analyzed it and then were able to use the analysis to formulate a policy that then enabled the President to bomb Syria?” he said. “If that’s true, I congratulate the CIA for its intelligence network inside Syria. The problem is – I don’t believe a word of it.”
In Kiriakou’s opinion, the US bombing of a Syrian airbase that followed the chemical incident was a political decision made by the White House who didn’t speak in advance with its allies.
“I don’t believe there was any intelligence. And I think this was done primarily for domestic consumption,” he said.
‘Designed to be vetoed’
The reason why the US-supported resolution was “rushed to the floor” is because “they wanted to be able to make their points,” said Daniel McAdams, executive director at the Ron Paul Institute.
“They wanted to be able to bash Syria, Russia, and Iran,” he told RT.
The analyst drew a parallel between the resolution and the Rambouillet Agreement – a US/NATO peace plan for Kosovo proposed to the then-Yugoslavia.
“Ironically we’re around the anniversary of the 1999 US bombings of Yugoslavia. But if you remember in Rambouillet [Slobodan] Milosevic and the government of Yugoslavia was presented with an agreement that there is no way they could sign, they would have opened the entire country to NATO forces. It was designed that way. It was designed to be vetoed to show recalcitrance to open the way for bombs. This is very reminiscent of this kind of approach. It is not a very serious approach. Although the consequences could be very serious,” he told RT.
McAdams also said that there’s already “a problem with a chain of evidence” regarding what happened in Khan Shaykhun.
“What is amazing – there has been no investigation whatsoever. The White House released a report [the day before] yesterday – this was a slam dunk as to what the US believes, that it was Assad who did it. But if you look at that report, it was unbelievably thin. It reminds one of the reports that they released proving the Russians hacked the elections. The intelligence community didn’t even sign off on this report. It didn’t have high confidence in the report,” he said.
While in Moscow, Tillerson reaffirmed the US administration’s view that the Assad era is coming to an end.
According to Joshua Landis from Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, the US has “certainly changed its rhetoric on Assad recently.”
“What it seems to be doing is finding the Obama doctrine in a sense falling in line with what President Obama did on Syria – a red line saying that Assad needed to step aside, but not actually doing anything to force him to step from office. That’s what we heard from the National Security advisor yesterday, who said: ‘Assad has to go, but it is not going to be America that makes him go,’” he told RT.
MOSCOW – Lavrov told reporters he “sufficiently convincingly” explained to US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday the reasons why a special independent UN and OPCW-based study should investigate the purported attack.
“But, considering the enormous very confrontational resonance surrounding what happened in Syria, we offered to complement these structures with professional inspectors in this field who would be invited from both Western countries, Russia, and regional countries,” Lavrov said.
He said “it seemed to me that Tillerson quite positively reacted to this idea.” Western countries’ reluctance to send experts to the site of a reported April 4 chemical attack in Syria’s Idlib province rely on “excuses” of purported dangers, he said.
Lavrov told a briefing that US, French and UK colleagues “do not pay attention to the fact that they need to visit not only the airfield they suspect was the place where chemical weapons were loaded onto planes, but also the place where these shells were struck.”
“They said ‘we do not know who controls this area, it is not safe to send inspectors there.’ These are all excuses,” he stressed.
Syrian opposition claimed on April 4 forces loyal to President Bashar Assad had used a chemical gas on people in the northwestern province, killing nearly 80 and injuring 200. Assad argued his government has no chemical weapons after agreeing to have them destroyed in 2013. He also ruled out having used chemicals against own people.
The Russian Defense Ministry said next day that the airstrike near Khan Shaykhun was carried out by Syrian aircraft, which struck a terrorist warehouse that stored chemical weapons slated for delivery to Iraq.
The US attack against a Syrian military airfield launched by President Donald Trump late last Thursday triggered criticism among such French presidential hopefuls as National Front (FN) party leader Marine Le Pen, leader of left-wing political movement Unsubmissive France Jean-Luc Melenchon and the president of Gaullist Arise France party Dupont-Aignan. Socialist Hamon and independent candidate Macron, on the other hand, have expressed their support for the US president’s action.
“Having criticized Trump before and after the election, [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [French President Francois] Hollande have approved of this attack, which is [Trump’s] most serious and most dangerous decision on the global scale. They have shown themselves to be completely irresponsible. The same applies to certain candidates at French presidential elections, like Hamon and Macron, the two former ministers of the socialist president. Their reaction is enough to disqualify them from assuming the office they seek, I believe,” Eric Anceau said.
Following the missile strikes, which killed seven people, according to the governor of Syria’s Homs province, Hollande in a joint statement with Merkel placed the blame for the latest developments in Syria on its President Bashar Assad, albeit without providing any evidence of his involvement in the attack.
According to Anceau, Trump’s hasty reaction to the chemical weapons incident is undoubtedly the most dangerous decision he has made since assuming office.
“When one is the head of the most powerful state in the world, one does not make decisions based on emotions, as he admitted to have done after having seen on TV all these dead bodies of children,” he said, adding that the Trump administration should have consulted the US Congress first.
“In his haste, he circumvented the US Congress, which, incidentally, says a lot about the state of the US democracy in particular and our democracies in general,” the spokesman added.
He underlined that unless the strike had an ulterior motive, such as “a desire to affirm one’s power” in regions where other world powers like Russia or Iran are present, Trump’s decision to strike Syria lacks logic.
Following the strikes, Dupont-Aignan, who according to recent polls enjoys support of some 3 percent of French voters, told the French daily Le Monde that the international community had no proof Assad ordered the chemical attack, and because of this, Trump had no reason to order the strike. At the same time, he pointed out that he would back a UN-led intervention in Syria if it is proved that the Syrian government was indeed responsible for the Idlib tragedy.
The Syrian government denied having chemical weapons, as it agreed for its entire stockpile to be destroyed under a 2013 US-Russian deal. The Organization for the Protection of Chemical Weapons confirmed in January 2016 that Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal was destroyed.
Trump may have acted with insufficient evidence as to whether the chemical weapons attack was actually the responsibility of Assad and the Syrian government. Would Syrian president Assad be foolish enough to launch a chemical attack against civilians, when a military response from the US would be possible, even likely? Peter Ford, a former UK ambassador to Syria, speaking on BBC Radio, said, “It doesn’t make sense that Assad would do it. Let’s not leave our brains outside the door when we examine evidence. It would be totally self-defeating as shown by the results… Assad is not mad.”
Critics of the US military response have suggested as a possible scenario for the chemical release in Idlib province that the Syrian government attack may have been a conventional bombing that exploded stored weapons in the possession of the Syrian rebels, which may have included chemical weapons.
Trump did not seek and obtain Congressional authorization for his act of war in attacking a Syrian Air Force base. Thus, the attack was illegal under US law. It is not the president’s prerogative to initiate attacks against sovereign nations without Congressional authorization. By acting without such Congressional authorization, Trump has placed himself and the presidency above the rule of law.
Trump did not seek and obtain authorization for his attack against Syria from the United Nations Security Council, as is required under international law. By failing to do so the US has put itself outside the boundaries of the UN Charter, which is also a part of US law, as well as other international law to which the US is bound.
Trump has further undermined US relations with Russia, and has harmed the chances of the US and Russia working cooperatively in resolving the Syrian conflict. Increased tensions between the US and Russia in Syria make conflict between these two nuclear powers more likely.
Trump has demonstrated to the world that in matters of war, as with tweeting, he is impulsive, shoots from the hip and is not constrained by US or international law. These characteristics are not generally accepted by other world leaders as being preferred qualities in a US president.
Trump’s impulsivity in ordering the attack sets a dangerous standard for someone in charge of the US nuclear arsenal. It demonstrates the extreme dangers of allowing a single individual to exercise control over a country’s nuclear arsenal.
Despite the illegality and inherent dangers of his military response, Trump seems to be getting a favorable response from the US media. Nearly all US mainstream media seems to have accepted the assumption that Assad was foolish enough to have launched a chemical attack, and have not questioned Assad’s responsibility for the chemical attack. It appears that neither the US government nor media have conducted a thorough investigation of responsibility for the chemical attack, which should have been done prior to a military response.
Referring to Trump’s ordering the missile strikes against Syria the evening before, a fawning Fareed Zakaria stated, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night. I think this was actually a big moment.” Given Trump’s narcissism, this is the kind of positive response that is likely to keep him returning to impulsive and illegal uses of military force.
For his violations of US and international law in attacking Syria with 59 cruise missiles, it is highly likely that Trump will also be rewarded by the American people with an upward bump in his current ground-level job-approval rating. Too many Americans tend to like their presidents to be fast on the draw and follow the pattern of Ready, Fire, Aim.
David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).
MOSCOW – The White House is forced to make unfounded accusations against Russia because of pressure from US President Donald Trump’s opponents, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday.
“The negotiations with Tillerson were not useless. They, in my opinion, helped the US administration better understand our position. This, in turn, is important for them to formulate their approaches to the issues on which Russia and the US can cooperate productively,” Lavrov told reporters.
“There is not a single fact, although under pressure from Trump’s opponents, the White House is forced to periodically make certain statements with unfounded accusations against us,” Lavrov said at a briefing with his counterpart from Bangladesh, Abul Hassan Mahmood.
On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov emerged from a closed-door summit in the Kremlin to discuss their two-hour meeting with President Vladimir Putin. While the two sides agreed that they “understand each other better,” Moscow and Washington have distinctly different perspectives on what should take place in Syria, specifically as it pertains to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s claims to power.
Russia and the United States will embark on the practical formation of generally agreed dialogue mechanisms, he said.
“These agreements have been reached in principle, we will now probably start the practical formation of these dialogue mechanisms,” Lavrov told a briefing.
Addressing two-hour talks between Putin and Tillerson, Lavrov said “the results will probably not be soon.”
“But at least in operational terms, we agreed to establish dialogue on a number of issues,” Lavrov said.
These include, he said, “an inventory of the problems created by the previous administration in bilateral relations,” mechanisms for the implementation of existing military and political agreements, as well as mechanisms to narrow differences on regional crises, including in Syria.
An anonymous senior US official told CNN that, while the US allegedly has proof that Damascus is responsible for the chemical incident in Idlib, Syria, it has uncovered no such evidence implicating Moscow, because Russia is wilier in scrambling its communications.
The anonymous official reportedly told the American news channel that the US intelligence community had intercepted communications “featuring Syrian military and chemical experts talking about preparations for the sarin attack in Idlib last week.” While the source failed to provide any concrete details about the alleged communication – such as when it was intercepted or what names or other information it contained – they did note that the US “did not know prior to the attack it was going to happen.”
CNN speculated that the communication had been sent prior to the incident, but was not processed until the US began investigating it.
The source added that “there are no intelligence intercepts that have been found directly confirming that Russian military or intelligence officials communicated about the attack,” but noted “the likelihood is the Russians are more careful in their communications to avoid being intercepted.”
The most specific proof the source could come up with was his observation that Russia has a surveillance drone, which he claimed “flew over the hospital that was treating people injured in the attack.”
CNN suggested that even if the US had evidence of Russia’s involvement, it might not go public with it, as “the US feels right now that it has made the case that Russian support for [Syrian President Bashar] Assad must end.”
The report is the latest in a long series based on anonymous sources – with undisclosed agendas citing vague evidence which is never submitted to public scrutiny – that the mainstream media has deployed to level accusations against Russia. The story that Russia allegedly meddled in the US election has become a dominant narrative for opponents of Donald Trump, who are still trying to explain his surprise victory.
The major media outlets’ eagerness to blame Russia for everything occasionally leads to embarrassment, however. A fairly spectacular example came in January, when the Washington Post was forced to backtrack on a story that falsely claimed Russia had hacked into Vermont’s power grid. The newspaper also sparked outrage in December by touting a list of “Russian propaganda” websites, which turned out to include many respected independent media sources.
The alarming trend is not limited to the US media, however. Last year, the Guardianfailed to accurately report on an Italian newspaper’s interview with Julian Assange. The British newspaper falsely painted WikiLeaks’ founder as a Trump supporter who would not criticize Moscow because he was presumably in league with the Russian government.
Some examples go back years. In 2014, the New York Times published photos of armed men, claiming that they were Russian troops on a clandestine mission in Ukraine. The newspaper had taken the images from the US State Department, and both had failed to properly verify them.
After making the provocative and dangerous charge that Russia is covering up Syria’s use of chemical weapons, the Trump administration withheld key evidence to support its core charge that a Syrian warplane dropped sarin on a northern Syrian town on April 4.
A four-page white paper, prepared by President Trump’s National Security Council staff and released by the White House on Tuesday, claimed that U.S. intelligence has proof that the plane carrying the sarin gas left from the Syrian military airfield that Trump ordered hit by Tomahawk missiles on April 6.
The paper asserted that “we have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence,” but then added that “we cannot publicly release all available intelligence on this attack due to the need to protect sources and methods.”
I’m told that the key evidence was satellite surveillance of the area, a body of material that U.S. intelligence analysts were reviewing late last week even after the Trump-ordered bombardment of 59 Tomahawk missiles that, according to Syrian media reports, killed seven or eight Syrian soldiers and nine civilians, including four children.
Yet, it is unclear why releasing these overhead videos would be so detrimental to “sources and methods” since everyone knows the U.S. has this capability and the issue at hand – if it gets further out of hand – could lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
In similarly tense situations in the past, U.S. Presidents have released sensitive intelligence to buttress U.S. government assertions, including John F. Kennedy’s disclosure of U-2 spy flights in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and Ronald Reagan revealing electronic intercepts after the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983.
Yet, in this current case, as U.S.-Russian relations spiral downward into what is potentially an extermination event for the human species, Trump’s White House insists that the world must trust it despite its record of consistently misstating facts.
In the case of the April 4 chemical-weapons incident in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which reportedly killed scores of people including young children, I was told that initially the U.S. analysts couldn’t see any warplanes over the area in Idlib province at the suspected time of the poison gas attack but later they detected a drone that they thought might have delivered the bomb.
A Drone Mystery
According to a source, the analysts struggled to identify whose drone it was and where it originated. Despite some technical difficulties in tracing its flight path, analysts eventually came to believe that the flight was launched in Jordan from a Saudi-Israeli special operations base for supporting Syrian rebels, the source said, adding that the suspected reason for the poison gas was to create an incident that would reverse the Trump administration’s announcement in late March that it was no longer seeking the removal of President Bashar al-Assad.
If indeed that was the motive — and if the source’s information is correct — the operation would have been successful, since the Trump administration has now reversed itself and is pressing Russia to join in ousting Assad who is getting blamed for the latest chemical-weapons incident.
Presumably, however, the “geospatial intelligence” cited in the four-page dossier could disprove this and other contentions if the Trump administration would only make its evidence publicly available.
The dossier stated, “Our information indicates that the chemical agent was delivered by regime Su-22 fixed-wing aircraft that took off from the regime-controlled Shayrat Airfield. These aircraft were in the vicinity of Khan Shaykhun approximately 20 minutes before reports of the chemical attack began and vacated the area shortly after the attack.”
So, that would mean – assuming that the dossier is correct – that U.S. intelligence analysts were able to trace the delivery of the poison gas to Assad’s aircraft and to the airfield that Trump ordered attacked on April 6.
Still, it remains a mystery why this intelligence assessment is not coming directly from President Trump’s intelligence chiefs as is normally the case, either with an official Intelligence Estimate or a report issued by the Director of National Intelligence.
The White House photo released late last week showing the President and a dozen senior advisers monitoring the April 6 missile strike from a room at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida was noteworthy in that neither CIA Director Mike Pompeo nor Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was in the frame.
Now, it is the White House that has released the four-page dossier supposedly summing up the assessment of the “intelligence community.”
An Argumentative Dossier
The dossier also seems argumentative in that it assumes that Russian officials – and presumably others – who have suggested different possible explanations for the incident at Khan Sheikdoun did so in a willful cover-up, when any normal investigation seeks to evaluate different scenarios before settling on one.
It is common amid the “fog of war” for people outside the line of command – and even sometimes inside the line of command – to not understand what happened and to struggle for an explanation.
On April 6, before Trump’s missile strike, I and others received word from U.S. military intelligence officials in the Middle East that they, too, shared the belief that the poison gas may have resulted from a conventional bombing raid that ruptured containers stored by the rebels, who – in Idlib province – are dominated by Al Qaeda’s affiliate and its allies.
Those reports were cited by former U.S. intelligence officials, including more than two dozen who produced a memo to President Trump urging him to undertake a careful investigation of the incident before letting this crisis exacerbate U.S.-Russia relations.
The memo said “our U.S. Army contacts in the area” were disputing the official story of a chemical weapons attack. “Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died,” the memo said.
In other words, to suggest possible alternative scenarios is not evidence of a “cover-up,” even if the theories are later shown to be erroneous. It is the normal process of sorting through often conflicting initial reports.
Even in the four-page dossier, Trump’s NSC officials contradicted what other U.S. government sources have told The New York Times and other mainstream news outlets about the Syrian government’s supposed motive for launching the chemical-weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun.
According to the earlier accounts, the Syrian government either was trying to terrorize the population in a remote rebel-controlled area or was celebrating its impunity after the Trump administration had announced that it was no longer seeking Assad’s removal.
But the dossier said, “We assess that Damascus launched this chemical attack in response to an opposition offensive in northern Hamah Province that threatened key infrastructure.” Although Khan Sheikhoun was not near the fighting, the dossier presented the town as an area of support for the offensive.
Assuming this assessment is correct, does that mean that the earlier explanations were part of a cover-up or a propaganda operation? The reality is that in such complex situations, the analyses should continue to be refined as more information becomes available. It should not be assumed that every false lead or discarded theory is proof of a “cover-up,” yet that is what we see here.
“The Syrian regime and its primary backer, Russia, have sought to confuse the world community about who is responsible for using chemical weapons against the Syrian people in this and earlier attacks,” the dossier declared.
But the larger point is that – given President Trump’s spotty record for getting facts straight – he and his administration should go the extra mile in presenting irrefutable evidence to support its assessments, not simply insisting that the world must “trust us.”
[In a separate analysis of the four-page dossier, Theodore Postol, a national security specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded that the White House claims were clearly bogus, writing:
“I have reviewed the document carefully, and I believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria at roughly 6 to 7 a.m. on April 4, 2017.
“In fact, a main piece of evidence that is cited in the document points to an attack that was executed by individuals on the ground, not from an aircraft, on the morning of April 4. This conclusion is based on an assumption made by the White House when it cited the source of the sarin release and the photographs of that source. My own assessment, is that the source was very likely tampered with or staged, so no serious conclusion could be made from the photographs cited by the White House.”]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
After several months of pushing the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory – a wild-eyed, all-encompassing but somewhat nebulous narrative involving U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks, the Russian mob, assassinations and certain indiscretions with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel – the U.S. mainstream media is now reverting to its traditional role of downplaying conspiracy theories, particularly those raising questions about the intelligence surrounding the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria last week.
On Monday, the New York Timespublished an article titled “Syria Conspiracy Theories Flourish, at Both Ends of the Spectrum,” which lamented the fact that websites on the left and the right have raised doubts about the casus belli for U.S. military action against Syria.
Noting that some alternative news sites have called the chemical attack a “false flag” operation and others have raised the question of whether Trump’s military action was a “wag the dog” diversion tactic, the Times pointedly attempts to “debunk” the internet memes that have been raising doubts about the chemical attack or calling into question the justification for the U.S. military action.
With an aggressiveness not seen at all when it comes to the unsubstantiated “Russian election-hacking” allegations, the Times fires back forcefully on matters such as whether President Bashar al-Assad had reason to use chemical weapons in the first place or whether anti-Assad forces may have had advance knowledge of the sarin attack. The Times article uses curt, all-caps responses to rebut these claims, such as flatly stating, “FALSE,” “NO EVIDENCE,” or “MISLEADING.”
The Times, for example, points out that Information Clearing House has argued that Assad lacked an obvious tactical or strategic reason to use chemical weapons, and therefore the attack may have actually been carried out by one of the terrorist groups operating in Syria such as Al-Nusra Front. As the Times responds, however, “THIS IS MISLEADING.”
Floating a few reasons that Assad’s forces might have conceivably been motivated to conduct a chemical attack, the Times argues that the attack was “consistent with Mr. Assad’s calculated strategy of attempting to drive out the civilian population in rebel strongholds through bombing neighborhoods and civilian targets.” The Syrian leader may have also “felt emboldened” by perceived shifts in U.S. foreign policies and priorities under Trump, the Times speculates.
Of course, this is simply guesswork on the part of the Times, which is not presenting any facts to counter doubts over the official story, but just responding to the doubts with more conjecture. The Times also seems to be cherry-picking some of the more easily “debunked” stories surrounding the Syria case, failing to address legitimate concerns over the lack of proof of Assad’s culpability. These include doubts raised by the former British ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, who told BBC Radio last week that there is “no proof that the cause of the explosion was what they said it was.”
It would not make sense for Assad to launch such an attack, Ford said, claiming that it would be “totally self-defeating.” He also objected to the veracity of claims made by eyewitnesses who claimed that they saw chemical bombs dropping from the air. “Well, you cannot see chemical weapons dropping from the air,” he said. “Such testimony is worthless.”
There are also serious doubts as to whether Syria even possesses the chemical weapons in question, with the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons noting that since 2013, “all of the chemical weapons declared by Syria were removed and destroyed outside of Syrian territory.”
While some governments have claimed that Syria’s declaration about its chemical weapons program may have been incomplete, the OPCW stresses that it has adapted itself “in unprecedented ways” in efforts “to remove, transport and destroy Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile in the midst of an active conflict zone.”
With this in mind, Sacha Llorenti, the Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, last Friday blasted the United States for unilaterally attacking Syria, saying that it recalls the decision 14 years earlier to attack Iraq based on equally questionable intelligence. It is “vital to remember what history teaches us,” Llorenti said, citing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and holding up a photo of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell delivering false testimony to the UN Security Council on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
“Whereas an investigation would have allowed us to establish in an objective manner who is responsible for the [chemical] attacks [in Syria], this is an extreme, extreme violation of international law,” he said.
In addition to the doubts that have been raised at the United Nations, a number of the U.S.’s closest G7 allies have refused to implement additional sanctions against Syria without proof of Assad’s guilt.
As the BBC reported on Tuesday, “Sanctions against Russian and Syria will not be put in place until after an investigation into last week’s apparent chemical attack, British government sources said. Members of the G7 group of leading industrialised nations agreed to delay implementing sanctions until there was ‘hard and irrefutable evidence’ over the alleged chemical attack.”
Yet the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. outlets continue to report as undisputed fact that Assad’s government intentionally carried out this attack, and furthermore, that Moscow knew about it in advance.
The sorts of unequivocal retorts that the NYT uses against journalists and bloggers for raising doubts about the official stories could, of course, just as easily be applied to the official stories themselves. When the Associated Press, for example, reported on Tuesday that “The United States has made a preliminary conclusion that Russia knew in advance of Syria’s chemical weapons attack last week,” the Times could have responded with an emphatic all-caps retort such as “NO EVIDENCE.”
These retorts could also be used against the accusations of the Russian government engaging in a convoluted conspiracy to undermine Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s electoral chances by hacking John Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails in order to expose the Democratic establishment’s undermining of Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign while simultaneously “elevating” Trump’s candidacy in the media through the so-called “pied piper” strategy, with the evil geniuses of the Kremlin somehow knowing beyond a doubt that this information would sway voters in favor of voting for the least popular major-party nominee in a generation.
Just as the NYT has denounced theories surrounding the Syria chemical attack as lacking evidence, so too could the entire Russiagate narrative be picked apart as lacking any foundation in fact. All that one needs to do is actually read the U.S. intelligence assessment that dubiously concluded that Russia “interfered” in the election without offering anything approaching hard proof of this claim – spending seven full pages instead bashing the Russian network RT for its perceived biases.
Going through the Director of National Intelligence report from last January, the reader is left with few details as to how the extraordinary conclusion was reached that Russia “hacked” the election, which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others have called an “act of war.”
The closest thing to evidence that could be found in the DNI report was regarding so-called Russian fingerprints on the hacking attacks of Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails, including malware associated with Russian hackers, as well as some Cyrillic letters and the phrase “Felix Edmundovich,” a reference to the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police.
However, as revealed in subsequent WikiLeaks’ disclosures of the so-called Vault 7 documents, the CIA has developed numerous tools, including a library of foreign malware, that can be used to falsely implicate a foreign intelligence service in a cyber-attack. These revelations called into question the entire basis for Washington’s case against Moscow for allegedly interfering in the U.S. election, but besides a few articles in the alternative press, including at Consortium News, the revelations received scant attention.
Apparently, the disclosures of CIA hacking activities – including new revelations of the CIA deploying malware in Samsung televisions as covert listening devices to spy on unwitting Americans – were not the sort of conspiracy theory considered worthy of sustained media coverage in the United States. In contrast to the months of wall-to-wall coverage of Russiagate, the Vault 7 leaks were largely treated as a one-day story by the mainstream press.
The disparity in coverage speaks to a longstanding aversion of the mainstream media to what it considers illegitimate “new media” encroaching on its territory and peddling conspiracy theories and what is today called “fake news.” This hostility can be traced to the earliest days of the internet.
Twenty years ago, responding to a proliferation of alternative news sites on the World Wide Web – or what was called back then the “information superhighway” – Newsweek magazine ran a 1,800-word article entitled “Conspiracy Mania Feeds Our Growing National Paranoia.” In the piece, Newsweek denounced what it called “conspiracy freaks.”
Explaining a growing acceptance of conspiracy theories as evidence of “mass psychosis,” the article warned that the “ranks of the darkly deluded may be growing” as “conspiracism has become a kind of para-religion.” It took particular aim at the African-American community, which it described as “a hotbed of this kind of suspicion and mistrust,” for believing that “the CIA had spread the crack epidemic by backing Nicaraguan drug dealers whose profits went to the contras.”
Newsweek also criticized Oliver Stone, director of “Platoon” and “JFK,” and Chris Carter, the creator of the popular “X-Files” television series, for promoting dangerous ideas that had the effect of eroding trust in the government. “On ‘The X-Files,’ everything from who killed JFK to why the Buffalo Bills lose so many Super Bowls is traceable to a single master plan,” Newsweek sneered.
Of course, Newsweek wasn’t alone in scoffing at popular conspiracy theories in the ‘90s. In fact, it was conventional wisdom among “respectable” media that government leaders simply do not cross certain lines, and that certain stories, for example, regarding CIA involvement in the cocaine trade – no matter howmuchevidencebackedthemup – were off-limits. Those who failed to get on board with this groupthink, for example Gary Webb who wrote a widely disseminated series for the San Jose Mercury News about the CIA-crack cocaine connection, had their careers destroyed.
This trend continued into the 2000s, with millions of angry Americans still seething over the stolen election in 2000 told to “get over it,” and then called crazy for doubting the basis for George W. Bush’s case for invading Iraq in 2003.
A couple years later, those who raised questions about the government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina were accused by the Washington Post of “racial paranoia” and hawking “conspiracy theories,” such as the widespread belief that New Orleans’ levees may have been intentionally blown up to protect rich neighborhoods at the expense of poorer ones, or to drive low-income African Americans out of town.
But skip ahead a decade, and oddly, this same media that historically has been so hostile to conspiracy theories was seen eagerly pushing conspiracy theories surrounding Clinton’s loss to Trump. Headlines of “Russian election hacking” were freely used by the Washington Post, CNN and the New York Times, despite the fact that there is zero evidence that Russia manipulated any voting machines in any state to alter the outcome of the election, or even any substantial proof offered to support the claims that the Kremlin attempted to influence voters’ decisions by exposing private emails between DNC officials.
Nevertheless, the Democrats and the media have coalesced around the conventional wisdom that the election was lost due to a Russian plot, which conveniently absolves the national Democratic Party of any responsibility for losing the election – for example by writing off the white working class vote or nominating a deeply flawed establishment candidate during a decidedly anti-establishment year – while simultaneously calling into question the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency.
It also feeds into the rallying cry that the Democrats have embraced since losing the election, which has been variations of the theme “This is not normal,” expressed by the hashtag #NotNormal on social media. This theme laments the loss of a more “normal” time, presumably personified by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.
Typically, the slogan refers to Trump’s controversial dealings with Russia, his unconventional communication style and his extensively documented conflicts of interests, as well as perceived misogyny, nepotism, racism and incompetence in his administration.
Clearly, there is very little that can be considered “normal” about this administration, including the strange role of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who has moved into the White House while the First Lady, Melania Trump, lives in New York. The First Daughter reportedly was instrumental in convincing the President to carry out the unilateral attack on Syria. “Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said: ‘Listen, this is horrible stuff,’” Ivanka’s brother Eric Trump told the Telegraph.
While that is certainly not normal, what the Democrats and the media are revealing through their #NotNormal campaign and the official conspiracy theories that they are promoting – while downplaying other theories or doubts about government claims – is how much they actually consider “normal.”
In today’s America, what is normal, according to the bipartisan consensus, are unilateral strikes against countries without evidence and in violation of international law. It is also apparently normal for televisions to spy on law-abiding citizens, and with drone strikes shooting up 432% under the Trump presidency so far, it is apparently quite normal to use flying robots to bomb suspected terrorists (and their eight-year old daughters) half-way around the world. Indefinite detention at the legal black hole of Guantanamo is also rather normal.
After all, these are all policies that have been in place for a decade and a half under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and hope seems to be dwindling for returning to a period of actual normalcy.
A professor who challenged the 2013 claims of a chemical attack in Syria is now questioning the Trump administration’s narrative blaming the Assad government for the April 4 attack in the Idlib province town of Khan Shaykhun.
On Tuesday, the White House released a declassified intelligence brief accusing Syrian President Bashar Assad of ordering and organizing the attack, in which Syrian planes allegedly dropped chemical ordnance on civilians in the rebel-held town.
The report “contains absolutely no evidence that this attack was the result of a munition being dropped from an aircraft,” wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Theodore Postol, who reviewed it and put together a 14-page assessment, which he provided to RT on Wednesday.
“I believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun,” wrote Postol.
A chemical attack with a nerve agent did occur, he said, but the available evidence does not support the US government’s conclusions.
“I have only had a few hours to quickly review the alleged White House intelligence report. But a quick perusal shows without a lot of analysis that this report cannot be correct,” Postol wrote.
It is “very clear who planned this attack, who authorized this attack and who conducted this attack itself,” Defense Secretary James Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday.
Earlier in the day, White House spokesman Sean Spicer also said that doubting the evidence would be “doubting the entire international reporting crew documenting this.”
The report offered by the White House, however, cited “a wide body of open-source material” and “social media accounts” from the rebel-held area, including footage provided by the White Helmets rescue group documented to have ties with jihadist rebels, Western and Gulf Arab governments.
Postol was not convinced by such evidence.
“Any competent analyst would have had questions about whether the debris in the crater was staged or real,” he wrote. “No competent analyst would miss the fact that the alleged sarin canister was forcefully crushed from above, rather than exploded by a munition within it.”
Instead, “the most plausible conclusion is that the sarin was dispensed by an improvised dispersal device made from a 122mm section of rocket tube filled with sarin and capped on both sides.”
“We again have a situation where the White House has issued an obviously false, misleading and amateurish intelligence report,” he concluded, recalling the 2013 situation when the Obama administration claimed Assad had used chemical weapons against the rebels in Ghouta, near Damascus.
“What the country is now being told by the White House cannot be true,” Postol wrote, “and the fact that this information has been provided in this format raises the most serious questions about the handling of our national security.”
In 2016 Donald Trump turned the political world upside down, and not just because his victory prevailed against conventional wisdom. Trump claimed to want a new direction in foreign policy. Gone would be the trade deals that sent American workers on a race to an endless bottom. He said that he wanted a new relationship with Russia and felt that the two countries might become partners in a war against terrorism. This terrorism resulted from the United States reliance on jihadists in order to effect regime change. While Hillary Clinton was an openly provocative war hawk, Trump gave an impression of wanting change.
But his attack on a Syrian airfield shows adherence to the worst of United States foreign policy tradition. In less than one week the Trump administration went from saying that “Assad’s fate will be decided by the Syrian people,” and “Our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out” to parroting Obama’s mantra that “Assad must go.” Vladimir Putin had already dispensed with calling the United States “our American partners.” He suspended Russia’s participation in an air safety agreement between the two countries. The likelihood of unintended consequence is now higher.
Trump was accused of being under Russian influence throughout the campaign and after his inauguration. Democrats used the charge to divert attention from their electoral failures, weaken the new president and force him to join the war party. They were determined to maintain foreign policy continuity and crush any nation that insisted on exercising sovereignty in the face of American attempts at full hegemony. They were also determined to crush Trump if he didn’t go along with their plans for a new American century.
The attack on the new president was unprecedented. After less than three months in office he was threatened with a severely damaged administration or impeachment. The Democrat’s vitriol had nothing to do with judicial appointments, deregulation of environmental protections or civil rights retreats back to the days of Jim Crow segregation. None of the issues which concern their base of supporters are the cause of their opposition. The fight was all about his willingness to carry on the drive for imperialism and the attempt to bring about regime change in Syria and in Russia too.
Years of demonizing Russia and president Vladimir Putin have had the desired impact. Democrats began by invoking the language of right wing discourse and endlessly repeated assertions of intelligence agencies. They are now praising him for bringing the world to the brink. Only one Democratic member of congress, Tulsi Gabbard, has dared to question the veracity of claims that the Syrian government used chemical weapons. The rest either heartily commend Trump or waffle by asking whether he should have asked for permission that they would surely have given.
The anti-war movement is weak, nearly killed off by the marketing that made Barack Obama look like a peace candidate. The U.S. Navy heads to Korea to threaten the DPRK which correctly points out that America’s aggressions force them to seek nuclear capability as a means of self-defense.
Syria is a living hell for millions of people because Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton wanted another notch on their regime change guns. Refugees flee from Libya and Syria because of their state sponsored terrorism. Trump is now making good on what his predecessors thought they could get away with easily when they began their plot in 2011.
In attacking Syria Trump upped the ante, bringing the world closer to war than even Obama did, and Democrats are praising him for it. The New York Times and the Washington Post both repeat lies about Assad and Putin and laud the man they disregarded just two weeks ago.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both support his actions in Syria. Sanders says, “We must get rid of Assad.” He proves himself to be a phony progressive, supporting the empire while claiming there is some difference between himself and his once and future rival.
Trump is still bringing out all of the contradictions in America at this stage of disintegration and crisis. He is certainly no match for the neo-cons, who had no intention of moving backwards from their Obama glory days. Republicans like Lindsay Graham and John McCain talk of “boots on the ground” and corporate media talking head Brian Williams says that deadly bombs are “beautiful.”
And what of the resistance? The pink pussy hat wearers and their ilk? They too approve of an American hegemon willing to kill at the first sign of a propaganda lie. They aren’t resisting anything at all. Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau have backed Trump too. If we didn’t know before, we now know who the imperialists are in this country and around the world.
The peace movement has an uphill climb. The demonization of Russia and Syria and the skillful manipulation of public opinion will make the work difficult. But someone must be willing to resist Trump and the Democrats too. Hillary Clinton was a threat to world peace but her electoral defeat did not mean the end of neocon dreams perpetrated by Democrats, Republicans and the corporate media.
The struggle is always the same. Presidents may be Democrats or Republicans. They may say they want to change foreign policy. But bloodshed persists. The fights against it must be equally relentless.
Margaret Kimberley can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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