There’s an awful lot about the poison gas attack that doesn’t add up for the casual observer.
It was only a week ago that the US enunciated a new policy that we would be content for Bashar al Assad to remain in power presiding over the Syrian government — after years of grousing and threats against him. Apparently Trump Central had concluded that Assad was a better alternative than another failed state in the Middle East with no government at all.
Trusting that you’re not additionally confused by all this, why would Assad choose this moment — only days after the US granted him a pass on remaining in power — to do the one thing guaranteed to bring the wrath of the US down him, namely, kill a lot of civilians, including women and children, with poison gas?
Either Assad is inconceivably stupid or possibly the gas attack is not exactly what happened.
Russia has claimed that Assad’s air force attempted to bomb a “rebel” (al Qaeda? Al Nusra? Isis?) ammunition depot that apparently contained supplies of Sarin nerve gas. Neither the US government or the American media has presented any arguments to counter that hypothesis. The New York Times banged the war drum as loudly as possible in the days after the incident. And now, of course, Trump Central has fired $60 million worth of cruise missiles at Assad’s main air force base. Assad’s spokesmen denied responsibility for the attack and the Russians are still asking for conclusive evidence via the UN Security Council.
The current incident appears to be — or was engineered to be — a replay of the August 2013 gas incident that left President Barack Obama looking weak and indecisive for not carrying out retaliation against Assad “crossing a line in the sand” against human decency.
The outstanding question remains: what might have possibly motivated Bashar al Assad to turn upside down a situation of great advantage to himself mere days after he achieved it? It will be interesting to see if a credible response emerges from the hall of mirrors that US policy has become.
President Trump earned neocon applause for his hasty decision to attack Syria and kill about a dozen Syrians, but his rash act has all the earmarks of a “wag the dog” moment.
Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.
Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.
There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.
But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.
One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.
Alarm within the U.S. intelligence community about Trump’s hasty decision to attack Syria reverberated from the Middle East back to Washington, where former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reported hearing from his intelligence contacts in the field that they were shocked at how the new poison-gas story was being distorted by Trump and the mainstream U.S. news media.
Giraldi told Scott Horton’s Webcast: “I’m hearing from sources on the ground in the Middle East, people who are intimately familiar with the intelligence that is available who are saying that the essential narrative that we’re all hearing about the Syrian government or the Russians using chemical weapons on innocent civilians is a sham.”
Giraldi said his sources were more in line with an analysis postulating an accidental release of the poison gas after an Al Qaeda arms depot was hit by a Russian airstrike.
“The intelligence confirms pretty much the account that the Russians have been giving … which is that they hit a warehouse where the rebels – now these are rebels that are, of course, connected with Al Qaeda – where the rebels were storing chemicals of their own and it basically caused an explosion that resulted in the casualties. Apparently the intelligence on this is very clear.”
The mainstream U.S. media has presented the current crisis with the same profound neocon bias that has infected the coverage of Syria and the larger Middle East for decades. For instance, The New York Times on Friday published a lead story by Michael R. Gordon and Michael D. Shear that treated the Syrian government’s responsibility for the poison-gas incident as flat-fact. The lengthy story did not even deign to include the denials from Syria and Russia that they were responsible for any intentional deployment of poison gas.
Today, because Trump and his administration are now committed to convincing Americans that Assad really was responsible for Tuesday’s poison-gas tragedy, the prospects for a full and open investigation are effectively ended. We may never know if there is truth to those allegations or whether we are being manipulated by another “wag the dog” psyop.
Atop CNN.com presently is a headline with which readers will actually agree – Many Trump Backers Scratching Their Heads [following Thursday’s airstrikes in Syria]. The article opens:
While much of the world is applauding President Donald Trump’s decision to strike a Syrian airbase in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack against civilians, right-wing populist supporters at home and abroad are criticizing the move and distancing themselves from him.
The official narrative is that President Assad is responsible for the chemical attack (and now the Fake News Media are asking what role Russia played in the atrocity). On the face of it this claim seems rather dubious.
The first thing that smacks of propaganda is the rush to judgement in the media and the establishment. Much like on 9/11, when the masses were told almost immediately that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the media instantly pronounced that President Assad was the party responsible for the use of chemical weapons.
No investigation. No forensics. No proceedings. Just Assad is a barbarian – see look! Suffering, dying, and dead children.
Last night InfoWars.com re-visited the propaganda that was used to sell the first Gulf War and drew parallels to today’s establishment push to go to war with Syria and Russia:
The April 5th Ron Paul Liberty Report records former Texas Senator and Presidential Candidate Ron Paul stating that there ‘is zero chance that [Assad] would have done this deliberatly’. Senator Paul asks cui bono (who benefits?) as the video graphic overlay reads: Assad’s doing or false flag?
What is so incredible that only a few short years ago the American establishment and the globalist tried – and ultimately failed – to pin a previous chemical weapons attack on Syria’s President Assad. Alex Newman of The New Americanwrites:
What we are now seeing is the neoconservative co-opting of the Trump White House. Did people really believe that POTUS would waltz into Washington and overthrow the Fed-MegaBank-Wall Street-Military-Industrial-Security Complex-Corporate Whore Media-Hollywood-Silocon Valley-phony left-right paradigm power structure in the matter of a few weeks? This author has a sneaking suspicion that Vice President Dick Cheney’s grubby fingerprints are all over this stinking mess – namely the swamp within a swamp in the Trump White House.
With the decision to bomb Syria, I have to ask, has America been fooled again? Is it an absolute that Presdients are selected not elected? Is Trump being blackmailed?
The facts are that the trust between Trump and his supporters has taken an enormous hit, and America is as close to all-out war as it has ever been with the Russians since the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Let’s start with Russia.
The words of war are coming from the Russian leadership and it is very hard to not take them seriously.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. in a terse statement, noted
“The US missile strike violated not only international, and added that the attack was on the brink of military clashes with Russia.”
On his Facebook page, Medvedev further stated:
“Instead of their much-publicized thesis about a joint fight with a common enemy, Islamic State, the Trump administration has proven that it will fiercely fight against the legal government of Syria…”
The Kremlin stated the following:
“President Putin views the U.S. strikes on Syria as aggression against a sovereign state in violation of the norms of international law and on a made-up up pretext. This step by Washington will inflict major damage on U.S.-Russia ties.”
Washington has presented “no evidence whatsoever” yet that the Shayrat airfield in Syria’s Homs Province targeted by the US after an alleged chemical attack in Idlib had any such weapons, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
“Twenty-four hours have passed since the US Navy warships launched a massive missile strike at the Shayrat airfield, and neither the Pentagon nor the State Department have provided any evidence of presence of chemical weapons at this airbase,” the ministry spokesman, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, said in a statement on Saturday.
Dozens of representatives of the media, local authorities, fire departments, police, and the Syrian military have visited the airfield since then, with no alleged “storage units” or any chemical shells having been found, he said.
“The only way to receive and present to the whole international community any objective evidence on the alleged presence of poisonous substances at Shayrat is to send a mission of professional experts there,” the defense ministry statement said.
All the people who have worked at or visited the airfield “do not wear gas masks and are feeling pretty normal,” Konashenkov said, adding that “any specialist from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) knows that traces of chemical agents cannot be hidden for months and years” if they were stored somewhere.
“So here comes the question: what and by who has yet again been presented to the new US president as ‘proof’ of existence of chemical weapons in the state which is out of Washington’s favor?” the military official said, reminding of then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s white powder vial at the UN and other allegations of the chemical weapons “threat” in Iraq.
Special equipment to collect samples for further scientific analysis should be used at the airfield, the defense ministry said, adding that Russia has already undertaken similar procedures in Aleppo, Syria where it said chemical weapons had been used by militants.
Sigh...President Trump is not a "neocon" for goodness sake. Did anyone listen to his speech after the strike?
ReplyDelete"Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children," Trump said from Mar-a-Lago, Fla. "Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror."
The Pentagon for example, wanted him to hit more than one Syrian airbase, and he didnt. Just one, that they factually tracked the Syrian aircraft back to. The proof is in, folks who have a tendency to not believe facts, wont believe them anyway. The attack on Syria was not just based on U.S. Intel, but many other Intel Agencies in the region. You can guarantee Israel was one of them.
Catherine Herridge's report at the 7:17 mark says it all when she was on Bill O
https://www.billoreilly.com/show?action=viewTVShow&showID=4414
"On Thursday, the Department of Defense released a map showing what it said was the specific flight pattern of the aircraft believed to have been used in the attack. Speaking to reporters, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said officials "have a very high level of confidence that the attacks were carried out by aircraft under the direction of the Bashar al-Assad regime."
The map shows that, over the course of a nine-minute period, what are believed to be Syrian government jets made two separate trips to and from the airbase that was eventually targeted by U.S. missiles. Those trips were apparently being monitored by U.S. radar systems at the time, and shortly after there were reports that people in the area were suffering symptoms consistent with exposure to chemical weapons."
"The Turkish ministry of health says the preliminary results show the use of sarin gas. Sarin is a colorless, odorless liquid and is highly volatile moving easily from liquid to a gas, that unlike chlorine which the Assad government has used on a regular basis, does not dissipate quickly. This explains the high number of fatalities. The victims in Syria and Turkey show all the hallmarks of a sarin attack – including twitching, jerking and foaming at the mouth."
"Pentagon officials said that during the counter-strike, they had to take care not to accidentally hit what they identified as a cache of weaponized sarin stored at the Syrian air base.
ReplyDeleteUS defense and intelligence officials are investigating whether the Russian military – which operates out of the facility – were complicit in Tuesday’s event, after discovering that a Russian drone struck a hospital treating victims of the initial attack. Washington believes the hospital strike might have been an attempt to cover up evidence of Assad’s use of chemical weapons."
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/World-leaders-praise-strike-on-Syria-as-US-braces-for-Russian-response-486520