Here We Go Again: Another Syria Chemical Weapons Tale

MORE WAR PORN TO PUSH FOR US ATTACK ON SYRIA

It is hard not to be completely distracted by the endless torrent of war propaganda over Ukraine and getting Americans whipped up into a bloody frenzy of hatred towards Russia and Vladimir Putin but there is another lurid tale of Syrian gas attacks on civilians making the rounds this week. While it is nowhere near as intense an effort to promote lies upon which to base the long-desired apple of the neocon's eye that is regime change in Damascus as we saw back last summer when Obama and his incredible shrinking Secretary of State John Kerry were trying to close the deal for yet another regime change in the Middle East.

There aren't those war porn videos of the poor children who were allegedly the victims of the use of chemical weapons by the "New Hitler" of the week Bashar al-Assad on civilians that the missing airplane network CNN looped over and over again in excruciating detail. The sheer cynicism of the Obama regime, one that has always been built upon a foundation of horseshit was laid bare for all to see before Putin saved the day, an act that was a terminal blow to the embedded neoconservatives and according to journalist Robert Parry over at the great Consortium News may have been - along with the desire to sink the P5+1 Iran talks - the impetus for the unfolding debacle in Kiev. This certainly resonates with the sort of tactics that the Leo Strauss inspired Machiavellian masturbators resort to in selling their illegal wars of aggression.

Despite the US war machine having never been able to definitively prove that the Sarin used in Ghouta indeed came from Assad's government and despite the account that was too volcanic to mention in the poisoned state-corporate media in The Homeland by Seymour Hersh that writes of a potential false flag Turkish involvement the neocons are flogging the fairy tales about gas attacks anew. The latest offering from the mighty megaphones of living high on the hog US war propagandists and their NATO allies is the claim that chlorine gas has been used nine times since February. According to a story in The Guardian (also with an image of suffering children as a sales tactic):

The global body supervising the surrender of Syria's chemical weapons is to investigate fresh claims that a less dangerous – but still lethal – chlorine gas has been used in recent attacks on opposition areas.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has announced it will investigate allegations that chlorine has been used at least nine times since February, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.

The move follows intensive lobbying from the US and France who have both indicated in the past fortnight that they believe the Syrian government has been responsible for the attacks.

Note the hypocrisy in that now the neocons are throwing in with those previously mocked and detested "cheese eating surrender monkeys" in Paris whose failure to support Bush-Cheney's military misadventures resulted in much outrage back in 2003. Such stupid behavior as the US House of Representatives (as big a collection of childish assholes that exists today) to rename french fries as freedom fries and a scary proposal by Florida Republican Ginny Brown-Waite who represents the textbook example for gerrymandered districts in Florida's 5th to exhume the bodies of the American war dead who were killed during the "good war" at Normandy and returning them home for burial as a retaliatory gesture to the "ungrateful French" are now forgotten but in attention deficit America a decade may as well be eternity.

Just as forgotten as the lessons of the ruinous - although massively profitable - war in Iraq and to a lesser degree the one in Afghanistan that Obama adopted like a Portuguese water dog puppy. With everything now focused on the support of the coup regime in Ukraine and the ongoing Russia bashing don't discount the ability of the neocons to work to slide a military attack on Syria under the radar. This piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department per her byline at a website Project Syndicate is indicative of the sorty of deranged thinking that has helped to punch the ticket of this once great country towards damnation. I excerpt from the following "Stopping Russia Starts in Syria":

The solution to the crisis in Ukraine lies in part in Syria. It is time for US President Barack Obama to demonstrate that he can order the offensive use of force in circumstances other than secret drone attacks or covert operations. The result will change the strategic calculus not only in Damascus, but also in Moscow, not to mention Beijing and Tokyo.

Many argue that Obama’s climb-down from his threatened missile strikes against Syria last August emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to annex Crimea. But it is more likely that Putin acted for domestic reasons – to distract Russians’ attention from their country’s failing economy and to salve the humiliation of watching pro-European demonstrators oust the Ukrainian government he backed.

Regardless of Putin’s initial motivations, he is now operating in an environment in which he is quite certain of the parameters of play. He is weighing the value of further dismemberment of Ukraine, with some pieces either joining Russia or becoming Russian vassal states, against the pain of much stronger and more comprehensive economic sanctions. Western use of force, other than to send arms to a fairly hapless Ukrainian army, is not part of the equation.

That is a problem. In the case of Syria, the US, the world’s largest and most flexible military power, has chosen to negotiate with its hands tied behind its back for more than three years. This is no less of a mistake in the case of Russia, with a leader like Putin who measures himself and his fellow leaders in terms of crude machismo.

It is time to change Putin’s calculations, and Syria is the place to do it. Through a combination of mortars that shatter entire city quarters, starvation, hypothermia, and now barrel bombs that spray nails and shrapnel indiscriminately, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have seized the advantage. Slowly but surely, the government is reclaiming rebel-held territory.

Realist” foreign policy analysts openly describe Assad as the lesser evil compared to the Al Qaeda-affiliated members of the opposition; others see an advantage in letting all sides fight it out, tying one another down for years. Moreover, the Syrian government does appear to be slowly giving up its chemical weapons, as it agreed last September to do.

 The problem is that if Assad continues to believe that he can do anything to his people except kill them with chemicals, he will exterminate his opponents, slaughtering everyone he captures and punishing entire communities, just as his father, Hafez al-Assad, massacred the residents of Hama in 1982. He has demonstrated repeatedly that he is cut from the same ruthless cloth.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, Assad has fanned fears of what Sunni opposition forces might do to the Alawites, Druze, Christians and other minorities if they won. But we need not speculate about Assad’s behavior. We have seen enough.

 A US strike against the Syrian government now would change the entire dynamic. It would either force the regime back to the negotiating table with a genuine intention of reaching a settlement, or at least make it clear that Assad will not have a free hand in re-establishing his rule.

Jesus Christ.. Colonel Kurtz has reached the end of the river here. Ms. Slaughter (how apropos a name) is indicative of the thinking that has set this country on the road to historical damnation if not the compilation of a body count that in the end would exceed that of all of the 'great" mass murderers of history driven by an insane ideology and that it is now pretty much the conventional wisdom bodes very ill for all of the subjects of the Empire as well as humanity itself.

Explosive New Seymour Hersh Piece on Syria and Benghazi Lies

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has delivered a devastating hit on that narrowly avoided war on Syria that was sold to the public by President Barack Obama and his minions based on a pack of lies. Just as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did with their hogwash about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and Condi Rice's apocalyptic conjecture about smoking guns and mushroom clouds so was the Bashar al Assad regime's alleged sarin gas attack on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The push for another of those great Middle East military interventions in accordance with the neocon PNAC/Clean Break manifestos was a massive coordinated effort, fully assisted by the same corrupt state-corporate media that has been feverishly hyping Cold War II as well as the warmongering cowardly swine in Congress. The whole thing nearly went down too until Obama decided at the last minute to draw in the Congress as being co-owners of what would have been yet another costly foreign disaster. At that point the latest foreign policy disaster was fortunately avoided although it would have lasting repercussions with 'allies' as well as the neocons.

Hersh's piece which is published in the London Review of Books is entitled "The Red Line and the Rat Line" and among other things implicates the government of Turkey in what was a false flag attack designed to provoke the narcissistic amateur in the White House into honoring his vow to enforce his "Red Line" of chemical weapons use by the Assad government as a trigger for war. I excerpt some bits of this very long article below: 

Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

AND

The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. 

AND

Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin. Five of those arrested were freed after a brief detention. The others, including the ringleader, Haytham Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence of 25 years, were released pending trial. In the meantime the Turkish press has been rife with speculation that the Erdoğan administration has been covering up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’.

AND

In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.

 The former intelligence official said that many in the US national security establishment had long been troubled by the president’s red line: ‘The joint chiefs asked the White House, “What does red line mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?” They tasked military intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat. They learned nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’

AND

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.

This thing is incredible and in addition to what is the involvement of a NATO ally in what appears to be a false flag gassing of civilians to instigate a US war on Syria is explosive. There were many skeptics about what was obviously a cooked up excuse to bomb Syria but they were nowhere to be found in the pathetic US media the majority of which sent out the presstitutes to wave their pom poms for the military action. Just look at the incessant propagandizing of the last several months over Putin and Russia, it could be reasonably suspected that a good amount of that as well as the  neocon led crusade for a regime change in Moscow can be tied back to Putin's assistance in preventing what would be a Middle East war backed on lies and involving a false flag attack. Sound familiar?

And the brief excepts that I chose didn't even include Benghazi, the Republican chief inquisitioner Darrell Issa aka Congressman Grand Theft Auto has pissed away millions of US taxpayer money on whatever limited hangout he could use to grandstand while avoiding actually looking into the truth. Hersh's piece blows the lid off of what now appears to be a covert weapons trafficking scheme run out of the Benghazi consulate to supply the Syrian militant rebels, the "rat line" referred to in Hersh's title. While the neocons and media are relentlessly jacking each other off over Cold War II what we really appear to have is Iran-Contra II with non other than the sainted General Petraeus showing up ala Colonel Oliver North.

There will be more on this coming as the article is dissected by honest writers in the alternative media and trashed in the state-corporate press. This really and truly could lead to Obama's impeachment, the Iran-Contra cowboys nearly took down Ronald Reagan and the same thing could happen to the current so-called leader of the free world.

Obama Administration Lied About Syria Gas Attack

We almost went to war over this. In a very long piece published by the London Review of Books Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has dropped the bombshell that the Obama administration's much hyped reason for attacking the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad over the Ghouta sarin gas attacks was total bullshit. It was as phony as the lies about Saddam Hussein's yellow cake uranium, mobile chemical weapons labs, trans-Atlantic chemical weapon spewing gliders and links to 9/11. This is not surprising in the least, most wars are based on lies that can be sold to the schmucks and it was at the time one hell of a sales pitch, all of those looped videos of the poor, twitching, dying children that were aired for the maximum emotional impact. It was pure war pornography at both its finest and its worst. Let us not forget how close that we really were to the missiles flying into Damascus, a conflict that could have dragged in Russia and possibly escalated into WW III. Barry and the boys, especially Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry were ready to rumble but unfortunately were too inept to close the deal sending the petulant tantrum throwing 'allies' in Riyadh and Tel Aviv into a series of ugly snits that reverberate to this day. Regarding the Hersh story what is even less surprising than the blatant lies that were outed is the refusal of the U.S. state-corporate media to publish it, partially because of the egg on their faces for assisting in selling the Syria attack as they did the shock and awe bombardment of Baghdad but more so that they are not legitimate news outlets in the traditional sense but rather function as propaganda organs of the rogue government.

Hersh himself has been neutralized, smeared and affixed with the dreaded tin-foil hat that effectively ends one's ability to be published in establishment media. Even the New Yorker where Hersh wrote for years about the machinations of the Bush-Cheney regime including the lies to gin up more wars, torture and subversion of the Constitution has deemed him to be radioactive. Having myself followed Hersh's work for years the man is a seasoned journalist of integrity and talent who rocketed to stardom with his reporting on the My Lai atrocities during the Vietnam war and ripped away the star spangled facade of Bush-Cheney's war on terror by writing extensively on the heinous activities at Abu Ghraib prison that forever stripped the noble lie from the Iraq misadventure. With the Obama-Eric Holder war on journalism quashing any serious reportage with media personalities who can't be bought off or who in the instance of 60 Minute's now fallen star Lara Logan have agendas real reporters need to go to the foreign press to be published. Hersh likely raised more than a few hackles in Obama's gang when according to a Guardian Story he blasted the bastards with both barrels by inveighing:  “Do you think Obama’s been judged by rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention ot Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for?”.  He also dared to blaspheme the new national religion by questioning Obama's crowning achievement calling bullshit on the assassination of the bad assed bogeyman Osama bin Laden.

Already on Obama's shit list the latest from Hersh on the Ghouta gassing lies will likely not endear him to administration officials nor the bloodthirsty freaks the likes of John McCain, Mike Rogers, DiFi and Palmetto State Princess Lindsey Graham. The London Review of Books piece thoroughly disembowels the case for the Syrian attack and there should be very serious questions asked of why Obama went in front of the American people early in September and flat out lied:

My fellow Americans, tonight I want to talk to you about Syria, why it matters and where we go from here. Over the past two years, what began as a series of peaceful protests against the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad has turned into a brutal civil war. Over a hundred thousand people have been killed. Millions have fled the country. In that time, America has worked with allies to provide humanitarian support, to help the moderate opposition and to shape a political settlement.

But I have resisted calls for military action because we cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The situation profoundly changed, though, on August 21st, when Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening, men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath, a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk. On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off limits, a crime against humanity and a violation of the laws of war.

This was not always the case. In World War I, American GIs were among the many thousands killed by deadly gas in the trenches of Europe. In World War II, the Nazis used gas to inflict the horror of the Holocaust. Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them. And in 1997, the United States Senate overwhelmingly approved an international agreement prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, now joined by 189 government that represent 98 percent of humanity.

Perhaps the state-corporate media can be shamed into acknowledging Hersh's reporting but more likely they will soon mobilize for another vicious coordinated smear campaign. It will be up to the bloggers and alternative media to try to get the truth out in The Homeland. Both Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com and Marcy Wheeler at Empty Wheel have already written on the Hersh story so hopefully more will follow. It is of especial importance that the exposure of the Syrian lies get out as there is a full court press right now from fifth columnists, war freaks, propagandists, foreign governments and traitors in Congress to sabotage the deal that would prevent the third world war from erupting in Iran which would be a global cataclysm and bring about that looming collapse.