is an independent researcher and reporter whose interest in propaganda and global force dynamics arose from working as a cross-cultural intermediary for large corporations in the US film and Television industry. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists. He begins work on a Master’s Degree in American Studies in the fall.
One of the world’s leading rocket scientists, national security advisor and MIT Professor Theodore Postol, who has won awards for debunking claims about missile defense systems and has been a scientific adviser to the US Chief of Naval Operations, says today in a nine-page report that a four-page report released by the Trump administration yesterday intended to blame the recent chemical attack in Syria on the Syrian government “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”.
Postol notes the “only source the document cites as evidence that the attack was by the Syrian government is the crater” left by a munition.
Postol located the crater via satellite and examined it himself, concluding it reveals “absolutely no evidence that the crater was created by a munition designed to disperse sarin after it is dropped from an aircraft”.
The “data cited by the White House”, he says, “is more consistent with the possibility that the munition was placed on the ground rather than dropped from a plane.” He says the evidence indicates that a tube of chemical agent was placed on the ground in the al Qaeda held area and then an explosive was placed on top of that and detonated, dispersing the chemical agent.
Trump’s claim that a chemical weapon was dropped from a plane is “erroneous”, and “no competent analyst” could avoid that conclusion.
Regarding a similar chemical attack in 2013, Postol notes the “Obama White House also issued an intelligence report containing obvious inaccuracies” (which are detailed in the report). While Obama initially blamed Assad for the attack, he received a briefing casting doubt on Assad’s guilt and, unlike Trump, refrained from launching an illegal attack at that time (though he continued illegally supporting proxy forces).
Postol notes that both the initial report blaming Assad made by the Obama White House and the one today by the Trump White House are “obviously false, misleading and amateurish” and may reflect politicization, similar, says Postol, to the way the W. Bush administration politicized ‘intelligence’ that was used to falsely claim ‘certainty’ that Saddam Husssein was stockpiling WMD in Iraq.
Award-winning journalist Robert Parry has noted evidence that Trump, like W. Bush, is simply excluding from meetings people he knows have information he doesn’t want to hear.
Postol concludes his report by noting this is a “very serious matter” and “what the country is now being told by the White House cannot be true” (emphasis in original).
Robert Parry today notes he has received reports that the chemical attack in question may have been carried out with assistance from a “Saudi-Israeli special operations base for supporting Syrian rebels” with the intention of creating “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.” Overthrowing Assad is longstanding US policy. US attempts to conquer Syria date to 1949.
Parry adds this Saudi/Israeli operation, if it is indeed what took place, has 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.”
Thanks to Chris Kabusk for providing Postol’s full statement. Postol’s report includes the text of Trump’s report and quotes from the Trump White House as an appendix, bringing Postol’s full paper to 14 pages.
(RPI) Thursday’s US missile attack on Syria must represent the quickest foreign policy U-turn in history. Less than a week after the White House gave Assad permission to stay on as president of his own country, President Trump decided that the US had to attack Syria and demand Assad’s ouster after a chemical attack earlier in the week. Trump blamed Assad for the attack, stated that “something’s going to happen” in retaliation, and less than two days later he launched a volley of 59 Tomahawk missiles (at a cost of $1.5 million each) onto a military airfield near where the chemical attack took place.
President Trump said it is in the “vital national security interest of the United States” to attack Syria over the use of poison gas. That is nonsense. Even if what Trump claims about the gas attack is true – and we’ve seen no evidence that it is – there is nothing about an isolated incident of inhuman cruelty thousands of miles from our borders that is in our “vital national security interest.” Even if Assad gassed his own people last week it hardly means he will launch chemical attacks on the United States even if he had the ability, which he does not.
From the moment the chemical attack was blamed on Assad, however, I expressed my doubts about the claims. It simply makes no sense for Assad to attack civilians with a chemical weapon just as he is winning his war against ISIS and al-Qaeda and has been told by the US that it no longer seeks regime change. On the verge of victory, he commits a suicidal act to no strategic or tactical military advantage? More likely the gas attack was a false flag by the rebels — or perhaps even by our CIA — as a last ditch effort to forestall a rebel defeat in the six year war.
Would the neocons and the mainstream media lie to us about what happened last week in Syria? Of course they would. They lied us into attacking Iraq, they lied us into attacking Gaddafi, they lied us into seeking regime change in Syria in the first place. We should always assume they are lying.
Who benefits from the US attack on Syria? ISIS, which immediately after the attack began a ground offensive. Does President Trump really want the US to act as ISIS’s air force?
[themify_quote]The gas attack, which took some 70 civilian lives, was horrible and must be condemned. But we must also remember that US bombs in Syria have killed hundreds of civilians. Just recently, US bombs killed 300 Iraqi civilians in one strike! Does it really make a difference if you are killed by poison gas or by a US missile?[/themify_quote]
What’s next for President Trump in Syria? Russia has not backed down from its claim that the poison gas leaked as a result of a conventional Syrian bomb on an ISIS chemical weapons factory. Moscow claims it is determined to defend its ally, Syria. Will Trump unilaterally declare a no fly zone in parts of Syria and attempt to prevent Russian air traffic? Some suggest this is his next move. It is one that carries a great danger of igniting World War Three.
Donald Trump’s attack on Syria was clearly illegal. However, Congress shows no interest in reining in this out-of-control president. We should fear any US escalation and must demand that our Representatives prohibit it. If there ever was a time to flood the Capitol Hill switchboard demanding an end to US military action in Syria, it is now!
Dr Ron Paul served in U.S. House of Representatives three different periods: first from 1976 to 1977, after he won a special election, then from 1979 to 1985, and finally from 1997 to 2013.
During his first term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Paul founded the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education (FREE), a non-profit think tank dedicated to promoting principles of limited government and free-market economics. In 1984, Paul became the first chairman of the Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a conservative political group founded by Charles Koch and David Koch ‘to fight for less government, lower taxes, and less regulation.’ CSE started a Tea Party protest against high taxes in 2002. In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy split into two new organizations, with Citizens for a Sound Economy being renamed as FreedomWorks, and Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation becoming Americans for Prosperity. The two organizations would become key players in the Tea Party movement from 2009 onward.
Dr Paul proposed term-limit legislation multiple times, while himself serving a few terms in the House of Representatives. In 1984, he decided to retire from the House in order to run for the U.S. Senate, complaining in his House farewell address that ‘Special interests have replaced the concern that the Founders had for general welfare…. It’s difficult for one who loves true liberty and utterly detests the power of the state to come to Washington for a period of time and not leave a true cynic.’
[themify_quote]It’s not the first time a US president launches missile strikes that do not amount to much but boost ratings.[/themify_quote]
The US fired dozens of cruise missiles at an airbase in Syria, in retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town [Ford Williams/US Navy/Reuters]
8 Apr 2017 – The United States launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a government-controlled Syrian air force base in the Homs province, purportedly where the nerve agent sarin was loaded on to aircraft that attacked a village in the rebel-held Idlib province.
Trump authorised this attack to ostensibly demonstrate that he will take a harder line against Syria, unlike his predecessor Barack Obama. While Trump’s actions represent the first time the US has attacked Assad’s forces since the civil war began six years, this military strike is embedded in a deeper history of America disciplining countries from the air over their weapons of mass destruction (WMD) facilities. Trump is in fact carrying on the legacy of President Bill Clinton.
The US launched cruise missile attacks against Iraqi WMD sites throughout the 1990s, and as of 2017 it is doing the same in Syria. The attacks seem to achieve little in the long run in changing the targeted government’s behaviour, but they provide symbolic proof to the international community of the US taking concrete action to discipline a country that violates the norm prohibiting WMD use.
The legacy of Bush and Clinton
On the 25th anniversary of the 1991 Gulf War I wrote: “Desert Storm represented the first time the US sought to shape, control, and configure the Middle East from the air.”
During the six-week air campaign of this war, aerial sorties were conducted against Iraq’s WMD sites. Yet UN weapons inspectors on the ground after the war still discovered both facilities and munitions that survived the air campaign.
With the Saddam Hussein regime having survived Desert Storm, the US tried to contain the Iraqi leader with no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq, dubbed respectively Operation Northern and Southern Watch. Air strikes during these operations constituted a means of disciplining Saddam Hussein from the air, targeting Iraqi anti-aircraft radars and missile sites.
Additionally, in 1993 the Clinton administration authorised the launch of 23 cruise missiles against Iraq in retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s alleged plot to assassinate former president George H W Bush, which ended up killing one of Iraq’s most prominent artists, Layla al-Attar.
In 1996 the US launched 27 cruise missiles at defence targets in southern Iraq, after Iraqi troops entered Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Iraq and hunted down opponents of the regime.
This attack was followed up in 1998 with Operation Desert Fox, during which 415 cruise missiles were launched at suspected Iraqi WMD sites.
These punitive aerial attacks did little to alter Saddam Hussein’s behaviour, and in fact subsequently intensified the conflict between the US and Iraq, where after 1998 the Iraqi president ordered increased efforts among his air defence forces to bring down an American aircraft, leading to an increase in US retaliatory bombings that continued right up to the 2003 Iraq war.
Trump’s military strike was ostensibly aimed at damaging Syria’s WMD programme. However, aerial military campaigns in the past have failed in this regard. While members of the Syrian opposition celebrated the attacks, in fact they are likely to do little damage to Bashar al-Assad’s survival, and only rally his domestic core of supporters, as well as Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia behind him.
The strike served a domestic agenda, showing that Trump can act against Russian interests, at a time when he is viewed as Vladimir Putin’s puppet.
In the media commentary that has emerged since the strike, I have noticed that pundits repeatedly have described the cruise missiles that struck Syria as “stand-off strikes”, fired from afar, in this case two American naval vessels in the Mediterranean. The terms used to describe such strikes are politically expedient for the Trump administration, opposed to its antithesis, sending in ground forces to take action.Fear of “boots on the ground”
While the decision to send boots on the ground in the form of US special forces to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in Iraq and Syria has backing from Congress and the American population, expanding the use of ground forces to strike targets linked to the Assad regime would have been seen as a dangerous escalation of the conflict. Even sending manned aircraft to take out the sites would have risked the downing of an American pilot.
However, a cruise missile strike carried little risk for the Trump administration, and distracted the public’s attention from his domestic political crises
A foreign policy distraction
In December 2016 there were predictions that Trump would attempt to “Wag the Dog”, or use a foreign crisis to distract domestic audiences and unite the nation behind him.
The strike served a domestic agenda, showing that Trump can act against Russian interests, at a time when he is viewed as Vladimir Putin’s puppet.
Trump did show emotion when moved by images of children killed in the chemical weapons attack. If he really wanted to do something for the children of Syria, Trump could open up the US to Syrian refugees rather than opting for a military strike that might make him look more decisive than Obama. This strike might improve Trump’s abysmally low approval ratings, but will do little to alleviate Syria’s humanitarian crisis.
[themify_quote]A Consumer Fraud Lawyer’s mini Primer[/themify_quote]
The U.S./NATO line
5 Feb 2017
If you try to follow events in the mainstream media, you may have noticed that they routinely refer to Syrian President Bashar al Assad as a “brutal dictator”. Assad is supposed to have responded to peaceful protests with repressive violence and by “killing his own people”. The U.S., UK, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar continue to maintain that “Assad must go”.
I disagree with all of that, as I’ll explain in this article. I spent 25 years prosecuting lies in commerce for the people of New York and Oregon. I prepared this primer to help you cut through the lies and get at the truth about Syria.
It’s still quite possible that a nuclear war could arise from careless U.S./NATO confrontations with Russia in Syria. President Trump has indicated he favors a cooperative relationship with Russia, but he faces continuing pressure from the Deep State, neocons, and apparently, Congress and the media, to continue the New Cold War that was initiated in Ukraine. And the demonization of Russian president Putin and of Russia itself has been going on for some time and shows no sign of letting up.1 So in addition to the suffering of the Syrian people, which has been horrific and continues as I write, the conflict in Syria also poses a serious threat to
all of us.
Apart from this introduction and some other brief statements of my own, most of this article is a string of excerpts from the excellent work of other people I find persuasive and citations or links to sources for further information and analysis. To insure you can access the sources, full URLs are provided for most of them.
Robert Roth’s Syria-Primer “what’s really happening” – (66 pages)
Robert Roth
is a retired public interest lawyer. He received his law degree from Yale in 1971 and prosecuted false advertising and consumer fraud as an assistant attorney general for New York (1981-1991) and Oregon (1993-2007).
[themify_quote]There are serious questions as to whether Trump’s bombing of the Syrian base has anything to do with protecting civilians.[/themify_quote]
A child at Babunnur Refugee Camp in Aleppo. Photo by IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation via Flickr
The U.S. bombing of Syria’s Al Shayrat air base has brought more death and destruction to that country and is unlikely to deter additional war crimes by the Syrian regime. It will not ease the suffering of the Syrian people.
But then it wasn’t actually meant to.
The missile strikes had nothing to do with any concern for the civilian victims of the regime’s apparent April 4 sarin attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun. The unilateral military action was ordered by the same president whose proposed budget would make major cuts to the very programs that have provided at least some relief to Syrian refugees fleeing the violence of the regime and various armed rebel factions and who has desperately tried to ban any of the refugees from even entering the United States.
With no direct threat to the national security of the United States and with no congressional authorization, such use of force was illegal. By contrast, when President Obama considered authorizing military action against the regime following an even deadlier sarin attack in 2013, he respected such constitutional limitations on his power and—failing to receive authorization from Congress—did not do so, providing time for the Russian-initiated UN-backed agreement, which resulted in the destruction of the vast majority of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.
Obama was willing, but not ideologically driven, to go to war. As a result, popular pressure and viable diplomatic alternatives prevented war at that time. And, despite Trump’s more recent criticism of that decision, he was at that time among the voices opposing U.S. military intervention.
While Trump’s militarism, unfortunately, may be harder to constrain, the fact that the air strikes were fairly limited may be indicative that he recognizes that the American public is not interested in the United States getting involved in another major Middle Eastern war.
Rather than promoting dubious conspiracy theories exonerating the Bashar al-Assad regime from yet another of its many war crimes, the focus should be on how the United States has no right to punish Syria.
True, there is something uniquely horrific about chemical weapons, the use of which has been banned since the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the possession of which has been illegal since the Chemical Weapons of 1993 (belatedly signed and ratified by Syria in 2013.)
But know this: Since Trump came to office, nearly 1,000 civilians have been killed by U.S. air strikes in Syria and Iraq—including up to 200 civilians in Mosul and around 60 civilians in the bombing of a mosque in al-Jena (not far from the site of the chemical weapons attack) this past month.
This again raises questions as to whether Trump’s bombing of the Syrian base has anything to do with protecting civilians.
The U.S. has been bombing Syria since 2014, conducting more than 8,000 air strikes against opponents of Assad (and not only the so-called “Islamic State”), resulting in thousands of civilian casualties, all in the name of fighting terrorism. Thursday’s bombing of the Syrian air base is the first direct deliberate attack by the United States against Assad’s forces, which have arguably been the worst “terrorists” out of the many armed groups fighting in that country. Yes, these latest air strikes are illegal and likely counter-productive, but so are the others.
There is little reason to think that these limited strikes will make much of a difference in Assad’s behavior. The Syrian government has lost more than 150,000 soldiers and militiamen and countless military assets, so the damage done by the 59 Tomahawk missiles is unlikely to lead to a change in regime policy. And there are reports that the Trump administration warned the Russians of the impending strikes and their limited nature.
The United States also has a long history of trying to undermine the peaceful, law-based efforts to eliminate chemical weapons, including opposition to the UN-mandated goal of ridding the Middle East of such weapons. Indeed, both Israel and Egypt—the largest recipients of U.S. military aid—have stockpiles larger than that of Syria.
In previous articles for YES!, I have tried to stress positive developments and put forward credible nonviolent alternatives to difficult political situations, even in the Middle East. I honestly have a hard time doing so in regard to Syria. We have a cultural propensity here in the United States to believe that if we put in enough money, or creativity, or willpower, or firepower into a problem, we can make things right. While that attitude has served us well overall, it isn’t always the case.
Both the right and the left seem to embrace the idea that the United States—either for good or for ill—has the power to determine the outcome of virtually every conflict in the world. But there are limits to power. The tens of billions of dollars’ worth of arms sent to the Shah of Iran and to Egypt’s Mubarak was not enough to keep these dictators in power against the will of their own people. Overwhelming U.S. military force could not prevent a Communist victory in Vietnam or create a peaceful, democratic, pro-America Iraq.
[themify_box]
Stephen Zunes
Stephen Zunes
Stephen is a leading scholar of U.S. Middle East policy and of strategic nonviolent action. He is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco and coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern studies. He serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).[/themify_box]
[themify_quote]The U.S. government and the mainstream media rushed to judgment again, blaming the Syrian government for a new poison-gas attack and ignoring other possibilities.[/themify_quote]
With the latest hasty judgment about Tuesday’s poison-gas deaths in a rebel-held area of northern Syria, the mainstream U.S. news media once more reveals itself to be a threat to responsible journalism and to the future of humanity. Again, we see the troubling pattern of verdict first, investigation later, even when that behavior can lead to a dangerous war escalation and many more deaths.
Map of Syria.
Before a careful evaluation of the evidence about Tuesday’s tragedy was possible, The New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets had pinned the blame for the scores of dead on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. That revived demands that the U.S. and other nations establish a “no-fly zone” over Syria, which would amount to launching another “regime change” war and would put America into a likely hot war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Even as basic facts were still being assembled about Tuesday’s incident, we, the public, were prepped to disbelieve the Syrian government’s response that the poison gas may have come from rebel stockpiles that could have been released either accidentally or intentionally causing the civilian deaths in a town in Idlib Province.
One possible scenario was that Syrian warplanes bombed a rebel weapons depot where the poison gas was stored, causing the containers to rupture. Another possibility was a staged event by increasingly desperate Al Qaeda jihadists who are known for their disregard for innocent human life.
While it’s hard to know at this early stage what’s true and what’s not, these alternative explanations, I’m told, are being seriously examined by U.S. intelligence. One source cited the possibility that Turkey had supplied the rebels with the poison gas (the exact type still not determined) for potential use against Kurdish forces operating in northern Syria near the Turkish border or for a terror attack in a government-controlled city like the capital of Damascus.
On Tuesday, the Times assigned two of its most committed anti-Syrian-government propagandists to cover the Syrian poison-gas story, Michael B. Gordon and Anne Barnard.
The controversial map developed by Human Rights Watch and embraced by the New York Times, supposedly showing the flight paths of two missiles from the Aug. 21 Sarin attack intersecting at a Syrian military base.
Gordon has been at the front lines of the neocon “regime change” strategies for years. He co-authored the Times’ infamous aluminum tube story of Sept. 8, 2002, which relied on U.S. government sources and Iraqi defectors to frighten Americans with images of “mushroom clouds” if they didn’t support President George W. Bush’s upcoming invasion of Iraq. The timing played perfectly into the administration’s advertising “rollout” for the Iraq War.
Of course, the story turned out to be false and to have unfairly downplayed skeptics of the claim that the aluminum tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, when the aluminum tubes actually were meant for artillery. But the article provided a great impetus toward the Iraq War, which ended up killing nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Gordon’s co-author, Judith Miller, became the only U.S. journalist known to have lost a job over the reckless and shoddy reporting that contributed to the Iraq disaster. For his part, Gordon continued serving as a respected Pentagon correspondent.
Gordon’s name also showed up in a supporting role on the Times’ botched “vector analysis,” which supposedly proved that the Syrian military was responsible for the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin-gas attack. The “vector analysis” story of Sept. 17, 2013, traced the flight paths of two rockets, recovered in suburbs of Damascus back to a Syrian military base 9.5 kilometers away.
The article became the “slam-dunk” evidence that the Syrian government was lying when it denied launching the sarin attack. However, like the aluminum tube story, the Times’ ”vector analysis” ignored contrary evidence, such as the unreliability of one azimuth from a rocket that landed in Moadamiya because it had struck a building in its descent. That rocket also was found to contain no sarin, so it’s inclusion in the vectoring of two sarin-laden rockets made no sense.
But the Times’ story ultimately fell apart when rocket scientists analyzed the one sarin-laden rocket that had landed in the Zamalka area and determined that it had a maximum range of about two kilometers, meaning that it could not have originated from the Syrian military base. C.J. Chivers, one of the co-authors of the article, waited until Dec. 28, 2013, to publish a halfhearted semi-retraction. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Backs Off Its Syria-Sarin Analysis.”]
Gordon was a co-author of another bogus Times’ front-page story on April 21, 2014, when the State Department and the Ukrainian government fed the Times two photographs that supposedly proved that a group of Russian soldiers – first photographed in Russia – had entered Ukraine, where they were photographed again.
However, two days later, Gordon was forced to pen a retraction because it turned out that both photos had been shot inside Ukraine, destroying the story’s premise. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Retracts Russian-Photo Scoop.”]
Gordon perhaps personifies better than anyone how mainstream journalism works. If you publish false stories that fit with the Establishment’s narratives, your job is safe even if the stories blow up in your face. However, if you go against the grain – and if someone important raises a question about your story – you can easily find yourself out on the street even if your story is correct.
No Skepticism Allowed
Anne Barnard, Gordon’s co-author on Tuesday’s Syrian poison-gas story, has consistently reported on the Syrian conflict as if she were a press agent for the rebels, playing up their anti-government claims even when there’s no evidence.
A heart-rending propaganda image designed to justify a major U.S. military operation inside Syria against the Syrian military.
For instance, on June 2, 2015, Barnard, who is based in Beirut, Lebanon, authored a front-page story that pushed the rebels’ propaganda theme that the Syrian government was somehow in cahoots with the Islamic State though even the U.S. State Department acknowledged that it had no confirmation of the rebels’ claims.
When Gordon and Barnard teamed up to report on the latest Syrian tragedy, they again showed no skepticism about early U.S. government and Syrian rebel claims that the Syrian military was responsible for intentionally deploying poison gas.
Perhaps for the first time, The New York Times cited President Trump as a reliable source because he and his press secretary were saying what the Times wanted to hear – that Assad must be guilty.
Gordon and Barnard also cited the controversial White Helmets, the rebels’ Western-financed civil defense group that has worked in close proximity with Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and has come under suspicion of staging heroic “rescues” but is nevertheless treated as a fount of truth-telling by the mainstream U.S. news media.
In early online versions of the Times’ story, a reaction from the Syrian military was buried deep in the article around the 27th paragraph, noting: “The government denies that it has used chemical weapons, arguing that insurgents and Islamic State fighters use toxins to frame the government or that the attacks are staged.”
The following paragraph mentioned the possibility that a Syrian bombing raid had struck a rebel warehouse where poison-gas was stored, thus releasing it unintentionally.
But the placement of the response was a clear message that the Times disbelieved whatever the Assad government said. At least in the version of the story that appeared in the morning newspaper, a government statement was moved up to the sixth paragraph although still surrounded by comments meant to signal the Times’ acceptance of the rebel version.
After noting the Assad government’s denial, Gordon and Barnard added, “But only the Syrian military had the ability and the motive to carry out an aerial attack like the one that struck the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun.”
But they again ignored the alternative possibilities. One was that a bombing raid ruptured containers for chemicals that the rebels were planning to use in some future attack, and the other was that Al Qaeda’s jihadists staged the incident to elicit precisely the international outrage directed at Assad as has occurred.
Gordon and Barnard also could be wrong about Assad being the only one with a motive to deploy poison gas. Since Assad’s forces have gained a decisive upper-hand over the rebels, why would he risk stirring up international outrage at this juncture? On the other hand, the desperate rebels might view the horrific scenes from the chemical-weapons deployment as a last-minute game-changer.
Pressure to Prejudge
None of this means that Assad’s forces are innocent, but a serious investigation ascertains the facts and then reaches a conclusion, not the other way around.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
However, to suggest these other possibilities will, I suppose, draw the usual accusations about “Assad apologist,” but refusing to prejudge an investigation is what journalism is supposed to be about.
The Times, however, apparently has no concern anymore for letting the facts be assembled and then letting them speak for themselves. The Times weighed in on Wednesday with an editorial entitled “A New Level of Depravity From Mr. Assad.”
Another problem with the behavior of the Times and the mainstream media is that by jumping to a conclusion they pressure other important people to join in the condemnations and that, in turn, can prejudice the investigation while also generating a dangerous momentum toward war.
Once the political leadership pronounces judgment, it becomes career-threatening for lower-level officials to disagree with those conclusions. We’ve seen that already with how United Nations investigators accepted rebel claims about the Syrian government’s use of chlorine gas, a set of accusations that the Times and other media now report simply as flat-fact.
Yet, the claims about the Syrian military mixing in canisters of chlorine in supposed “barrel bombs” make little sense because chlorine deployed in that fashion is ineffective as a lethal weapon but it has become an important element of the rebels’ propaganda campaign.
U.N. investigators, who were under intense pressure from the United States and Western nations to give them something to use against Assad, did support rebel claims about the government using chlorine in a couple of cases, but the investigators also received testimony from residents in one area who described the staging of a chlorine attack for propaganda purposes.
One might have thought that the evidence of one staged attack would have increased skepticism about the other incidents, but the U.N. investigators apparently understood what was good for their careers, so they endorsed a couple of other alleged cases despite their inability to conduct a field investigation. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “UN Team Heard Claims of Staged Chemical Attacks.”]
Now, that dubious U.N. report is being leveraged into this new incident, one opportunistic finding used to justify another. But the pressing question now is: Have the American people come to understand enough about “psychological operations” and “strategic communications” that they will finally show the skepticism that no longer exists in the major U.S. news media?
On 5 April 2017, the European Union and the United Nations will hold a joint conference on the future of Syria and its region. “Civil Society” is invited to participate, but it is not clear in advance if the Brussels meeting will be a “fund raising” one, in which case most non-governmental organizations (NGO) in consultative status with the UN will have little to contribute or if there will be wider aims.
The EU-UN meeting is the third in a short space of time concerning Syria, a reflection of concern with the refugee flow and the continued violence and suffering in Syria and Iraq. The following is a text written on behalf of the Association of World Citizens (AWC) [http://www.worldcitizensunited.org, https://awcungeneva.com] that is being sent to governments in advance of the 5 April conference. The text notes earlier appeals and efforts of the AWC in the Syria-Iraq-Turkey conflicts.
Following the 23-25 January 2017 talks in Astana, Kazakhstan sponsored by the Russian Federation, Turkey, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a new round of UN-sponsored talks, 23-31 March was held in Geneva (informally called Geneva 4). The UN Special Envoy for Syria, Mr Staffan de Mistura has led the UN, Geneva and Lausanne-based talks. Not all the parties involved in the Syria-Iraq conflicts are participants in the talks. ISIS and the Kurds were not present nor all segments of the opposition to the Government of President Bashar al-Assad have been formally present. What informal talks are held in Geneva hotels and restaurants during the negotiations are not officially reported. There is a large and active Kurdish community in the Geneva area and some may be spokespersons for the effort to create Rojava, a Kurdish autonomous zone in Northern Syria that might form some sort of association with the Kurdish autonomous area of Iraq.
The Geneva-based talks have concerned short-term issues such as a ceasefire, safety of Syrian civilians and humanitarian access. There have also been longer-range issues concerning political processes such as a transition administration, constitutional changes, and elections for a new, more broadly based government.
Parallel to the intra-Syrian talks mediated by Mr de Mistura, the United Nations has been concerned with the human rights issues having created an Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic as well as a joint UN-Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons investigative mechanism.
The Association of World Citizens,(AWC), a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the UN, active on issues of the resolution of armed conflicts and the promotion of human rights, had welcome a 20 July 2011 call of then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for an inclusive dialogue to respond to pressing grievances and longer-term concerns of the Syrian people. The AWC, in a message to the Secretary-General encouraged broad participation of Syrian civil society in such a dialogue and indicated that AWC,knowing the possible usefulness of international NGOs in conflict resolution, would help facilitate such discussions in any way considered appropriate.
In December 2011, there was the start of a short-lived Observer Mission of the League of Arab States. In a 9 February 2012 message to the Secretary General of the League of Arab States, Ambassador Nabil el-Araby, the Association of World Citizens proposed a renewal of the Arab League Observer Mission with the inclusion of a greater number of non-governmental organization observers and a broadened mandate to go beyond fact-finding and thus to play an active conflict resolution role at the local level in the hope to halt the downward spiral of violence and killing.
On many occasions since, the AWC has indicated to the United Nations, the Government of Syria and opposition movement the potentially important role of non-governmental organizations, both Syrian and international, in facilitating armed conflict resolution measures.
The fighting in Syria, Iraq and parts of Turkey has led to a large number of displaced persons and refugees. The response of governments to the refugee flow has been very uneven, welcoming in a few cases, outright rejection in other cases. The AWC early on called for a UN-led conference on refugees and internally displaced persons. The AWC welcomed and participated in the UN conferences on refugees and humanitarian aid.
The armed conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan have led to serious violations of humanitarian international law: attacks of medical facilities and personnel, the execution of prisoners of war, the use of torture, the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, the deliberate attacks on civilian populations, the use of weapons banned by international treaties. Therefore, the Association of World Citizens has stressed the need for a UN-led conference to reaffirm humanitarian international law. If strong support for international law is not manifested now, there is a danger that violations will become considered as “normal”, and thus will increase. Strong measures of support for humanitarian international law are needed to be undertaken now.
The structures of government, the authority, and the geographic limits of administrative regions, the rights and participation in national life of minorities have been issues in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Appropriate forms of government which allow both for local autonomy and regional cooperation need to be developed. The search for an appropriate structure for those considering themselves to be Kurds has been a particularly difficult issue often leading to violence. The Association of World Citizens which has a decentralization, federalist tradition in the spirit of Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont, has highlighted that federalism and decentralization are not steps toward the disintegration of a State but rather are efforts to find a more just structure of State organization and regional cooperation.
The Association of World Citizens welcomes the 5 April 2017 EU-UN conference on Syria and the region. The Association of World Citizens re-confirms its willingness to cooperate fully in the vast and critical effort for an end to the armed conflict and a development of an inclusive and just society.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
(RPI)Despite vowing not to use depleted uranium (DU) weapons in its military action in Syria, the U.S. government has now admitted that it has fired thousands of the deadly rounds into Syrian territory. As Foreign Policy Magazine reports:
“U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesman Maj. Josh Jacques told Airwars and Foreign Policy that 5,265 armor-piercing 30 mm rounds containing depleted uranium (DU) were shot from Air Force A-10 fixed-wing aircraft on Nov. 16 and Nov. 22, 2015, destroying about 350 vehicles in the country’s eastern desert.”
Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman John Moore said in 2015 that:
“U.S. and coalition aircraft have not been and will not be using depleted uranium munitions in Iraq or Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve.”
Now we know that is not true.
Numerous studies have found that depleted uranium is particularly harmful when the dust is inhaled by the victim. A University of Southern Maine study discovered that:
“…DU damages DNA in human lung cells. The team, led by John Pierce Wise, exposed cultures of the cells to uranium compounds at different concentrations.
“The compounds caused breaks in the chromosomes within cells and stopped them from growing and dividing healthily. ‘These data suggest that exposure to particulate DU may pose a significant [DNA damage] risk and could possibly result in lung cancer,’ the team wrote in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.”
We should remember that the United States is engaged in military activities in Syria in violation of international and U.S. law. There is no Congressional authorization for U.S. military action against ISIS in Syria and the United Nations has not authorized military force in violation of Syria’s sovereignty either.
The innocent citizens of Syria will be forced to endure increased risks of cancer, birth defects, and other disease related to exposure to radioactive materials. Depleted uranium is the byproduct of the enrichment of uranium to fuel nuclear power plants and has a half-life in the hundreds of millions of years. Damage to Syrian territory will thus continue long after anyone involved in current hostilities is dead.
Award-winning journalist Robert Parry has noted evidence that Trump, like W. Bush, is simply excluding from meetings people he knows have information he doesn’t want to hear.
![The US fired dozens of cruise missiles at an airbase in Syria, in retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town [Ford Williams/US Navy/Reuters]](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2017/4/7/e0c975ea70574eb4b2c377e07c4677c5_18.jpg "Trump's strike on Syria: A convenient distraction")
