Who Destroyed Syria?

Syria is a very difficult country to govern, because of its diversity. It has both ethnic and religious divisions that make the contentment of all the people difficult if not impossible to achieve. Even under the best of circumstances, there will always be dissatisfied factions in such a diverse society.

This difficulty is aggravated by the fact that certain segments of Syria’s population are notoriously prone to religious fanaticism.

Nonetheless, Bashar al-Assad was a rather popular president of Syria after he came to office in 2000, who clearly tried to alleviate grievances. I learned about this from reading Professor David Lesch’s book, Syria, the Fall of the House of Assad, published by Yale University Press, one could say prematurely, in 2012. Lesch was privileged to have personal interactions with President Assad over the course of some years.

Lesch wrote that, prior to 2011, President Assad had “a not insignificant level of popularity in Syria,” and had “ability to connect with the people.” That’s on page 74 of Lesch’s book.

The book has a liberal and internationalist bias, and the author seems to reject out of hand the rather obvious fact that the State of Israel and its puppets in Washington, D.C., have been trying to create chaos in Syria, and in the Levant generally. Nonetheless, Lesch, as an academic writer, had to be careful not to say anything obviously false, and therefore, despite his bias, the book does contain some valuable information.

Lesch wrote that Assad did not have absolute power in Syria. The fact that Bashar al-Assad was not an absolute ruler has important implications. It means that he had to take into account how other people in Syria felt about whatever he did. It means that much of the picture of Bashar al-Assad that we have been given is impossible.

It also means that not everything that happened under Bashar al-Assad’s presidency was his doing. He has acknowledged that some Syrian people had some real grievances, and has taken actions, at least in some cases, to try to address those grievances.

In the United States of America, a group of Zionist Jews, calling themselves neoconservatives, have been, for decades, agitating for the United States of America to overthrow governments hostile to the interests of the State of Israel. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. In 2011, the government of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya was overthrown, and chaos put in its place because of propaganda and agitation from these Zionist Jews. The next target on the list was Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Finally, because Vladimir Putin had discouraged US and NATO intervention in Syria in 2013, the government of Ukraine was overthrown and replaced with an anti-Russian government, and a war was fomented between Ukraine and Russia, with Putin being characterized as another Hitler. In all of these campaigns, recycled propaganda from the Second World War was used to manipulate public opinion in the United States.

On January 24, 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, Peace Prize winner and professional Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel gave an hour-long interview to Jewish interviewer Ted Koppel on ABC television, justifying military action against Iraq.

In 2012, Wiesel went into action again, this time trying to pressure a less willing president, Barack Obama, into attacking Syria. President Barack Obama was present at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance ceremony in April 2012, discussing his administration’s policies regarding Syria and Iran. Elie Wiesel used the occasion to humiliate Obama for inaction, in effect calling for war against Syria.

Elie Wiesel compared the USA’s inaction against Assad in Syria and Ahmadinejad in Iran to the USA’s earlier hesitation to get involved in the Second World War, a hesitation that is supposed to have allowed the Holocaust to happen. Elie Wiesel said,:

“It could have been prevented. The greatest tragedy in history could have been prevented had the civilized world spoken up, taken measures in 1939, 40, 41, 42. In each time, in Berlin, Goebbels and the others always wanted to see what would be the reaction in Washington and London and Rome, and there was no reaction, so they felt they could continue.

So in this place, we may ask: have we learned anything from it? If so, how is it that Assad is still in power? How is it that the number one Holocaust denier, Ahmadinejad, is still a president, he who threatens to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Jewish state?”

That quote appears in Foreign Policy magazine, 23rd of April 2012.

Wiesel’s assertion that the British government had nothing to say about the supposed suffering of the Jews is completely nuts. It was the BBC that put out the accusation in the summer of 1942 that relocated Jews were being mass-murdered.

Wiesel also wrote an op-ed about U.S. foreign policy toward Syria that appeared in the Washington Post of the 8th of June 2012. Formally, Wiesel dismissed the possibility of going to war against Syria – not because it was undesirable, but “because the American people are tired of waging distant wars.”

Wiesel recommended, instead, a course of action that was very likely to lead indirectly to war:

“Why not warn Assad that unless he stops the murderous policy he is engaged in, he will be arrested and brought to the International Criminal Court in The Hague and charged with committing crimes against humanity?”

In other words, Elie Wiesel suggested issuing an ultimatum.

The problem is that an ultimatum requires action, if there is an appearance that it has been ignored. Since the “murderous policy” that Elie Wiesel attributed to Bashar al-Assad was an invention of Zionist propaganda, there was nothing that Assad could do to prevent such an ultimatum from leading to war. Thus, the ultimatum that Elie Wiesel proposed was supposed to be a backdoor to war.

The red line enunciated by President Obama on the 20th of August 2012 resembled the course of action that Elie Wiesel had urged.

Arab states, like Iraq and Syria, have sought chemical weapons as a relatively inexpensive way to counter the threat of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Pressure to give up those poor man’s nukes was created through incessant accusations that such weapons had been used against civilians. The accusation against Saddam Hussein that he had gassed his own people was used in precisely this way, and led to Iraq’s being coerced to abandon its chemical weapons – along with any missiles that were able to reach the State of Israel. A similar accusation was used to induce Syria to abandon chemical weapons semi-voluntarily in 2013.

As part of a deal with Russia, Assad agreed that Syria would abandon its chemical weapons. There is no good reason to believe that Syria continued to have chemical weapons after 2013.

But beyond that, this kind of accusation lays a foundation for Hitler-comparisons and invocations of good versus evil. This is the standard form of propaganda used to incite wars that have no evident relevance for American interests.

As much as Assad’s enemies would like to accuse him of gassing his own people, it has been problematic for them to do that.

It was on the 5th of May 2013, several months after Obama drew his red line, that Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss member of the United Nations observers team in Syria, announced that the team had found many instances of the anti-Assad forces’ use of chemical weapons, but no instance of Assad’s government using chemical weapons. That was reported by Reuters on the 5th of May 2013.

When an attack on civilians with sarin gas occurred at Ghouta in August 2013, the claim that Assad’s government had done it was pushed hard, but encountered skepticism. Professor Theodore A. Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was an important skeptic toward the anti-Assad narrative about what happened at Ghouta. Seymour Hersh summarized Postol’s position on that gassing incident as follows:

“Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large-caliber rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal.

The New York Times – again relying on data in the UN report – also analyzed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent pointed directly to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometers from the landing zone.

Postol, who has served as the scientific advisor to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere were not based on actual observations. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts,’ because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was unlikely to be more than two kilometers.”

That’s from Seymour Hersh’s article, “Who’s Sarin?”, which appeared in the London Review of Books on the 19th of November 2013.

Professor Theodore Postol says that the rocket used in the 2013 attack at Ghouta was not from the Syrian arsenal and that its range would not have allowed it to be fired from pro-Assad territory.

According to Theodore Postol, President Obama ultimately decided not to attack Syria for crossing his “red line” because Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told him that the case against Assad was “not a slam dunk.” In other words, the case against Assad was not even as convincing as the case against Saddam Hussein had been in 2003.

International support for the attack was also very shaky. The House of Commons surprisingly voted against British participation in a U.S.-led operation that was being contemplated.

The preeminent example of an “industrial killing center” or “human slaughterhouse” in the public mind is, of course, Auschwitz-Birkenau. The government of Bashar al-Assad was accused of operating such a facility.

An entirely anonymous and faceless person, known to the public only by the pseudonym Caesar, is supposed to have assembled a portfolio of 55,000 photographs of persons killed while in the custody of the Syrian government. A report on Caesar’s photos was commissioned by the government of Qatar, which is hostile to Syria, through the British Carter-Ruck law firm, which hired a committee of three former war crimes prosecutors to compile the report, which was published on the 20th of January 2014.

Most news media greeted the report credulously. They weren’t at all skeptical.

The State Department arranged for Caesar to come to the United States. Caesar’s first destination when he arrived in the United States in 2014 was – guess where? – The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where, on the 28th of July 2014, he was introduced to a small audience of reporters and researchers by former Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.

Concealment of Caesar’s identity was maintained during that presentation.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum arranged an exhibit of Caesar’s photos, called Genocide, the Threat Continues.

So, they’ve indicated even in the title that Sednaya prison in Syria is being portrayed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – since 2014 – as another Auschwitz.

For this display, a mere one dozen images were selected, one might say cherry-picked, from Caesar’s 55,000 images.

The Russian government’s news channel for foreign audiences, Russia Today, oubished a very candid criticism of the Holocaust Museum’s exhibit written by independent Irish journalist Maidhc Ò Cathail:

“Since its creation after World War II, Israel and friends have been masters at manipulating emotions, endlessly invoking the memory of Hitler’s Germany as a pretext for starting further wars, as in the recent Holocaust-themed propaganda against Syria‘s government.

The irony is that the Nazi Holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression. Norman Finkelstein tells Yoav Shamir in Defamation, the Israeli filmmaker’s award-winning 2009 documentary on how perceptions of antisemitism affect Israeli and U.S. politics, quote, Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi Holocaust. Close quote.

If you’re looking for evidence in support of Finkelstein’s thesis today, you need to look no further than the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibit of images of emaciated and mutilated bodies from contemporary Syria.”

That’s from “Using the Holocaust to Justify War on Assad,” written by the late Maidhc Ò Cathail, published by Russia Today on the 30th of October 2014.

Now, the fact that comparisons to Hitler and the Holocaust are used to start wars should be obvious by now. It could not have been more obvious that Hitler-comparisons were an important part of the propaganda against Saddam Hussein during the 15 years of agitation for invasion of Iraq.

But beyond that, one should also ask whether the specific accusations being made to start another war are even true. Beyond merely criticizing how the Holocaust Museum used the evidence proffered by Caesar, questions about the credibility of that evidence were raised by Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor and by Rick Sterling, writing for Counterpunch.

While Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor found the claim that Assad’s government had killed 11,000 prisoners since 2011 believable per se, he found the source and the nature of the evidence and the obvious motive behind it problematic. First, Murphy says,

“This is a single source report from an unidentified man.”

Murphy notes that the little that is revealed about Caesar indicates that he is biased. He is related by marriage to a member of the Syrian National Movement, an anti-Assad group. Caesar has been collaborating with this opponent of Assad since approximately September 2011.

Murphy notes that the committee that was supposed to validate Caesar’s evidence did not put much time into it. They interviewed him on the 12th, 13th, and 18th of January 2014 and released the report only two days after the last interview. Murphy notes that the report’s executive summary, the only portion that many people will read, is misleading about the report’s thoroughness, indicating that it is quite thorough, when in fact only 835 of the alleged 11,000 persons killed while in custody of the Syrian government were, quote, evaluated in detail, close quote. That’s only 7.6%.

Furthermore, while the Caesar report was compiled by three former war crimes prosecutors, Murphy does not consider war crimes prosecutors as a class to be very credible.

“Just consider Luis Moreno Ocampo’s absurd claims about Viagra and mass rape in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011. War crimes prosecutors have, unsurprisingly, a bias towards wanting to bolster cases against people they consider war criminals, like Assad or Gaddafi, and so should be treated with caution. They also frequently favor as a class humanitarian interventions.”

Murphy called the Caesar report, “a well-timed propaganda exercise funded by Qatar, a regime opponent who has funded rebels fighting Assad who have committed war crimes of their own.”

The obvious motive for the report’s release on the 20th of January 2014 was to influence peace talks sponsored by the UN a few days later. Rick Sterling, writing for Counterpunch, in an article called “Caesar Photo Fraud,” 4th of March 2016, picks up where Murphy left off.

Sterling indicates that there must be an ulterior motive in the rigorous concealment of the alleged defector’s identity. He suggests that Caesar’s identity is not being concealed from the Syrian government, but from skeptics, since Caesar’s family was no longer in Syria and the Syrian government could easily determine his identity anyway if his story was true, says Sterling.

“After all, how many military photographers took photos at Tishreen and military hospitals during those years and then disappeared?”

He wrote that in Counterpunch, the 4th of March 2016.

Sterling indicates that the photos actually tend to undermine the accusation that they are supposed to support. Human Rights Watch unintentionally laid the foundation for Sterling’s criticism by studying all 55,000 photos and publishing the results. In its report, If the Dead Could Speak, Human Rights Watch reported that 24,568 of the 55,000 images – that’s 46% – showed persons who definitely had not been tortured to death.

Sterling explains:

“On the contrary, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence. Thus, nearly half the photos show the opposite of what was alleged. These photos, never revealed to the public, confirm that the opposition is violent and has killed large numbers of Syrian security forces and civilians.”

Human Rights Watch claims to understand that the remainder were tortured to death, but Sterling is skeptical:

“It seems the military hospital was doing what it had always done, maintaining a photographic and documentary record of the deceased. While some may have died in detention, the big majority probably died in the conflict zones. The accusations by Caesar and the Carter-Ruck report and Human Rights Watch that these are all victims of death in detention or death by torture or death in government custody are almost certainly false.”

On the 28th of September 2014, 40 rabbis sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi in support of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. This amounted to another ultimatum and another indirect path to war.

The 40 rabbis stated:

“Our teacher Elie Wiesel taught us that wherever there is suffering, that is the center of the world. Syria is the center of the world today. Each day we open our newspapers to see distressing images of more wailing and injured children in the city of Aleppo, which is now experiencing the worst air attacks in the entire Syrian conflict.”

Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, was at the time held by Jabhat al-Nusra. Jabhat al-Nusra was more or less synonymous with Tahrir al-Sham, which is the group that now has taken over Syria, and it was known to be receiving assistance from the State of Israel. That fact was reported by, among others, a journalist named Ravid in Ha’aretz on the 7th of December 2014. And the Syrian government at the time happened to be attempting to recapture Aleppo. Thus, these 40 rabbis, as they invoked the name of Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust, were obviously trying to mobilize assistance for a proxy of the State of Israel.

In the last weeks of the Obama administration, Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the UN, was due to speak at a memorial service for Elie Wiesel, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach used the name of Elie Wiesel to try to shame her into advocating military action against the government of Syria. Rabbi Shmuley said:

“She should speak about the appalling American failure in Syria, and how the nations of the world must stop the carnage and the slaughter. She should express her unending friendship with Israel and the Jewish people, and publicly condemn the despicable government of Iran for daring to even threaten a second Holocaust. And if she feels uncomfortable in the last few weeks of her ambassadorship speaking truth to power, then she should consider doing the right thing by removing herself from the Elie Wiesel Memorial Lecture, and allowing someone else to take her place.”

And that was published in the Jerusalem Post on the 21st of November 2016.

That was some of the very Jewish and Holocaust-invoking agitation for war against Syria that happened under Barack Obama’s presidency.

Now, remember, Barack Obama was elected largely as a reaction against the invasion and occupation of Iraq that had happened under George W. Bush. Obama was elected on the slogan, Change You Can Believe In. People thought: Well, let’s give the black guy a chance, maybe he’ll do something different. And we were very disappointed. I remember that a friend of mine who had voted for Obama said that he had expected that even with Obama we probably would get more of the same, but he didn’t expect this much more of the same. Because even though we didn’t get another big war like the invasion of Iraq, drone killings of supposed Islamic militants continued, including the killings of many innocent people, and there was the destruction of the secular government of Libya because of absolutely insane propaganda, which had the very negative effect of releasing a flood of African immigrants on Europe.

After all of this, we voted for a real wildcard candidate, Donald Trump, who didn’t just promise Change You Can Believe In, but even went so far as to say America First, which was the slogan of anti-interventionists during the Second World War. During the 2016 Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, Trump had also explicitly and emphatically condemned the invasion of Iraq, despite a hostile audience. Surely now, we had our anti-war candidate. Surely now, we would have a president who would have us stay out of all that trouble over there.

Well, for a short time, it looked as if we might have that. Donald Trump took office as President of the United States in January 2017. After a gassing incident in Syria in April 2017, a letter from 90 rabbis, quoting Elie Wiesel’s advocacy of military intervention and advocating a missile strike, was sent to President Trump. Again, the name of Elie Wiesel was invoked.

“Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said in 2012, ‘The so-called civilized world isn’t even trying to stop the massacre. Its leaders issue statements, but the bloodshed continues. A situation that has lasted 13-odd months is not about to end.’ The Assad regime will not cease these brutal attacks unless it faces the threat of serious military repercussions, such as airstrikes against air bases associated with chemical weapons and suspected storage facilities.”

That appeared in the Forward on the 6th of April 2017.

The fact that Hillary Clinton had advocated a missile strike against an airbase shortly before Trump’s action has been widely noted, but the source of the idea, these rabbis quoting Elie Wiesel, has gotten very little attention. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been pushed along by organized Jewry.

A few days after President Trump’s administration announced that it had no interest in regime change in Syria, on the 4th of April 2017, a gassing incident at Khan Sheikhoun was used to pull the United States back into an anti-Assad posture.

Wasn’t that convenient?

Professor Postol says that the physical evidence for the attack is inconsistent with the story that a chemical munition was dropped from the sky by the Syrian air force. The metal cylinder alleged to have contained sarin had never contained sarin, but was in fact merely a spent rocket motor casing, bent because of impact, according to Professor Postol. Relying on the investigative reporting of Seymour Hersh, Professor Postol allows that there really was poison gas released in the area, but it was due to the fact that a command and control center where rebel munitions were stored was bombed by the Syrian air force on the 4th of April 2017 in order to kill leaders of Tahrir al-Sham.

Now, you may recognize that name. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is the group that now rules Syria. And in 2017, they had a stockpile of sarin gas that was released because they got bombed by the Syrian air force.

And then they said: Oh my, look at what Assad’s government did! They released sarin gas on the people!

No, it was from Tahrir al-Sham’s stockpile.

The Syrian air force’s 500-pound conventional bomb set off secondary explosions in the building, and toxic gases from the rebels’ own munitions were released as a consequence. The accusation that the Syrian air force had dropped poison gas was perhaps an attempt to obfuscate the rebels’ own guilt for having poison gas – which had been previously observed by Carla del Ponte.

Former U.S. intelligence officer Philip Giraldi is another prominent skeptic. He points out that nearly all the information about the alleged attack at Khan Sheikhoun came from sources hostile to Assad. And he wrote that for The American Conservative on the 25th of April 2017.

Tulsi Gabbard, the only Hindu member of the United States Congress at that time, expressed her own reasonable skepticism about Assad’s responsibility for the attack at Khan Sheikhoun, and was immediately isolated in the Democratic Party as a pariah.

On the Republican side, Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky offered the self-evident observation that such an attack would not have served any purpose for Assad:

Massie: “It’s hard to know exactly what’s happening in Syria right now. I’d like to know specifically how that release of chemical gas, if it did occur, and it looks like it did, how that occurred – because frankly, I don’t think Assad would have done that. It does not serve his interests. It would tend to draw us into that civil war even further.”

CNN: “Who do you think is behind it? Who do you think is behind it?”

Massie: “You know, you’ve got a war going on over there. Supposedly, that airstrike was on an ammo dump. And so, I don’t know if it was released because there was gas stored in the ammo dump or not. That’s plausible. I’m not saying that’s what I think happened. But I think — ”

CNN: “You’re more inclined to believe the position of what Bashar al-Assad is saying and what the Russians are saying right now [and not] more inclined to agree with, believe, what even your colleagues here in the United States believe is true, that this is Assad and what human rights observers over there say is Assad?”

Massie: “I don’t think it would have served Assad’s purposes to do a chemical attack on his people. So I, you know, it’s hard for me to understand why he would do that if he did.”

CNN: “Congressman Tom Massie, thanks for your time.”

While Congressman Masseie pointed out how little we know, and appealed to common sense, CNN’s bleach-blonde interviewer urged conformity with the majority opinion. And for his skepticism, she seemed to regard Congressman Massie as a dangerous nut. If you wondered how it could be possible for completely false beliefs to become entrenched in public opinion, and to persist without being effectively criticized, there it is in microcosm.

And that was on the 5th of April, 2017.

Skepticism about the false-flag gassing at Khan Sheikhoun has been propagated mostly via blogs and social media, getting very little notice in major news media – with notable exceptions, including :

• The Savage Nation on the 6th of April, 2017. Yes, Michael Savage, that walking Jewish stereotype actually criticized the warmongering against Syria and suggested that Israeli interests were behind it.
• Deutsche Welle on the 6th of April, 2017.
• Russia Today on the 12th of April.
• The Nation magazine on the 19th of April.
• The Telegraph, (British newspaper) on the 11th of May, with an essay on the matter by the Russian ambassador to Britain.
• And Democracy Now on the 13th of April – not because Democracy Now had a program deliberately featuring skepticism, but because guest Jonathan Steele mentioned Theodore Postol., and again, on the 28th of May, when guest Noam Chomsky mentioned Theodore Postol.

Democracy Now seemed to be pro-war. They seemed to be in favor of war against Syria, but because they had these sort of traditional leftist guests on, their guests would bring these things up. Despite the recommendations of respected guests, Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Steele, Democracy Now never did have on Professor Theodore Postol to discuss the gassing incident at Khan Sheikhoun, – and this really should be quite a scandal for Pacifica Broadcasting, since it was founded by a pacifist, an objector to the Second World War.

However, fortunately, in this day and age, we do have some real alternative media. Russia Today asked Theodore Postol to discuss the White House’s intelligence report on the incident at Khan Sheikhoun after it was released. This is from the Going Underground program of March 10th, 2018:

“I think this is an indication that there is something extremely problematic in the American national system with regard to the use of intelligence. This particular report is in some ways exactly parallel to the report that occurred in the Obama administration. Factual claims that could not be true.

Let me give you an example. They claimed that the American infrared satellites saw the launch and impact of the sarin munitions that were used in that attack. That is not possible. The American infrared satellites are very good, and they could certainly see the launch of a rocket, but they could not tell where the rocket landed because there was no explosion when the rocket landed. They would only be able to see the flash from an explosion. So this is overtly wrong. And no intelligence – I want to underscore – no American intelligence expert who knows anything about their business would have argued that this data was available. So that was fabricated.

But what it indicates is a willingness on the part of high-level people in the White House to distort, to use intelligence claims that are false to make political points and political arguments. And this is a serious, intolerable situation. […]

And we need an investigation into how such a false intelligence report could be generated at the highest levels of our government. This is very serious. This confrontation with Russia has some potential to escalate. And if it’s escalating over false intelligence claims, that is very serious.

And in addition, I would argue that such an investigation of this report should also include a complete investigation of what happened when Obama was initially misled into thinking that there was an attack by the Assad government. We know that Obama was told after he initially believed it was the Assad government, he was told that it was not necessarily the case. So he was initially given incorrect intelligence and then it was corrected – although the public was never told about this.”

What Professor Postol saw was a report containing obvious falsehoods. President Donald Trump in 2017, like President Obama before him in 2013, was subjected to an attempt to mislead him into taking aggressive action. If we want to know why, when we vote for Change You Can Believe In and America First, we always get more of the same, this is very clearly part of the explanation of why this happens. All of our presidents are being subjected to systematic distortion of information by advisors who are effectively Israeli agents – while, as Professor Postol observed, pro-Israel mass -media keep the public in the dark about what is happening.

Because of the general blackout on skepticism toward the gassing accusation, it is likely that most Americans have continued to believe that Assad’s government, for no good reason, attacked innocent Syrian civilians with poison gas at Khan Sheikhoun.

The next alleged gassing incident was about a year later at Douma in 2018, which provoked President Trump to launch his second missile strike against Syria. This is an especially important case for reasons that I will leave for investigative journalist Aaron J. Maté to explain. This is from his speech to the United Nations Security Council in early 2023.

“At the heart of it are at least two veteran inspectors from the OPCW with nearly 30 years of combined experience who worked on the Douma investigation, who deployed to Syria for the Douma investigation. And what they say is very simple. They have accused senior officials at the OPCW of suppressing findings from their probe, and putting out unsupported conclusions that baselessly implicate the Syrian government in a chemical attack. […]

The people seen in the photographs, they look like they’ve been subjected to a nerve agent attack. There is profuse foaming from the mouth in several victims. And inside the apartment building where dozens of bodies were filmed, the victims are gathered in piles at the center of a room. So these are classic signs of a nerve agent attack like Sarin. But the OPCW’s chemical analysis that comes from its own labs turns up no traces of any nerve agents whatsoever, including Sarin.

So the OPCW team has a quandary. You have symptoms of a nerve agent attack, but no evidence of nerve agents in the chemical samples.

So, they need expertise. So what do they do? They fly to Germany to consult with top military toxicologists for help. And they show these German toxicologists, four of them, photos and videos of the incident in Douma.

The Germans very quickly reach an unequivocal conclusion. They conclude that the observed symptoms of the Douma victims have no correlation to chlorine whatsoever. […] And this head of the OPCW laboratory even reports that one of the Germans raised ‘the possibility of a staged attack’ in Douma because ‘the circumstances of death for the victims do not match chlorine.’

What happens to that finding? It gets erased. The OPCW – some unknown senior officials at the OPCW — take the original report produced by the Douma team, they erase that finding based on the German toxicologists’ input, and they add a series of unsupported conclusions suggesting that a chemical attack occurred. And when this is discovered by the dissenting inspector known as Inspector B – his name is Dr. Brendan Whelan, who is the chief author of that original report – he protests this deception. And that doctored version of the report is withdrawn. But the Germans’ input that was censored is never, ever disclosed publicly. […]

In the fall of 2020, the first director general of the OPCW, the founding director general, Jose Bustani, he tried to speak before members of the UN Security Council to share his concerns. Now, he has experience with this issue because he helped design the protocols that the OPCW investigations like the one in Douma follow.

And what happens to Jose Bustani? His testimony is blocked. Certain member states here do not allow him to speak.

More OPCW officials start to speak out. In March 2021, there is a statement of concern signed by five former OPCW officials, including Jose Bustani, the founding director general. And this statement says this in part:

‘The issue at hand threatens to severely damage the reputation and credibility of the OPCW and undermine its vital role in the pursuit of international peace and security. It is simply not tenable for a scientific organization such as the OPCW to refuse to respond openly to the criticisms and concerns of its own scientists.'”

And Hans von Sponeck has told this council before that he received that letter back to him return to sender. The director general refused to even open it.

So that’s the response of the OPCW, suppressing its own findings, refusing to allow the dissenting inspectors to be heard. And then when other former OPCW officials weigh in and just try to have the facts addressed, will not even open up the letter containing that call. And they call these inspectors erroneous and uninformed, but they don’t object to a single fact that they’ve raised.

“So that is the response of the OPCW so far: suppressing findings and stonewalling any accountability.

So, fast forward now to January of this year. Finally, we get a response to the OPCW by the OPCW to all the concerns that have been raised in the form of this new report put out by the IIT, the Investigation and Identification Team.

But if you read the IIT report, there are a number of new claims, and even new claims of evidence, that are being introduced. So this IIT report is not based on the findings of the FFM. This is, in fact, an attempt to cover the tracks of the FFM and cover up for all the inconsistencies and glaring holes that were raised by the dissenting inspectors.

Well, to assert that a chemical attack happened in Douma, which is what the IIT concludes, when it comes to chemistry, they base that conclusion on finding what they call a marker chemical, a marker chemical being a signature of chlorine gas. And this so-called marker chemical is named tetrachlorophenol, TeCP. And the IIT claims to have found this TeCP sample from a single sample of concrete debris taken at location two, which is the apartment building where the Douma victims were filmed. […]

But what I can tell you is that there are a number of glaring problems with this sample.

The first glaring problem is that this new supposed smoking gun marker chemical sample has appeared out of the blue. This is the first time in any OPCW report that this sample is being acknowledged. If you go back to the March 2019 final report, there’s a long table of all the samples that were collected by the Douma team, or received by third parties in Douma. And the table tells you whether or not the samples were tested or not. This sample doesn’t even appear there. So, amazingly, nearly five years after this alleged incident, all of a sudden, the smoking gun sample that the IIT is basing a critical conclusion on has magically appeared out of the blue.

The report tells us even that the OPCW received this sample back in July 2018, in the very early weeks of this probe. Why was it never disclosed back then? Why is there no mention of it in the March 2019 final report? The IIT does not tell us.

But then we find something just as glaring. This sample was not collected by the OPCW. The OPCW, as I mentioned earlier, sent a team on the ground who collected samples. They collected dozens of samples. This sample that is now their newfound smoking gun was not collected by them. The OPCW instead tells us that it was collected by a third party, which it doesn’t identify – which is extraordinary. So you’re relying on a smoking gun sample that you’re disclosing now for the first time and you didn’t even collect yourself. This is all the more remarkable because OPCW policy – the protocols, the foundational protocols of the OPCW – specifically say that the OPCW has to control its own chain of custody.”

So we see that both the U.S. government and the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare are both infiltrated with either de facto or de jure Israeli agents who are distorting intelligence in order to perpetuate policies and misguided actions benefiting the state of Israel.

In 2017, Amnesty International augmented Caesar’s collection of alleged atrocity photos with stories from alleged eyewitnesses, which, as we know from the experience of the Second World War and its aftermath, are not trustworthy.

Amnesty International claims:

“As many as 13,000 people have been killed in Sednaya since 2011 in utmost secrecy. Many other people at Sednaya have been killed after being repeatedly tortured and systematically deprived of food, water, medicine, and medical care. The bodies of those who are killed at Sednaya are taken away by the truckload and buried in mass-graves.”

According to Amnesty International, when prominent Jewish journalist Michael Isikoff interviewed Assad for Yahoo News in 2017, he brought up Amnesty International’s collection of witness accounts and Caesar’s photos, quoting Amnesty’s characterization of Sednaya as a human slaughterhouse. Assad’s response included the observation that photographs of unidentified corpses in the midst of a war, and stories told by alleged witnesses where a political agenda is being served, do not constitute proof of systematic killing by his government.

Isikoff, however, was undeterred from his foregone conclusion, and he wrote:

“The photos are inconvenient just as initial reports about the Holocaust were, and history does not judge well those who dismissed the latter reports.”

So, Isikoff’s argument was: you don’t want to be found disbelieving the Holocaust. And if you disbelieve the accusations against Assad, that’s equivalent to disbelieving the Holocaust.

Michael Isikoff’s statement that the reports of the Holocaust and the tall tales that came to us out of Syria are “inconvenient” is very disingenuous on his part. I’m sure that he never felt that those stories were inconvenient.

The stories are inconvenient for us, non-Jewish Americans, because we never want to get involved in this stuff. So they have to trick us. They lie to us.

Many Americans became wary of this kind of propaganda after the debacle in Iraq, but not enough Americans, and not wary enough. We didn’t do a full-scale occupation of Syria, but over the course of 15 years, the Israel lobby did manage to nag our politicians into taking various measures that have led to the destruction of that country, and this is a terrible thing.

The terrible deed having been done, however, it must now be made to appear justified. Now, we are being told that there is a mass-grave of 100,000 corpses that has been discovered only a few days after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, and we’re being told that 100,000 corpses in a mass-grave have been discovered.

Just ask yourself: if there were a mass-grave containing 100,000 corpses, how long would it take to excavate and to count 100,000 corpses? This is a very obvious lie.

They’re lying exactly as they have been lying all along.