Robert Parry of Consortium News has become an invaluable news source for me over the past several months. In case you are unfamiliar with his work, Robert is an investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He writes extensively on politics and geopolitics. His latest piece, Trump’s ‘Wag the Dog’ Moment, is a must read.
Much of the post focuses on the ridiculous notion that Assad would have intentionally gassed his own people at the exact moment he was most secure in his position after years of brutal internal conflict. He notes:
Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.
There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.
But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.
The above is far more likely to be accurate than the fairytale narrative being spun by the corporate media and Washington officialdom.
continue reading