Excellent op ed from Mahdi Nazemroya Also available at Information Clearinghouse - ht anonymous commenter Just posting parts of this article, one should truly take the entire piece in and look at all the images presented
The US intelligence community has been put to shame by the dedication and determination of a lone Christian nun. Her modest study of the videos of the Syrian chemical attack shows they were productions involving staged bodies.Those who take the time to read the report by Mother Agnes and the International Support Team for Mussalaha in Syria (ISTEAMS) will realize that it disgraces the entire US intelligence community for endorsing video footage that is clearly dubious and not credible upon careful study by even a layperson.
Dubious nature of videos selected by US intel community
The US intelligence community selected or nominated 13 videos that the Obama Administration used in their case against the Syrian government. These videos need to be carefully looked at. The emphasis that US Secretary of State John Kerry put on the videos in his scripted speech that he read out to reporters on August 30, 2013, came across as ingenious. Kerry notably refers to the footage from Syria and constantly uses the words “our own eyes” and “seeing.” He even asks that the videos be watched by the general public. He should have been taken to task on this, and he was through the study that Mother Agnes has produced. Undoubtedly there will be those who will dismiss the fact that there is an almost total absence of adult corpses next to the bodies of the children, nor any parents, especially mothers, coming to claim their children. Where were the parents? From a cultural context, this is strikingly odd. It is highly unlikely that the parents, especially the mothers of all these children, would have left them alone or not rushed to where their bodies were.
If the parents were not killed, then where are they? If the parents, especially the mothers (following the gender script of Syrian society), were with their children, then where are their corpses?
In one video where it is stated that all the bodies are dead, we can see that the some of the corpses are being injected with an unknown liquid. Why?
The report also highlights the fact that there have been no public funerals or announcements about all the dead children. This is outside of both cultural and religious norms.
In the footage of one burial, only eight people are buried and three of them are not even covered in white shrouds, which is a compulsory ritual. Were these people murdered by the insurgents and disrespectfully buried without the proper rituals as a sign of disdain?
Moreover, the identities of the dead have consistently been withheld. There is more to say on this and it should be kept in mind.
Mother Agnes also makes a point of indicating that there is virtually an absence of the sound of ambulances and that in the testimonies that are used the individuals talking claim to have smelled the chemical that was used. Sarin gas, however, is odorless, which raises important questions about the testimonies.
A horrible conclusion
Many bad things have happened in Syria, including the chemical attack in East Ghouta. Yet there many questions that have to be answered. There was a massacre in Latakia on August 4, 2013 that went unreported. The mainstream media in the US and the countries allied to it failed to cover this or casually pass it over, obviously because it was inconvenient to change the agenda in Syria. The study mentions that the relatives of children that were abducted by the US-supported insurgents have begun to come forward to identify their relatives in the videos. It paints an ominous picture that the bodies of these children were prostituted to open the field in Syria for a foreign military intervention. Regardless of whatever position one takes on Syria, it is their responsibility to analyze the videos from the alleged chemical attack and pay attention to observations of Mother Agnes Mariam’s report.