21st Century Wire says…
When the UN released its summary of their ‘chemical weapons’ report on August 30th, the usual suspects – led by the US, UK and France, immediately rushed to their media pulpits to claim that this was “proof” that Syria, under the leadership of President Bashar al Assad, was somehow guilty (again) of the charge of “using chlorine bombs against its own people.” This latest UN report was the result of a year-long joint inquiry with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Before the full report was even released, western officials and their media surrogates began hysterically claiming that it was imperative for the UN Security Council to move for more sanctions against Syria, to impose a ‘Safe Zone’ (No-Fly Zone) and to possibly give more license to increasing US-led military intervention in Syria.
When confronted with the summary of the yet-to-be released report, Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, came straight out of the gates, stating it was wrong to jump to conclusions before actually reading the report, replying simply, “There are a number of questions which have to be clarified before we accept all the findings of the report.”
Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin.
This week the full report was finally released, and as it turns out – Russia’s Churkin was 100% correct. The report, as with many other US-led attempts to fabricate cases of weapons of mass destruction against governments it wishes to depose, seems at the very least to be sexed-up, and at most – a completely fraudulent assessment of events on the ground in Syria. The only real conclusive findings in this report point to ISIS using sulfur mustard gas in Syria. Once again, the West, led by the United States, has attempted to position what appears to be another fabricated case against the Syrian government – and place that in the same report next to real findings of a malicious ISIS chemical weapons attack – in a somewhat crude attempt to conflate the two (ISIS and Assad) in the court of public opinion.
Even worse than attempting to falsely attribute chemical weapons attacks to Syria and Assad, the UN is also guilty of ignoring witness testimonies that have said ‘chlorine attacks’ were in fact staged by western-backed ‘rebels’ (see details and assessment of the UN report below).
POWELL & POWER: Same ‘WMD’ fraud, different target nation.
You could tell that a desperate agenda was in play judging by the over-the-top and leading statements made by US, UK and French representatives before the report was released two weeks ago.
Of course, leading the charge, with a her summary of the yet-to-be released fraudulent assessment in hand, was R2P hawk and US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, who insisted that Syria must “pay a price”. She added, “It is incumbent on the council to act swiftly to show that when we put that Joint Investigative Mechanism in place we were serious about there being meaningful accountability.”
Once again, just like Colin Powell before her, and as with Iraq… the west brazenly touts another dodgy dossier, custom-made for yet another humanitarian stitch-up.
British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft also joined-in the diplomatic pantomime, saying the UK is calling for “the imposition of a sanctions regime and some form of accountability within international legal mechanisms.”
French UN Ambassador Francois Delattre demanded a “quick and strong security council response” and said, “We need a resolution with teeth.”
Back in August 2013, Western and Saudi-backed ‘rebels’ launched an elaborate media-driven ‘WMD’ hoax also designed to assign blame to the Syrian Government for ‘sarin gas’ attacks in East Ghouta, Damascus. Western newspapers ran photos of Assad with headlines like, “Now They’re Gassing Their Own Children”(image, above). On the back of that stunt, both the US and the UK even went so far as to press for a declaration of war vote in both their parliaments. Unfortunately for their military industrial complexes, the public did not buy it, but that hasn’t discouraged them to keep on trying.
What’s more shocking however, is why the United Nations would allow its name to be attributed to such a fraudulent and misleading document – one that is clearly designed to bolster another bogus case for western military intervention. In the end, this type of self-interested abuse and manipulation by certain UN Security Council members only serves to damage the credibility of the UN as an international arbiter and the institution as a whole (maybe that’s part of the West’s agenda too).
Verdict: The ‘evidence’ presented in the UN report derives hearsay reporting only from “activists” and “rebels”(listed terrorist groups), in effect, lowering the bar so that absolutely no burden of proof is required by accusing parties.
Considering what is at stake, and knowing full-well just how the US, UK, France and its NATO allies have demonstrated they are willing to conjure any report of ‘chemical attacks by the regime’ and will hold this up as a violation of Barack Obama and Washington’s ethereal “Red Line” – this is leads immediately to calls to mount another “humanitarian” intervention.
Joining in the party also, are the West’s new instruments of war: high-profile “human rights” charities with links the US State Department. One such organization, Human Rights Watch, whose CEO Ken Roth has already been seen on multiple occasions tweeting fake Syria images in order to build the case for ‘regime change’, called on the UN Security council to renew its resolution referring Syria to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch stated, “Russia and China don’t have a leg to stand on by continuing to obstruct the Security Council,” he said, “The Security Council diminishes its importance if it doesn’t take strong action against demonstrated use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government.” To learn more about ‘Human Rights’ NGOs are being used to support western imperial objectives read 21WIRE’s detailed report on this subject:
AN INTRODUCTION: SMART POWER & THE HUMAN RIGHTS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
More on the Washington’s latest dodgy dossier from award-winning journalist Robert Parry…
Robert Parry
Consortium News
United Nations investigators encountered evidence that alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian military were staged by jihadist rebels and their supporters, but still decided to blame the government for two incidents in which chlorine was allegedly dispersed via improvised explosives dropped by helicopters.
In both cases, the Syrian government denied that it had any aircraft in the areas at the times of the purported attacks, but the U.N. team rejected that explanation with the curious argument that Syria failed to provide flight records to corroborate the absence of any flights. Yet, if there had been no flights, there would be no flight records.
The U.N. team also dismissed out of hand the possibility that jihadist rebels who had overrun some air bases and thus had operational helicopters at their disposal might have used them as part of a staged event designed to incriminate the Damascus regime and thus justify U.S. or other outside military intervention.
Another problem with the U.N. team’s findings is that the home-made chlorine bombs had minimal military value, inflicting relatively few casualties and only a handful of deaths.
Why the Syrian government, which was under intense international pressure regarding alleged chemical weapons use and was in the process of surrendering its stockpile of such weapons, would have jerry-rigged a handful of homemade bombs and dropped them for no discernible military effect makes little sense.
However, since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been thoroughly demonized over his harsh reaction to an uprising that began in 2011, pretty much any accusation against him – no matter how unlikely or implausible – is widely accepted in the mainstream Western media and political circles. In other words, the U.N. team was under pressure to reach a guilty verdict.
Accusations of Staging
Yet, the evidence from at least one of the incidents examined by the U.N. team suggests that an attack on Al-Tamanah on the night of April 29-30, 2014, might well have been staged by rebels and then played up by activists through social media.
“Seven witnesses stated that frequent alerts [about an imminent chlorine weapons attack by the government] had been issued, but in fact no incidents with chemicals took place,” the U.N. report stated. “While people sought safety after the warnings, their homes were looted and rumours spread that the events were being staged. … [T]hey [these witnesses] had come forward to contest the wide-spread false media reports.”
Accounts from other people, who did allege that there had been a government chemical attack on Al-Tamanah, provided suspect evidence, including data from questionable sources, according to the U.N. report.
The report said, “Three witnesses, who did not give any description of the incident on 29-30 April 2014, provided material of unknown source. One witness had second-hand knowledge of two of the five incidents in Al-Tamanah, but did not remember the exact dates. Later that witness provided a USB-stick with information of unknown origin, which was saved in separate folders according to the dates of all the five incidents mentioned by the FFM (the U.N.’s Fact-Finding Mission).
“Another witness provided the dates of all five incidents reading it from a piece of paper, but did not provide any testimony on the incident on 29-30 April 2014. The latter also provided a video titled ‘site where second barrel containing toxic chlorine gas was dropped tamanaa 30 April 14’”
Some other witnesses alleging a Syrian government attack offered curious claims about detecting the chlorine-infused “barrel bombs” based on how the device sounded in its descent.
The U.N. report said, “The eyewitness, who stated to have been on the roof, said to have heard a helicopter and the ‘very loud’ sound of a falling barrel. Some interviewees had referred to a distinct whistling sound of barrels that contain chlorine as they fall. The witness statement could not be corroborated with any further information.”
As in other cases that were investigated, the U.N. team demanded that the Syrian government provide flight records to support its denial that any of its aircraft were in the air in that vicinity at the time of the attack.
“The Government of the Syrian Arab Republic stated that no military activities were conducted from land or air in Al-Tamanah on the dates of the incidents, but did not provide any records of flight operations to support this statement,” the U.N. report said.
In the Al-Tamanah case, the U.N. team judged the evidence insufficient to reach a firm judgment regarding who was responsible. However, in two other cases, in Talmenes in April 2014 and Sarmin in March 2015, the U.N. team accused the Syrian military of dropping chlorine-infused “barrel bombs.”
Investigative Limitations
Yet, regarding all eight cases that were examined, the U.N. team acknowledged significant limitations on its ability to investigate.
The report said, “As was the case with the Fact-Finding missions, the lack of access to the locations under investigation due to the dire security situation on the ground affected the manner in which the Mechanism [a committee from the U.N. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] was able to conduct its investigation.
“Visits to certain locations would have facilitated the ability of the Mechanism to (a) confirm and access specific locations of interest; (b) collect comparative environmental samples; (c) identify new witnesses; and (d) physically evaluate the material of interest to the Mechanism (e.g., remnants).
“Other challenges and constraints include the following factors: (a) the time period that had elapsed since the incident (i.e. in some cases, more than two years since the incident); (b) the lack of chain of custody for some of the material received; (c) the source of information and material was of secondary or tertiary nature; (d) some of the information material, including those depicting the size and nature of the incident, were misleading; (e) finding independent sources of information that could provide access to individuals and information material proved difficult; and (f) the impact locations were not preserved and were compromised by the time they were recorded (e.g., the videos and photographs of the impact locations were taken days after the incident and in many cases after the remnants had been removed from the impact location).”
In other words, the U.N./OPCW investigation was compromised by its inability to conduct an effective on-the-ground assessment and was forced to rely on witnesses who were often allied with the rebel forces or sympathetic to the political opposition to President Assad.
This problem is reminiscent of what happened inside the U.S. Intelligence Community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq when some 18 witnesses – supposedly “defectors” from Saddam Hussein’s regime – became “walk-ins” who presented claims about the Iraqi government’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
CIA analysts debunked some of these bogus claims and traced some of the deceit to the machinations of the pro-invasion Iraqi National Congress (INC), but – given the political-and-media hatred of Saddam Hussein – the CIA analysts were under intense pressure to accept some of the dubious accounts that were then incorporated into U.S. intelligence products and used to justify a war under false pretenses.
As with Iraq – where the U.S. government had helped fund anti-regime groups such as the INC – a similar situation exists inside Syria where U.S. officials have assisted the “opposition” in organizing politically and mastering propaganda skills. So, the means and opportunity for depicting regime “atrocities” through social media are there, along with the motive.
These activists – as well as the radical jihadists and other armed rebels – have become increasingly desperate to induce the United States to intervene militarily against the Syrian army and thus make their desired “regime change” possible.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Aug. 30, 2013, claims to have proof that the Syrian government was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21, 2013, but that evidence failed to materialize or was later discredited. [State Department photo]
Obama’s Red Line
The emphasis on creating a chemical weapons casus belli increased when President Barack Obama set the Syrian government’s possible use of such weapons as a “red line” that might cause him to intervene directly with U.S. forces.
That comment and the political pressure for instituting another Mideast “regime change” were the backdrop for the sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, which anti-Assad activists, the mainstream U.S. press, and the U.S. State Department immediately blamed on government forces.
In the ensuing days, Obama came to the edge of authorizing a retaliatory military strike before hearing from U.S. and other Western intelligence services that they had doubts about who had actually pulled off the attack.
Since then, the sarin case against Assad has largely collapsed (although to defuse the crisis he agreed to a Russian plan for Syria to surrender all its chemical weapons). The evidence now appears to indicate that radical jihadists released the sarin with the goal of goading Obama into joining the war on their side, i.e., a false-flag operation.
As the sarin case fell apart in 2014, the U.S. government shifted its emphasis toward chlorine-gas allegations. I first encountered this bait-and-switch tactic when I pressed a senior State Department official to back up or back off the increasingly discredited sarin gas claims.
While sidestepping the sarin case, the official asserted that the Syrian government almost surely was responsible for the more recent chlorine-gas incidents, citing the bombs’ delivery by helicopter and arguing that only the Syrian government possessed such aircraft.
According to the U.N. report, however, that belief regarding the government’s monopoly of helicopters may not be true, since rebel forces had captured air bases where operational helicopters were present. That means, at least theoretically, the jihadists could have staged the night-time attacks – complete with prior alarms spread by activist first-responders, known as “white helmets,” about the imminent arrival of “government” helicopters with chlorine bombs.
But the more nettlesome question, which the U.N. report does not address, is why would the Syrian government launch these strange attacks while realizing that any chemical weapons incident could prompt U.S. military intervention that could tip the war in favor of the jihadists and other rebels, especially since the chlorine attacks had virtually no military value.
Few Fatalities
While the makeshift chlorine bombs may have sent scores of civilians to get medical attention, very few of the casualties were fatal, according to the U.N. report. By contrast, the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin attack killed hundreds, with the U.S. government putting out an even higher (and almost surely exaggerated) number of 1,429 dead…
Continue this report at Consortium News
READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Syria Files
