West toxic lie on Syria exposed
by Finian Cunningham
They say an expert liar needs to have a good memory to succeed in maintaining deceptions. This is because sooner or later the liar is liable to trip himself up with his own previous lies.
Only weeks after the deadly chemical weapons incident near the Syrian capital Damascus on 21 August, the Western narrative is coming apart at the seams from its own lies.
Recall that this was the “horrific” incident that nearly resulted in the US and its allies launching an all-out war on Syria. “The US doesn’t do pin-pricks,” said President Barack Obama sinisterly as American warships armed with hundreds of Tomahawk Cruise missiles suddenly honed in on the Mediterranean country.
Western turgid claims that Syria’s government forces had carried out an atrocity against civilians with deadly Sarin nerve gas were always tenuous from the outset.
Where are the names and graves of the more than 1,400 people that Washington so adamantly claims “beyond doubt” were killed by Syria’s army? What about the alleged intercepts that the US said it had obtained between Syrian army commanders? Where is the “conclusive intel” that Washington, London and Paris all said they had to justify punitive military attacks on the sovereign government of President Bashar al-Assad?
There is a growing host of evidence that soundly negates the Western claims, and indeed supports an altogether more credible and disturbing narrative. Namely, that a large-scale killing took place near Damascus on 21 August involving Saudi and Western military intelligence in collusion with the foreign-backed anti-government mercenaries. Civilians, including children, were murdered in cold blood, perhaps by lethal injection, in order to stage a provocation that was aimed as a pretext for a US-led military assault on Syria.
That all-out attack on Syria was all the more pressing because of the floundering regime-change objective of the Axis of Evil comprising Washington, London, Paris, Riyadh, Doha, Tel Aviv, Amman and Ankara.
But here is where the liars really come unstuck. President Obama,Britain’s David Cameron, France’s Francois Hollande and all their top officials, including US Secretary of State John Kerry and US ambassador the UN Samantha Power, reiterated the following mantra, “We know the Assad regime did it because the Syrian rebels do not have the capacity to use chemical weapons.”
This assertion that the Western-backed militants in Syria did not have access to chemical weapons was amplified over and over again in the Western mainstream news media.
Of course, more informed observers knew this assertion to be false. Several reports confirmed that the Takfiri and Al Qaeda-linked groups, such as Al Nusra, had been caught red-handed elsewhere in Syria and in Turkey on several occasions with supplies of Sarin and other toxic chemicals.
However, it is worth holding this particular Western contention up to account precisely because it was proffered as a key element in the Western case for military action on Syria.
And it turns out that Western diplomats, media and the UN-approved chemical weapons inspectors are now saying that the Western-backed militants do in fact have access to the internationally banned toxic munitions.
Western backed militants loading apparent chemical weapon on rocket launching device
What should have been a startling admission was disclosed rather casually in the New York Times this week. “Pressure intensified on Syrian rebels [sic] on Monday to permit access to chemical weapons sites in areas under their control,” reported the newspaper.
The Times added, “A Western diplomat in the Arab world said that though the Syrian government was legally responsible for dismantling its chemical weapons under an international agreement, its opponents should also cooperate in the process, because several chemical weapons sites were close to confrontation lines or within rebel-held territory.”
Ahmet Uzumcu, the director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, also said this week that the Syrian government had cooperated fully in providing access to weapons sites under its control, but he added that the problem for his inspection team was gaining safe access to sites under control of militants. This was because of the lawless conduct of these groups, which have opened fire on the inspectors and even set off bombs near one of the hotels where the team is staying.
“We appeal to all sides in Syria to support this mission, to be cooperative and not render this mission more difficult,” said Uzumcu.
The crucial point is that Western government leaders and their most senior representatives, as well as the dutiful Western news media, have been caught choking on their own toxic lies over Syria.
The New York Times and other Western media did not seem to notice the glaring contradiction to the claims that they had been peddling only a few weeks ago – that the militants in Syria allegedly do not have chemical weapons.
Washington and its allies were about to launch a massive missile and bombing attack on Syria that would have probably caused thousands of civilian deaths. That offensive would have been an outrageous criminal aggression because, as it has clearly turned out, it was all based on lies. Central to the fabrication for military attack on Syria was the lie that the Western-backed militants did not carry out the Damascus atrocity because “they did not possess such weaponry.”
Well, clearly as the mainstream media is now letting slip, the militants do have access and control over deadly chemical weapons. So much so that the head of the OPCW is compelled to plead for cooperation from these militants in order to carry out the UN Security Resolution mandating the total chemical disarmament inside Syria.
Western propaganda lies evidently have a memory problem. But we should not let the world forget the criminal deeds that Western governments are prepared to carry out – lest they try to pull another pernicious stunt.
FC/PR
This article was originally published at PRESS TV
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Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio.
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