Thursday, September 5, 2013

Pants on Fire


       Rush Limbaugh finally asked the question which is not a question to the Russian president. Did al-Qaeda frame Assad ? Putin said bluntly John Kerry lied to Congress about the role and extent of al-Qaeda participation in the rebel Free Syrian Army. Putin was referring to the Secretary’s answer to Wisconsin’s Senator Ron Johnson who was concerned about the infiltration of the FSA by offshoots of the notorious terrorist organization.

 Kerry answered: “The opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation, more defined by the breadth of its membership and more defined by its adherence to some, you know [sic], democratic process and to an all-inclusive, minority-protecting constitution, which will be broad-based and secular with respect to the future of Syria. And that's very critical.”

This comes barely a month after  a massacre in the North in which some 450 civilians were reported killed including 120 children. In this horrrific assault on humanity Assad was not suspected. It was brigades that Secretary Kerry denies play prominent role in the conflict or falsely labels as "moderates" pledged to a post-war democratic process in Syria. The western media have largely ignored the mounting evidence of large-scale atrocities committed by the al-Qaeda affiliates such as the one in Tal Abyad just mentioned or at Khan al-Assal.  In John Kerry’s narrative such incidents simply don’t exist. Or if there is not a decisive proof that al-Qaeda was involved, they are blamed on Assad.  In John McCain’s almanac, the jihadi cri-de-guerre Allahu Akhbar heard on the rebels’ videos showing the decapitations of priests or mass shootings of prisoners, is an equivalent of a church-going Christian’s Thank God!   Do these guys think we are total idiots ? 

 If one goes by facts and not oaths there is little evidence that Bashar al-Assad ordered a large-scale sarin attack against the suburbs of his capital which his forces were bombarding and from which his troops were clearing the rebel fighters.  Of course it is possible he did it,  or someone on his side took matters in his own hands, but on the surface it looks about as probable as that Nidal Hasan was thanking God for the gift of life when executing his unarmed fellow soldiers at Fort Hood.   

  There is obviously something terribly wrong with Kerry’s Syria narrative. It falls apart the moment you start reading something else than Washington Post or the Guardian and watching something else than the Wolf-Blitzer-Christian-Amanpour babble fests.  Kerry's estimate of "15%-25% of extremists among the rebels" would be laughed off by most people on the ground in Syria, that is if they would not laugh off the notion of  FSA as a disciplined, civilized military force before that.   

We of course do not have reliable sources that tell us the chemical attack near Damascus was perpetrated by the rebels. Yes, I am aware of the Gavlak’s report in MintPress News that has jihadist fighters admitting to releasing the gas in Ghouta, but I am not buying that either.  It just does not figure that the chief of Saudi intelligence would have been so personally involved in the incident to have blown his cover. It does not help either that the chief editor of the electronic outlet that employs the former AP reporter is a hijab-clad Palestinian-bred Shia.  We should not be anyone’s fools !  And as a cynic who grew up in communist Eastern Europe during the History’s inexorable march to the final victory of communism, I can tell stupid propaganda when I see it. 

Last Tuesday (9/3/2013), The Guardian ran a staged query on Syria and allowed  the “taboo” question to be asked again: Did the rebels have sarin gas ?  It answered in this fashion:

"It is not the media that is assuming that Assad is responsible. The Guardian and other media have reported claims and assessments by the US, UK, France and the Syrian rebels, and of course official Syrian denials. Only western governments have provided any evidence at all, however adequate or convincing it is judged. All three governments also state categorically that the rebels did not have the capacity to mount a CW attack on the scale of what occurred on 21 August. All have stated they are relying on classified sources as well as the precedent of earlier, smaller attacks. More detail is clearly needed to convince sceptics, given the experience of the Iraq WMD dossier.It has previously been reported that members of the al-Nusra front were caught with sarin nerve gas in Turkey – and this has been echoed by Syrian state media. Dale Gavlak, an independent journalist, has reported a belief that nerve agents used in Ghouta were supplied by Saudi Arabia. So far, however, neither the Syrian government nor Russia have publicly provided any evidence that the rebels were responsible for the incident. Delay in allowing the UN inspectors access to the scene of the attacks, and heavy shelling before they were able to get there, appeared designed to destroy evidence.”

I am sorry but I always assumed that we in the West believe that a crime has to be committed beyond reasonable doubt for one to be in a position to apply sanctions legally.  It cannot be just “any evidence at all”.  Note also, that the Syrian rebels are named among the ones who “concluded” Assad was responsible.  Gee whiz, should not a party that may well be guilty of the atrocity be excluded from passing opinions on it ?   And what about the weaseling around the al-Nusra rebels caught with a sarin canister in Turkey in June ?  Pardon me for asking a stupid question, but why would they try to smuggle sarin into Syria if they did not have the intent, the know-how, and the means to use it ?  Does that make any sense ?     But the real shocker and one that exposes the mendacious nature of the so-called “intelligence data” is the categorical denial that the rebels have “the capacity” to deliver a large scale attack such as undeniably took place east of Damascus in August. 

This is a bold-faced lie that has been repeated by everyone who wants the US military to get involved in the Syrian pandemonium. They say the rebels do not have sophisticated delivery systems for chemical weapons. They do not have an air force, missiles, specialized artillery to deliver the munitions whose payload is mixed in flight. Hmmm, really ? I don't think so.

The fact of the matter is you do not have to have any of the above to launch a horrific assault on humanity by chemical weapons. A president who professes to be outraged by mass killings of civilians has no excuse for not knowing that !  If the jihadists in Syria have access to sarin (which btw is not denied by The Guardian) it means they could very well have used it on the scale and with the effects observed in the terrible incident.  They do not need sophisticated delivery systems. All they need is a few bags of liquid sarin, and a way to puncture them as the terrorists of the death cult Au Shinrikyo did in the Tokyo subway system in 1995 killing twelve and injuring close to a thousand people. This is not a fantasy. This happened and it cannot be denied.  The agreement of the experts is that the toll could have been much worse if the attack had not been botched.  The Syrian jihadis could have very well done something similar during a conventional bombardment by Assad’s army of the areas where they had their fighters and make it look like a chemical attack by him.    

We do not know whether the rebels actually did it or not. But we definitely know it is a self-serving and damnable lie to say that they did not have the capacity to do it.

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