[Peace-discuss] Attack On Ghouta, Syria, 1 Year On: Washington's Lies Debunked

Sun Aug 24 15:47:57 EDT 2014

  Attack On Ghouta, Syria, 1 Year On: Washington's Lies Debunked

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Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> ISIS 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/isis/>, Syria 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/syria/>, Wars and Militarism 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/wars-and-militarism/>
By Eric Draitser, www.rt.com 
<http://rt.com/op-edge/181840-syria-chemical-ghouta-war-us/>
August 23rd, 2014
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/ARCHIVE PHOTO: A United Nations (UN) arms expert collects samples on 
August 29, 2013, as they inspect the site where rockets had fallen in 
Damascus' eastern Ghouta suburb during an investigation into a suspected 
chemical weapons strike near the capital (AFP Photo)/

This week marks the first anniversary of the infamous chemical weapons 
attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta.

What makes that incident significant, both politically and historically, 
is the fact that, despite the evidence of Syrian government involvement 
being non-existent, the Obama administration nearly began a war with 
Syria using Ghouta as the pretext.

As the months have passed however, scientific studies amassing an 
impressive body of evidence have shown that, not only were Washington's 
claims of /"certainty"/ that Assad's forces had used chemical weapons in 
their war with extremist fighters utterly baseless, but in fact the 
reality was quite the opposite -- the rebels were the most likely 
culprits of the attack.

Additionally, in the year since the Ghouta attack, the nature of the war 
in Syria, and specifically the way in which it is understood in the 
West, has changed dramatically. The so-called rebels have been defeated 
in regular battles and skirmishes with Syrian military forces, while the 
specter of ISIS has emerged as the embodiment of evil in the eyes of the 
Western public.

While ISIS (now the Islamic State, or IS) was summarily executing Syrian 
civilians in Aleppo and smaller towns in Syria, they were no threat. 
While they were merely destroying Christian and Shiite shrines, 
crucifying prisoners, and sowing terror throughout Syria, they did not 
constitute a serious problem.

However, now that the IS has emerged on the world stage, controlling 
parts of Syria and Iraq, and expanding into Lebanon, the equation on the 
ground in Syria has changed. With the West, in particular the United 
States, desperately seeking to reestablish a politically dominant 
position in Syria and delegitimize Assad and his government, the pretext 
for aggression has shifted from chemical weapons and Assad's 
/'butchery'/ to the inescapable need to combat the IS.

Though conditions on the ground have changed in the last 12 months, the 
West's agenda for Syria has changed very little. Regime change is still 
the name of the game.

AFP Photo / HO

AFP Photo / HO

    Ghouta: Washington's lies debunked

By the morning of August 22, 2013 -- mere hours after the incident -- 
the Western media had already tried and convicted Syrian President 
Bashar Assad for the chemical attack on Ghouta, which allegedly killed 
roughly 1,300 Syrians. Headlines 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syrias-darkest-day-opposition-blames-assad-forces-as-up-to-1300-killed-in-poison-gas-attacks-8777527.html> 
around the world, such as /"Syria's darkest day? Opposition blames Assad 
forces as up to 1,300 killed in 'poison gas attacks'"/ had already 
convinced the world that Damascus was behind the attack, that Assad was 
obviously a war criminal with a lust for blood, and that Western 
intervention was both necessary and morally justified.

Such was the tone of political discourse and rhetoric in the West 
following the attack. But then, a funny thing happened...people began 
questioning the validity of the claims and demanding irrefutable evidence.

I am happy to say that I was one of those people demanding that the 
US-NATO version of events be scrutinized carefully. In an article 
<http://stopimperialism.org/articles/debunking-u-s-government-assessment-syrian-governments-use-chemical-weapons-august-21-2013/> 
dated August 30, 2013, and titled /'Debunking the US Government 
Assessment of the Syrian Government's Use of Chemical Weapons on August 
21, 2013'/ I examined carefully the claims made by Washington that 
purported to establish undeniable proof that Assad's forces carried out 
the attack. In the article, which provided a point-by-point refutation 
of Washington's allegations, I wrote:

/"Any critical reading of this document [the US Assessment] must begin 
with the notions of 'human intelligence' and 'witness accounts'. Such 
terminology indicates that the US is simply basing pre-conceived 
conclusions on rebel sources and the much touted 'activists' who seem to 
always be the sources quoted in Western media reports. Secondly, it is 
obvious that US officials have cherry-picked their eyewitness accounts 
as there are many, from both sides of the conflict, which directly 
contradict this so-called high-confidence assessment."/

Just by examining the conclusions drawn by Washington at the time, it 
was abundantly clear that a political, rather than a forensic and 
evidenced-based, account of the events was being presented by the White 
House. However, the attempt to make war on Syria ultimately faltered for 
political reasons, and so, the story mostly fell away from the public 
spotlight.

In the subsequent months, multiple studies were in fact carried out to 
try to firmly establish the truth of what happened in Ghouta. In a 
comprehensive report released in January 2014 (more than four months 
after the incident), former UN weapons inspector Richard Lloyd and Prof. 
Theodore Postol of MIT effectively debunked the claims of the US 
government (along with Human Rights Watch and a number of other 
organizations), showing conclusively that US intelligence and 
conclusions regarding the incident were grossly inaccurate. The report 
<https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1006045/possible-implications-of-bad-intelligence.pdf?_sm_au_=iRVHR0PW26P4tNjr>, 
entitled Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in 
the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013, notes that:

/"The Syrian improvised chemical munitions that were used in the August 
21 nerve agent attack in Damascus have a range of about 2km...[The 
evidence] indicates that these munitions could not possibly have been 
fired at East Ghouta from the 'heart', or from the eastern edge, of the 
Syrian Government-controlled area shown in the intelligence map 
published by the White House on August 30, 2013...The UN independent 
assessment of the range of the chemical munitions is in exact agreement 
with our findings...this mistaken intelligence could have led to an 
unjustified US military action based on false intelligence."/

A handout image released by the Syrian opposition's Shaam News Network 
shows people inspecting bodies of children and adults laying on the 
ground as Syrian rebels claim they were killed in a toxic gas attack by 
pro-government forces in eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus on 
August 21, 2013. (AFP/Shaam News Network)

And so, once an honest, scientific investigation was conducted, the 
entire fabricated narrative with which Washington sought authorization 
to go to war in Syria was exposed as fraudulent. Unfortunately, by that 
point most of the world was no longer paying attention.

A few months later, in April 2014, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist 
Seymour Hersh published his absolutely critical piece 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line> 
The Red Line and the Rat Line in which he wrote:

/"The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since 
the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing 
chemical weapons...Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly 
classified five-page 'talking points' briefing... which stated that 
Al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its program, the paper 
said, was 'the most advanced sarin plot since Al-Qaeda's pre-9/11 
effort...Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost 
entirely on Syrian CW [chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF 
attempting to make its own CW ... Al-Nusra Front's relative freedom of 
operation within Syria leads us to assess the group's CW aspirations 
will be difficult to disrupt in the future.' The paper drew on 
classified intelligence from numerous agencies: 'Turkey and Saudi-based 
chemical facilitators,' it said, 'were attempting to obtain sarin 
precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated 
large-scale production effort in Syria.'"/

So Hersh's reporting finally firmly established the fact that the rebels 
were indeed capable of carrying out the attack on East Ghouta, and that 
they had help from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and possibly other regional 
actors. And so, not only did they have the motive (to blame Assad for 
using chemical weapons while international investigators were in Syria, 
thereby justifying a military intervention and regime change), but also 
the means and opportunity. This is an essential point because the entire 
/'case'/ against Assad relied on the fact that only Damascus was 
technologically and logistically capable of carrying out such an attack. 
On the contrary, evidence has since come to light substantiating the 
claim from Damascus all along that the rebels indeed carried out the attack.

Why go into this history with the first anniversary upon us? Because it 
provides observers with a case study in how Western propaganda operates, 
how it works in synchronicity with the policy agendas of the Western 
powers, how it serves to suppress and/or distort facts in order to shape 
them to fit a pre-conceived narrative. They did, and continue to do, it 
in Syria. They're doing it in Ukraine. They're doing it in Iraq (not for 
the first time). It is predictable yet, sadly, many still fall for it.

AFP Photo / HO

AFP Photo / HO

    How ISIS changed conversation, but not agenda

In the year since the Ghouta attack, the war in Syria has taken on a new 
dimension. With the rise to public infamy of the IS, the conversation 
around Syria has changed drastically. Before, the warmongers such as 
John McCain and others argued that the US must bomb Syria in order to 
effect regime change, ousting the /'butcher'/ Assad and replacing his 
government with one more amenable to Washington. Today, the same 
warmongers make the same tired arguments about the necessity of using 
military /'intervention'/ to fight the menace of the IS, an organization 
now controlling vast swaths of Iraq and Syria.

The gruesome video 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/08/isis-beheaded-journalist-james-wright-foley.html> 
allegedly depicting American journalist James Wright Foley being 
executed by members of the IS has predictably elicited bellicose 
rhetoric from seemingly every corner of US political life. The 
unabashedly right-wing New York Post published an editorial 
<http://nypost.com/2014/08/20/time-to-bomb-isis/> entitled Time to Bomb 
ISIS in which the authors wrote, /"[This incident] puts President Obama 
in a difficult spot. But the president must do whatever it takes to 
counter this vicious savagery: that is, launch full-throttled airstrikes 
against ISIS and its 'caliphate' in Iraq and Syria -- until the threat 
is gone...With American lives now being taken and even more at risk, 
America is now directly involved. No more playing footsie with butchers."/

The editorial offers insights into the thinking of US imperialists who 
have been calling for US military action against Syria for more than a 
year, who supported the illegal US war on Iraq, and seemingly every 
instance of US aggression throughout the world, especially when 
initiated by Republican presidents. Indeed, a close reading of the above 
excerpt makes it clear that many in the US feel that the IS should be 
used as a pretext to /'finish the job'/, so to speak. /"No more playing 
footsie with butchers"/ is a revealing statement, showing clearly that 
the vilified Assad must be destroyed via an operation against the IS.

Notice also that the authors make the appallingly ignorant statement 
that /"America is now directly involved."/ Naturally, these political 
observers must have been asleep for the past three years, as the US has 
been intimately involved in every phase of the destabilization of Syria. 
As the NYT reported 
<http://rt.com/op-edge/181840-syria-chemical-ghouta-war-us/%20http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/world/middleeast/cia-said-to-aid-in-steering-arms-to-syrian-rebels.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0> 
back in June 2012, the CIA has been working extensively with the Syrian 
Muslim Brotherhood to funnel weapons, communications equipment, and 
other material support to the extremists in Syria fighting against the 
government of Assad.

Naturally, those weapons and materiel have been used to create and 
expand the terror group we now call the IS. And so, in a very direct 
way, the cancer spreading through Iraq and Syria is a US-NATO-GCC 
creation. But of course, according to the eminent American analysts at 
the NY Post and elsewhere, the US has been merely a sideline 
cheerleader, totally uninvolved in the chaos in the region. Whether 
these /'experts'/ are willfully ignorant, deliberately deceitful or 
genuinely stupid is certainly up for debate.

But, a look at the media coverage of the IS and the region in recent 
weeks does not bode well for the millions around the world who have 
simply had enough of US /'interventions'/ in the Middle East and beyond. 
The drumbeat for war is once again audible, as it was exactly one year 
ago with the incident in Ghouta. The more things change, the more they 
stay the same. Yesterday's chemical weapons have become today's IS threat.

Conveniently for Washington, no matter which way the menu is written, 
war is the main course.

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