Weekend Economists Get Syri-ous August 30-September 2, 2013

[Demeter]

29. Chemical Hallucinations By William Bowles

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36037.htm

I think it’s true to say that the days of creating ‘dodgy dossiers‘ http://williambowles.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ukdossier.pdf 1] are now over, at least if the latest ‘dodgy report’ is anything to go by. Put out by the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee, it purports to offer proof that Assad gassed his own people. But aside from the fact that it offers not a shred of proof, it’s also amateurish and clearly put together in a panic.

We…have a limited but growing body of intelligence which supports the judgement that the regime was responsible for the attacks and that they were conducted to help clear the Opposition from strategic parts of Damascus. Some of this intelligence is highly sensitive but you have had access to it all. – UK Joint Intelligence Organisation, 29 August 2013

The ‘intelligence’ report http://williambowles.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Jp_115_JD_PM_Syria_Reported_Chemical_Weapon_Use_with_annex.pdf is short, barely two pages of text and short not only in size, it’s also short of any real content that backs up the mantra,’Assad, the brutal dictator did it’. Not a single fact is presented. Here are are the relevant ‘proofs’ offered by the JIC’s report:

JIC assessment of 27 August on Reported Chemical Weapons use in Damascus

A chemical attack occurred in Damascus on the morning of 21 August, resulting in at least 350 fatalities. It is not possible for the opposition to have carried out a CW attack on this scale. The regime has used CW on a smaller scale on at least 14 occasions in the past. There is some intelligence to suggest regime culpability in this attack. These factors make it highly likely that the Syrian regime was responsible.

Run this past me again? “It is not possible for the opposition to have carried out a CW attack on this scale”, ergo, it must have been Assad. This is evidence? It’s a pathetic, not to say ludicrous attempt and obviously hastily assembled from thin air. Aside from anything else, it’s just not true, there is definitive proof that the ‘rebels’ had sarin gas.

Turkey finds sarin gas in homes of suspected Syrian Islamists – reports Turkish security forces found a 2kg cylinder with sarin gas after searching the homes of Syrian militants from the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra Front who were previously detained, Turkish media reports. The gas was reportedly going to be used in a bomb. – ‘Turkey finds sarin gas in homes of suspected Syrian Islamists’ – reports’, – RT, 31 May 2013

Then the ‘report’ resorts to using the numerous videos to be found on Youtube as somehow proof that Assad used toxic gas on its citizens but again the videos don’t show who did it, how could they?

Extensive video footage attributed to the attack in eastern Damascus (which we assess would be very difficult to falsify) is consistent with the use of a nerve agent, such as sarin, and is not consistent with the use of blister or riot control agents. – JIC Report

This ‘report’ is pure hokum. After you take away all the padding which constitutes 90% of the document, there’s nothing left except the allegation that because the ‘rebels’ couldn’t have done it, it had to be Assad. I suspect that the political class here (and in the US) really didn’t expect to have so much trouble convincing people to support more Anglo-Saxon slaughter and got caught off-guard as it were, hence the paucity of the document, rushed out in a few days and aside from an alleged Syrian Army conversation (see below), nothing at all to work with.

Ok, I think I’ve dispensed with the disinfo put out by the UK Cabinet Office, it doesn’t amount to much. But I suppose the time constraints imposed by Cameron jumping the gun, all gung ho to kill some more ‘rag-heads’, forced the Empire’s hand.

The Israeli connection

To understand how this false flag operation got started we need to go back to the first article published on the debkafile website 21 August 2013.

Syrian opposition activists report between 200 and 650 dead and hundreds more wounded in a poison gas strike by Bashar Assad’s forces on rebel-held areas of eastern Damascus. They claim nerve gas canisters were dropped by Syrian Air Force fighter planes which were seen flying over the area after the attack, the most extensive reported till now. Their claim has not been verified. The regime denied the accusation, saying there was “no truth whatsoever” in reports that chemical gas was used near Damascus, and maintaining over state television that the Syrian army was conducting a conventional attack on rebel positions south and east of Damascus. – ’Reported Syrian gas attack killing hundreds after first US-trained rebel incursion from Jordan‘, debkafile, 21 August 2013 (my emph. WB)

The gas attack, according to debka was actually just part of a three-pronged attack (masterminded in Tehran), carried out to counter a major incursion from Jordan, commanded by US personnel, into Syria, in order to extend the Israeli-imposed ‘buffer zone’ between Syria and the occupied Golan Heights.[2]

debkafile reports exclusively that Assad is acting to counter the first organized incursion of US-trained Syrian rebels from Jordan into southern Syria. The first group of 250 rebels, trained in special operations tactics by US and Jordanian instructors, entered Syria Saturday, Aug. 17, armed with weapons of Russian provenance supplied by the US and Saudi Arabia.

They are fighting under US and Jordanian commanders based in the Hashemite Kingdom.

A second group of 300 fighters crossed into Syria from Jordan Monday.

They are linking up with local rebel groups chosen from amongst those with no ties with the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria).

According to our military sources, the rebel units are advancing at speed along the Syrian-Israeli border. They have forced the Syrian brigades posted there into retreating from positions inside a strip of 1-25 kilometers from the border, and captured the villages of Raihaniya, Breiqa and Beer Ajam.

This tactic has moved the Syrian army back from the area opposite the Israeli Golan, and started marking out a buffer zone between Israeli and Syrian forces in the Horan province.

/../

This Jordan-based rebel offensive was launched shortly after Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff, visited US forces in Jordan and inaugurated the underground US war room near Amman for commanding the operation in Syria.

Syrian ruler Bashar Assad has more than once declared that if the Syrian capital Damascus came under threat, he would resort to chemical warfare and the entire Middle East including Israel would go up in flames. For now, his army is fighting to keep the rebels from taking control of southern Syria. -ibid

Enter the Dragon – sorry Tehran

But by 24 August, the situation had changed and so had debka’s story. Now the poison gas shells were,

…fired from the big Mount Kalmun army base south of Damascus, one of the three repositories of Syria’s chemical weapons. In response to a demand from Moscow last December, Assad collected his chemical assets in three depots. The other two are Dummar, a suburb 5 kilometers outside Damascus, and the Al-Safira air base, west of Aleppo. – ‘The sarin shells fired on Damascus – by Syrian 4th Division’s 155th Brigade – were followed by rockets on Israel and car bombings in Lebanon‘, debkafile, 24 August 2013

And here comes the alleged Iranian connection,

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu commented Thursday, Aug. 22 that Iran is using Syria as its testing ground while closely monitoring international responses to its actions [like gassing hundreds of people?].

His remark followed the four Grad rockets fired on northern Israel the day after the chemical attack in East Damascus. His words were scarcely noticed, mainly because Israel’s own spokesmen were busy spreading a blanket of disinformation over the attack, attributing it vaguely to “Global Jihad” (whatever that is). – ibid

debka were presented with a bit of conundrum to deal with here because obviously Netanyahu’s head was someplace else, not fixed firmly on Assad and his WMD like he should have been. Whatever else you can accuse Assad of, belonging to the ‘Global Jihad’ is not on the list.

The debka piece continues,

debkafile’s military sources affirm that, just as the Assad brothers orchestrated the chemical shell attack on Syrian civilians, so too did Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah set in motion the rocket attack on Israel.

/../

Then, on Friday night, two car bombs blew up outside Sunni mosques in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli, killing 42 people and injuring 500.

The triple coordinated outrages added up to a dire warning from Tehran and Damascus about what they have in store for the region, and especially Syria’s neighbors, as payback for foreign intervention in the Syrian civil war. - ibid

Then there’s that conversation…

Then we have the ‘evidence’ leaked separately to Focus magazine in Germany, also from Mossad which I’ve dealt with elsewhere, concerning the alleged Israeli monitoring of Syrian communications. Remember all of this ‘intelligence’ originates with Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, no matter that it’s repeated by other, Western governments as ‘their’ intelligence. As I noted before, this monitored communication is interesting because apparently, the Israeli 8200 intelligence unit only started listening after the bombs/missiles had been launched. And why wait three days to inform the world (Focus published the story on the 24 August)? And given that Syria is on a knife edge, why not release these recordings now? (And we are still waiting for the US’ declassified report that we should have had yesterday, the 29 August, why the delay?) It’s all hearsay; talk of a panicked army officer, the implication being that it was a ‘rogue’ soldier wot did it? No identities, it’s all conveniently left vague. Not exactly a smoking gun. And I think it explains why the political class on both sides of the (polluted) pond are all stirred up and agitated.For once, they’ve not been able to to get their way, yet…

So there we have it, all the essential elements of a false flag operation, initiated by Mossad but with the obvious collusion of the US and possibly even the UK, that used the media to insert the story ‘sideways’, first via debka and Focus, followed by Ynet, the Times of Israel and then the leap across to the UK Guardian and all points West. But clearly, what started as a military/psyops campaign centred around the Golan Heights and designed to drag Iran into it, rapidly morphed into something far larger, perhaps because whoever was responsible for the carnage, ‘overcooked’ it and killed far too many people?[3] But the change does explain much about the nature of the propaganda campaign and how the story has ‘evolved’.



But the fact that the Empire is not lobbing cruise missiles in Syria’s direction just yet is a temporary victory for the forces of progress. Moreover, I think independent journalism is starting to have some impact on events, perhaps at last we can begin to think about neutralising or effectively countering the MSM and the state’s massive propaganda onslaught, especially if it’s as badly managed as this one has been.

Notes

1. It was more than ten years ago when Tony Blair, his spin doctor and MI5 cooked up the Dodgy Dossier that formed the basis for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

2. Could this have anything to do with extending the occupied Golan Heights, the illegal drilling for oil by Israel on Syrian territory?

Genie Energy (NYSE: GNE, GNEPRA), said today that the government of Israel has awarded its subsidiary, Genie Israel Oil and Gas, Ltd., an exclusive petroleum exploration license covering 396.5 square kilometers in the Southern portion of the Golan Heights, and look at who are on the board: Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, and Lord Jacob Rothschild. See: ‘Israel has granted oil exploration rights inside Syria, in the occupied Golan Heights‘ by Craig Murray, Global Research, 21 February 2013

3. There are reports that allude to this here, and here. SEE ARTICLE FOR MORE LINKS TO SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS