Fri Apr 11, 2014 at 05:09 AM PDT
Obama & Syria: Lies and deception now institutionalized
by bobdevoFollow
Patrick Smith at Salon and Seymour Hersch at London Review of
Books, take on our carefully managed understanding of what's been
going on in Syria.
Smith begins with an indictment of US foreign policy globally:
In less than a year, the Obama administration has mounted four
covert coup operations, all variants of the classic Cold War model,
all costly of human life, all assuring us the contempt and animosity
of many people for years to come.
In chronological order:
* The American-authorized coup in Egypt last July. In the
disinformation universe, Washington watched at a distance...
• In the war to depose Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the
linchpin event is the chemical-weapons attack last Aug. 21. We are
invited — required, actually — to believe Assad allowed U.N.
inspectors in to determine responsibility for previous gas attacks
and then launched another attack near Damascus while the inspectors
were settled in their hotel rooms.
* The role of the U.S. and its European allies in financing,
fomenting and steering the direction of the Ukraine coup requires
little discussion at this point. Rather bizarrely in the face of all
we have on record, the Obama people continue to insist Ukraine is
nothing more than a case of Russian overreach...
* In Venezuela, the foreign minister recently read aloud
portions of intercepted cable traffic documenting American
subterfuge....
Hersch prefers to focus on US shenanigans and media disinformation
specific to Syria:
In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons......analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal.
The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s
public claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were
wrong. The American and British intelligence communities had been
aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were
developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense
Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking
points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd,
which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its
programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since
al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’...
Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were
arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press
were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was
accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction
of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin.
A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013
was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to
Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria
told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the
first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near
Aleppo...
At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army
was capable of deploying sarin – was unravelling...
The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia
and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come
to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its
role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel
highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used
to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and
across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria
who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them
affiliated with al-Qaida.
Suggest you read the full Hersch article to get all the details
and nuance. Unfortunately, the take away from both articles is we
have no more reason to believe Obama administration representations
in matters of war and peace than we had to trust his predecessor . .
. . and we certainly cannot count on mainstream media to provide any
utile information on world events.

