UK Spies Are the World Champs in False Flags, Lying and Deception and Have Been for Centuries

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Wayne Madsen

Apr 18, 2018

When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led the way for its American “cousins” and Britain’s Commonwealth partners – from Canada and Australia to India and Malaysia – in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths.

Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories alleging that Russia carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a Russian émigré and his daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda barrage was quickly followed by yet another – the latest in a series of similar fabrications – alleging the Syrian government attacked civilians in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.

It should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British correspondents stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary sources. MI-6 has historically relied on non-official cover (NOC) agents masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian aid workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel managers, to carry out propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in positions where they can promulgate British government disinformation to unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.

For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and “regime change.” IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly “The Daily Telegraph,” “The Times,” “Financial Times,” Reuters, “The Guardian,” and “The Economist,” ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers).

These leaders included Indonesia’s President Sukarno, North Korean leader (and grandfather of Pyongyang’s present leader) Kim Il-Sung, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Chile’s Salvador Allende, British Guiana’s Cheddi Jagan, Grenada’s Maurice Bishop, Jamaica’s Michael Manley, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Guinea’s Sekou Toure, Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara, Australia’s Gough Whitlam, New Zealand’s David Lange, Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk, Malta’s Dom Mintoff, Vanuatu’s Father Walter Lini, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Somalia’s Mohamad Farrah Aidid, and Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today, it is Assad’s, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont’s turn to be in the Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine State.

Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the “New York Herald Tribune” and a former US ambassador to London. It is not a stretch to believe that similar and even more formal relationships exist today between US and British intelligence and so-called British “journalists” reporting from such war zones as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Gaza Strip, as well as from much-ballyhooed nerve agent attack locations as Salisbury, England.

No sooner had recent news reports started to emerge from Douma about a Syrian chlorine gas and sarin agent attack that killed between 40 to 70 civilians, British reporters in the Middle East and London began echoing verbatim statements from the Syrian “White Helmets” and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

In actuality, the White Helmets – claimed by Western media to be civilian defense first-responders but are Islamist activists connected to jihadist radical groups funded by Saudi Arabia – are believed to have staged the chemical attack in Douma by entering the municipality’s hospital and dowsing patients with buckets of water, video cameras at the ready. The White Helmets distributed their videos to the global news media, with the BBC and Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News providing a British imprimatur to the propaganda campaign asserting that Assad carried out another “barrel bomb” chemical attack against “his own people.” And, as always, the MI-6 financed Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad news front claimed to be operated by a Syrian expatriate and British national named Rami Abdel Rahman from his clothing shop in Coventry, England, began providing second-sourcing for the White Helmet’s chemical attack claims.

With President Trump bringing more and more neo-conservatives, discredited from their massive anti-Iraq propaganda operations during the Bush-Cheney era, into his own administration, the world is witnessing the prolongation of the “Trump Doctrine.”The Trump Doctrine can best be explained as follows: A nation will be subject to a US military attack depending on whether Trump is facing a severe political or sex scandal at home.

Such was the case in April 2017, when Trump ordered a cruise missile attack on the joint Syrian-Russian airbase at Shayrat, Syria. Trump was still reeling from the resignation of his National Security Adviser, Lt. General Michael Flynn, in February over the mixing of his private consulting business with his official White House duties. Trump needed a diversion and the false accusation that Assad used sarin gas on the village of Khan Sheikoun on April 4, 2017, provided the necessary pabulum for the war-hungry media.

The most recent cruise missile attack was to divert the public’s attention away from Trump’s personal attorney being raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a sex scandal involving Trump and a porn actress, and a “tell-all” book by Trump’s fired FBI director, James Comey.

Although these two scandals provided opportunities for the neo-cons to test Trump with false flag operations in Syria, they were not the first time such actions had been carried out. In 2013, the Syrian government was blamed for a similar chemical attack on civilians in Ghouta. That year, Syrian rebels, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, admitted to the Associated Press reporter on the ground in Syria that they had been given banned chemical weapons by Saudi Arabia, but that the weapons canisters exploded after improper handling by the rebels. Immediately, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian rebel organizations operating out of Turkey claimed that Assad had used chemical-laden barrel bombs on “his own people.” However, Turkish, American, and Lebanese sources confirmed that it was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that had badly bungled a false flag sarin nerve agent attack on Ghouta.

Few Western media outlets were concerned about a March 19, 2013, sarin nerve agent by the Bashair al-Nasr Brigade rebel group linked to the US- and British-backed Free Syrian Army. The rebels used a “Bashair-3” unguided projectile, containing the deadly sarin agent, on civilians in Khan al-Assal, outside Aleppo. At least 27 civilians were killed, and scores of others injured in the attack. The Syrian Kurds also reported the use of chemical weapons on them during the same time frame by Syrian rebel groups backed by the United States, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The usual propaganda operations – Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Doctors Without Borders, the BBC, CNN, and Sky News – were all silent about these attacks.In 2013, April 2017, and April 2018, the Western media echo chamber blared out all the same talking points: “Assad killing his own people,” “Syrian weapons of mass destruction,” and the “mass murder of women and children.” Western news networks featured videos of dead women and children, while paid propagandists, known as “contributors” to corporate news networks – all having links to the military-intelligence complex – demanded action be taken against Assad.

Trump, now being advised by the notorious neocon war hawk John Bolton, the new National Security Adviser, began referring to Assad as an “animal” and a “monster.” Bolton, along with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, helped craft similar language against Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was not coincidental that Trump – at the urging of Bolton and other neocons – gave a full pardon to Libby on the very same day he ordered the cruise missile attack on Damascus and other targets in Syria. Libby was convicted in 2005 of perjury and illegally disclosing national security information.

The world is being asked to take, at face value, the word of patented liars like Trump, Bolton, and other neocons who are now busy joining the Trump administration at breakneck speed. The corporate media unabashedly acts as though it never lied about the reasons given by the United States and Britain for going to war in Iraq and Libya. Why should anyone believe them now?

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Once Upon A Time Long Ago Truth Was Important

Cnn whitewashing bahrain dictatorship

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With permission from

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org

Paul Craig Roberts

April 16, 2018

Once Upon A Time Long Ago Truth Was Important

I wonder how many people, not just Americans but those in other countries, have come to the conclusion that the United States today is a less free and less aware society than the societies in the dystopian novels of the 20th century or in movies such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta. Just as people in the dystopian novels had no idea of their real situation, few Americans do either.

What are we to make of the extraordinary war crimes committed by the United States in the 21st century that have destroyed in whole or part seven countries, resulting in millions of dead, maimed, orphaned, and displaced peoples? Consider, for example, the latest Washington war crime, the illegal attack on Syria. Instead of protesting this illegality, the American media egged it on, cheering impending death and destruction.

During the entirety of the 21st century, Israel, Washington’s only ally—as contrasted with the European, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassal states of Washington’s empire—has continued with Washington’s support, protection, and encouragement the genocide of the Palestinian people. Essentially, all that is left of Palestine is a ghetto concentration camp known as Gaza which is routinely bombed by Israel using weapons and money supplied by Washington. When a bombing of Gaza is announced, God’s Chosen People take their lawn chairs and picnics up on a hill overlooking Gaza and applaud as the Israeli military murders women and children. This is America’s only ally.

The crimes committed by the US and Israel are horrific, but meet with little opposition. In contrast, an alleged attack in which 70 Syrians are alleged to have died sets in motion the wheels of war. It makes no sense whatsoever. Israel routinely bombs Syrian targets, killing Syrians, and the US arms and supports the “rebels” that the Obama regime sent to overthrow Assad, resulting in large numbers of dead Syrians. Why all of a sudden do 70 Syrians matter to Washington?

According to the Washington authorities, or to the presstitutes’ reports of their statements, two or three alleged Syrian chemical weapons facilities were destroyed by Washington’s missile attack. Think about this for a minute. If Washington bombed or sent missiles into chemical weapons facilities, a vast cloud of lethal gas would have been released. The civilian casualties would be many times higher than the claimed 70 victims of Assad’s alleged and unsubstantiated chemical attack used as the pretext for the Trump regime’s war crime against Syria. There is no evidence whatsoever of these casualties.

Had there been casualties, Washington’s attack would obviously be a far greater crime than the chemical attack that Washington used as cover for its own crime. Yet the American presstitutes are crowing over the lesson that America has taught Syria and Russia. Apparently, the American media consists of such immoral or moronic hirelings that the presstitutes are unable to comprehend that an attack by Washington on Syrian chemical weapons plants, if such actually existed, is the equivalent of an attack on Syria with chemical weapons.

As I wrote yesterday, when I was a Wall Street Journal editor, if Washington had just announced that it had bombed the chemical weapons facilities of another country in punishment for that country’s alleged use of a chemical weapon, the Journal’s reporters were sufficiently intelligent to ask where are the victims of Washington’s chemical attack on that country? Are there thousands of dead people from the chemical gas released by Washington’s attack? Are the hospitals of the country over-filed with the injured and dying?

If a reporter had brought to us a story that was nothing but a Washington press release claiming obviously impossible happenings, we would have told him to go look again and ask the obvious questions. Today the NY Times and Washington Post put the unsubstantiated report on the front page.

Today reporters no longer have to check sources, because there is no longer journalism in America. When the Clinton regime in compliance with the Deep State that made the Clintons super-rich permitted 90% of the independent and diverse US media to be concentrated in the hands of six political companies, that was the end of journalism in America. All we have now is a propaganda ministry that lies for a living. Anyone in American journalism who tells the truth is either immediately fired or in the case of Tucker Carlson at Fox News is set upon by outside presstitutes in an effort to force Fox to replace him. I wonder how long before some woman pops up and claims Tucker Carlson sexually harassed her.

As far as I can tell, the United States is now a police state in which all information is controlled and the population is trained to believe the propaganda or be accused of lack of patriotism and consorting with terrorists and Russians.

Should We Hope for an Apology from Britain?

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Winston Churchill

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An increasing number of voices are being heard demanding that Britain apologize for the unprecedented witch hunt being conducted against Russia under the utterly false pretext of the “Skripal incident.” However, Russian President Vladimir Putin has bluntly stated:

“We do not hope for anything other than for common sense to eventually prevail and for international relations to avoid the setbacks we have seen recently.”

It is clear that on an official level Moscow is not going to dig in its heels and demand an apology from London as a prerequisite for the resumption of communication, although that sort of dialog would be possible with the leaders of other countries. For example, in November 2015, after the Turkish air force shot down a Russian jet, the Kremlin held Ankara accountable by cutting off not only all top-level contacts, but also the Russian-Turkish relationship in its entirety. Only Turkish President Recep Erdoğan’s letter of apology nine months later to Russian President Vladimir Putin resuscitated that relationship.

Why is it impossible to have a dialog like that — direct and open, albeit unflinching — with the British government?

Because the Anglo-Saxon elite that has ruled Britain and half of the world for the last three centuries sees itself as a special caste entitled to special rights. They have never been in the habit of apologizing to anyone.

Actually, they enjoy quite a long history of feeding their own people to sheep. The enclosures erected in the English countryside in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were at their heart a means of forcibly depriving the English peasantry of their access to arable land, which was then turned over to big sheep farms. Tens of thousands of people were driven from what had been common land to become vagabonds and beggars. Many perished from hunger and disease. But instead of doing battle against the poverty it had created, the government battled against the poor themselves. Specially drafted laws against vagrancy demanded that those who fell afoul be cruelly beaten, enslaved, and executed. Seventy-two thousand people were put to death in England in just the first half of the 16th century.

Image on the right: King Henry VIII

Likely this treatment of their own population can be explained by the fact that peasants in England belonged to an entirely different ethnic group than that of the aristocracy, who were descended from the Norman army that conquered that island in the 11th century and also the Saxon nobility, which later emerged as the ruling dynasties. The Anglo-Saxon elite developed not just a contemptuous, but a downright racist attitude towards their subjects, elevating themselves into a special caste with a special law of morality.

The genocide of the Irish, which the English carried out for centuries, certainly deserves special mention. When Oliver Cromwell‘s troops invaded Ireland in 1649 that was only one of the most egregious episodes from that history. Over 40% of the Irish population died as a result of that campaign.

In the 17th century — the early days of Britain’s growing maritime and colonial empire — London began a pattern of horrifying abuse of the indigenous populations of its conquered countries, almost to the point of their physical extermination. The British aristocracy considered the native peoples of the Americas, India, Africa, and China all to be races of a lower order. No rules or laws protected them.

Millions of members of the aboriginal communities were butchered in the English colonies in North America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. The mass slaughter of aborigines raised no more eyebrows than did hunting. In Tasmania in 1830, British soldiers orchestrated a massacre of native inhabitants who had the effrontery to be “bad-mannered.” First they gunned down the men and then beat the women and children to death.

In the 1950s, reacting to what is known as the Mau Mau Uprising waged by the natives of Kenya against the English regime to protest their seizures of land from the indigenous inhabitants, the British massacred about 300,000 Africans and drove another 1.5 million into concentration camps. It is worth noting that the world’s first concentration camps were established in South Africa by Britain’s Lord Herbert Kitchener to imprison Boer families during the Second Boer War of 1899-1902.

London’s predatory colonial policies often created genuine humanitarian disasters in the countries under British occupation. In India, tens of millions died from mass starvation, which became a commonplace event under British rule. The British attitude toward it all was eloquently expressed by Sir Winston Churchill himself, who in 1943 had this to say about the famine in Bengal:

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”

British government continued its policy of “forced export” of food from India in 1876-1879, while the famine swept among its people. Estimated 10.3 million people starved to death most of which were in South India.

In the 19th century, London began a brisk trade of selling opium to China, making huge profits while simultaneously undermining Chinese society and government. In an attempt to rescue his country, the Chinese emperor began to seize and destroy those caches of opium in 1839. London reacted by launching a war in which China was defeated and forced to accept the crippling terms offered by the British state-sponsored drug mafia. The British elite, including the British royal family, made a fortune off of this. But China paid a horrifying price — entire generations perished in a narcotic haze that mentally and physically degraded the Chinese people. However, London’s official narrative would have us believe that the opium wars laid the foundation for the development of democracy in China.

Do you think that London ever apologized to the Chinese for the opium wars or for its policy of doping up their native population? Even in 1997 when Hong Kong was returned to China? On the contrary — in his private correspondence, which was later leaked to the press, Prince Charles referred to China’s leaders at that time as “appalling old waxworks.”

One would have to be very naive to expect an apology from the British elite. The former Labour PM, Tony Blair, who orchestrated the Iraq War along with George W. Bush, never apologized for the invasion of that country in 2003. He never said he was sorry even after it had been proven that Baghdad possessed no weapons of mass destruction, which had been the pretext for the attack by the Western coalition. When, after many years of trying to bring Blair to justice, he finally did express his regrets, it was only for “some mistakes he made in planning the conflict … and its aftermath,” but never for having deliberately exaggerated the intelligence findings in order to unleash a war that ultimately destroyed Iraq and resulted in chaos, terror, and hundreds of thousands of dead.

Of course, some decent and honorable people have always been part of British political circles. It’s just that as a rule the “free” British press tries to turn them into whipping boys or mad hatters or to dismiss them using that handy label of “odd man out.”

Jeremy Corbyn (image on the left) is one member of the British elite who fits that bill today.

The fact that he is now the leader of the linchpin of the opposition, the Labor Party, which has outstripped the ruling Conservatives in popularity, is a unique situation that reflects the deep crisis into which British politics has stumbled. His success was as big a surprise for the British elite as Donald Trump’s rise to power was for their American counterparts.

The fact that Corbyn currently only holds the reins of power in his own party and would have to win the parliamentary elections at a minimum in order to take the helm of his country is another issue. If the Brexit talks become deadlocked or Parliament votes down the agreement that May’s cabinet will have to sign this year with the European Union, Great Britain may be looking at a snap election. And at that point, the Corbyn-led Labour Party has a chance of winning.

That is why we have seen such aggressive attempts to depose this political figure. One of those attacks “oddly enough” coincided with Corbyn’s statement on the “Skripal incident.” While supporting May’s position against Russia, Corbyn also raised the question of whether there was any real proof of Russian fingerprints. Soon the press began a campaign to accuse Corbyn of … anti-Semitism.

Jeremy Corbyn might well become the prime minister of Great Britain — and then one British political tradition could be shattered. Because then the whole world would have to deal with someone who is not a representative of the usual British elite, reflecting the interests of an extremely limited stratum of society, but rather the foremost representative of his country, a man who has the support of a majority of its citizens, a man of honor who is ready to reliably defend their interests and respect his nation’s partners in international discourse.

The original source of this article is Oriental Review

Copyright © Oriental Review, Oriental Review, 2018

The day UFOs stopped play

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By Richard Padula BBC World Service Sport

24 October 2014

 Image copyright Archivio Foto Locchi Firenze

Sixty years ago a football match ground to a halt when unidentified flying objects were spotted above a stadium in Florence. Did aliens come to earth? If not, what were they?

It was 27 October 1954, a typically crisp autumn day in Tuscany. The mighty Fiorentina club was playing against its local rival Pistoiese.

Ten-thousand fans were watching in the concrete bowl of the Stadio Artemi Franchi. But just after half-time the stadium fell eerily silent – then a roar went up from the crowd. The spectators were no longer watching the match, but were looking up at the sky, fingers pointing. The players stopped playing, the ball rolled to a stand-still.

One of the footballers on the pitch was Ardico Magnini – he was something of a legend at the club and had played for Italy at the 1954 World Cup.

“I remember everything from A to Z,” he says. “It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter.

“We were astonished we had never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked.”

Image copyright Giornale del Mattino

Play was suspended because spectators saw something in the sky, according to the referee’s match report.

Among the crowd was Gigi Boni, a lifelong Fiorentina fan. “I remember clearly seeing this incredible sight,” he says. His description of multiple objects differs slightly from Magnini’s.

“They were moving very fast and then they just stopped. It all lasted a couple of minutes. I would like to describe them as being like Cuban cigars. They just reminded me of Cuban cigars, in the way they looked.”

Image caption La Nazione’s headline reads: Glass fibres fall on Tuscan cities after globes and flying saucers pass by. Lower headline: The sighting over Florence (with a photograph, now lost, of the UFO).

Boni has spent many years reliving that day in his mind. “I think they were extra-terrestrial. That’s what I believe, and there’s no other explanation I can give myself.”

Another of the players, Romolo Tuci, still sprightly in his 70s, agrees. “In those years everybody was talking about aliens, everybody was talking UFOs and we had the experience, we saw them, we saw them directly, for real.”

The incident at the stadium cannot simply be interpreted as mass hysteria – there were numerous UFO sightings in many towns across Tuscany that day and over the days that followed. According to some eyewitness accounts a ray of white light was seen in the sky coming from Prato, north of Florence.

Another man who relishes the chance to speak about that day is Roberto Pinotti, the president of Italy’s National UFO Centre. He has written many books about UFOs and his home in the centre of Florence is stuffed full of alien memorabilia, posters of old Italian B-movies, framed newspaper articles and black-and-white photographs of blurry flying saucers.

“The players and the public were stunned seeing these objects above the stadium,” Pinotti says.

“At the time the newspapers spoke of aliens from Mars. Of course now we know that is not so – but we may conclude that it was an intelligent phenomenon, a technological phenomenon and a phenomenon that cannot be linked with anything we know on Earth.”

He’s also intrigued by the material that fell from the sky – what Magnini describes as silver glitter.

Image caption “A wave of flying saucers over Italy,” reported the Domenica del Corriere three years later. With thanks to the Fondazione Corriere della Sera for the use of material from their historic archives.

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Part of the Bible that is Suppressed or Ignored

Disinformation

Numbers 31:17-18 King James Version (KJV)

¹⁷ Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

¹⁸ But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

King James Version (KJV)Public Domain

North Korea Propaganda Art

From the article “REVEALED: This is what North Korea says REALLY happened in WW2” from the http://www.dailystar.co.uk, April 16, 2018

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By Henry Holloway

16th April 2018

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Syria: UN Mission Report Confirms that “Opposition” Rebels Used Chemical Weapons against Civilians and Government Forces

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Global Research

First published on GR in April 2017, this article by GR’s UN correspondent Carla Stea  is relevant to recent developments in Syria regarding the alleged chemical weapons attack.

*

There is no basis to the Trump Administration’s accusations that the government of Bashar al Assad was involved in deliberately triggering a chemical weapons attack with a view to killing Syrian civilians.

This December 2013 article by Global Research’s Correspondent Carla Stea at UN Headquarters confirms that the “Opposition” rebels were in possession of chemical weapons. According to the UN mission report, Syrian soldiers as well as civilians were in 2013 the target of chemical weapons attacks led by opposition rebels. 

The US sponsored “rebels” had been trained in the use of chemical weapons by specialists on contract ot the Pentagon. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, April 8, 2017

On December 13, [2013] UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon signed identical letters to the UN General Assembly and Security Council, stating: 

“I have the honour to convey herewith the final report of the United Nations Mission to investigate allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic”

The letter of transmittal was signed by Professor Ake Sellstrom, Head of Mission, and Dr. Maurizio Barbeschi, signing for the WHO component.

On page 21 of this 85 page report is stated:

“Khan al Asal, 19 March 2013:  111.  The United Nations Mission collected credible information that corroborates the allegations that chemical weapons were used in Khan al Asal on 19 March 2013 against soldiers and civilians.”

Page 22:

“Jobar, 24 August 2013:  113.  The United Nations Mission collected evidence consistent with the probable use of chemical weapons in Jobar on 24 August on a relatively small scale against soldiers…”

Page 114, this assessment is based on the following:

(a)    Interviews with survivors and clinicians and medical records confirm symptoms of organophosphorous intoxication:

(b)    Blood samples recovered by the Syrian Government on 24 August 2013 and authenticated by the United Nations Mission using DNA techniques tested positive for signatures of Sarin;

(c)    One of the four blood samples collected from the same patients by the United Nations Mission on 28 September 2013 tested positive for Sarin.”

Page 23:

“Ashrafiah Sahnaya, 25 August 2013 117.  The United Nations Mission collected evidence that suggests that chemical weapons were used in Ashrafiah Sahnaya on 25 August 2013 on a small scale against soldiers.  118.

This assessment is based on the following:

(a)    Interviews with survivors and clinicians and medical records confirm symptoms of organophosphorous intoxication;

(b)    Blood samples recovered by the Syrian government on 24 August 2013, authenticated by the United Nations Mission using DNA techniques, tested positive for signatures of Sarin.”

The attacks of March 19, August 24 and August 25, 2013 upon Syrian government soldiers indicate that the rebels were in possession of sarin both before and immediately after the chemical weapon attack at Ghouta of August 21, 2013.  It would have been virtually impossible for the rebels to acquire chemical weapons so quickly in late August had they not already previously been in possession of chemical weapons.

According to Seymour Hersh, December 19 ( published in The London Review of Books),

“already by late May, the senior (US) intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin.  At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta.  An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tarriq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta.  The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who  is implicated in making and using sarin.’  He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American
military.”

This would support the Russian Ambassador’s claim, following the Security Council consultations of December 17, 2013 that:  “Why would the Syrian government use chemical weapons on August 21?  To cross the red line drawn by Washington and invite a missile strike upon itself?  Why would the opposition use chemical weapons?  Exactly because of the red line.  To provoke foreign military intervention in the Syrian conflict…The Russian team’s analysis concluded that ‘home-made’ sarin was used near Aleppo on March 19.  It stated that the Sarin was likely delivered by a crudely made missile.  The team also named the particular opposition group most likely behind the attack.  At the time, the Syrian government immediately requested an international investigation of the March 19 incident, but then the United Kingdom and France all of a sudden recalled a Homs case, that had not bothered them for 3 preceding months, while the US started insisting on the need to investigate ‘all incidents.’  Why did those who accused the Syrian government of this act do their utmost to derail or at least delay such investigation?”  The dragging UN probe was interfered with by the tragic events in Ghouta on August 21.  “As our experts concluded, sarin used on August 21 was of approximately the same type as the one used on March 19, though of a slightly better quality.  It means that over a few months, opposition chemists somewhat improved the quality of their product.”

According to Seymour Hersh,

“Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally.  He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly-capable machine shop.’  The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal.”

MIT specialist, Professor Theodore Postol’s analysis of the weapons used in the chemical attack on August 21, and the Russian team’s analysis appear to point toward the opposition as the perpetrator of the August 21 attack in Ghouta.  The US intelligence document, according to Hersh’s article,

“issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta.”

The chemical weapon attack in Ghouta on August 21 would, therefore, credibly point to Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed as among the perpetrators of that attack, particularly as the Assad government had no motive to use chemical weapons, especially with the UN inspectors already on the ground in Syria, and as the Syrian government was in a strong position militarily in its struggle with the opposition.

The opposition, on the contrary, had both the capacity to launch a chemical attack on innocent civilians, (as evidenced by several documented prior chemical attacks on Syrian soldiers), and the motive:  to distract and disrupt investigations of previous chemical attacks that had victimized Syrian soldiers as well as civilians, and to garner international sympathy, which the sympathetic mainstream media’s distorted reporting guaranteed.

Hersh’s final paragraph should be taken seriously:

“The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September by the Security Council dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces such as an-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm….No group was cited by name.  While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone.”

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Carla Stea, Global Research, 2018