The US launch of 59
US Tomahawk cruise missiles at 3:40 am Syrian time on April 7, allegedly aimed
to destroy the Syrian Government Shayrat military air base, according to the
letter US President Trump sent Congress, was done, “in the vital national
security and foreign policy interests” of the United States, done “to degrade
Assad’s ability to conduct chemical weapons attacks, and to dissuade the Syrian
regime from using or proliferating chemical weapons.” The entire incident
leaves huge strategic questions begging serious responsible answers.
First questionable
issue of many is the fact that Washington has refused to allow any serious
independent investigation of the alleged Syrian government sarin gas attack by
the scientifically competent UN Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons (OPCW), the body that certified in January 2016 that Syria’s government
was free of all chemical weapons after a 2013 US near-war over allegations of
Assad using sarin gas weapons.
The same UN
organization supervised the removal of all Assad government chemical weapons in
2013, acting on a Russian initiative to prevent a US war in Syria. US Secretary
of State Tillerson has now charged that Russia did not remove all Syrian
chemical weapons in 2013. He ignores the fact that US military forces took part
in 2013 in what was not a Russian operation, as the US Secretary of State
Tillerson falsely charges, but an international UN OPCW operation, to remove
and destroy all Syrian chemical weapons held by the Assad government, as
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State
Colin Powell, points out.
2013 Sarin Gas ‘false flag’
At that time, in
August 2013, as President Barack Obama was talking about how Assad had crossed
a “red line” by using banned Sarin poison gas, Carla del Ponte, former Hague
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia prosecutor acting as
a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria member, told media that their
UN investigations had uncovered definite use of sarin gas in Ghouta. However,
she said, they found no evidence sarin was used by Assad’s military. Rather,
del Ponte stated, “This was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not
by the government authorities.” Her report was blacked out of mainstream
western media.
Other investigations
at that time, including one in August 2013 by Associated Press war
correspondent Dale Gavlak, stated from eye-witness interviews in and around
Ghouta at the time, that the illegal sarin gas in 2013 was provided to Al Qaeda
and other terrorist anti-Assad “rebels” by then-Saudi Intelligence chief,
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, an intimate of the Bush family.
Dr Christof Lehmann
of NSNBC in September 2013 gave detailed evidence, including eyewitness reports
from citizens in Ghouta, that the sarin chemical weapons used were provided to
Al Qaeda in Syria or Al Nusra terrorists by Saudi Arabia, with knowledge of the
CIA and US Special Forces stationed at Al Mafraq, Jordan on the border to
Syria. Al Mafraq was the major transit point for smuggled weapons from Jordan
into Syria for Al Nusra and other anti-Assad terrorist mercenaries. The
Al-Qaeda terrorist forces in Ghouta then were also led by a Saudi national
known by the name Abu Ayesha.
Was this latest
chemical weapons incident another ‘false flag’ as intelligence jargon describes
it, done by US-Saudi backed ISIS or Al Nusra, in order to give the Trump
Administration war hawks the excuse for major military action in Syria for the
first time in six years of US-backed war? All evidence says yes.
Illogical and Mad
There is the bizarre
fact that the alleged sarin gas bombing by the Syrian Air Force came just days
after US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the US President both indicated
that forcing Assad out was no longer US priority, but an issue that ought to be
decided by the Syrian people. With Assad’s forces having liberated large swaths
of ISIS and Al Nusra terrorist areas, including Aleppo, it would make no sense
for Assad to use illegal chemical weapons at this stage when he is apparently
winning on all fronts including diplomatic. It would have been illogical and
suicidal of Bashar al Assad. And whatever his faults, those are not among them.
According to an
analysis by Charles Abi Nader, a retired Lebanese Army General published in the
Lebanese Al-Ahed News, numerous Syrian witnesses interviewed in the Khan
Sheikhoun area where the April 4 chemical explosion took place, confirmed that,
“the explosion took place in the targeted building because it was struck by a
missile from the air. A small cloud of smoke – a result of the explosion of
barrels of poisonous gases – appeared shortly afterwards.” General Abi Nader
poins out that, “This is completely contrary to the specifications and methods
used in a chemical weapons strike, which requires a military technician to
carry out the explosion using a temporary sheath that explodes at least 100
meters above the surface in order to avoid the ineffective launch of this type
of weapon that can happen in case the rocket carrying poisonous gas explodes
directly on the target.” That a Syrian Air Force missile hit the Al Qaeda
weapons storage depot, not aware it concealed also banned chemical weapons,
corresponds to what both the Russian and Syrian governments also claim took
place.
Abi Nader points out
that had there first been a serious independent scientific investigation
on-the-ground to determine true facts, it would necessarily include both Khan
Sheikhoun in Idlib province, the site of the chemical explosion, as well as
inspection of the Syrian Shayrat airbase from which Assad’s air force launched
their attack on the terrorist weapons depot in Idlib.
Such inspection Abi
Nader stresses, would “certainly show the existence or absence of the missiles
or bombs loaded with chemical weapons whose effects cannot be obscured or
hidden from a scientific standpoint. The (April 7 US) missile strike against
the air base, the warehouses, and bomber jet launchers eliminates any
possibility to reach the scientific data needed by any commission of inquiry to
investigate the facts.” That’s very convenient to prevent discovery of the
false flag and allows Mad Dog Mattis and the Washington Flying Circus otherwise
called the Trump Administration to charge anything they wish.
White Helmets’ Fake Videos
There is overwhelming
evidence that the entire Syrian sarin gas incident at Khan Shaykhun in Idlib,
controlled today by Al Nusra Front terrorists tied to al Qaeda, was fake news
and a deliberate US-backed false flag attempt to charge Assad with illegal war
atrocities.
Videos supplied by
the Syrian White Helmets, a US and UK government-funded NGO that pompously
renamed itself Syria Civil Defense, along with tweets from the head of the
terrorist-controlled Idlib Province Health Authority, were the source of the
sarin gas bombing allegations. However the videos released by White Helmets and
sent by them to the dubious London-based Syria Observatory on Human Rights,
show a man in a White Helmets uniform carrying an alleged sarin gassing child
victim with bare hands and no mask.
For anyone familiar
with protective measures in chemical warfare attacks with sarin, CBRN
(Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense) protective gear of the
most severe high security, masking the breathing and the entire body of the
first aid emergency rescue workers, such as the rescue workers of victims in
the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack, is standard. If White Helmets are truly
the “Syrian Civil Defense” which they misleadingly name themselves, they would
have been trained in dealing with chemical toxic attacks.
Another video posted
by Syrian journalist “Partisangirl” shows a young girl supposedly killed by the
alleged sarin attack of April 4. The only problem, overlooked by the video
taker was that in the final second of the video the “dead” girl opens her eye
to see if the act is over.
White Helmet Fake Videos
In November 2016 the
same White Helmets organization was forced to apologize for using another fake
video to make its case. White Helmets, the “reliable” source for the CIA and
Trump Defense Secretary General Mad Dog Mattis, for the decision to bomb Assad’s
airbase on April 7, were created by money from USAID, an arm of the US
Government tied intimately to worldwide CIA regime change operations known as
“democracy promotion.”
According to the
organization Swedish Doctors for Human Rights, the Syrian White Helmets had
also filmed gruesome faked videos in April 2015 detailing an alleged chlorine
gas attack in Sarmin, Idlib. The White Helmets used bodies of dead children.
The videos claimed to show the White Helmets “first responders” intensely
working to revive the children via adrenalin injection and artificial
respiration techniques.
On careful viewing of
the White Helmet videos, the Swedish medical expert, Dr. Leif Elinder, stated,
“After examination of the video material, I found that the measures inflicted
upon those children, some of them lifeless, are bizarre, non-medical,
non-lifesaving, and even counter-productive in terms of life-saving purposes of
children.”
Another Swedish
doctor who viewed the same video, stated, “In order to perform the injection,
CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) has to be interrupted, and then the CPR
resumed immediately after. Which is not done in the procedures shown in the
video… The doctor who wrote the comment, ‘If not already dead, this injection
would have killed the child’ was right! What a macabre scene; and how sad.”
USAID Created the NGO
The White Helmets
were created in 2013 by USAID’s Office of Transitional Initiatives, a slush
fund for US-backed regime-change Color Revolution funding. They’ve gotten $23
million in funding from the USAID. USAID supplies the White Helmets through
Chemonics, a for-profit contractor based in Washington DC. They are “managed”
by a slick image-maker PR firm with offices in London and New York called
Purpose.
According to
award-winning researcher Max Blumenthal, the Syrian White Helmets were founded
March 2013 by a former British military intelligence officer named James Le
Mesurier. Le Mesurier is a veteran of NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo
and Iraq, who set up a private mercenary security company before being
recruited by USAID to train what became the Syrian White Helmets under the USAID’s
Syria Regional Option program.
Le Mesurier’s job for
USAID was to organize a band of Syrian people who would go to the
terrorist-held regions. They were trained to rush into freshly bombed buildings
to extract survivors—while filming themselves—in terrorist-held areas, facing
routine bombing by Syrian army aircraft. Curious we never see videos of Jihadi
John or other ISIS figures cutting the heads of any White Helmets.
In 2014, Le Mesurier
established Mayday Rescue, a non-profit based in Turkey that grew out of the
Dubai-based “research, conflict transformation, and consultancy” firm known as
Analysis, Research, and Knowledge, short for ARK. That group, which
employed Le Mesurier while he was overseeing the White Helmets’ training, has
received millions in grants from the US government and the British Ministry of
Defense.
Blumenthal continues
his report on the true origins of Syrian White Helmets, describing it as a de
facto NATO propaganda arm creating the sympathy for a US No-fly Zone as in
Libya and ultimately a NATO military attack on Syria.
There are enormously
important unanswered questions behind Washington’s staging of the latest false
flag sarin gas incident in Khan Shaykhun. While the Trump Administration shows
contempt for international law or the truth, will he now widen the war from
Yemen and Somalia to Syria directly, directly facing the Russian military
presence in a Trump-style “gunfight at OK Corral”?
Notably, the Russian
Defense Ministry and Foreign Ministry report that the US missile attack on
sovereign Syrian territory was planned well before the alleged sarin gas
incident of 4 April. Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor
Konashenkov stated, “It is evident that the US cruise missile strikes against a
Syrian airbase have been prepared long before today’s events. A large system of
measures of reconnaissance, planning, preparation of flight tasks and bringing
the missiles to launch readiness needs to be carried out to prepare such an
attack,” Konashenkov pointed out.
If the US media
reports that Trump made his decision to bomb Syria on April 7 because of the
pleas of his “heartbroken and outraged” daughter Ivanka, the world is in even
more dangerous peril than we realize. Neither Trump nor his daughter, nor
her husband, Jared Kushner, have any international political experience, most
certainly not sufficient to be making decisions that could decide war and
global disorder. That, however, is most likely a Trump media false story
designed to give the entire bizarre and dangerous Trump bombing a touch of
human interest for something inhuman.
14.04.2017
F. William
Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree
in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil
and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook.”
