In a new phase of a multi-year cover-up, the OPCW has accused Syria of a chemical attack in Douma. But to make the case, the OPCW breaks its rules and offers an argument that its findings undermine.
Not one weapon to Ukraine. Let it learn to live with all its neighbors, not just the ones it likes. If not, let it defend itself. No WWIII for Ukraine.
Only a handful of bought and paid for demonstrators at the Maidan Square nine years ago wanted regime change. Ordinary Ukrainians didn't want a US imposed dictator. When Russian armed forces are done in Ukraine Iraq will look like a picnic in the park.
Well I wouldn't say no one is learning anything...to the contrary, I think the more focused/revealing question is who is doing the learning, usually gleaned by asking what is effectively the only political question: cui bono? Who benefits?
Reminded of Michael Parenti, an excerpt from his piece Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty, which highlights this lacuna cultivated under the auspices of global US empire:
"In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?
No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?
The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.
In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.
The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!
Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we."
Biden is Obama 2.0. Am independent, didn’t vote for Trump, but he did try to end Obama’s war on Syria. And Afghanistan was 1, Cheney pere plus Obama. The Taliban was a result of the first (proxy) war on Af., 1979-89. We should still be there?
Again, I vote Green, so my judgments aren’t by R or D or R vs D. Syria was Obama’s war, one Arab Sting that didn’t result in regime change (unlike Tunisia or Libya). Kerry was the PR guy, saying, “Assad and only Assad...” could have killed Syrian civilians, military, police. Made no sense at all.
Peaceful institutions like what? MSF (Doctors Without Borders) or Amnesty International?
The MSF were screaming for NATO to bomb Libya. Ditto AI. Under Qaddafi every resident in Libya had free dental care. Norway, Sweden and Denmark has never even had that. How's that for a brutal dictator?
"The IIT states that the sample was “collected by a third party” on April 8th 2018, days before the OPCW inspectors even arrived in Syria."
Where would be be without valued third party contractors.. after all it was Crowdstrike that gave us the Russian hacking evidence.. cost plus cowboys even more valuable than lobbyists!
the world under US leadership has become a place of falsehoods, where we are "good" even with all our murderous wars, and anybody we don't happen to like, or who rivals us, is "bad" and deserves the worst we can do.
Please share and talk about this issue. False flags are right out of the US interventionism playbook. Proof that the US MIC will stop at nothing and hold nothing sacred to get what they want.
The USS Maine was never hit by a torpedo like our great grandparents were told. They had a boiler explosion. The Pentagon has admitted to this. The Spanish - American War happened none the less.
The Lusitania didn't have a single civilian passenger onboard when it was torpedoed. It was carrying weapons and ammo. Still the US entered WWI.
Japan begged for negotiations with the US for years. The US said no every time until Japan had no choice but to attack its sanctioning enemy.
There were no shots fired from any North Vietnamese MTB in the Bay of Tonkin in 1963. This has also been confirmed by the Pentagon. That didn't stop the US from killing millions in that country and its neighboring countries.
Everyone here has heard about, and maybe even read the so-called PNAC document. The quote is well known: "The road to rebuilding America's defenses is going to be a long one, barring some catastrophic catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor."
The document is the smoking gun with regards to Afghanistan and more.
Libya's head of state had apologized to the victims of the crash at Lockerbie, and had been given a welcome back to the so-called international community. (Excuse me while I puke.) That didn't prevent the global media and several NGOs from screaming from the top of their lungs that Moamar Qaddafi must die, and after that the country was bombed back to the stone age. Literally.
Several NATO countries participated in the emptying of chemical weapons from Syria during the Dubya era. My own included. The armed forces here that participated were very proud when the job was done. That didn't prevent the US from unleashing the same thugs from Benghazi that they financed in Libya to do their dirty work.
Fortunately the government here understood that there was a regime change operation about to happen in Syria after seeing what happened in Libya, and support was withheld.
When Lughansk and Donetsk declared their independence from the US puppet government in Kiev a Malaysia Air flight was shot down, and the global MSM immediately blamed Russia without a shred of evidence. Everyone here knows Senator Cicero of Rome's famous quote: "If you want to find the perpetrator of a crime, all you have to do is figure out who benefits from it", or "Qui bono?" The Ukraine had everything to gain, and nothing to lose.
I prefer to remain brainwashed because it is a condition which been programmed into my subconscious by my western country’s government and it’s complicit imperialism adjacent corporate media allies, ranging from an entire lifetime of Saturday morning cartoons to public school curriculum to the evening “news”over the span of an entire lifetime that I have inexplicably become to be most comfortable with, despite the ongoing daily struggle with the predicable discomfort brought about by cognitive dissonance resulting from the distinct contrast between ludicrously distorted,
official narratives and the attendant, abundantly obvious realities to the contrary.
Great coverage of the Douma incident by Aaron as always. Well done.
I also have a newsletter called "THE GREAT AWAKENING" which is focused at peeling away the illusions we live and develop our systems under.
It talks about the two biggest threats to humanity: climate change and nuclear war, animal cruelty, and the various propaganda tactics the elites use to prevent us from taking action against the above crises.
The most fundamental cause of our trajectory towards destruction is the human mind, or more specifically, the Ego. So, you will also see articles on transcending our ego.
The hawks get what they want via Deep State (Intelligence, Military, false NGO, etc) regardless of what foreign policy may be stated. It doesn't seem to matter which party is in office. It's above and beyond politics until someone takes serious measures against it. Sadly, it may take a World War to come to that stage. Which, from all appearances, is the goal of the hawks to begin with. Catch-22.
OPCW, IMF, World Bank, UN, OAS, EU, NATO -- all answer to the once-mighty USA and in doing so have smeared crap all over themselves. When i hear one of these organizations trumpeting "findings" that support whatever crime the US is committing that day, I just tune them out. They have nothing to say to educate me except on the tragedy of careerism.
At the embedded Twitter link to the revelation about the obviously faked Douma hospital scene , a random Twit argued that that any criticism of the purported AQ links to the white Helmets is tantamount to smearing “someone with an academy award”
Lima Oscar Lima …you mean like the smearing of the confirmed pedophile, sexual predator Woody Allen, winner of 4 Academy Awards, 10 BAFTAs and two Golden Globes?
Agree, Aaron gets it. I trust the Russians on this. Surprised the US didn’t blame Pres. Assad personally. White Helmets or the “Syrian Observatory”--one guy in London.
This is probably a stupid question, but did anyone bother to perform autopsies on the people who were killed? Do we even know the names of the victims? Who controlled Douma at the time of the attack? Where did the victim's bodies go? Where are the bodies now? Why are we analyzing chunks of concrete to try and figure out how these people died instead of doing autopsies?
I can answer a couple of those questions. The analysis of materials like concrete, wood, etc. are just one aspect of the investigation. I think they did do autopsies, but unfortunately I can't recall the results off the top of my head. (Aaron's done a ton of reporting on the Douma incident, though, so you'll probably find the answer in there somewhere.) So the different prongs of the investigation are chemical analysis, witness interviews, and toxicology (autopsies, blood samples, etc.). It's a similar concept to something like a homicide investigation.
Jaysh al-Islam (an Al Qaeda affiliated group fighting the Syrian government) ruled Douma at the time. Their control of the area at the time is an undisputed fact that even those who blame Syria for a gas attack agree on. The BBC journalist who claimed the hospital scene was staged went as far as to say that they ruled the area with "iron fist" - which is quite believable given their violent and extreme nature - and therefore the supposed victims at that particular scene very well might have been forced to just say whatever Jaysh al-Islam told them to.
Are you absolutely positive that autopsies were performed on the victims? I can't find any mention of autopsies in the OPCW report that Aaron linked to in this article. I also did a quick search online and couldn't find mention of autopsies or even the names of the victims.
I think there are two main questions: How did the victims die? And did they die at the location where their bodies were filmed?
Is there any information available about the victims of the supposed "chemical weapons" attack? Were they residents of the building where the incident occurred and do we know their names? It seems unusual that there hasn't been any identification of the victims -- at least not that I can find.
Typically, after a massacre or terrorist attack, a memorial is created to honor and identify the victims. They don't just remain anonymous. The press often interviews the loved ones of the victims and we learn more about their lives. Was any of this done in this case, or did I miss it?
Seems that we have learned nothing from the War On Iraq, or rather, we have not wanted to learn anything from that particular fiasco.
The war in Ukraine suggests as much. In Syria since 2010 (Blue Anon, Aaron?).
Seen my artical
Not one weapon to Ukraine. Let it learn to live with all its neighbors, not just the ones it likes. If not, let it defend itself. No WWIII for Ukraine.
Don't feed the troll.
and CERTAINLY don't pet him! I didn't get the troll part with this guy --
Only a handful of bought and paid for demonstrators at the Maidan Square nine years ago wanted regime change. Ordinary Ukrainians didn't want a US imposed dictator. When Russian armed forces are done in Ukraine Iraq will look like a picnic in the park.
From what global fiasco has anyone learned anything?
Humans in fact do learn lots, just not the lessons they should.
After 75 years billions of people still believe the UN to be benign and benevolent. Go figure.
Yes, when convenient to do so.
See my artical
Well I wouldn't say no one is learning anything...to the contrary, I think the more focused/revealing question is who is doing the learning, usually gleaned by asking what is effectively the only political question: cui bono? Who benefits?
Reminded of Michael Parenti, an excerpt from his piece Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty, which highlights this lacuna cultivated under the auspices of global US empire:
"In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?
No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?
The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.
In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.
The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!
Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we."
Biden is Obama 2.0. Am independent, didn’t vote for Trump, but he did try to end Obama’s war on Syria. And Afghanistan was 1, Cheney pere plus Obama. The Taliban was a result of the first (proxy) war on Af., 1979-89. We should still be there?
Don't feed Gene the troll.
Not a fan of ANY Cheney!
Again, I vote Green, so my judgments aren’t by R or D or R vs D. Syria was Obama’s war, one Arab Sting that didn’t result in regime change (unlike Tunisia or Libya). Kerry was the PR guy, saying, “Assad and only Assad...” could have killed Syrian civilians, military, police. Made no sense at all.
Not sure what the context is here, but in Syria, WE are the terrorists. ISIS, rolled out in Iraq in 2014 to get troops back in, is CIA and Mossad.
Once again we see that international specialist, peaceful institutions have been hijacked and diverted by the warmongers.
But Aaron cuts through the lies.
Peaceful institutions like what? MSF (Doctors Without Borders) or Amnesty International?
The MSF were screaming for NATO to bomb Libya. Ditto AI. Under Qaddafi every resident in Libya had free dental care. Norway, Sweden and Denmark has never even had that. How's that for a brutal dictator?
Masterful research, Aaron!
"The IIT states that the sample was “collected by a third party” on April 8th 2018, days before the OPCW inspectors even arrived in Syria."
Where would be be without valued third party contractors.. after all it was Crowdstrike that gave us the Russian hacking evidence.. cost plus cowboys even more valuable than lobbyists!
the world under US leadership has become a place of falsehoods, where we are "good" even with all our murderous wars, and anybody we don't happen to like, or who rivals us, is "bad" and deserves the worst we can do.
Please share and talk about this issue. False flags are right out of the US interventionism playbook. Proof that the US MIC will stop at nothing and hold nothing sacred to get what they want.
The USS Maine was never hit by a torpedo like our great grandparents were told. They had a boiler explosion. The Pentagon has admitted to this. The Spanish - American War happened none the less.
The Lusitania didn't have a single civilian passenger onboard when it was torpedoed. It was carrying weapons and ammo. Still the US entered WWI.
Japan begged for negotiations with the US for years. The US said no every time until Japan had no choice but to attack its sanctioning enemy.
There were no shots fired from any North Vietnamese MTB in the Bay of Tonkin in 1963. This has also been confirmed by the Pentagon. That didn't stop the US from killing millions in that country and its neighboring countries.
Everyone here has heard about, and maybe even read the so-called PNAC document. The quote is well known: "The road to rebuilding America's defenses is going to be a long one, barring some catastrophic catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor."
The document is the smoking gun with regards to Afghanistan and more.
Libya's head of state had apologized to the victims of the crash at Lockerbie, and had been given a welcome back to the so-called international community. (Excuse me while I puke.) That didn't prevent the global media and several NGOs from screaming from the top of their lungs that Moamar Qaddafi must die, and after that the country was bombed back to the stone age. Literally.
Several NATO countries participated in the emptying of chemical weapons from Syria during the Dubya era. My own included. The armed forces here that participated were very proud when the job was done. That didn't prevent the US from unleashing the same thugs from Benghazi that they financed in Libya to do their dirty work.
Fortunately the government here understood that there was a regime change operation about to happen in Syria after seeing what happened in Libya, and support was withheld.
When Lughansk and Donetsk declared their independence from the US puppet government in Kiev a Malaysia Air flight was shot down, and the global MSM immediately blamed Russia without a shred of evidence. Everyone here knows Senator Cicero of Rome's famous quote: "If you want to find the perpetrator of a crime, all you have to do is figure out who benefits from it", or "Qui bono?" The Ukraine had everything to gain, and nothing to lose.
Masterful research, Aaron!
I prefer to remain brainwashed because it is a condition which been programmed into my subconscious by my western country’s government and it’s complicit imperialism adjacent corporate media allies, ranging from an entire lifetime of Saturday morning cartoons to public school curriculum to the evening “news”over the span of an entire lifetime that I have inexplicably become to be most comfortable with, despite the ongoing daily struggle with the predicable discomfort brought about by cognitive dissonance resulting from the distinct contrast between ludicrously distorted,
official narratives and the attendant, abundantly obvious realities to the contrary.
Nice irony there.
Great coverage of the Douma incident by Aaron as always. Well done.
I also have a newsletter called "THE GREAT AWAKENING" which is focused at peeling away the illusions we live and develop our systems under.
It talks about the two biggest threats to humanity: climate change and nuclear war, animal cruelty, and the various propaganda tactics the elites use to prevent us from taking action against the above crises.
The most fundamental cause of our trajectory towards destruction is the human mind, or more specifically, the Ego. So, you will also see articles on transcending our ego.
CHECK HERE:
https://awakes.substack.com
Aaron is indeed the best. Veteran Intel Pros said the first “finding” was of precursors from Turkey, also involved.
Truly mind-blowing.
The west have destroyed itself all the trust we could have on our values. There are no more values. They have all been tainted with so many lies.
The hawks get what they want via Deep State (Intelligence, Military, false NGO, etc) regardless of what foreign policy may be stated. It doesn't seem to matter which party is in office. It's above and beyond politics until someone takes serious measures against it. Sadly, it may take a World War to come to that stage. Which, from all appearances, is the goal of the hawks to begin with. Catch-22.
brilliant reporting, thank you, aaron.
OPCW, IMF, World Bank, UN, OAS, EU, NATO -- all answer to the once-mighty USA and in doing so have smeared crap all over themselves. When i hear one of these organizations trumpeting "findings" that support whatever crime the US is committing that day, I just tune them out. They have nothing to say to educate me except on the tragedy of careerism.
At the embedded Twitter link to the revelation about the obviously faked Douma hospital scene , a random Twit argued that that any criticism of the purported AQ links to the white Helmets is tantamount to smearing “someone with an academy award”
Lima Oscar Lima …you mean like the smearing of the confirmed pedophile, sexual predator Woody Allen, winner of 4 Academy Awards, 10 BAFTAs and two Golden Globes?
Agree, Aaron gets it. I trust the Russians on this. Surprised the US didn’t blame Pres. Assad personally. White Helmets or the “Syrian Observatory”--one guy in London.
Magic bullets. Magic marker. Blame *Syria*?
This is probably a stupid question, but did anyone bother to perform autopsies on the people who were killed? Do we even know the names of the victims? Who controlled Douma at the time of the attack? Where did the victim's bodies go? Where are the bodies now? Why are we analyzing chunks of concrete to try and figure out how these people died instead of doing autopsies?
I can answer a couple of those questions. The analysis of materials like concrete, wood, etc. are just one aspect of the investigation. I think they did do autopsies, but unfortunately I can't recall the results off the top of my head. (Aaron's done a ton of reporting on the Douma incident, though, so you'll probably find the answer in there somewhere.) So the different prongs of the investigation are chemical analysis, witness interviews, and toxicology (autopsies, blood samples, etc.). It's a similar concept to something like a homicide investigation.
Jaysh al-Islam (an Al Qaeda affiliated group fighting the Syrian government) ruled Douma at the time. Their control of the area at the time is an undisputed fact that even those who blame Syria for a gas attack agree on. The BBC journalist who claimed the hospital scene was staged went as far as to say that they ruled the area with "iron fist" - which is quite believable given their violent and extreme nature - and therefore the supposed victims at that particular scene very well might have been forced to just say whatever Jaysh al-Islam told them to.
Are you absolutely positive that autopsies were performed on the victims? I can't find any mention of autopsies in the OPCW report that Aaron linked to in this article. I also did a quick search online and couldn't find mention of autopsies or even the names of the victims.
I think there are two main questions: How did the victims die? And did they die at the location where their bodies were filmed?
There were no autopsies. White Helmets buried the bodies and supposedly gave the location to OPCW, but exhumations were ruled out.
Thanks for clarifying!
Is there any information available about the victims of the supposed "chemical weapons" attack? Were they residents of the building where the incident occurred and do we know their names? It seems unusual that there hasn't been any identification of the victims -- at least not that I can find.
Typically, after a massacre or terrorist attack, a memorial is created to honor and identify the victims. They don't just remain anonymous. The press often interviews the loved ones of the victims and we learn more about their lives. Was any of this done in this case, or did I miss it?
I've seen a list of names but haven't been able to verify it. I have similar questions.
Maybe I'm misremembering. It's been a while since I've read about this subject.