More on Syria

[canta_brian]

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/ ... ing-online

Oh, but this story is in the western media so can be dismissed....

[rowan]

Oh dear, looks like you guys were completely wrong about everything - once again...

But will you be man enough to admit it

In terms of suffering caused, there is often not, in fact, much to choose between dismembering and burning people alive with high explosives, shredding them with shrapnel, and choking them with poison gas. Modern 'conventional' weapons can be far more cruel and devastating than, for example, chlorine gas. But chemical weapons, prohibited by international law, are extremely potent in allowing Western 'humanitarians' to justify 'intervention' in response to crimes - real, hyped or imagined - that the West has itself far surpassed using more respectable forms of mass murder.

Noam Chomsky has observed that 'propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state'. This is certainly true for social control at home, but propaganda also allows nominally democratic states to wield their military bludgeons abroad in much the same way as totalitarian states.

Thus, in April, it happened again: the entire corporate media system rose up with instant certainty to damn an enemy state for crimes against humanity on April 7, in Douma, Syria.

This was not acceptable death by bomb and bullet; this was a nerve gas attack. The villainous agent on every journalist's lips: sarin, a highly toxic synthetic organophosphorus compound that has no smell or taste, but which quickly kills through asphyxiation.

As we discussed at the time, there was no question that this was a repetition of the fake justification for war to secure non-existent Iraqi WMDs, or to prevent a fictional Libyan massacre in Benghazi. Instead, the Guardian editors insisted that this certainly was 'a chemical gas attack, orchestrated by Bashar al-Assad, that left dead children foaming at the mouth'. From the safety of his Guardian office, assistant editor Simon Tisdall hammered the drum for a war that risked even nuclear confrontation:

'It means destroying Assad's combat planes, bombers, helicopters and ground facilities from the air. It means challenging Assad's and Russia's control of Syrian airspace. It means taking out Iranian military bases and batteries in Syria if they are used to prosecute the war.'

By contrast, Scott Ritter - a former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq who understands the issues - was more cautious:

'The bottom line, however, is that the United States is threatening to go to war in Syria over allegations of chemical weapons usage for which no factual evidence has been provided. This act is occurring even as the possibility remains that verifiable forensic investigations would, at a minimum, confirm the presence of chemical weapons...'

No matter, on April 14, three days after Ritter's article appeared, the US, UK and France attacked Syria in response to the unproven allegations.

Robert Fisk of the Independent visited Douma and spoke to a senior doctor who works in the clinic where victims of the alleged chemical attack had been brought for treatment. Dr Rahaibani told Fisk what had happened that night:

'I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a "White Helmet", shouted "Gas!", and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.'

When Fisk's report wasn't ignored, it was sneeringly dismissed. A headline in The Times read:

'Critics leap on reporter Robert Fisk's failure to find signs of gas attack'

The Times, which is no stranger to controversy, suggested that there were big question marks over Fisk's record:

'Fisk is no stranger to controversy.'

No Organophosphates Found
On 6 July 2018, the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), issued an interim report on the FFM's investigation regarding the allegations of chemical weapons use in Douma. The passage that jumped out of the report:

'No organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties.'

No sarin! But is it possible that any nerve agents had degraded and disappeared before OPCW investigators reached the site? An April 17, Guardian article had reported:

'The OPCW has been racing against the clock to collect samples from the site of the attack, a three-storey house in Douma, in which scores of people died in a basement. Jerry Smith, who helped supervise the OPCW-led withdrawal of much of Syria's sarin stockpile in 2013, said samples of nerve agent rapidly degrade in normal environmental conditions... The Russian military and Syrian officers have had access to the house since last Thursday, raising fears that the site may have been tampered with. However, Smith said it was likely that residual samples of nerve agent would remain for at least another week, even after an attempted clean-up.'

The OPCW later commented:

'On 21 April 2018, after security concerns had been addressed, the FFM team conducted its first visit to one of the alleged sites of interest, and it was deemed an acceptable risk to enter Douma...'

In other words, OPCW's race 'against the clock' appeared to have been successful. Charles Shoebridge a former Scotland Yard detective and counter terrorism intelligence officer, observed:

'if OPCW find no traces, likely not due to any inspection delay'

Before we examine 'MSM' reaction to the OPCW report, particularly to the failure to find 'organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products', let's look at their initial reaction to claims of a nerve agent attack on April 7.



Initial Response - 'Those Symptoms Don't Come From Chlorine'
CNN reported on April 14:

'Senior US officials expressed confidence Saturday that both chlorine and sarin gas were used in Syria's alleged chemical weapons attack on the Damascus enclave of Douma last week...'

CNN cited reports 'from media, nongovernmental organizations and other open sources' that 'point to miosis - constricted pupils - convulsions and disruptions to central nervous systems. Those symptoms don't come from chlorine. They come from nerve agents... It's a much more efficient weapon, unfortunately, the way the regime has been using it, and it's resulted in higher deaths, it resulted in terrible pictures.'

The Financial Times cited Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer of the UK's chemical biological radiological and nuclear regiment (see here on his credibility as an impartial source):

'There's no doubt this was a major chemical weapons attack. The big question is whether it was chlorine or sarin. I am favouring a mix of the two.' (David Bond and Rebecca Collard, 'Experts say gas attack proof will take weeks: Civil war. Douma Inspectors are struggling to access site of alleged atrocity as Assad's troops move in,' Financial Times, 12 April 2018)

A Telegraph article opened with this harrowing line:

'The victims were found exactly where they had been when the gas hit. Their silent killer had given little warning.'

This clearly suggested a very powerful nerve agent, as the article explained:

'Medics on the ground reported smelling a chlorine-like substance, but said the patients' symptoms and the large death toll pointed to a more noxious substance such as nerve agent sarin.

'"The number of casualties is so high and that's not typical for chlorine," said Dr Ahmad Tarakji, president of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which assists hospitals in Eastern Ghouta. "Unfortunately, because of a lack of resources, we can't take blood samples."'

The claims did indeed suggest something much more powerful than chlorine, as The Daily Mail made clear in a report also citing de Bretton-Gordon:

'If it was chlorine, they could have escaped. But they died after just taking a few steps.' (Vanessa Allen, 'Little girl left foaming at the mouth by horrific gas attack,' Daily Mail, 16 April 2018)

The Mail cited an 'activist' making the same point:

'Ibrahim Reyhani, a White Helmet civil defence volunteer, said anyone who touched the bodies started getting sick, and said he believed a mixture of sarin and chlorine had been used.

'He told the Sunday Times: "If it's just chlorine, if you smell it you can escape. But sarin you breathe and it kills you."

The Telegraph published an op-ed by de Bretton-Gordon:

'There have been a number of chlorine attacks, but it would appear that chlorine, although outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention, is below the threshold for the UK and France to strike.

'Saturday's attack, with so many deaths and casualties, looks possibly to be a mixture of chlorine and the nerve agent sarin, and this atrocity must surely stretch above their threshold for action.'

It is worth reiterating again – as media responses to the OPCW's latest report, conspicuously, have not - that chlorine was not a sufficiently deadly agent to cause either the claimed level of carnage or the claimed level of Western moral outrage. In 2015, Barack Obama noted: 'Chlorine itself, historically, has not been listed as a chemical weapon.'

Charles Shoebridge commented:

'while headlines of chemical weapons are undoubtedly dramatic, the relatively low lethality of chlorine makes it an ineffective – and therefore arguably also unlikely – choice of weapon...

'Indeed, given the low toxicity of the allegedly small amounts used and the unpleasant bleach smell that always betrays chlorine's presence, in most instances people could avoid being killed by simply walking away – another indication of its near uselessness as a weapon. Perhaps the only way it could be tactically effective is if used to drive people from trenches or bunkers to allow them to then be killed with bombs and bullets – but again, the amounts of chlorine needed would be far more than is alleged, and the accuracy needed to target in this way is unlikely to be achieved using unguided rockets as alleged this week in east Ghouta, or by dropping a "barrel bomb" from a helicopter.'

Chlorine gas was not included in the list of Syrian chemical weapons reported to the OPCW. It is an unsophisticated weapon that could also be deployed by 'rebel' forces and to which they have had access. The OPCW reported in August 2016: 'Chlorine is available to all parties in the Syrian Arab Republic.'

A Guardian leader also linked the alleged attack in Douma to sarin:

'Dozens of civilians in the Douma district were killed by Syrian government chemical attacks on Saturday.'

It continued:

'This is not the first time this has happened. Since the use of sarin at Khan al-Assal in 2013 there have been dozens of chemical attacks by the regime.'

Peter Hitchens commented on the Guardian's coverage in the Mail on Sunday:

'Here is the Guardian, on 9th April 2018: "Aid workers and medics described apocalyptic scenes in the besieged city of Douma, where at least 42 people have died from what appears to be a chemical attack, as they scrambled to save the survivors of the latest atrocity in Syria...

'"Doctors said the symptoms had been consistent with exposure to an organophosphorus substance."'

Hitchens asked:

'Which doctors? Note the absence of named, checkable sources in a story written some distance from Damascus. This was typical of almost all western media reports of the episode at the time.'

Hitchens observed that OPCW had found no traces of organophosphates but that 'The quoted "doctors", being unidentified, cannot now be approached to ask for their response to this.'



Responding To OPCW's July 6 Report
The skwawkbox website noted that the BBC had covered, and distorted, OPCW's July 6 report. A BBC headline read:

'Syria attack was chlorine gas – watchdog

'The deadly attack in Douma in April left dozens of civilians dead and caused and international outcry.'

This was complete invention. As skwawkbox commented: 'the OPCW report emphatically does not say that chlorine gas was used'. The report actually said:

'Along with explosive residues, various chlorinated organic chemicals were found in samples from two sites, for which there is full chain of custody. Work by the team to establish the significance of these results is on-going. The FFM team will continue its work to draw final conclusions.' (Our emphasis)

Chlorinated organic chemicals are extremely common, found in degreasers, cleaning solutions, paint thinners, pesticides, resins, glues, and many other mixing and thinning solutions. The BBC amended the article, which later read:

'The report said two samples from gas cylinders recovered at the scene tested positive for chlorine.'

Skwawkbox commented again:

'This is a classic example of a technically-correct claim that is completely misleading.

'The [OPCW] report does note the presence of chlorine in some samples tested from the cylinders – but not chlorine gas or the residues that would be expected from its reaction with other substances...

'The relevant page of the OPCW's full report states that no 'relevant chemicals' were found from a swab inside the opening of one cylinder:

'In debris and on other items around the cylinder, chlorine compounds were found – but these are common compounds that would be unlikely to be formed simply by chlorine reacting with something on site.'

In similar vein, Alec Luhn, the Telegraph's Russia correspondent, tweeted:

'The April chemical attack in Douma was caused by chlorine gas, the OPCW says. Or it was completely staged, if you still believe the Russian authorities'

Sharmine Narwani, a writer, commentator and analyst covering Middle East geopolitics, replied brusquely but accurately:

'No, the OPCW didn't say that. It found traces of chlorine on the scene, which it would find in your house or office or water supply too, if sampled. Try actual #journalism.'

OffGuardian noted several headlines covering OPCW's findings. Reuters reported:

'Chemical weapons agency finds "chlorinated" chemicals in Syria's Douma'

The Independent wrote:

'Syrian conflict: Chlorine used in Douma attack that left dozens of civilians dead, chemical weapons watchdog finds'

As Off-Guardian noted, the headlines should have read: No nerve agents found.

Remarkably, these rare mentions aside, the OPCW interim report has been ignored by most major newspapers and media, including the Guardian.

http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/a ... douma.html

[rowan]

Legend!

If Seymour Hersh had only broken the story of the massacre of unarmed civilians at My Lai in Vietnam by the United States Army in 1968, it would have been enough to make a career. But that was only one story in a range of stories that this feisty and independent journalist has broken over the course of his long career. He was the one who pointed his finger at a host of stories, including the U.S. programmes for chemical and biological weapons, the Israeli nuclear bomb and the shenanigans of the Nixon White House regarding Vietnam and Watergate. Recently, it was Hersh who wrote important stories on the death of Osama bin Laden and on allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the war in Syria. Each of his stories is received as a bombshell, largely because the story is likely to be a bombshell.

Over his long career, Hersh has worked for major U.S. publications such as The New York Times and for smaller outlets such as the Dispatch News Service. He did not care where he wrote as long as he could report with freedom and write with his usual bluntness. It was not prestige that Hersh was after, but the story. This is clear across his fascinating autobiography—Reporter: A Memoir (2018). Winning the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the U.S. atrocities in My Lai did not stir him. It simply meant that he had done the right thing. It did not inflate his personality or make him eager for more establishment accolades. He won the Pulitzer Prize because he deserved it. If he wrote another story that deserved a prize, well, then he would get it. There was no need to write for the prize. To learn to write for the prize puts the reporter in the camp of the establishment. Hersh would have none of that.

Born in a hardscrabble home in Chicago, Hersh had none of the opportunities that were available to many of his peers. He went to college by luck and by determination and went to work with that same attitude. Like many good reporters, Hersh began on the night shift in Chicago, covering stories that taught him the essence of his craft. Listen to people’s stories, surely, but also do not take the word of the authorities without question. One night, in 1964, there was a clash between the police and a group of African Americans. The police told Hersh that the African Americans had shot at the police, hence the retaliation. Hersh rushed back to the Associated Press office, where he worked, and filed his story about how African Americans had fired at the police. His night editor, Bob Olmsted, rewrote the lead. “Gunfire broke out tonight”, Olmsted wrote. When Hersh protested, Olmsted asked him if he had talked to any African Americans. He had not. “I had made no effort to get to the rioters across the police barriers,” Hersh recalled. He did not “begin to know what they thought the riot was about”. On that one night, Hersh writes, Olmsted, who would later be an editor at Chicago Sun-Times, “taught me a master’s degree worth of journalism”.

Stenographers of war

Of course, many master’s courses in journalism do not teach the lesson that one must not become the stenographer of the state. Hersh begins his memoir by saying that today “the reporter is little more than a parrot”. This is a harsh assessment but there is merit to it. So much of the world of journalism now adopts the views of the state without any question. Press releases are directly reprinted as if they are news reports. The view of the state is allowed to define stories of monumental importance. Trust in the state has become a fundamental attitude in newsrooms and amongst opinion writers. Even more so, trust in corporations has become commonplace. If there is an oil spill, the view of the oil company is taken more seriously than the views of the people who are impacted by the spill. This is the lesson that Hersh learned early in his career.

When Hersh went to Washington from his time in Chicago, he was confronted directly with the most important story of the mid 1960s, the U.S. war on Vietnam. Leonard Downie, who was a fixture at The Washington Post, wrote in The New Muckrakers: “Most major stories written by Pentagon correspondents on national issues reflected the official point of view.” There were important exceptions, although these reporters were pilloried for their brutal honesty. As Hersh writes: “If you supported the war, you were objective; if you were against it, you were a lefty and not trustworthy.” Hersh rightly praises the work of Harrison Salisbury, who went to Hanoi for The New York Times and wrote about the morale in Vietnam’s north, as well as about civilian casualties as a result of the U.S. bombing raids on cities and towns. Hersh went into the world of the Pentagon to see if he could corroborate from within the U.S. military what Salisbury found in Vietnam. He was able to do so and wrote landmark pieces both on the collapse of morale in the U.S. forces and on the futility of the bombing raids and on civilian casualties. The leadership of the U.S. military denied all this. Hersh’s conclusion is important: “I had no idea of the extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect their losing hand.”

Hersh’s method

How did Hersh get the stories that other reporters seemed to miss? The first point is his attitude. He cultivated scepticism about governmental and corporate power. Hersh was not awed by the leadership or eager for its approval. This allowed him to ask questions that it did not want asked and that it prevented from being asked by using every means. It is because he did not believe that the U.S. was always good or right that he was able to do the landmark stories that he did. Hersh’s Reporter should be read by young journalists. It is itself an education. There is buried in this book a manual for how to do good journalism. Here are some basic points to explain his method:

(1) Read. Hersh read. “Read before you write,” he notes in reference to an important but buried article that he had read by Elinor Langer in Science, the weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reading Langer in this obscure publication allowed Hersh to see that the U.S. government was pursuing a chemical and biological weapons programme. He would not have known of such a story or pursued it if he had not read Langer’s work.

(2) Research. Having read Langer, Hersh went to the Pentagon library and read everything available on the chemical and biological weapons programme. He digested whatever public material was available. He learned which U.S. military bases had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. He read the weekly newspapers of those bases. Here he found reports on retirement parties for colonels and generals that offered details about where they had decided to retire. This information was crucial.

(3) Find and cultivate sources. Hersh then travelled to the towns that housed the bases as well as the towns where the retired military officers had moved. He tried to meet retired officers and others to ask them about the weapons programme and its impact on the local communities (as well as on their own health). Painstaking work allowed him to find one or two people who would talk to him and then point him to others. This is how Hersh found William Calley, who gave him the My Lai story. Some of these retired officers were upset by the chemical and biological weapons programme or were disgruntled by being passed over for promotion. “Want to be a good military reporter?” Hersh asks “Find those officers.” Over the course of his career, Hersh cultivated many of these officers and other military officers. They would slip him reports and lead him to other people like themselves. These kind of sources are crucial for the Hersh method. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Colby, would later say of Hersh and the CIA: “He knows more about this place than I do.” He was probably right.

(4) The Hersh rule. In the book, Hersh says that when he interviewed officials he would often ask them about their work outside the story at hand. When he interviewed a judge, for instance, he asked him about his appellate decisions—having read them already. “Never begin an interview by asking core questions,” Hersh writes. “I wanted him to know I was smart and capable of some abstract thought. And I wanted him to like me and, perhaps, trust me.” That judge would eventually deliver Hersh a crucial part of the My Lai story.

(5) Write to learn more, stay on the story. There is something to be said for persistence. Hersh would stay on a story for as long as he needed. He would write short articles, which would shake the trees and draw in more sources—some family member who wanted to say something, some government official (including elected officials) who wanted Hersh to know something. He was not in a hurry to put out his final story. There would be time for that. Journalism, for Hersh, was a process, not about the creation of a product.

(6) Resist intimidation. One of the realities of being a journalist is that you always face intimidation of one kind or another. Murder and imprisonment are the harshest sentences. But there is an everyday quality by which the state and corporations go after reporters. Hersh tells many such stories, including when high government officials would call him up to make him uncomfortable or scared. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Seymour?” asked Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger’s loyal deputy. This must have rankled. It was in the context of Hersh’s story about Kissinger and the wiretapping of just about everyone. Hersh stood firm.

All this is fine, but how does one make a living if one follows the Hersh method? Which news house would tolerate this kind of reporter, not only by financing them for extended periods of time as they chased important stories, but also by allowing them to question the government and corporations? Nobody hired Hersh for the totality of his career. He sought a long-term deal with The New York Times but could not get it. “How’s my little commie?” Abe Rosenthal, his boss at The New York Times, said to him in 1971. Hersh says he wrote in the “golden age of journalism”, but his own career was idiosyncratic, funded by an article here or there, a short stint here or there, a book deal here or there. While Hersh grumbles about freelance journalism, his entire career seems peppered with examples of the freelance life.

So much more could be said about Reporter. One hopes that Hersh will come back and write another book about matters to which he alludes at the close of this one. Some of his most important stories in recent years have been about the allegations of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Hersh’s stories, which raised important questions about the validity of these allegations, had been reported mainly from U.S. government sources. He does not say enough about these stories. One would like to know more. One would like, as well, to know why U.S. publications had refused to run these stories, which eventually ran in British and German publications. “I will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work,” he writes in the final pages. But this is not enough. Hersh is a good raconteur of the process of his reporting. I would have liked more of his sense of those stories and his judgment about how they were squelched and then received.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/23 ... sh-method/

[Sandydragon]

Noam Chomsky as confirmation. Right oh.

[rowan]

He knows a hell of a lot more than you or anyone else here - evidently!

I see the American mainstream press is reporting that a Syrian military jet was shot down over Israeli air space yesterday. But the UN has ruled in Syria's favor on the Golan Heights, Israel has maintained its illegal occupation regardless and the plane was therefore still in Syrian territory when the Israelis shot it down. So once again the American mainstream press is lying to us.

[rowan]

Interesting report on Britain's support for Turkish operations in Syria: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/uk ... -243982867

[Buggaluggs]

Copy McPastyface is at it again. Will you ever stop polluting this site with reams of dubious paste-shoite?

[rowan]

To students of British history, Britain’s favouring of Islamist-backed military conquest over more liberal, democratic forces comes as no surprise - rather, it is a leitmotif of British foreign policy in the Middle East.

Very true. Britain's entire history has been once of genocidal wars against other nations, and that continues right up to this day. There is no difference between the Britain today and the Britain that was exterminating the native peoples of North America and Australasia, running a brutal slave trade in the Caribbean and mass-murdering, torturing and raping the inhabitants of India and Africa. The only difference is now they do it as part of the US empire, but the tactics are the same, most recently helping America to bomb and destroy Middle Eastern nation after nation, right up to Syria - where they finally failed. Thus the lies and propaganda, the finger-pointing elsewhere, and the support for terrorists who kept civilian hostages as human shields and even unleashed chemical weapons upon them to frame the government and provide the US and its lackeys with a pretext to bomb another sovereign nation - though they most certainly knew the truth all along. Britain and its evil ideology ...

[rowan]

The mop-haired baboon and his delusions:

Brexit is only the latest in a series of British ventures this millennium in which political class has miscalculated what we could accomplish. The process was already evident when Britain was engaged in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and failed to achieve its ends in all three of them.

There is nothing secret about what happened. The Chilcot Report, for instance, lucidly explained in great detail how the British government did not know what it was getting into in Iraq and ended up, after all its efforts, signing a humiliating truce agreement with a local Shia militia in Basra.

Britain was repeatedly caught by surprise by events, tumbling out of Iraq into even bloodier skirmishing in Helmand province in Afghanistan. In Libya, it should have been perfectly obvious that if Gaddafi fell, there was nobody but predatory militias to replace him, and much the same was true in opposing Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

At some point, the British political, diplomatic and military establishment seems to have lost its touch or capacity to learn from experience.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/23 ... h-history/

[Digby]

Still it was a nice touch to seek the evacuation of the brave white helmets before Assad and Putin get really stuck into what might be, for now, the final round of mass executions

[rowan]

Still it was a nice touch to seek the evacuation of the brave white helmets before Assad and Putin get really stuck into what might be, for now, the final round of mass executions

The White Helmets embedded with the terrorists, you mean? It must be very upsetting to the British and Americans to see their proxy head-choppers and child-rapists being finished off. Can't win 'em all

[Digby]

Wibble, said without reading of course, but I'm confident going with a guess of wibble

[Sandydragon]

Gotta love the promAssad propagandists venting so much anger at people risking their lives to save others. Too many inconvenient truths perhaps?

[rowan]

So you support the terrorists then. The White Helmets were embedded with the terrorists, which is why they needed evacuating. Even mainstream news has, for the most part, reported that the Syrians and Russians are driving out the last of ISIS.

I also think it's time you showed a bit of spine and admitted to the fact you had it very wrong on the chemical weapons accusations. The OPCW's findings have made a mockery of this.

[kk67]

Copy McPastyface is at it again. Will you ever stop polluting this site with reams of dubious paste-shoite?

That whole nonsense started as cuntyMccuntface.........

Did you start it, Fella..?. The entire cuntyMcCuntface debacle has got your fingerprints all over it. You or KO.

[Sandydragon]

So you support the terrorists then. The White Helmets were embedded with the terrorists, which is why they needed evacuating. Even mainstream news has, for the most part, reported that the Syrians and Russians are driving out the last of ISIS.

I also think it's time you showed a bit of spine and admitted to the fact you had it very wrong on the chemical weapons accusations. The OPCW's findings have made a mockery of this.

I don’t support any Islamic terrorist. I do support those poor bastards who protested against the Assad regime and got massacred as a result.

I don’t support a mass murdering regime that has used every weapon available to it, including WMDs, to kill its own civilians. You do.

[rowan]

Copy McPastyface is at it again. Will you ever stop polluting this site with reams of dubious paste-shoite?

That whole nonsense started as cuntyMccuntface.........

Did you start it, Fella..?. The entire cuntyMcCuntface debacle has got your fingerprints all over it. You or KO.

Indeed.

[rowan]

So you support the terrorists then. The White Helmets were embedded with the terrorists, which is why they needed evacuating. Even mainstream news has, for the most part, reported that the Syrians and Russians are driving out the last of ISIS.

I also think it's time you showed a bit of spine and admitted to the fact you had it very wrong on the chemical weapons accusations. The OPCW's findings have made a mockery of this.

I don’t support any Islamic terrorist. I do support those poor bastards who protested against the Assad regime and got massacred as a result.

I don’t support a mass murdering regime that has used every weapon available to it, including WMDs, to kill its own civilians. You do.

WMDs. Are you talking about Bush & Bliar's war in Iraq now? Because this sounds awfully familiar. If you're talking about Syria, you're ignoring the OPCW's findings, which is really ironic (and hypocritical), given how often they were cited in arguments about the Skripals. There is no mass-murdering regime in Damascus. There are mass murdering regimes in Washington and London, which have invaded countless nations and created wars and conflicts that have resulted in an estimated 20 million deaths since WWII alone, including several million in the Middle East since the start of the 90s. A standard method which has become very apparent is to arm and train terrorist proxies. The most quoted source in mainstream media from terrorist-held areas has been the White Helmets. Now they have been evacuated by Israel as government troops supported by their Russian allies destroy the last of ISIS. This has become possible because Trump withdrew American support for them - and the conflict - albeit a little belatedly and a couple of parting shots since proved to be based on false accusations. The OPCW findings have shot your theories about chemical weapons use by the Syrian government down in flames.

[Sandydragon]

Cherry picking? Previous reports were satisfied that chemical weapons, WMDs, were used in earlier barracks. This report only ruled out some types of chemical weapons, not all.

[Sandydragon]

Here is the OCPW statement.

https://www.opcw.org/news/article/opcw- ... b-in-2016/

No evidence of certain chemical weapons in those two attacks, but injuries consistent with exposure to an irritating agent such as Chlorine.

The report also states that the use of chemical weapons in previous attacks has been proven.

[rowan]

The accusations, which you echoed, were about the use of nerve agents against a civilian population in Douma. The OPCW's findings have disproved this - completely. You have yet to admit you were wrong about this.

Chlorine is what's in your toothpaste. Easily available and hardly likely to have been used as artillery by the Syrian or Russian militaries. Neither do the findings apportion blame - and this also applies to previous findings. We have already discussed at length the previous attacks and there is substantial evidence - and logic, given the timing - to suggest they were carried out by the US-backed terrorists themselves. But going back to those debates is simply your attempt to worm out of this one.

You should just admit you were wrong, as was much of the mainstream press - and of course the warmongering governments who seized upon the (now disproved) accusations to drop yet more bombs on a Middle Eastern nation not yet under their control.

[canta_brian]

I was going to respond, but then I remembered it was Rowan and thought what's the fucking point.

[Sandydragon]

Changing th e topic Rowan. I didn’t mention a specific attack, you did. You claimed that the Assad regime wasn’t a mass murdering one. The independent experts you cited disagree with you on that score.

And have you seriously never heard of chlorine gas shells. Really?! And again, what about the other incidents when independent experts did blame the Assad regime. You are apologising for a regime which uses WMDs against its own people. Do you have any actual arguments to the contrary, because at the moment you are coming across as a troll by repeating the same propaganda over and over again.

Stop referring to arguments over WMDs in Iraq. It’s just a distraction to this debate.

[rowan]

So this is what happens when you are proved wrong, Sandy, as you clearly were in supporting Western mainstream news reports that nerve agents had been used against civilians in Douma. Again, since you're obviously not getting it, the OPCW's findings have disproved this completely, and no blame has been apportioned by them for the chlorine attack. Takes a big man to admit he's wrong...

You should actually apply those same comments to yourself, Sandy, because it is you who is changing the topic and defending the mass murdering regimes of America and Britain, and many independent experts will disagree with you. And the idea of the Syrian army using chlorine as artillery is absurd enough, let alone just after Trump has announced America's withdrawal from the conflict (which the US started in the first place and joined illegally in the second).

This makes your claim of WMD's used against ones own people as baseless and heinous as Bush & Bliar's lies about WMD's in Iraq, Sandy, a war that had led to at least a million deaths, millions more wounded, bereaved, disenfranchised and otherwise traumatized - on a scale of genocidal proportions. & such lies have become the blueprint for successive invasions and interventions in other Middle Eastern nations - leading to several million deaths and a refugee tidal wave.

So do you have any actual arguments to the offer, Sandy, because at the moment you are coming across as a troll by repeating the same propaganda over and over again?

[Digby]

We do know Iraq had WMDs as we sold the bloody things to them, we just didn’t know they'd used them all and didn't want to admit it. The problem was without a clear understanding of that we tried to establish a legal position for military intervention, the likes of Syria and Russia don't have the same problems as they couldn't give a rat's ass about even fabricating a legal justification