[JohnRawls]

The Syrian army have gone on the offensive in Idlib, hopefully it's liberated as quickly as possible.

Also, there's a blackout on this story in Western MSM. Similar to how the war on Syria is basically ignored these days because the various countries who made war on Syria basically failed at their attempt of regime change.




How is Syria the "antagonistic" state when it was the Zionist entity that stole/occupied/occupies some of its territory, along with ethnically cleansing over 100K Syrians about 4 decades ago? Please explain.

There was literally nobody on Pofo who believed in the Chemical Weapons bullshit, may be besides ZN who has his own ulterior motives to do so.

There were no practical reasons for Assad to use them at all after perhaps the first appearance that was severely condemned. The only realistic usage might have been that first case when the civil war has not even started but even that is under heavy doubt.

[Crantag]

There was literally nobody on Pofo who believed in the Chemical Weapons bullshit, may be besides ZN who has his own ulterior motives to do so.

There were no practical reasons for Assad to use them at all after perhaps the first appearance that was severely condemned. The only realistic usage might have been that first case when the civil war has not even started but even that is under heavy doubt.

If that's what you really think it doesn't leave much room for you to support Assad's opponents. You are stating that these opponents staged chemical weapons attacks to frame Assad (I agree) but your tone seems rather dismissive of it. Were such means justified by their unrealized ends to you?

[JohnRawls]

If that's what you really think it doesn't leave much room for you to support Assad's opponents. You are stating that these opponents staged chemical weapons attacks to frame Assad (I agree) but your tone seems rather dismissive of it. Were such means justified by their unrealized ends to you?

Because i support Assad since the start of the civil war. The alternative is ISIS/AQ tribalistic rule along with a Saudi puppet government. It won't be a democracy even if Assad falls for some miraculous reason.

[Zionist Nationalist]

Because i support Assad since the start of the civil war. The alternative is ISIS/AQ tribalistic rule along with a Saudi puppet government. It won't be a democracy even if Assad falls for some miraculous reason.

Well honestly I perfer ISIS with a puppet sunni government since we are on a collision course with Iran/Syria/Hezbollah

ISIS pose no threat

[JohnRawls]

Well honestly I perfer ISIS with a puppet sunni government since we are on a collision course with Iran/Syria/Hezbollah

ISIS pose no threat

You prefer who is weaker at any given time. If ISIS becomes stronger than Assad then you will start preferring Assad.

[Zionist Nationalist]

You prefer who is weaker at any given time. If ISIS becomes stronger than Assad then you will start preferring Assad.

ISIS will not get strongher. they will get crushed before it can happen
Hezbollah are the real threat they have hundreds of thousands of rockets and they have alot of advanced equipment ISIS have nothing even close to this
also their priority is to slaughter the shites and alawites there is no reason for Israel to stand in their way

[skinster]

Eva Bartlett calls out the propagandists who sang for war on Syria.

Things in Idlib are going well.

There was literally nobody on Pofo who believed in the Chemical Weapons bullshit, may be besides ZN who has his own ulterior motives to do so.

And the revisionism begins. Everyone was anti airstrikes and further intervention in Syria here on PoFo, and that's why there were pages and pages of discussions about it at the time.

Also, yay to ZN for admitting his preference for ISIS, something some of us are already aware of with regards to Israel. Like legit, ZN's honesty is always refreshing.

[JohnRawls]

Eva Bartlett calls out the propagandists who sang for war on Syria.

Things in Idlib are going well.








And the revisionism begins. Everyone was anti airstrikes and further intervention in Syria here on PoFo, and that's why there were pages and pages of discussions about it at the time.

Also, yay to ZN for admitting his preference for ISIS, something some of us are already aware of with regards to Israel. Like legit, ZN's honesty is always refreshing.

Revisionism? I think there were literally like 3-4 people on the forum when it all started who bought in to the chemical attack thing or were against Russian intervetion:
1) One was ZN, who doesn't realy believe it but its a good propaganda factor.
2) Other one was some kind of Caliphate supporter anti-Assadist who quit. (Mujaheddin something)
3) And perhaps very few others that casted doubt on it but didn't fully say it was bullshit outloud. (Atlantis I think and somebody else, not sure here. Sorry Atlantis if this wasn't the case but i remember you vaguely being anti-Assad a lot for some reason)

May be a bit more if we take in to account that we actually had 2 or 3 massive topics about the civil war. The other 2 died out thankfully.

[skinster]

[Atlantis]

Revisionism? I think there were literally like 3-4 people on the forum when it all started who bought in to the chemical attack thing or were against Russian intervetion:
1) One was ZN, who doesn't realy believe it but its a good propaganda factor.
2) Other one was some kind of Caliphate supporter anti-Assadist who quit. (Mujaheddin something)
3) And perhaps very few others that casted doubt on it but didn't fully say it was bullshit outloud. (Atlantis I think and somebody else, not sure here. Sorry Atlantis if this wasn't the case but i remember you vaguely being anti-Assad a lot for some reason)

May be a bit more if we take in to account that we actually had 2 or 3 massive topics about the civil war. The other 2 died out thankfully.

Try as I might, I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been anti-interventionist since the Vietnam war, or even earlier. Doesn't mean Assad is my favorite dictator, but he's miles better than any likely alternative. The atrocities he (or more precisely his regime) committed are partly due to the ferocity of the terrorists and the foreign powers he had to defend his regime against. The imperialists are wading ankle deep in blood.

I haven't seen anything to change my mind.

[JohnRawls]

@skinster

Go read the first couple of pages i guess? Or more if you want.

[skinster]

The Syrian conflict is awash with propaganda – chemical warfare bodies should not be caught up in it
In the very early spring of this year, I gave a lecture to European military personnel interested in the Middle East. It was scarcely a year since Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chlorine gas against the civilian inhabitants of the Damascus suburb of Douma on 7 April 2018, in which 43 people were said to have been killed.

Few present had much doubt that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which represents 193 member states around the world, would soon confirm in a final report that Assad was guilty of a war crime which had been condemned by Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May.

But at the end of my talk, a young Nato officer who specialises in chemical weapons – he was not British – sought me out for a private conversation. “The OPCW are not going to admit all they know,” he said. “They’ve already censored their own documents.”

I could not extract any more from him. He smiled and walked away, leaving me to guess what he was talking about. If Nato had doubts about the OPCW, this was a very serious matter.

When it published its final report in March this year, the OPCW said that testimony, environmental and biomedical samples and toxicological and ballistic analyses provided “reasonable grounds” that “the use of a toxic chemical had taken place” in Douma which contained “reactive chlorine”.

The US, Britain and France, which launched missile attacks on Syrian military sites in retaliation for Douma – before any investigation had taken place – thought themselves justified. The OPCW’s report was splashed across headlines around the world – to the indignation of Russia, Assad’s principal military ally, which denied the validity of the publication.

Then, in mid-May 2019, came news of a confidential report by OPCW South African ballistics inspector Ian Henderson – a document which the organisation excluded from its final report – which took issue with the organisation’s conclusions. Canisters supposedly containing chlorine gas may not have been dropped by Syrian helicopters, it suggested, and could have been placed at the site of the attack by unknown hands.

Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday reported in detail on the Henderson document. No other mainstream media followed up this story. The BBC, for example, had reported in full on the OPCW’s final report on the use of chlorine gas, but never mentioned the subsequent Henderson story.

And here I might myself have abandoned the trail had I not received a call on my Beirut phone shortly after the Henderson paper, from the Nato officer who had tipped me off about the OPCW’s apparent censorship of its own documents. “I wasn’t talking about the Henderson report,” he said abruptly. And immediately terminated our conversation. But now I understand what he must have been talking about.

For in the past few weeks, there has emerged deeply disturbing new evidence that the OPCW went far further than merely excluding one dissenting voice from its conclusions on the 2018 Douma attack.

The most recent information – published on WikiLeaks, in a report from Hitchens again and from Jonathan Steele, a former senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian – suggests that the OPCW suppressed or failed to publish, or simply preferred to ignore, the conclusions of up to 20 other members of its staff who became so upset at what they regarded as the misleading conclusions of the final report that they officially sought to have it changed in order to represent the truth. (The OPCW has said in a number of statements that it stands by its final report.)

At first, senior OPCW officials contented themselves by merely acknowledging the Henderson report’s existence a few days after it appeared without making any comment on its contents. When the far more damaging later reports emerged in early November, Fernando Arias, the OPCW’s director general, said that it was in “the nature of any thorough enquiry for individuals in a team to express subjective views. While some of the views continue to circulate in some public discussion forums, I would like to reiterate that I stand by the independent, professional conclusion [of the investigation].” The OPCW declined to respond to questions from Hitchens or Steele.

But the new details suggest that other evidence could have been left unpublished by the OPCW. These were not just from leaked emails, but given by an OPCW inspector – a colleague of Henderson – who was one of a team of eight to visit Douma and who appeared at a briefing in Brussels last month to explain his original findings to a group of disarmament, legal, medical and intelligence personnel.

As Steele reported afterwards, in a piece published by Counterpunch in mid-November 2019, the inspector – who gave his name to his audience, but asked to be called “Alex” – said he did not want to undermine the OPCW but stated that “most of the Douma team” felt the two reports on the incident (the OPCW had also published an interim report in 2018) were “scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent”. Alex said he sought, in vain, to have a subsequent OPCW conference to address these concerns and “demonstrate transparency, impartiality and independence”.

For example, Alex cited the OPCW report’s claim that “various chlorinated organic chemicals (COCs) were found” in Douma, but said that there were “huge internal arguments” in the OPCW even before its 2018 interim report was published. Findings comparing chlorine gas normally present in the atmosphere with evidence from the Douma site were, according to Alex, kept by the head of the Douma mission and not passed to the inspector who was drafting the interim report. Alex said that he subsequently discovered that the COCs in Douma were “no higher than you would expect in any household environment”, a point which he says was omitted from both OPCW reports. Alex told his Brussels audience that these omissions were “deliberate and irregular”.

Alex also said that a British diplomat who was OPCW’s chef de cabinet invited several members of the drafting team to his office, where they found three US officials who told them that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack and that two cylinders found in one building contained 170 kilograms of chlorine. The inspectors, Alex remarked, regarded this as unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s principles of “independence and impartiality”.

Regarding the comments from Alex, the OPCW has pointed to the statement by Arias that the organisation stands by its final report.

Further emails continue to emerge from these discussions. This weekend, for example, WikiLeaks sent to The Independent an apparent account of a meeting held by OPCW toxicologists and pharmacists “all specialists in CW (Chemical Warfare)”, according to the document. The meeting is dated 6 June 2018 and says that “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there is no correlation between symptoms [of the victims] and chlorine exposure.”

In particular, they stated that “the onset of excessive frothing, as a result of pulmonary edema observed in photos and reported by witnesses would not occur in the short time period between the reported occurrence of the alleged incident and the time the videos were recorded”. When I asked for a response to this document, a spokesman for the OPCW headquarters in Holland said that my request would be “considered”. That was on Monday 23 December.

Any international organisation, of course, has a right to select the most quotable parts of its documentation on any investigation, or to set aside an individual’s dissenting report – although, in ordinary legal enquiries, dissenting voices are quite often acknowledged. Chemical warfare is not an exact science – chlorine gas does not carry a maker’s name or computer number in the same way that fragments of tank shells or bombs often do.

But the degree of unease within the OPCW’s staff surely cannot be concealed much longer. To the delight of the Russians and the despair of its supporters, an organisation whose prestige alone should frighten any potential war criminals is scarcely bothering to confront its own detractors. Military commanders may conceal their tactics from an enemy in time of war, but this provides no excuse for an important international organisation dedicated to the prohibition of chemical weapons to allow its antagonists to claim that it has “cooked the books” by permitting political pressure to take precedence over the facts. And that is what is happening today.

The deep concerns among some of the OPCW staff and the deletion of their evidence does not mean that gas has not been used in Syria by the government or even by the Russians or by Isis and its fellow Islamists. All stand guilty of war crimes in the Syrian conflict. The OPCW’s response to the evidence should not let war criminals off the hook. But it certainly helps them.

And what could be portrayed as acts of deceit by a supposedly authoritative body of international scientists can lead some to only one conclusion: that they must resort to those whom the west regards as “traitors” to security – WikiLeaks and others – if they wish to find out the story behind official reports. So far, the Russians and the Syrian regime have been the winners in the propaganda war. Such organisations as the OPCE need to work to make sure the truth can be revealed to everyone.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/sy ... mdd99du5xI

[skinster]

Lol, Twitter suspended Assad's twitter account.

[Atlantis]

Germany abandons Syrian White Helmet (in German)

The German foreign ministry had promised to grant asylum to Khaled al-Saleh, a Syrian who had helped 400 White Helmets escape Syria via Israel to Jordan. However, when the ministry of interior made some background checks (reading out his mobile phone), they found that al-Saleh had an Islamist background. The interior ministry therefore refused to grant him asylum. Jordan wasn't happy because they had taken in al-Saleh on the grounds that he was promised asylum in Germany.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

[Atlantis]

Putin and Assad having a bit of fun at Trump's expense:



Machine Translation:

Assad about the road to Damascus, on which the apostle Paul became a Christian: If Trump goes along this road, everything will become normal with him right away.
Putin: Invite him, he will come.
Assad: I'm ready.
Putin: I'll tell him

I'm afraid it's too late for Trump to see the light. He's hardwired for the last cycle of hell.

[skinster]

[skinster]

[skinster]

[skinster]

[skinster]

lol @ Amnesty International.