[anarchist23]

Trump uses the pretext of a possible gas attack in Syria for future military action.

This is reminiscent of the excuse for the war against Saddam Hussein.

In fact there still isn't any concrete evidence of the involvement of Syria in the recent gas attack in Syria.

Will the Americans fall for it again?


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 09641.html

The White House has announced that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is preparing to launch a chemical weapons attack on his own citizens, warning that the regime would “pay a heavy price” if it goes ahead.

In a statement released late on Monday, the White House said the preparations by Syria were similar to those undertaken before an April 4 chemical attack that killed dozens of civilians and prompted US President Donald Trump to order a cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base.

“The United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said.

“If... Mr Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price,” he said.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment on potential US plans or the intelligence that prompted the statement about Syria's preparations for an attack.

Mr Trump, who took to Twitter not long after the statement went out, focused his attention on a Fox News report related to former President Barack Obama and the 2016 election rather than developments in Syria.

Mr Trump ordered the strike on the Shayrat airfield in Syria in April in reaction to what Washington said was a poison gas attack by Mr Assad's government that killed 87 people in rebel-held territory. Syria denied it carried out the attack.

Mr Assad said in an interview with the AFP news agency earlier this year that the alleged April attack was “100 percent fabrication” used to justify a US air strike.

The strike was the toughest direct US action yet in Syria's six-year-old civil war, raising the risk of confrontation with Russia and Iran, Mr Assad's two main military backers.

US and allied intelligence officers had for some time identified several sites where they suspected the Assad government may have been hiding newly made chemical weapons from inspectors, said one US official familiar with the intelligence.
The assessment was based in part on the locations, security surrounding the suspect sites and other information which the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to describe.

The White House warning, the official said, was based on new reports of what was described as abnormal activity that might be associated with preparations for a chemical attack.

Although the intelligence was not considered conclusive, the administration quickly decided to issue the public warning to Mr Assad’s regime about the consequences of another chemical attack on civilians in an attempt to deter such a strike, said the official, who declined to discuss the issue further.

At the time of the April strike, US officials called the intervention a “one-off” intended to deter future chemical weapons attacks and not an expansion of the US role in the Syrian war.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

The answer is yes, people are still gullible and stupid enough to believe the Syrian government used chemical weapons twice before, and the WH announcement is meant to drum up that stupidity a third time to justify further involvement in aiding Islamist militants in Syria.

[mikema63]

Trump doesn't need pretext to invade Syria. It doesn't change the internal politics in the US in any way and a third gas attack isn't going to make the international community any more interested in supporting us.

[skinster]

The answer is yes, people are still gullible and stupid enough to believe the Syrian government used chemical weapons twice before, and the WH announcement is meant to drum up that stupidity a third time to justify further involvement in aiding Islamist militants in Syria.

QFT.

Related:

[fuser]

Let's keep this to more than one line posts where we immediately resort to just calling people who disagree with you gullible and stupid. Pretty please?

Trump doesn't need pretext to invade Syria. It doesn't change the internal politics in the US in any way and a third gas attack isn't going to make the international community any more interested in supporting us.

Why Trump don't need any pretext? What government went with all guns blazing without any pretext ever? This is just dumb, of course Trump or any other US prez need some sort of pretext, even US can't just go in and be like we are here because we feel like it. There is a reason why Gulf of Tonkin like incident exists, WMD in Iraq etc etc.

What makes Trump so very different than every other US prez before him that he needs no pretext?

[Saeko]

Why Trump don't need any pretext? What government went with all guns blazing without any pretext ever? This is just dumb, of course Trump or any other US prez need some sort of pretext, even US can't just go in and be like we are here because we feel like it. There is a reason why Gulf of Tonkin like incident exists, WMD in Iraq etc etc.

What makes Trump so very different than every other US prez before him that he needs no pretext?

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

Why Trump don't need any pretext? What government went with all guns blazing without any pretext ever? This is just dumb, of course Trump or any other US prez need some sort of pretext, even US can't just go in and be like we are here because we feel like it. There is a reason why Gulf of Tonkin like incident exists, WMD in Iraq etc etc.

What makes Trump so very different than every other US prez before him that he needs no pretext?

Upon consideration, there's already a pretext as simple as appealing to emotions: Assad is a dictator who is slaughtering his people. That's literally the only pretext the US government needs to sell it to the masses of Americans who can't think for themselves, and it's literally the argument that is floating around on US media channels, social media, and in WH statements. If Russia, and to a far lesser extent China, weren't involved in Syria, we wouldn't need chemical weapons excuses to drum up support to turn Syria into another Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya/Yemen. With the civil war in Syria brewing, if Russia weren't involved in Syria, all the WH needs to do is point at the carnage and justify starting another war to bring down yet another secular and nationalist MENA government.

[MememyselfandIJK]

Trump supporters are in one word, gullible. If Trump called for a ban on water tomorrow, I'm willing to bet that they would follow suit.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

It's not just people who support Trump. Most people appear to believe the bit about "Assad did chemical weapons" and the part about "our intelligence reports indicate..." without considering how this same exact thing (more or less) happened with Iraq, the previous two times this was tried with Syria, or how obviously maneuvered this is.

The very first time this was tried with Syria (the Ghouta incident) happened the exact same day UN chemical weapons inspectors arrived in Syria, invited there by the Syrian government and Assad, and people actually bought the completely insane Western narrative that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in what amounted to broad daylight, with UN inspectors fresh in the country and ready to start reporting back everything they'd see or hear, rather than Islamist militants fighting the government and using captured weapons supplies to gain sympathy and look like the victims. UN commissioner Carla del Ponte publicly stated that the investigation into Ghouta showed it was the rebels who used sarin gas, not the regime.

[skinster]

Media’s propaganda war on Syria in full flow

If you wish to understand the degree to which a supposedly free western media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate their audiences, keeping us uninformed and docile, then there could hardly be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

All of these highly competitive, for-profit, scoop-seeking media outlets separately took identical decisions: first to reject Hersh’s latest investigative report, and then to studiously ignore it once it was published in Germany last Sunday. They have continued to maintain an absolute radio silence on his revelations, even as over the past few days they have given a great deal of attention to two stories on the very issue Hersh’s investigation addresses.

These two stories, given such prominence in the western media, are clearly intended to serve as “spoilers” to his revelations, even though none of these publications have actually informed their readers of his original investigation. We are firmly in looking-glass territory.

So what did Hersh’s investigation reveal? His sources in the US intelligence establishment – people who have helped him break some of the most important stories of the past few decades, from the Mai Lai massacre by American soldiers during the Vietnam war to US abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004 – told him the official narrative that Syria’s Bashar Assad had dropped deadly sarin gas on the town of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 was incorrect. Instead, they said, a Syrian plane dropped a bomb on a meeting of jihadi fighters that triggered secondary explosions in a storage depot, releasing a toxic cloud of chemicals that killed civilians nearby.

It is an alternative narrative of these events that one might have assumed would be of intense interest to the media, given that Donald Trump approved a military strike on Syria based on the official narrative. Hersh’s version suggests that Trump acted against the intelligence advice he received from his own officials, in a highly dangerous move that not only grossly violated international law but might have dragged Assad’s main ally, Russia, into the fray. The Syrian arena has the potential to trigger a serious confrontation between the world’s two major nuclear powers.


But, in fact, the western media were supremely uninterested in the story. Hersh, once considered the journalist’s journalist, went hawking his investigation around the US and UK media to no avail. In the end, he could find a home for his revelations only in Germany, in the publication Welt am Sonntag.

There are a couple of possible, even if highly improbable, reasons all English-language publications ignored Hersh’s story. Maybe they had evidence that his inside intelligence was wrong. If so, they have yet to provide it. A rebuttal would require acknowledging Hersh’s story, and none seem willing to do that.

Or maybe the media thought it was old news and would no longer interest their readers. It would be difficult to sustain such an interpretation, but at least it has an air of plausibility – except for everything that has happened since Hersh published last Sunday.

His story has spawned two clear “spoiler” responses from those desperate to uphold the official narrative. Hersh’s revelations may have been entirely uninteresting to the western media, but strangely they have sent Washington into crisis mode. Of course, no US official has addressed Hersh’s investigation directly, which might have drawn attention to it and forced western media to reference it. Instead Washington has sought to deflect attention from Hersh’s alternative narrative and shore up the official one through misdirection. That alone should raise the alarm that we are being manipulated, not informed.

The first spoiler, made in the immediate wake of Hersh’s story, were statements from the Pentagon and White House warning that the US had evidence Assad was planning yet another chemical attack on his people and that Washington would respond extremely harshly if he did so.

Here is how the Guardian reported the US threats:

The US said on Tuesday that it had observed preparations for a possible chemical weapons attack at a Syrian air base allegedly involved in a sarin attack in April following a warning from the White House that the Syrian regime would ‘pay a heavy price’ for further use of the weapons.

And then on Friday, the second spoiler emerged. Two unnamed diplomats “confirmed” that a report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had found that some of the victims from Khan Sheikhoun showed signs of poisoning by sarin or sarin-like substances.

There are obvious reasons to be mightily suspicious of these stories. The findings of the OPCW were already known and had been discussed for some time – there was absolutely nothing newsworthy about them.

There are also well-known problems with the findings. There was no “chain of custody” – neutral oversight – of the bodies that were presented to the organisation in Turkey. Any number of interested parties could have contaminated the bodies before they reached the OPCW. For that reason, the OPCW has not concluded that the Assad regime was responsible for the traces of sarin. In the world of real news, only such a finding – that Assad was responsible – should have made the OPCW report interesting again to the media.

Similarly, by going public with their threats against Assad, the Pentagon and White House did not increase the deterrence on Assad, making it less likely he would use gas in the future. That could have been achieved much more effectively with private warnings to the Russians, who have massive leverage over Assad. These new warnings were meant not for Assad but for western publics, to bolster the official narrative that Hersh’s investigation had thrown into doubt.

In fact, the US threats increase, rather than reduce, the chances of a new chemical weapons attack. Other, anti-Assad actors now have a strong incentive to use chemical weapons in false-flag operation to implicate Assad, knowing that the US has committed itself to intervention. On any reading, the US statements were reckless – or malicious – in the extreme and likely to bring about the exact opposite of what they were supposed to achieve.

But beyond this, there was something even more troubling about these two stories. That these official claims were published so unthinkingly in major outlets is bad enough. But what is unconscionable is the media’s continuing blackout of Hersh’s investigation when it speaks directly to the two latest news reports.

No serious journalist could write up either story, according to any accepted norms of journalistic practice, and not make reference to Hersh’s claims. They are absolutely relevant to these stories. In fact, more than that, the intelligence sources he cites are are not only relevant but are the reason these two stories have been suddenly propelled to the top of the news agenda.

Any publication that has covered either the White House-Pentagon threats or the rehashing of the OPCW report and has not mentioned Hersh’s revelations is writing nothing less than propaganda in service of a western foreign policy agenda trying to bring about the illegal overthrow the Syrian government. And so far that appears to include every single US and UK mainstream newspaper and TV station.
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2017- ... full-flow/

[neopagan]

On another forum, I said that I did not think Assad and his government were so stupid as to give the US or the UN reason to intervene militarily anymore than they have. And I asked what advantage there is in a small chemical attack. To which a liberal-progressive-humanist Anti-Trump type replied that fascists like Assad don't make decisions based on logic. End of story: Assad bad, opposition good.

[skinster]

[ArtAllm]

On another forum, I said that I did not think Assad and his government were so stupid as to give the US or the UN reason to intervene militarily anymore than they have. And I asked what advantage there is in a small chemical attack. To which a liberal-progressive-humanist Anti-Trump type replied that fascists like Assad don't make decisions based on logic. End of story: Assad bad, opposition good.

That is what experts call "circular reasoning". There is no need for any proves, you just declare that your premise is true, and deduct everything from your premise.

How can you achieve this?
Well, you have to control the media, speak the brainwashing machine.

[JohnRawls]

There is no reason for Assad to use chemical weapons. He is in full control of the war right now. He managed to inflict significant defeats to the Rebels and ISIS. Both sides are on the downside right now. Isis is being pressed by the Kurds and SAA. Rebels have lost Aleppo and in a state of a semi-civil war. Support from the Middle East is decreasing due to Qatar, SA and general turmoil in the region.

He had significant gains in several theaters 1 by 1. He is also rearming and preparing for the next season of Warfare in Idlib. June, July and August are usually the hottest months so military action during those times is problematic, especially offensive operations.

What possible reason would he have to use chemical weapons ?

[skinster]

There is no evidence the Syrian army attacked its own people with chemical weapons and it makes no sense why they would. MSM lies are boring.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

There is no reason for Assad to use chemical weapons. He is in full control of the war right now. He managed to inflict significant defeats to the Rebels and ISIS. Both sides are on the downside right now. Isis is being pressed by the Kurds and SAA. Rebels have lost Aleppo and in a state of a semi-civil war. Support from the Middle East is decreasing due to Qatar, SA and general turmoil in the region.

He had significant gains in several theaters 1 by 1. He is also rearming and preparing for the next season of Warfare in Idlib. June, July and August are usually the hottest months so military action during those times is problematic, especially offensive operations.

What possible reason would he have to use chemical weapons ?

This basically sums up a lot of the easy thinking it takes to question the Western bullshit about who is responsible for what. There is literally no reason for Assad to use chemical weapons and invite Western attacks: not a reason in the world. Even at the time of the incident in Ghouta, Assad wasn't losing the war, and the momentum was slowly picking up in the favor of the SAA.

Virtually the only possible excuse people can believe to think Assad "did it" is because "Assad is an evil dictator who doesn't use logic or reason," which is absolutely stupid, naive, and ignorant.

Simply put: it is better for the media to exaggerate when it comes to Syria. The narrative about poor, innocent freedom fighters who love democracy and Western values (they're all Islamists in reality, some of them are just less strict about implementing Sharia law) being attacked by the bad evil Assad who uses his chemical weapons and deliberately thumbs his nose at us in the West who can't sit idly by any longer while innocent people are killed while an evil dictator is trying to kill everyone is far more entertaining and bite-sized and thus better for ratings than a story with investigative journalism and questioning the lies coming out of Washington and the lies coming from Islamist militants who are fighting secular forces in Syria.

[skinster]

Which idiot at this stage believes the Syrian govt/army were responsible for the false flags?

[Rancid]

Which idiot at this stage believes the Syrian govt/army were responsible for the false flags?

Me.

oh wait...

[skinster]

[daniel.petcu]

Honestly, I feel that this age-old excuse is running out of fashion. That said, throughout history, whenever America has set its eyes on a particular economic target, it pursued it relentlessly until that target was obtained. So, yes this pretext has become redundant, yet whether the populace likes it or not, the government couldn't care less about public opinion. Hence why political rhetoric fluctuates so drastically during electoral campaigns.

Also, if you wouldn't mind, could you spare 5 minutes to read and hopefully comment on my recently-started political blog? There are only two articles published thus far, and another shall follow in due course. Here is the link to it, if you are interested: https://danielpetcu96.blogspot.ro/