RT Says U.S. Prepares New Bombing Raid to Topple Assad in Syria

Eric Zuesse

A report from Russian Television asserts that the U.S. Government is positioning weaponry for yet another bombing-raid to punish Syria for having Bashar al-Assad as its President.

Headlining “Terrorists readying chemical attack to frame Damascus & provide pretext for US strikes” RT reported on Saturday, August 25th, that “The US and its allies are preparing new airstrikes on Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry said, adding that militants are poised to stage a chemical weapons attack in order to frame Damascus and provide a pretext for the strikes.”

A day prior, Eva Bartlett, who reports for several news-media, headlined at RT “Bolton calls on Al-Qaeda to stage more chemical attacks in Syria” and said, “In a move that was entirely predictable, the US administration is once again threatening to bomb Syria if there is a ‘chemical weapons attack’.”

There is considerable evidence that all of the prior alleged chemical-weapons attacks by Syria’s Government against innocent non-combatants were, in some instances, actually staged and photographed by the White Helmets and other supporters of jihadist groups in Syria, or else were actual chemical attacks which had been perpetrated by those jihadist groups in order to serve as ‘justification’ for the U.S. and its allies to bomb Syria so as to help those jihadists to bring down Syria’s Government. (The CIA and King Saud have been unsuccessfully trying, ever since 1949, to take over the committedly secular, non-sectarian, nation of Syria. In fact, the CIA perpetrated two of the three Syrian coups that were carried out in 1949.)

For example, back on 19 December 2013, Seymour Hersh, who has been pretty much banned from U.S. news-media ever since he started reporting and exposing lies by the George W. Bush Administration about terrorism, headlined in the London Review of Books, “Whose Sarin?” and he reported that “in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence” in order to ‘justify’ U.S. invasions, now in Syria, as also in other countries. He boldly noted that “The press would follow suit. The UN report on 16 September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note that its investigators’ access to the attack sites, which came five days after the gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces.” He wrote that, “Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual observations’.” He noted that: “The White House’s misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned al-Nusra, the Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist organisation.”

Actually, ever since 2012, the U.S. Government was actually employing Al Nusra, which was the name given to Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch. In fact, as an intelligence-analyst, Bill Roggio, reported and documented extensively throughout December 2012 (and I quoted from and linked-to extensively in an article five years later), the U.S. basically hired Nusra as its agency to train and lead the vast majority of the forces (all but the few who weren’t jihadists) that were trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, back in 2012.

Furthermore, on 14 January 2014, the detailed report by Dr. Postol and his MIT colleague Richard Lloyd, was made public, and it asserted, with unambiguous clarity: “The US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” They proved that Obama had been lying, but didn’t put it in those words, because that would have made it be totally banned from any but very ‘alternative’ news-media in the U.S. (such as you might be reading here).

The next day, January 15th, McClatchy newspapers ran an article (and all other mainstream U.S. ’news’ media continued to ignore the MIT study) “New analysis of rocket used in Syria chemical attack undercuts U.S. claims”, which article included some of the study’s findings, but surrounded those by, and closed with, mainstream authorities (as if those two MIT specialists in the matter weren’t also that) denigrating the very idea, for irrelevant reasons. The closing of that McClatchy article was: “Some say they are worried that the failure to declare one delivery system may also mean that other items went undeclared. ‘The most likely explanation for some of the delivery systems not showing up on the chemical declaration is that Assad doesn’t want to incriminate himself or his regime,’ said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association.” In other words: the U.S. Government’s mouthpieces simply couldn’t deny the facts that were in the Lloyd-Postol report, so they deflected to other, far less relevant, matters, to help McClatchy deceive Americans.

From that moment onward, there could be no reasonable doubt but that the U.S. Government was hiring Al Qaeda in Syria to lead the U.S. effort to replace Syria’s Government, by jihadists. The U.S. ’news’media lie — they consciously misrepresent — like the U.S. Government does, and all in service to the billionaires (and their paid agents) who control this country.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.