OH, the hypocrisy of it. The ignoble aims. The distraction. The outrageous lies and excuses.
I’m not talking about America’s tweet-from-the-hip president and his desire to escape from the cops’ raid on his lawyer’s office — there’s a Russian connection, all right. And I’m not talking about his latest sleaze. Life with Melania might not be great at the moment. More distracting to sit with the generals and ex-generals and talk tough about Russia and Syria.
I’m not talking about Theresa May, who wants to step out of the Brexit ditch with any distractions of her own: Salisbury attacks, Douma — even Trump. So Trump telephoned Macron, when the poor lady thought she’d won his hand. What is this nonsense?
Macron has now hitched his own wagon to the Saudis against Iranian “expansionism” — and no doubt arms sales to Riyadh have something to do with it. But how sad that the desire of young French presidents to act like Napoleon (I can think of a few others) means that they devote themselves to joining in a war, rather than pleading against it.
Now we have our spokespersons and ministers raging about the need to prevent the “normalisation” of chemical warfare, to prevent it becoming a part of ordinary warfare, a return to the terrible days of the First World War.
This does not mean any excuses for the Syrian government — though I suspect, having seen Russia’s Syrian involvement with my own eyes, that Putin might have been getting impatient about ending the war and wanted to eradicate those in the last tunnels of Douma rather than wait through more weeks of fighting.
Remember the cruelty of Grozny (the Chechen capital).
But we all know the problems of proof when it comes to chemicals and gas. Like depleted uranium — which we used to use in our munitions — it doesn’t, like a shell fragment or a bomb casing, leave a tell-tale hunk of metal with an address on it.
When all this started with the first gas attack in Damascus, the Russians identified it as gas munitions manufactured in the Soviet Union — but sent to Libya, not to Syria.
But it’s a different war that I’m remembering today. It’s the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. When the Iranians re-crossed their own border and stormed into Iraq years later, Saddam used gas on thousands of Iranian soldiers — and civilians, for there were nurses and doctors at the war front.
Funny how we forget this now. We don’t talk about it. We have forgotten all about it. Talk about the “normalisation” of chemical warfare — this was it!
But in our desire to concentrate minds on Syria, we’re not mentioning the Iran gassings — Iran being another one of our present-day enemies, of course — and this may be because of our lack of official memory.
More likely it’s because of what happened: the institutionalisation of chemical warfare, the use of chemicals by Saddam who was then an ally of the West and of all the Gulf states, our frontline Sunni hero.
The thousands of Iranian soldiers who were to die were referred to on Iraqi radio after they crossed the frontier. The “Persian insects” had crossed the border, it announced. And that’s how they were treated.
For the precursors for the Iraqi gas came largely from the United States — one from New Jersey — and US military personnel later visited the battlefront without making any comments about the chemicals which were sold to the Iraqi regime, of course, for “agricultural” purposes. That’s how to deal with insects, is it not?
Inconvenient truth
Yet not a soul today is mentioning this terrible war, which was fought with total acquiescence of the West. It’s almost an “exclusive” to mention the conflict at all, so religiously have we forgotten it. That was the real “normalisation”, and we allowed it to happen.
Religious indeed, for it was the first great battle of the Sunni-Shia war of our time. But it was real.
Of the thousands of Iranians who were asphyxiated, a few survivors were even sent to British hospitals for treatment. I travelled with others on a military train through the desert to Tehran, the railway compartments packed with unsmiling young men who coughed mucus and blood into white bandages as they read Quran.
They had blisters on their skin and, horrifically, more blisters on top of the first blisters. I wrote a series of articles about this obscenity for The Times, which I then worked for.
The Foreign Office later told my editors that my articles were “not helpful”.
No such discretion today. No fear of being out to get Saddam then — because in those days, of course, the good guys were using the chemicals. Don’t we remember the Kurds of Halabja who were gassed by Saddam, with gas which the CIA told its officers to claim was used by the Iranians?
For this war crime, Saddam should have been tried. He was indeed a “gas-killing animal”. But he was hanged for a smaller massacre with conventional weapons — because, I have always suspected, we didn’t want him exposing his gas warfare partners in an open court.
So there we are. Theresa May holds a “war cabinet”, for heaven’s sakes, as if our losses were mounting on the Somme in 1916, or Dorniers were flying out of occupied France to blitz London in 1940.
What is this childish prime minister doing? Older, wiser Conservatives will have spotted the juvenile quality of this nonsense, and want a debate in parliament. How could May follow an American president who the world knows is crackers, insane, chronically unstable, but whose childish messages — about missiles that are “nice and new and ‘smart’”— are even taken seriously by many of my colleagues in the US?
We should perhaps be even more worried about what happens if he does turn away from the Iran nuclear deal.
This is a very bad moment in Middle East history — and, as usual, it is the Palestinians who will suffer, their own tragedy utterly forgotten amid this madness. So we are going to “war”, are we?
And how do we get out of this war once we have started it? Any plans, anyone? What if there’s a gigantic screw-up, which wars do tend to usually produce? What happens then?
Well, I guess Russia comes to the rescue, just as it did for president Barack Obama when gas was used for the first time in the Syrian war.
By arrangement with The Independent
Published in Dawn, April 14th, 2018
" I judge that the war party currently infecting the US is harming the country, not making it stronger. "
The war party running the country has been running it since the beginning, actually before.
The US has been at war for 94% of its existence. It took 6% off to plan for more.
Again, for any security apparatus types lurking here my main concern is that my country be as strong and well positioned for the future as it can be ...
Maybe we're not being lurked and followed here, maybe we're too small to qualify as a movement, but the odds say we are: ...
I appreciate this comment, and also the quantification of the problem. It's not easy to guess who those Cointel operatives might be, but it's not crazy to think they might be here. Oftentimes as I'm talking on the telephone, I make it a point to say "hello" to whatever NSA officers or AI bots might be listening in.
These days, some people assume that I'm a Russian bot, just because I post links to Russian media sources. But, I post those links because the sources look credible and honest to me. I hope we live to see a day when CNN has 10% of the credibility of RT. Not to mention my current favorite for Syria news, http://fort-russ.com, a little independent website in Belgrade.
cmartenson wrote:
However, I don't fear being followed or tracked because I know that I am on the same side as anybody who actually cares about their country and wants to create a secure and viable future for their children.
The war party is working against both of those interests, although they seem to think the opposite.
Indeed; and perhaps some of those lurkers and infiltrators will eventually come around to see things our way. I can't imagine any more crazy way to waste $200 million, than to send 105 cruise missiles to destroy a pharmaceutical lab that's making cancer drugs in Damascus.
For all we know, the next batch of cruise missiles could start WWIII, and a chain of escalations that leads to thousands of nukes destroying every major city in the northern hemisphere. Maybe some lurker or Cointel operative can explain how that works to anyone's benefit?
I judge that the war party currently infecting the US is harming the country, not making it stronger.
The war party running the country has been running it since the beginning, actually before.
The US has been at war for 94% of its existence. It took 6% off to plan for more.
That sounds about right Mohammed : -
TranscriptWilliam Kristol - " The problem with America is not that we go marauding around the world imposing ourselves. The problem with America in the last 10, 15 years - since the end of the cold war - really in the last 60 years - is that we've been too slow to get involved in conflicts."
John Pilger - "Outside America, people are worried about the United States conducting an unprovoked attack on a country - a sovereign country."
William Kristol - "Are they?"
John Pilger - "Yes, they are."
William Kristol - "They worry they think we're going to attack Britain - France - Germany?"
John Pilger - "No."
William Kristol - "Any democracy?"
John Pilger - "No."
William Kristol - "Any decent regime?"
John Pilger - "No, the United States doesn't attack strong countries."
William Kristol - "Are people really worried that the United States is going to attack a decent law abiding country - come in and say, we don't like the look of you - we're going to depose - is this something the U.S has done quite often?"
"How many countries have the United States attacked in the last 50 years?"
John Pilger - "Well since World War 2 there's been 72 interventions by the United States?"
William Kristol - "Oh, is that right? That's ludicrous."
John Pilger - "Well, it's not ludicrous, it's true."
As ever, I’m sick to my guts!
Please, don’t just wander past this article with a possible thumbs up, but comment, share the article everywhere you can think of - find your inner passion for the truth with others.
The author of the article below - Robert Fisk - isn’t just any journalist, he’s 72 this year - a veteran of his craft, and one of the few journalists to interview Osama Bin Laden.
As I write, he’s on the ground in Douma.
He’s been based in the Middle East since 1976 - covering much of the horrors of this region in this time - and lives in Lebanon.
The search for truth in the rubble of Douma – and one doctor’s doubts over the chemical attackExclusive: Robert Fisk visits the Syria clinic at the centre of a global crisis18th April 2018 The Independent UK
This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks – and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world – despite all the doubters – is perfectly genuine.
War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?
By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the coming weeks.
France, meanwhile, has said it has “proof” chemical weapons were used, and US media have quoted sources saying urine and blood tests showed this too. The WHO has said its partners on the ground treated 500 patients “exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”.
At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they lacked the correct UN permits.
Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars.
So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.
I first drove into Douma as part of an escorted convoy of journalists. But once a boring general had announced outside a wrecked council house “I have no information” – that most helpful rubbish-dump of Arab officialdom – I just walked away. Several other reporters, mostly Syrian, did the same. Even a group of Russian journalists – all in military attire – drifted off.
It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic – “Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.
“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.”
Oddly, after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find one who showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the Western air attacks. Two actually told me they didn’t know about the connection.
But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma attack.
The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.
Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.
There were food stalls open and a patrol of Russian military policemen – a now optional extra for every Syrian ceasefire – and no-one had even bothered to storm into the forbidding Islamist prison near Martyr’s Square where victims were supposedly beheaded in the basements. The town’s complement of Syrian interior ministry civilian police – who eerily wear military clothes – are watched over by the Russians who may or may not be watched by the civilians. Again, my earnest questions about gas were met with what seemed genuine perplexity.
How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that “news” in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them. Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy – as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues – and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?
They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Ms May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?
Sorry about the quality of sound in this video report of Robert Fisk, but this is a telephone report on the ground from Douma. I urge you to listen to this very carefully. Hat tip to Tim Jones at You Tube : -
Hi Finn
Next time you speak with Adam Curtis tell him his docs are awesome but he needs to get rid of the music. I can’t hear a damn thing. It is horrible musice from B horror movies.
Hi Finn
Next time you speak with Adam Curtis tell him his docs are awesome but he needs to get rid of the music. I can’t hear a damn thing. It is horrible musice from B horror movies.
Amazing article. Robert Fisk and you Finn, sure know how to find gold, tip my hat to you. Why do I doubt that the official enquiry will uncover the same info…
Amazing article. Robert Fisk and you Finn, sure know how to find gold, tip my hat to you. Why do I doubt that the official enquiry will uncover the same info...
Hello Geedard,
you're really refreshing for me, because I'm witnessing you, witnessing the media lie on behalf of our lying elect.
There's just nothing better to help question everything you read or view in the future, than seeing an event like this play out in real time.
I'll leave you with Hunter S. Thompson's prophetic words : -
Hi Finn
Next time you speak with Adam Curtis tell him his docs are awesome but he needs to get rid of the music. I can't hear a damn thing. It is horrible musice from B horror movies.
Hi Mohammed,
I'll be sure and tell him ...
Which parts of the documentary did you find most intriguing?
For me - with support from Wikipedia - there were two subtle areas that I was drawn to. The video's beneath each are but a taste of my points. The full documentary itself balances these pieces together, forming a higher understanding of the two : -
The first was Vladislav Surkov using ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theater, with Donald Trump using similar techniques in his presidential campaign using language from Occupy Wall Street, and the extreme racist right-wing - Trumps "defeated journalism", rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant.
Secondly - following the United States' involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War - a vengeful Hafez al-Assad making an alliance with Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. It was a plan to force the US out of the Middle East by encouraging civilians to carry out suicide bombings on American targets in the region, thereby avoiding reprisals, such as February 1984, when the U.S. withdrew all its troops from Lebanon because, in the words of then US Secretary of State George P. Shultz, "we became paralysed by the complexity that we faced".
Hi Finn
Next time you speak with Adam Curtis tell him his docs are awesome but he needs to get rid of the music. I can't hear a damn thing. It is horrible musice from B horror movies.
Hi Mohammed,
I'll be sure and tell him ...
Which parts of the documentary did you find most intriguing?
For me - with support from Wikipedia - there were two subtle areas that I was drawn to. The video's beneath each are but a taste of my points. The full documentary itself balances these pieces together, forming a higher understanding of the two : -
The first was Vladislav Surkov using ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theater, with Donald Trump using similar techniques in his presidential campaign using language from Occupy Wall Street, and the extreme racist right-wing - Trumps "defeated journalism", rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant.
Secondly - following the United States' involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War - a vengeful Hafez al-Assad making an alliance with Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. It was a plan to force the US out of the Middle East by encouraging civilians to carry out suicide bombings on American targets in the region, thereby avoiding reprisals, such as February 1984, when the U.S. withdrew all its troops from Lebanon because, in the words of then US Secretary of State George P. Shultz, "we became paralysed by the complexity that we faced".
Finn
Well the point is and has always been state control of reality, or rather perception. Huxley and Orwell eloquently described the scenario.
Curtis did not go into CIA involvement which is all over the ME and has been since its inception. He also neglected to cover the role of Hillary in the current situation which is nothing more than a continuation of the destabilization process foisted on the US by its parent Israel.
Many of us here keep lamenting the globalists/oligarchs’ attempts to establish rule over the rest of us, undermining or “retiring” old rights and liberties and ways of doing things.
What if…that phase change is already essentially over? What if the current goings-on are essentially just fine-tuning/getting the last few bits in place – and what we have now is more or less what we’ll have going forward?
Think about it: above the local level, when was the last time your “vote” counted and resulted in palpable change? (at the federal level, has to be decades at least!)
Think about it: TPTB have nearly-ubiquitous surveillance of our doings and preferences and what we say/write, a list of everyone with whom we associate, when we go where and what we buy, etc.
Think about it: is it possible the never-ending stream of atrocities and outrages and tragedies and “this just burns my biscuit!” is (to a great extent) planned? ie. the tit-for-tat in Syria (gas “attack”, cruise missles, etc.).
Think about it: Protest does what, these days? Did BLM accomplish anything? Did the million woman march (pink pussy hats) accomplish anything? Did Occupy accomplish anything? IMO, they accomplished about as much as all the Anti-Iraq-War marches back in the early 00s.
Think about it: the dollar is dying, being slowly bit to pieces by the petro yuan, Russia finding workarounds for the SWIFT system, etc. Eventually, we’ll get a blockchain-based SDR, methinks.
While all our attention is on Vegas shootings and Syria (don’t forget Ukraine, that’ll be the next hotspot!) and North Korea and floods in ______ and droughts in _______ and plastic in the oceans and reef death etc etc, they are busy taking this little step and that little step (hey, Trump’s lawyer doesn’t get atty-client privilege because reasons says Judge Kimba).
This is not to say all these events are not legit crises – okay, most: I am sympathetic to trans people but the whole bathroom issue last year was good for a couple weeks of “outrage” – but just that they are managed such that the public’s attention is diverted and occupied (colonized, if you will) and used to advance the agenda.
Once we have another good stock market crash, and the Fed et al jump in to buy buy buy, seems to me we’ll have had a de facto privatization of public companies. And once the Fed owns 51% of a certain number of companies that form the backbone of the economy, they’ll own, well, everything. (If you’re a blacksmith near a giant noble’s farm, you’re essentially a subcontractor/employee of that noble, even if you’re nominally a private actor – without their biz/permission to be in biz, you can’t survive.)
TPTB control the ““markets”” and the “currency” and the new feeds and are slowly moving to control the flow of info on the internet (censoring Twitter/FB/etc., Net Neutrality on its way out, etc.), and a controlling percent of the population are dependent on the gov for handouts. That keeps the rest, especially those in the bottom half of the working population, afraid to stick their head up too far, yah? What else do TPTB need? They don’t have total control of everything, they just have enough control of enough things to more or less influence everything to go their way (or close).
If you can build the case that the US/Russia/China are (behind the scenes, waaaaay behind the scenes) working out a pact of some sort to divvy things up three ways (with the occasional skirmish to keep up appearances – like the gas “attack” + cruise missile reprisal of last week), then I think we’re there.
So – I’m just sayin – what part of this still represents a free country/economy/world?
VIVA anyway – Sager
...
Which parts of the documentary did you find most intriguing?
For me - with support from Wikipedia - there were two subtle areas that I was drawn to. The video's beneath each are but a taste of my points. The full documentary itself balances these pieces together, forming a higher understanding of the two : -
The first was