Video:
A Kenny G Holiday

“Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad…………..”

The story of Sarin use in at least two cases this year was broken through the semi-official Saudi Alarabiya network (a network that is owned and operated in Dubai by an in-law of the late King Fahd). These stories always came out at critical times for the Syrian opposition groups, usually after big defeats on the battlefield: for example one story broke out just after the regime victory as Qusayr. Saudi Alarabiya as usual broke the story through an interview with “activists” who supplied a video. Western media adopted the story with gusto: CNN practically declared its own war. The governments of the USA, Britain, and France jumped on the story, again. The French, always good at cooking food and occasionally cooking up evidence, quickly confirmed the use of Sarin. The French and British governments immediately implicated the Assad regime. The Obama administration seemed more doubtful and was relatively more honest: it often avoided pointing the finger at any one side, merely saying that “Sarin was used in Syria”.

Cheers
mhg