During the summer, we continue the publication in episodes of Thierry Meyssan’s book, Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump. In this episode, the chemical attack in Ghouta and the Western hesitations up to the financing of Daesh.

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The adult victims of the Ghouta gassing were almost exclusively men. The children were all close in age, having been abducted together by the jihadists in Aleppo.

27 - The “red line”

In May 2013, Nato distributed a report to its members indicating that the population supported President el-Assad at 70%, 20% support the rebels and 10% have no opinion [1]. Paris and Ankara conclude that there will be no victory without returning to the original plan to bomb Syria. An initiative must be taken to put pressure on Washington.

On August 21, a chemical attack hit Syrian civilians in the suburbs of Damascus, in an area controlled by the jihadists, the Ghouta. In the hours that followed, a vast communication machine was set in motion, accusing the Syrian Arab Republic of being responsible. This attack would mark the crossing of the “red line” set by President Obama. The West prepared to “punish the regime” by bombing its capital.

The Syrian government denied any involvement and recalled that on May 23, Turkish police arrested 11 jihadists in Adana in possession of a large stock of sarin gas [2]. While the leader of the group, Hytam Qassap, was of Syrian nationality, the others were Turkish. In addition, the Free Syrian Army itself released videos of a small chemical weapons laboratory and threatened to gas the Alawites [3].

What happened in Ghouta was questionable: the US secret service claimed to have observed - without intervening - the Syrian Arab Army preparing the gas for the previous four days [4]. Videos were released by the opposition, but one of them was dated by YouTube (California time) before sunrise in Damascus, although it was filmed in daylight. The victims are either children - all the same age - or men, only 2 women out of the 1,429 victims counted by the US. The dead children turn out to be Alawites who were abducted by the jihadis a few weeks earlier [5]. Although they were officially absent from the country, France and the United Kingdom assured us that they took samples on the spot and analyzed them immediately. They confirmed the use of sarin gas. Problem: the only known test requires ten days to be performed.

According to the French and British intelligence services, the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian army is attested by telephone interceptions of officers. But it turns out that these interceptions were carried out by the Israelis [6]. Very quickly, it became clear that French military intelligence was cautious. It was not the author of the summary note distributed by the French Ministry of Defense [7]. It was produced by Sacha Mandel, a bi-national French-Israeli advisor to the Minister.

Basically, we do not understand why the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line”. How is it worse than other “weapons of mass destruction”? Why does the United States, a signatory to the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, blame Syria for using them when it is not a signatory and when it violated its own signature in 2003 in the Baghdad palm grove? [8]

When chemical weapons first appeared in the First World War, they came as a surprise and, as a result, were very deadly. However, states quickly found ways to deal with them, so that none used them significantly on the battlefield during the Second World War. In the Middle East, Israel refused to sign the Convention, taking Egypt and Syria with it. From 1985 to 1994, Israel funded research in South Africa to create racially selective weapons. The aim was to identify toxic agents that would kill only blacks and Arabs and not the Jewish people [9]. They were conducted under the direction of President Peter Botha’s cardiologist, Colonel Wouter Basson. It is not known whether they were successful, which seems scientifically unlikely. Several thousand human guinea pigs died during the experiments [10].

The British services quickly validated the above observations and warned the Prime Minister, David Cameron, against a false flag operation [11]. Syrian television broadcasted a video of a jihadist driver. He testified that he went to Turkey and received the toxic shells in a Turkish barracks, then secretly transported them to Damascus [12].

Questioned by the Russian press, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad replied: “The statements made by American, Western and other politicians are an insult to common sense and an expression of contempt for the public opinion of their peoples. It is nonsense: first you accuse, then you gather evidence. (...) This kind of accusation is exclusively political, and responds to the series of victories scored by government forces over the terrorists [13].”

François Hollande, for his part, claims loudly that his conscience orders him to “strike” Damascus [14]. In so doing, he continues the work of the colonization party which, during the provisional governments of Charles de Gaulle and Georges Bidault, in May 1945 and November 1946, bombed Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata (Algeria), then Damascus (Syria), and finally Hai Phòng (Indochina/Vietnam) on its own initiative. At the moment of withdrawing its troops, just after independence, the army of General Fernand Olive attacked Damascus, just to show spite. It destroyed part of the thousand-year-old souk (as it did today in Aleppo [July 21-ed]) and the National Assembly, the symbol of the new Republic it rejected.

Germany was the first to observe that, even if Syria had used chemical weapons, its bombing would still be illegal under international law, unless the Security Council decides otherwise [15]. The British and the Americans are ultimately convinced that the case was fabricated by Turkey with the support of France and Israel.

In London, the House of Commons forbade the Prime Minister to attack Damascus until the responsibility of Bashar al-Assad’s government was established with certainty. The MPs, many of whom know the extent of their country’s involvement against Syria, remember the damage done to the Kingdom following its war against Iraq in 2003, based on the false accusations of George Bush and Tony Blair. In Washington, Barack Obama relied on Congress, which he knew was opposed to any new military adventure whatsoever [16]. This was of course a delaying tactic, because the Syrian Accountability Act of 2003 gave him all the powers to destroy Syria.

François Hollande, who spoke too loudly and too quickly, remained alone in the race. Powerless, he holed up in the Élysée Palace, while France’s word was discredited internationally. No one asked Turkey to account for anything, especially not Anne Lauvergeon, Alexandre Adler, Joachim Bitterlich, Hélène Conway-Mouret, Jean-François Copé, Henri de Castries, Augustin de Romanet, Laurence Dumont, Claude Fischer, Stéphane Fouks, Bernard Guetta, Élisabeth Guigou, Hubert Haenel, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Alain Juppé, Pierre Lellouche, Thierry Mariani, Gérard Mestrallet, Thierry de Montbrial, Pierre Moscovici, Philippe Petitcolin, Alain Richard, Michel Rocard, Daniel Rondeau, Bernard Soulage, Catherine Tasca, Denis Verret and Wilfried Verstraete, all of whom received “gifts” from Turkish patrons on behalf of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Russia helped the United States to emerge from the crisis with its head held high. They invited Syria to sign the Convention on the prohibition of chemical weapons, which it did without delay. President Bashar al-Assad negotiated with the OPCW to destroy the existing stockpiles, but at Washington’s expense.

Subsequently, the American journalist Seymour M. Hersh highlighted his country’s hesitations in this matter [17]. Then, professors Richard Lloyd and Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated that the chemical shells had been fired from the “rebel” zone [18]. However, France alone persisted in accusing the Syrian Arab Republic. “He who wants to drown his dog accuses it of rabies”, as the saying goes in the French countryside.

In any case, the West would regularly repeat its accusations against Syria of chemical weapons use, even though all stocks had been destroyed jointly by Russia and the United States. This game would end when Damascus discovered such weapons in jihadist bunkers. They had been delivered by the CIA and were manufactured by Chemring Defense (UK), Federal Laboratories and Non-Lethal Technologies (USA).

28 - Indecision

Having closed its embassy and recalled all its personnel in 2012, having withdrawn most of its Special Forces after its commitment in Mali in early 2013, having been disavowed by Washington, Paris no longer had any means on the ground, nor any plan of action.

Not knowing what to do, François Hollande turned to his long-time ally, Tel Aviv, which had provided him with false evidence of Syrian responsibility in the false flag attack on Ghouta. A brief look at his activity in favor of the colonization of Palestine during his tenure as first secretary of the Socialist Party is in order:

-        In 2000, while southern Lebanon was occupied, he and future Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë prepared Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s trip to Palestine. His speech included a condemnation of the Resistance to the occupation, which he equated with terrorism.

-        In 2001, he demanded the resignation from the Socialist Party of the geopolitician Pascal Boniface, guilty of having criticized, in an internal note, the blind support of the Party to Israel.

-        In 2004, he wrote to the Conseil supérieur de l’Audiovisuel to question the broadcasting authorization given to Al-Manar, the Hezbollah television channel. He would not stop his pressure until the Resistance channel was censored.

-        In 2005, he was received behind closed doors by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF). According to the minutes of the meeting, he gave his support to Ariel Sharon and strongly criticized the Gaullist Arab policy. He was quoted as saying, “There is a trend that goes back a long way, what is called the Arab policy of France, and it is not acceptable that an administration have an ideology. There is a recruitment problem at the Quai d’Orsay and at ENA and this recruitment should be reorganized. In doing so, he reverses reality because “France’s Arab policy” is not a policy in favor of the Arabs against the Israelis, but a policy in the Arab world.

-        In 2006, he took a stand against President Ahmadinejad, who invited rabbis and historians, including Holocaust deniers, to Tehran. He pretended to ignore the meaning of the congress, which aimed to show that Europeans had substituted the religion of the Holocaust for their Christian culture. And, in contradiction, he explained that the Iranian President intended to deny the right of Israelis to exist and that he was preparing to continue the Holocaust.

-        He mobilized for the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, a prisoner of Hamas, on the grounds that the latter had dual French and Israeli nationality. It does not matter that the young man was arrested while serving in an army of occupation at war with the Palestinian Authority, also an ally of France.

-        In 2010, he published with Bertrand Delanoë and Bernard-Henri Lévy, an open letter in Le Monde to oppose the boycott of Israeli products. According to him, the boycott would be a collective punishment, also inflicted on Israelis who work for peace with the Palestinians. A reasoning that he did not hold during the similar campaign against apartheid in South Africa.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, observed that the United States and the United Kingdom had withdrawn from the theater of operations, which did not prevent the CIA and MI6 from continuing the secret war. He therefore proposed to set up a coordination of those who wish to continue the open war until the overthrow of the Syrian Arab Republic: Saudi Arabia, France, Israel, Qatar and Turkey. Lebanon and Jordan would continue to provide logistical support, but would not intervene in the direction of operations. Since Washington no longer wished to appear, the whole operation would be directed by Jeffrey Feltman from the UN in New York. We needed to act quickly. Indeed, the storm was rumbling in Washington. The supporters of the attack on Syria were being pushed aside. On November 8, General David Petraeus was forced to resign as director of the CIA, while Hillary Clinton suffered an “accident” and disappeared for a month.

Jeffrey D. Feltman was the mastermind of the “Arab Spring”, and is also a great friend of Netanyahu. He had been the UN’s Director of Political Affairs for over a year. He had a plan for the total and unconditional surrender of Syria drawn up by Volker Perthes, the director of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), the most powerful European think tank. He had also taken charge of the North Africa and Middle East Directorate of the European Union’s External Action Service. The High Representative of the Union, Catherine Ashton, had become his parrot. Feltman entrusted Saudi Arabia for a second time with the training of an army of 50,000 men in Jordan. At the same time, he began a reorganization of the jihadist groups. Finally, on instructions from the White House, he organized the “Geneva 2” negotiations.

Benyamin Netanyahu imagined a three-way alliance: France would defend the interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia internationally, in exchange for huge contracts, investments and bribes. The aim was to sabotage the US-Iran negotiations, so as to maintain the monopoly of the Tel Aviv-Riyadh regional directoire.

The King of Arabia, whose most important agent, Majed Al-Majed, had just been arrested by the Lebanese army, agreed to offer 3 billion dollars in French arms if the Lebanese did not record his confession. The terrorist leader conveniently died while the King distributed “gifts” to the Lebanese and the French (for example, $100 million for the unconstitutional “President” Michel Sleimane) [19]. In reality, while the beneficiaries of the royal “gifts” would keep them, the arms orders would never be formalized [20]. The only French leader not to receive a royal “gift” personally, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian negotiated for his region the rescue of the Doux poultry group, indebted to the tune of 400 million euros, which was partially bought out and bailed out by the Saudi company Al-Munajem.

After the resignation of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General appointed the Algerian Lakhdar Brahimi to follow the Syrian file. Unlike Annan, he did not have the title of “mediator” because Ban Ki-moon now considered that “Bashar must go!” His mission was to lead Syria towards “a political transition, in accordance with the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people.” Brahimi was responsible for the creation of the “Decision Support Service”, the personal secret service of the Secretary General, because from now on the UN is no longer a forum for peace, but has a secret service to implement Washington’s policy. French diplomacy knows it well, given its successive roles at the end of the civil war in Lebanon, the military coup in Algeria and the Anglo-Saxon aggression in Afghanistan [21].

Geneva 2 is a trap. Unlike Geneva 1 - which brought together the United States and Russia in the presence of their closest partners, but to the exclusion of all Syrians - not only Syria and “opposition representatives” are invited to this second round, but all the states involved. Except for Iran, whose invitation, after having been issued, was cancelled, allegedly at the request of the Saudis. But who can believe that Arabia has such power over the UN? In reality, Jeffrey Feltman is also organizing the 5+1 negotiations with Iran and does not intend to anticipate the lifting of US and European sanctions against it. As for the representatives of the opposition, it will only be those who have been endorsed by Arabia, that is to say the new National Coalition of Opposition Forces and Revolution, chaired by Ahmed Jarba. The latter is a small-time drug trafficker who finds his hour of glory there because he comes from the Saudi-Syrian tribe of Chammars, the same as the king’s.

Two days before the opening of the conference, Qatar had the London law firm Carter-Ruck publish a report by three former international prosecutors on the testimony of “Caesar” and the exhibits he had given them [22]. “Caesar” claims to be a Syrian military police officer, usually in charge of photographing crime scenes. He claims to have photographed the victims of the “regime” during the conflict in the morgues of military hospitals. He recently defected. He handed over 55,000 photographs, representing 11,000 corpses, which he claims to have taken himself. To make matters worse, each page of the press release announcing the report is stamped with the double mention “Confidential”. The former prosecutors conclude that food deprivation and torture were systematically administered by the “regime” to “people [it] imprisoned. In reality, those of these photographs that were taken in Syria show the bodies of mercenaries of various nationalities who were picked up by the Syrian Arab Army on the battlefield and those of civilian and military personnel who died under jihadist torture because they supported the Syrian Arab Republic.

The new Secretary of State, John Kerry, who knows Bashar al-Assad well, obviously knows that all of this is pure propaganda, but the Carter-Ruck cabinet statement provides him with one more argument for his speech at Geneva 2 on January 22, 2014. Since no one quite understands what is going on since the ouster of Hillary Clinton and her supporters, the world’s television stations are there. When the Syrian foreign minister whom the French tried to assassinate, Walid Mouallem, takes the floor, he does not fit the situation and addresses the Syrian public, missing the only opportunity he will have to dismantle the Western plot live in the eyes of the world. He is a diplomat of rare loyalty: at a meeting of the Arab League, he refused a bribe of 100 million dollars offered by his Qatari counterpart if he turned against his country. His speech raises the question of support for terrorism by the “opposition delegation” and its sponsors in the room.

In the end, nothing will come out of Geneva 2 because, between the time it was convened and the time the conference was held, Washington adopted a new strategy. The United States does not have to give up its dream of a unipolar world and make a pact with Russia. It still has a card to play: terrorism. While the diplomats are talking in Geneva 2, President Obama is receiving the King of Jordan to set the conditions for his country’s participation. At the same time, the National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, is hosting the heads of the Coalition’s secret services [23].

As every year, Congress held a closed session during which it voted on the Pentagon’s “black budgets”. The existence of this session is attested to by a dispatch from the British agency Reuters [24], but it was never mentioned by the American press and does not appear on the official records. The parliamentarians authorized the continuation of the financing and arming of armed groups in Syria, in violation of Security Council resolutions 1267 and 1373 [25]. Without knowing it, they had just opened the gates of hell.

(To be continued ...)

Notes

[1] “NATO data : Assad winning the war for Syrians’ hearts and minds”, World Tribune, May 31, 2013.

[2] “Turkish prosecutors indict Syrian rebels for seeking chemical weapons”, Russia Today, September 14, 2013. «Türkiye’den sarin gazinin üretim maddelerini almaya çalisanlara dava açildi», T24, 11 Eylül 2013.

[3] “FSA showcases its chemical weapons lab”, Voltaire Network, 8 December 2012.

[4] “US Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013”, Voltaire Network, 30 August 2013.

[5] “Identification of the dead children in Ghouta”, Translation Alizée Ville, Voltaire Network, 6 September 2013.

[6] « Exclusive : US Spies say intercepted calls prove Syria army used nerve gas », Foreign Policy, August 28, 2013. « L’administration Obama valide une intox israélienne », Réseau Voltaire, 30 août 2013.

[7] « Synthèse du Renseignement français sur l’attaque chimique du 21 août 2013 », par Sacha Mandel, Réseau Voltaire, 2 septembre 2013.

[8] “Chemical weapons arsenals and the hidden truths about the “Convention”“, by Manlio Dinucci, Translation John Catalinotto, Il Manifesto (Italy) , Voltaire Network, 13 September 2013.

[9] Dr la mort - Enquête sur un bioterrorisme d’État en Afrique du Sud, Tristan Mendes-France, Favre Pierre Marcel (2002).

[10] « L’Afrique du Sud, ex-laboratoire secret de bio-terrorisme des démocraties », Réseau Voltaire, 28 octobre 2002.

[11] “Letter From the Chairman of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee on Syria”, Voltaire Network, 29 August 2013.

[12] “Ghouta chemical weapons came from Turkish Army”, Translation Alizée Ville, Voltaire Network, 17 September 2013.

[13] « Entretien de Bachar el-Assad aux Izvestia », par Bachar el-Assad, Réseau Voltaire, 26 août 2013.

[14] « Interview de François Hollande au « Monde » », par François Hollande, Réseau Voltaire, 30 août 2013.

[15] « Syrie : ingérence délibérée, prétexte douteux », par Général Dominique Delawarde, Réseau Voltaire, 12 septembre 2013.

[16] “Barack Obama’s Remarks on Syria”, by Barack Obama, Voltaire Network, 31 August 2013.

[17] “Syria: Whose sarin?”, Seymour M. Hersh, London Review of Books, Voltaire Network, 13 february 2014.

[18] Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013, Richard Lloyd & Theodore A. Postol, MIT, January 14, 2014.

[19] « Le silence et la trahison qui valaient 3 milliards de dollars », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 15 janvier 2014.

[20] “Lebanese Army forgoes 3 billion dollars worth of French weapons”, Translation Alizée Ville, Voltaire Network, 10 February 2014.

[21] “The Brahimi Plan”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Michele Stoddard , Information Clearing House (USA) , Voltaire Network, 29 August 2012.

[22] “A Report into the credibility of certain evidence with regard to Torture and Execution of Persons Incarcerated by the current Syrian regime”, Carter-Ruck, January 20, 2014

[23] “Spymasters gather to discuss Syria”, par David Ignatius, Washington Post, 19 février 2014.

[24] “Congress secretly approves U.S. weapons flow to ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels”, par Mark Hosenball, Reuters, 27 janvier 2014.

[25] « Les États-Unis, premiers financiers mondiaux du terrorisme », par Thierry Meyssan, Al-Watan (Syrie) , Réseau Voltaire, 3 février 2014

Courtesy Thierry Meyssan; Translation Roger Lagassé

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