The Syria ‘Chemical Weapons’ Media Hype: Pushing for Military Intervention
Yesterday’s report of an alleged ‘chemical weapon’ attack near Damascus has prompted the US and UK media machines to spin into overdrive in the push for a military intervention and regime change in Syria.
Washington’s official response is predictable by now: “The White House is ‘deeply concerned’ about reports that chemical weapons were used by Syria’s government against civilians”.
In the UK, the mainstream media has put on a full-court press, clearly delivering a guilty verdict even before any claims can be independently verified, a coordinated trial-by-media which looks to be designed to coax a majority public support for either a direct supply of arms to the confab of ‘rebel’ insurgencies in Syria.
Pre-Iraq War talking points have been dusted off by the UK press and others, as the PR war begins for the hearts and minds of voters begins. It is alleged that hundreds have been killed by this latest ‘gas attack’ which is being compared by the UK media to Iraq where thousands of Kurds were gassed by Saddam Hussein in Halabja in 1988.
The focus of the UK and US government-media-complex led efforts to win public support for a “humanitarian intervention” similar that which was perpetrated in Libya in 2011, is now centred around the main victims of the conflict being portrayed as that of children.
No one within the government media complex is asking the most fundamentally important question here: were real military-grade chemical weapons actually used at all? The reason no one is asking this is because the answer to this question so far is a resounding ’no’, which means that despite all the media hype neither the UK nor the US governments have a case against the Assad regime regarding the use of chemical weapons during this conflict.
Media invent a ‘chemical weapons’ incident
In reality, this is nearly an identical government and media PR campaign to that which was launched in the run-up the invasion and bombing of Iraq in 2003.
Varying reports estimate between 90 and 500 killed in this incident, yet, the Guardian was quick to ramp-up the death toll to 1,400. Every media report of the incident is based on the same dubious source material, described by the Daily Mail as:
“Extensive amateur video and photographs purporting to show victims appeared on the Internet. A video puportedly shot in the Kafr Batna neighbourhood showed a room filled with more than 90 bodies, many of them children and a few women and elderly men.”
Today’s Daily Mirror led with the headline, “NOW THEY ARE GASSING OUR CHILDREN”, but when you actually read the article, the ambiguity of the claims becomes obvious. ”At first they were being affected by the gas. But now they’re dying in the regular shelling. The bombs just won’t stop.”
Rupert Murdoch’s newest war promotion paper, The Times, was even more ambiguous and misleading today, with one headline reading, “Horror video is no fake but cannot tell the full story”. This was referring to the Pièce de résistance of this latest chemical attack, a video of the dead. The Times went on to debunk itself, with Dan Kazela, a former chemical warfare officer stating the obvious, “You can’t autopsy a video”, adding, “In the end stages (of a chemical attack) there are tremors and convulsions. There are a lack of the immediate symptoms (in the footage). I am confused.” In other words, the videos do match the allegations.
If there was a military-grade chemical attack involving thousands of death, how come that entire area of the city was not evacuated, and how could videographers and photographers be on the scene so quickly after the attack without suffering the effects they claim to be documenting?
The Times continued in a desperate bid to cover all its bases with the next article entitled, “Ignore the conspiracists: We must find the truth”. This headline is a breathtaking example of high level propaganda, and mixed messaging. It implies that anyone who thinks that the Syrian government are innocent, or the rebel opposition guilty – of chemical weapons charges, is a conspiracist, and that “the truth” must be the opposite conclusions. The article goes on to attack the Russian press coverage of the conflict specifically, stating:
“The Russian press scrambles to demonstrate the depravity of the rebels – making much of the commander who who appeared on film to be eating the body parts of an opponent”.
It seems lost on this Times writer Roger Boyes, that the Russian press didn’t need to scramble, because the rebel cannibal in question was very depraved and was part of the insurgent-terrorist confab backed by both the US and UK governments.
The press continue their PR campaign to intervention in Syria with the headline image (see below) for the Mirror depicts an image of eight children sleeping, and it is a fact that no one can independently verify as yet who these children are and if indeed they were killed in a chemical weapons attack in Syria on Tuesday evening. Nonetheless, the story and pictures run in the press and the desired public perception is created.
IMAGE: Today’s headline on the UK Daily Mirror. Who are these children in the photo, are they alive and what exactly happened to them?
It’s important that the public educate themselves as to how propaganda campaigns work, particularly those run by the government media complex in countries like the US and the UK.
To demonstrate this, as well as an acute level of bias and pre-judgement by a cast of hand-picked pundits crowing for the establishment’s line on the Syrian issue, we can look again at today’s Daily Mirror. Notice the technique which is used ad nauseam by the British press which employs the use of mixed messaging, which makes the reader believe that the pundit is an objective commentator, when in fact, they are not. One pundit being used help to nail down the Foreign Office’s executive outcome in Syria, is Fawaz A. Gerges, a Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and a man affiliated with Washington DC’s main advocate for war – the Council on Foreign Relations. Note the how the twists and turns are employed by this ‘expert’, only to end with the final verdict of guilt well before any real independently verified evidence has been returned. This is Propaganda 101 for a master’s degree in public opinion making:
GERGES/MIRROR: “We lack independent information to verify opposition claims about the apparent use of poison, and the counter claims of the Assad regime that it is a fabrication to divert attention from rebel losses in strategic Al Ghouta.”
21WIRE says: Seems objective enough. Carry on…
GERGES/MIRROR: “If the attacks have taken place, this would affect the “red line” established by Obama about the use of chemical weapons, and intensify the pressure on him to retaliate militarily against Assad.”
21WIRE says: He’s just flicked the switch for Washington and London’s predetermined outcome for Syria.
GERGES/MIRROR: “The British and French would probably join any US military strikes…”
21WIRE says: Here Gerges and the Mirror lay out what they want the public to accept as the inevitable outcome.
GERGES/MIRROR: “There are several unanswered questions. Why would the Assad government use chemical weapons while there is a UN team in Damascus?”
21 WIRE says: There they go again, sounding objective. How very nice. Carry on…
GERGES/MIRROR: “Why would the Syrian army deploy poison when it has gained the upper hand in Al Ghouta?”
GERGES/MIRROR: “Why would Assad use chemical weapons at this stage and trigger investigations?
21WIRE says: Now that sounds sensible. I’m interested again. Carry on…
GERGES/MIRROR: “This seems illogical, though Assad has confounded us before by irrationality and brutality. We should not be shocked.”
21WIRE says: We see the clear propaganda slight of hand here: President Assad is irrational and brutal – so according to this illustrious expert, without actually saying it, he’s planted the idea: Assad is capable of doing irrational and brutal acts like this insane chemical weapons attack in Damascus, even while the UN inspections team is nearby.
GERGES/MIRROR: “If Assad was intelligent, which he is not, he would allow the inspectors to visit the sites.”
21WIRE says: Clever, sort of. The Mirror and Gerges foreshadowing the pre-boxed outcome that if the Assad government will not allow inspectors in, it proves that he is guilty of the attack.
GERGES/MIRROR: “My instinct would be that he will say it is too dangerous for the UN to travel to Al Ghouta.”
21WIRE says: Too dangerous? It wasn’t too dangerous for all the ‘activists’ who managed to take pristine video and Mirror photo ops of the dead children lined up on the ground as the poison gas was in the air. Gerges is clearly doing a brief back-pedal here. But wait…
GERGES/MIRROR: “Finally, the burden of truth lies on the Assad regime.”
21WIRE says: This is NLP at its finest, and very skilled propaganda by the professor. The ‘burden of truth’ he is referring to is better know in the real world as ‘The Burden of Proof’. The west want the burden of proof to be on Assad regime – and not the opposition accusing the Syrian government of the crime – and that, Ladies and Gentleman, is the crux of this particular psy-op run by the government media complex.
21st Century Wire’s Patrick Henningsen appeared within hours of the attacks live on RT news on August 21st, and called out this very psy-op regarding “the burden of proof”. Watch:
What really happened this week
Only last month, Syrian forces found a large cache of chemical weapons in a Damascus warehouse belonging to the rebels. This is well documented, as RT reported:
Military sources reported that the militants “were preparing to fire mortars in the suburbs of the capital and were going to pack missiles with chemical warheads.”
A video shot by RT’s sister channel Russia Al Youm shows an old, partly ruined building which was set up as a laboratory. After entering the building, Syrian Army officers found scores of canisters and bags laid on the floor and tables. According to a warning sign on the bags, the “corrosive” substance was made in Saudi Arabia.
On July 7, the Syrian army confiscated “281 barrels filled with dangerous, hazardous chemical materials” that they found at a cache belonging to rebels in the city of Banias. The chemicals included monoethylene glycol and polyethylene glycol. Any investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Damascus and Syria should begin with the above report.
This week’s effort to hammer a guilty verdict down on the Assad regime is not the first this year. Both the American and British interests have rallied on multiple occasions to try and fabricate a series of ’chemical weapons’ incidents in Syria.
So if this latest alleged ‘nerve gas’ attack in Damascus reveals no real military-grade chemical weapons, then what type of weapons might have been deployed? Were they makeshift chlorine or bombs, or sulphur type bombs or mortars?
One similar incident took place with a series of chlorine bomb attack in Aleppo, Northern Syria in March 2013. Reuters, along with others, reported, “Alleged chemical attack kills 25 in northern Syria”, and stated:
“U.S. President Barack Obama, who has resisted overt military intervention in Syria, has warned President Bashar al-Assad that any use of chemical weapons would be a “red line”. There has, however, been no suggestion of rebels possessing such arms.”
Well, actually, there was suggestion, and evidence too. If the mainstream media had been doing their job, then they would’ve found what we found, published the following week on March 27 in a report by Patrick Henningsen entitled, Iraq 2.0: West will now lean on UN to delivery a WMD verdict in Syria, where, among other important revelations of western-backed al Qaeda attempting to create a chemical false-flag incident in Aleppo, we presented this:
“(…) Jordanian intelligence proceeded to facilitate the smuggling of chlorine gas from Jordan to the (terrorist) organization known as “Islamic State of Iraq”, the first to use chlorine gas technology (with the help of Jordanian Intelligence and Saudi Arabia) as a “chemical weapon” – a taboo issue in the media in the context of covering genocide….”
If any doubt remains as to the nefarious cloak and dagger antics being carried out through the western-controlled terrorist confab and rebel opposition in Syria, we need only look back a few months before, on Jan 29th, when the Daily Mail, and Yahoo News India, published a revealing news piece about a US and British-linked plan to stage a chemical weapons attack in Syria and blame it on Assad, entitled, “U.S. ‘backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria and blame it on Assad’s regime’.
The Mail quickly pulled the story down within 24 hours, offering no formal retraction, but simply wiped it clean from their website, but we have a screen shot here:
One of the original leaks which led to this brief, but buried story, was contained in the Britam Leaks, which detailed the plan to be carried out via a private British defense contractor Britam Defense, which we are told got the green light from Washington and was to be financed by Qatar, as evidenced by this email contained in the documents cache:
It is clear now, more than ever, that this latest campaign for regime change in Syria is being rolled out like a carbon copy of Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2003, only, this time the propaganda is much more complex, making it hard for the public – and the mainstream media as we have demonstrated – to actually follow the facts in the midst of all the sensational reporting and political grandstanding by the like of William Hague, the Tory Foreign Secretary in the UK.
Remember how the public was lied to and duped by the US and UK government in order to invade, rape, and occupy Iraq in 2003? Well, the same process is in motion again, with the same results waiting for us down the road – but only if you are naive enough to swallow the same propaganda again this time.
Remember those embarrassing scenes, like that of then US Secretary of State Colin Powell – going in front on the UN claiming that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile chemical weapons labs manufacturing weaponised anthrax by the ton, infamously dubbed the “Winnebagos of Death”? It’s the same exact public perception campaign you are witnessing now regarding Syria.
You didn’t trust the government and their talking heads back then, so why trust them with a repeat performance now?
The truth is that the US, Britain, France and others, are involved in a proxy war having allied with Islamic terrorists and imported, non-Syrian militant brigades in Syria being financed by western allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar – the west will do anything to get a green light to upscale their illegal activities there.
Sure, their level of deceptive, high magic propaganda may even make Joseph Goebbels’s head spin, but whatever you do... don’t fall for it a second time.
By Patrick Henningsen, 21st Century Wire