All The Shit That’s Fit to Print against Syria and Russia

March 15, 2018, American Herald Tribute – Jeremy Salt

Corporate media propaganda against Syria is an avalanche that never seems to end. Government policy and media policy are now melded into a single policy of support for ‘the opposition’ and unceasing hostility towards ‘the regime’ and all those who have come to its aid, especially Russia.

The hysteria in the US over alleged and completely unproven Russian interference in the US elections is now reaching the point of open confrontation with Russia. Britain has climbed aboard with its alleged and unproven accusation of official Russian involvement in the nerve weapon poisoning of a washed-up former spy, whom Russia could have no conceivable interest in eliminating.

Syria sits at the epicentre of this global campaign of fear, hatred and menace. For most of the past seven years the overthrow of the government in Damascus has been the central objective of the governments masquerading as the ‘friends’ of the Syrian people. But since Russian intervention with air support in 2015 ‘regime change’ has given way to the determination to stop Russia in its tracks. The motivation is entirely negative. Russia cannot be allowed to win in Syria or anywhere else and towards this end any lie can be told and any distortion of the news allowed.

Never before has ‘news’ began less deserving of the designation. The media has trampled on the basic principles of journalism. It does not report the news without fear or favour and it does not protect people from the lies and manipulation of governments. It actually promotes these lies. It represents not the interests of the people but the designs of governments – often malevolent – and the vested interests standing behind them. The sanctified logo of the New York Times, ‘all the news that’s fit to print’, needs to be replaced with something more contemporary, more attuned to the fake ‘news’ cycle in which we are all trapped, perhaps ‘all the shit that’s fit to print.’ What is being printed – certainly about Syria and anything to do with Russia – is rank propaganda designed to whip up support for confrontation and possibly war with Russia.

This has just been exposed again in the refusal of the media to report the discovery of a Jaish al Islam chemicals weapon factory in East Ghouta. Allegations of chemical weapons attacks by the ‘regime’ have been made intermittently ever since the launching of the war on Syria in 2011. Not one has been substantiated. All the evidence points in the other direction. The takfiris were experimenting by submitting rabbits to chemical weapons exposure almost as soon as the war began. They soon moved on to people. After Barack Obama declared his ‘red line’ in 2013 they strove hard to push him across it, their attacks throughout 2013 (including Khan al Assal and Adra in March) culminating in the atrocity committed on the outskirts of Damascus in August.

The ‘regime’ was blamed and Obama came close to launching a military attack on Syria before being persuaded by intelligence agencies that the evidence was not there and that the US was being led into a trap by a ‘false flag’ operation. The falsity of the accusation made against the Syrian government was exposed by scientific evidence and the investigative journalism of Seymour Hersh, who is now persona non grata across the US corporate media spectrum, ‘liberal’ as much as right wing. Despite his extraordinary record, going back to his reporting of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968, he now has to look for publishers outside his own country.

In April 2017 an apparent chemical weapons ‘attack’ at Khan Shakhun in Idlib province was followed a few days later by a US missile attack on the air base from where the chemicals had allegedly been launched. Without visiting the site, a joint OPCW (Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons)-UN report concluded that sarin had been dropped on Khan Shaikhun from the air and that the Syrian government was responsible. Sources said to have seen a Syrian plane included the White Helmets, an organization embedded with the takfiris across Syria, and ‘spotters’ in the town of Khan Shaikhun, infiltrated and occupied by the Hayat Tahrir al Sham terrorist group.

Information implicating the Syrian government was also provided by the US and France. Samples of the chemical from Khan Shaikhun could only have been supplied by the takfiris, or sources authorized by them. The samples were taken Turkey, a US ally in the campaign against the Syrian government, before laboratory testing, raising obvious questions about the source of the samples and the ‘chain of custody.’ The size of the crater and the metal canister in which the chemicals had been placed indicated a more likely scenario, that it had been exploded on the ground, not dropped from a plane.

Objectively, the US and its allies are defending the people they are theoretically committed to destroying, the takfiri groups, ideologically no different from the Islamic State and still holding positions despite the advances of the Syrian army. They are effectively the front-line troops for western governments and their gulf allies, their true nature concealed by misleading references to the ‘opposition’ and ‘rebels.’ They are now on the point of defeat in East Ghouta, and hence the rising crescendo of attacks on the Syrian ‘regime’ and the threat by the US of direct military intervention. The rhetorical lead has been taken by Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, who has now enlarged on the theme by telling the Security Council that unless concrete action is taken ‘Russia could use these weapons here in New York or in any country that sits on this council.’

Considering the completely unproven nature of all these accusations and their accusations of chemical weapons attacks by the ‘Russian-backed’ Syrian government, as shrill as they are unsubstantiated, the refusal of ‘western’ governments and the corporate media to acknowledge the hard evidence just produced of chemical weapons being produced in Syria is significant.

Moving into the East Ghouta village of Al Shiffuniyya in the past few days, the Syrian army found a chemical weapons factory abandoned by Jaish al Islam. The material includes shelves loaded with bottles of chemicals, rows of plastic barrels, what seemed to be an underground mixing chamber, a large metal drum with the manufacturer’s logo stamped on the side (‘Hill-Rom Mediplus Air Plant’), a sheaf of dockets bearing the logo of Jaish al Islam and what seemed to be instructions for the mixing of chemicals. Founded in 1829 the Hill-Rom company manufactures medical equipment under the slogan ‘Bring home into the hospital.’ How its products (other machines bore the company’s name) ended up in East Ghouta is an obvious question, to which the answer might lie in Hill-Rom’s operations in Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of Jaish al Islam.

Foreign reporters were present in East Ghouta to report on the opening of the ‘humanitarian corridor.’ None seemed to have responded to the Syrian government’s invitation to visit Al Shiffunia. Sharmine Narwani went and duly reported on what she saw in the factory, as well as the lush crops being grown outside in what is supposed to be a food-starved region under siege: Sharmine Narwani, Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett, with their reporting and commentary, have completely exposed the fraudulent nature of mainstream ‘reporting’ on the crisis in Syria. The list of corporate media outlets which completely ignored this hard evidence of the manufacture of chemical weapons included the following, in no particular order, according to a survey of their internet sites: Al Jazeera, Washington Post, the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, the ABC network (the US) and the ABC (Australia), CNN, CBC (Canada) and the Daily Telegraph (London).

All of them were hot for Theresa May’s expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats on the basis of unproven allegations, with the Washington Post also highlighting ‘Isolated and vulnerable: a look at Ghouta, the rebel-held enclave under siege’ but of the chemical weapons factory set up by these ‘rebels’ not a mention by any of them. Jaish al Islam has admitted to using chemical weapons (against Kurds) and may have used them against rival takfiri groups before taking control of East Ghouta in 2013. The recent accusations of chemical weapons attacks in Ghouta, designed to implicate the Syrian government, indicate that this factory is almost certainly the true source.

The media’s job is supposed to be the exposure of lies, not their packaging for public consumption. This is not a question of being fooled because the lies told over Iraq and Libya were not sophisticated lies. They were obvious lies, laughable lies. Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ was a buffoon’s dossier. Anyone of reasonable intelligence could have seen through it. Colin Powell’s brandishing of a vial of anthrax filled with icing sugar or talcum powder and his dark reference to Saddam’s missiles being hidden behind date palms was pure comedy: Peter Sellers would have died laughing had he not already died.

The problem is not the media’s lack of capacity to get through to the truth but rather its disinterest in the truth, in favour of government policies based on lies and deception. What it gets out of this arrangement only proprietors and editors would know, not journalists who need their jobs and may well disagree with the editorial line. In the past seven years the media has seized on anything that might damage the Syrian government or alternately promote the interests of the ‘rebels.’ Some of the misreporting is so extreme that newspapers have to be suspected of providing journalistic cover for intelligence agents, as they have done in the past.

The corporate media has always had a patchy record, but over Iraq, Libya and Syria it has turned itself into a full-blown propaganda arm of government policy, at the cost of losing readers and viewers and destroying the last remnants of trust anyone could have in it when it comes to critical questions of foreign policy.