Konflikten i Syrien

Exclusive: Despite evidence that Al Qaeda and its allies have staged fake chemical attacks in Syria before, Official Washington asserts with “high confidence” that it’s not being fooled again, reports Robert Parry.
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Given the neocon/liberal-interventionist domination of Official Washington’s foreign policy – and the professional Western propaganda shops working for Assad’s overthrow – there was virtually no pushback against the quick formulation of this new groupthink. All the predictable players played their predictable parts, from The New York Times to CNN to the Atlantic Council-related Bellingcat and its “citizen journalists.”
All the Important People who appeared on the TV shows or who were quoted in the mainstream media trusted the images provided by Al Qaeda-related propagandists and ignored documented prior cases in which the Syrian rebels staged chemical weapons incidents to implicate the Assad government.
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But Official Washington’s resistance to reality was perhaps best demonstrated one year ago when The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published a detailed article about Obama’s foreign policy that repeated the groupthink about Obama shrinking from his “red line” but included the disclosure that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had informed the President that U.S. intelligence lacked any “slam dunk” evidence that Assad’s military was guilty.

“Our U.S. Army contacts in the area have told us this is not what happened. There was no Syrian ‘chemical weapons attack.’* Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died…..This is what the Russians and Syrians have been saying and – more important –what they appear to believe happened.”

— Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity,* 20 former members of the US Intelligence Community

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the case against Syrian President Bashar al Assad is extremely*weak. The chemical weapons attack in*Khan Shaykhun, has produced no smoking gun, *no damning evidence, in fact, no evidence at all. Similar to the Russia hacking fiasco, (not a shred of*evidence so far)**the*western media and the entire political class*has made the case for attacking a sovereign country on the thin gruel of a few videos*of an incident that took place in a location that is currently*under the*control*of militant groups connected to al Qaida. That’s*pretty shaky*grounds for a conviction, don’t you think?
And it’s not up to Assad to prove his innocence either. That’s baloney. The burden of proof rests with the prosecution. If Trump and his lieutenants have evidence that the Syrian President used chemical weapons, then– by all means– let’s see it and be done with it. If not, we*have to assume*that Assad is innocent, not because we like Assad, but because these are the legal precedents that one*follows to establish the truth. And that’s what we want, we want to know what really happened.