“A lie travels half way around the world before the truth has time to put its pants on.”
On April 7, 2018, images and video footage purporting to show the victims of a chemical attack in Douma, Syria were released by ‘opposition activists’ and began to spread like wildfire across social media, along with accusations coming from the same sources claiming that Syrian President Bashar al Assad was responsible for the alleged attack(s) in Eastern Ghouta.
The western media narrative was immediately set in stone, parroting the ‘opposition’ claims, and leaders were from both sides of the political aisle all across the establishment began pushing for regime change in Syria.
Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson accurately summarized the official story of the event as follows:
“Assad is an evil man, they tell us, his latest crime is a chlorine gas attack carried out over the weekend by his forces against a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. Assad’s poison gas suffocated children. Pictures of the aftermath of that are all over the internet, and they are horrifying. Assad is a monster. That’s the official story. Almost everyone in power claims to believe it. But do they really know that? Of course they don’t know that, they’re making it up! They have no real idea what happened.”
Answers and evidence would eventually come, but not enough would arrive in time to stop the inevitable western strikes on Damascus.
One week later, on April 14, the US, UK and France launched over 100 cruise missiles at Damascus in response, reportedly killing three civilians and injuring several others.
But had Assad actually carried out the attack, and what evidence had the US obtained to support this theory before launching an attack on a sovereign nation which could have easily led to all-out war? These questions were at the heart of an ongoing debate, and they would persist for many months before a clear picture of what had actually happened began to fully emerge. But evidence casting doubt on the official story began to surface almost immediately, and there were plenty of red flags visible from the get-go to anyone who was simply willing to look beyond the mainstream reporting and smear campaigns.
Officially, Syria doesn’t even have the ability to employ chemical weapons, as they were all given up and destroyed years ago. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which oversaw the months-long process announced in early 2016 that the destruction of all Syria’s declared chemical weapons had finally been completed.
And while there is certainly the possibility that Assad kept some stores of undeclared chemical agents hidden from the OPCW inspectors for future use, there is no evidence to suggest this is the case, apart from the ‘opposition’ accusations that Syrian forces continue to utilize chemical weapons in frequent attacks against Syrian civilians.
The ‘opposition’ on the other hand, not only has access to its own chemical weapons stockpiles, but is more than willing to use them; having carried out a number of chemical attacks, both before and after the Douma event, a reality which has been independently confirmed but widely ignored by the corporate media.
“We know they’ve used chlorine in the past. We know they’ve done that in the past,” Lord West, former Chief of the Naval Staff and UK Chief of Defense Intelligence explained in a BBC interview shortly after the Douma event.
In fact, “the American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons.”
As award-winning American journalist Seymour Hersh revealed in a 2014 expose, The Red Line and the Rat Line, US intelligence was well aware that al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria) was actively producing sarin and working towards developing a large network of chemical weapon stockpiles for widespread use throughout the country, and they did nothing to prevent the terrorists from achieving this goal, preferring to focus deterrent efforts on the regime instead.
On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’.
“Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future,” it warned.
In the days leading up to the Douma event, the Russian military had also repeatedly warned they had intelligence suggesting opposition forces in southern Syria, trained by US instructors at the al-Tanf military base for this purpose, were planning to stage a series of false flag chemical weapons “provocations” to be used as the pretext for western strikes on Damascus. These Russian warnings coincided with the deployment of a US naval strike group to the region, which appeared to substantiate the Russian claims and would coincidentally be used to strike Damascus following the alleged Douma attack, just as the Russians had warned.
Such claims, however – and any speculation that the alleged attack had in fact been a false flag event of some kind, staged to some degree by the ‘opposition’ forces and their affiliates in Douma – were brushed off by the mainstream media as outrageous conspiracies fueled by Russian propaganda, and Tucker Carlson. President Assad maintained Syria's innocence and pressed the international community to provide evidence of the alleged attack, while the Russians immediately pronounced that the entire “provocation” had been a staged hoax, maintaining that no chemical attack had even taken place.
A massive propaganda war ensued, and an intense media campaign to silence and discredit anyone who challenged the official narrative in any way was launched. Anyone who so much as questioned the obvious lack of a clear motive on the part of Assad was immediately labeled a 'conspiracist' peddling outrageous conspiracy theories or accused of being a Russian or Assad apologist complicit in covering up Syrian war crimes. The defamation and character assassination were vicious, and willingness to actually consider the legitimate concerns being raised was almost nonexistent.
And so it was that, without congressional approval, despite a number of serious doubts and concerns being raised, in the face of a reasonable alternative theory proposed by Russia, without waiting for the anticipated UN investigation to be launched, and despite the Russians clearly warning that if the US attacked Syria they would “target the launch platform” of any strike, Donald Trump went ahead and authorized a large military strike on a sovereign foreign nation which had neither attacked nor threatened to attack America.
Trump called Russia’s bluff, and risked starting a world war based upon unverified claims, and to top it all off, “Among the American cruise missile targets was a scientific centre in Damascus which the OPCW had itself cleared of any involvement in chemical warfare in the autumn of 2018.”
According to journalist Vanessa Beeley, who was in Damascus at the time of the US strikes, this building was actually a cancer research center.
When Donald Trump announced the US strikes on Syria on the evening of the attack, he addressed the reason why the US had taken this bold action, telling the American people that:
“One year ago, Assad launched a savage chemical weapons attack against his own innocent people,” the script read.
After blaming Assad for once again deploying “chemical weapons to slaughter innocent civilians,” Trump reiterated his first point.
“This massacre was a significant escalation in a pattern of chemical weapons use by that very terrible regime,” the President declared.
Much of the mainstream narrative depends upon these claims, and little depends upon any actual evidence implicating Assad in the Douma ‘attack’ itself.
The entire official story stands or falls on this “pattern of chemical weapons use” narrative, because without it, the entire western Douma narrative falls apart. Take away the previous attacks, and you lose 90% of the official ‘why’ behind Trump’s April airstrikes on Syria.
It wasn’t the first time that such a scenario had played out, and it seemed likely that it wouldn’t be the last. But it might just be the first time that such a large body of convincing evidence would eventually emerge to reveal the lies and propaganda used to fuel the chemical weapons narrative and to demonize Assad and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA); exposing a criminal conspiracy to pin the blame for an attack that may never have happened on Assad, without one shred of evidence he was responsible, to create the pretext for ongoing western military intervention, in a country President Donald Trump had just weeks before announced he was planning to withdraw all US troops from.
What will eventually emerge is a conspiracy of vast proportions, that spans continents, a conspiracy to suppress the truth at all costs. This is the story of the Douma conspiracy, the real one; and how sometimes the truth does eventually come out - revealing that sometimes real conspiracies do exist - and vindicating everyone who dared to question those who claim they don’t.
Doubts & Motive
There was no shortage of doubt cast upon the mainstream Douma narrative from the very outset, even among a few prominent western officials.
“The debate that seems to missing from this [discussion],” British General Jonathon Shaw pointed out in an interview on Sky News before being abruptly cut off, “is what possible motive might have triggered Syria to launch an attack at this time, in this place?“
It’s a good question, and nobody peddling the official narrative had a believable answer.
“Either Assad is the dumbest dictator on the planet earth,” US Senator Rand Paul said in a TV interview, “or he didn’t do it.”
“Because you think about it, they’ve been winning the war for over a year, the only thing that galvanizes world opposition to the regime, the only thing that gets us involved at all is the use of chemical weapons, and when you compare them to other weapons, there are many other weapons much more lethal,” the KY senator argued on Fox News in the wake of the Douma event. “What I am saying is that it doesn’t make any sense for Assad to have done this.”
It doesn’t make any sense at all for Assad, on the verge of a military victory, to gas his own people, but what would make a lot more sense is for the terrorists to stage a false flag to blame on Assad. Even top military brass in the western world recognized the obvious strategic advantage to the terrorists gained by staging such an attack to be blamed on Assad, and the ease with which they could have done so.
“I could set up a situation where I would wait until a Syrian helicopter was overhead, dropping a barrel bomb, and then set off some chlorine agent. I know I could do that. And that’s what I would do if I was one of the Islamic terrorists, because they know they’re losing at the moment,” Lord West explained. “I am concerned, and as we move forward, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if there was another gas attack, because it’s in their interest to make us respond.”
And respond we did. It isn’t the first time the western world was fed this very same unlikely story, with the very same results.
Twice in one year, you had Donald Trump announce a policy shift away from foreign intervention in Syria, and in both cases, in a matter of days you have allegations of a chemical weapons attack carried out by Assad which draws the US back into the Syrian conflict. While there was there no clear motive for Assad to order such an attack, there was a very clear motive for the warhawks in the US establishment hellbent on regime change in Syria to orchestrate such a false flag attack.
Only one man in American mainstream media was asking the relevant questions and pointing out the obvious, however, and that was Tucker Carlson.
“How would it benefit Assad using chlorine gas last weekend? Well, it wouldn’t. Assad’s forces had been winning the war in Syria. The administration just announced its plans to pull American troops out of Syria, having vanquished ISIS. That’s good new for Assad, and about the only thing he could do to reverse it and to hurt himself, would be to use poison gas against children. Well he did it anyway, they tell us. He’s that evil! Please.
“Keep in mind this is the same story they told us last April, do you remember that? It was almost exactly a year ago, the administration had announced it was no longer seeking to depose Assad from power. Regime change was no longer a policy, so the usual war chorus in Washington started yelping, went berserk, and days later Assad supposedly used sarin gas against civilians in Syria - there was video. We bombed a Syrian airbase in response to that. At the time, this show asked what seemed like the obvious question - Are we really sure Assad did that? It seems weirdly timed, and counterproductive to him. Shut up, they explained, of course we’re sure, what an unpatriotic question.
“But of course they were lying. Two months ago, the Secretary of Defense admitted that actually we still have no proof Assad used sarin gas last year. The story, it turns out, was propaganda, it was designed to manipulate Americans, just like so much of what they say.”
It is well known that two of the most important keys to making a solid case in a court of law is establishing means and motive. In this case, Assad had zero motive, and according to the available information he did not have the means, while the terrorists and their western backers demonstrably had both the motive and the means.
Who Benefits?
Cui Bueno? Who Benefits? It’s an important question which must be asked by any serious investigator. And the answer isn't difficult to see, if we are just willing to look.
Timeline for Alleged Chemical Weapons Attack in Douma, Syria
July 7, 2017: U.S., Russia Reach Deal on Cease-Fire in Syria July 25, 2017: Donald Trump Orders End to Covert CIA Ops in Syria, Democrat Tulsi Gabbard Defends Trump’s Decision April 4, 2018: White House Announces U.S. Military Mission in Syria “Coming to a Rapid End” April 7, 2018: Alleged Chemical Attack in Douma, Russia Blames Israel for Missile Strikes in Syria Post-Chemical Weapons Attack April 13, 2018: Trump Approves U.S. Military Strikes in Syria Against Assad Regime April 14, 2018: U.S., Allies “Significantly Crippled” Syrian Chemical Weapons Program
In this case, both the ‘opposition’ and various Zionist actors behind the regime change efforts in Syria benefited. For the terrorists, despite losing Douma, it was a big political win and brought about a small military ‘victory’. The weapons manufacturers whose missiles were fired at Damascus benefited. Those opposing Trump’s plan to withdraw forces from Syria and seeking regime change in Syria benefited. About the only party involved in the event who didn’t benefit from the alleged chemical attack was President Assad himself and the Syrian state.
While determining motive and benefit alone doesn’t solve our case, it does provide substantial evidence suggesting that Assad was not the most likely culprit; and that alone should have necessitated that western officials pointing their fingers at him provide concrete evidence for their claims before carrying out an attack on a sovereign nation. But that is not how things went down; instead they went down just like they had gone down one year before, and this rush to ‘punish’ Assad before any real investigation was carried out looks to be all by design.
History Repeating?
“We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.” - Tucker Carlson
Indeed, one year before, in the heat of very much the same media frenzy following almost identical allegations of a gas attack on April 4 in Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib province of northern Syria, there were much the same doubts, much the same questions being asked, and much the same rush to judgment without as much as a single piece of credible evidence being produced to support the official narrative.
US Representative Thomas Massey raised serious doubts about the official narrative in a CNN interview, immediately following the alleged chemical attack of April 4, 2017.
“Frankly I don’t think Assad would have done that, it does not serve his interests, it would tend to draw us into that civil war even further,” the congressman explained.
“Donald Trump’s decision to launch cruise missile strikes on a Syrian Air Force Base was based on a lie,” former DIA Col. Patrick LANG said on April 7, 2018, exactly one year prior to the alleged Douma attack. “In the coming days the American people will learn that the Intelligence Community knew that Syria did not drop a military chemical weapon on innocent civilians in Idlib.”
The official narrative was that there had been a sarin gas attack carried out by Assad, but that was realistically impossible, considering numerous ‘first responders’ (White Helmets) handled the ‘victims’, and survived. Skin contact with sarin gas, on the other hand, would be deadly.
According to the Russian side, the event had been caused by a Syrian airstrike targeting a terrorist ammo depot which apparently housed some of their poison gas stores, and ended up releasing the chemicals (not sarin) into the air and causing the deaths and injuries among those said to be victims of a sarin attack.
“Apparently the intelligence on this is very clear,” former CIA officer Philip Giraldi said, citing sources on the ground “intimately familiar with the intelligence,” who described the official narrative as a “sham.”
And as for the White House report alleging proof of Syria as the perpetrator of the alleged sarin gas attack on April 4, 2017, a scathing “Assessment of the White House Intelligence Report” was issued just days later on April 11, 2017 by Theodore A. Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy; in which it was found that the evidence provided in the White Ho