Scott Ritter examines OPCW report on claimed Sarin attack at Khan Sheikhun and finds large discrepancies.
It turns out that both HRW and the OPCW relied on the purported 'NGO' called the White Helmets to provide samples, descriptions, photographs as well as witnesses to the event. Neither agency had their own investigative teams on the ground where the supposed attack actually occurred. Wholly depending on parties that have an invested interest in convicting the Syrian government goes against all norms of jurisprudence.
It is in this light that Scott Ritter looks at the claims being made of the purported Sarin bombing at Khan Sheikhun. What we discover is that the OPCW report rests almost entirely on evidence and testimony given by the White Helmets.
Ex-Weapons Inspector: Trump’s Sarin Claims Built on ‘Lie’
By Scott Ritter • June 29, 2017
...
The search for truth is as old as civilization. Philosophers throughout the ages have struggled with the difficulties of rationalizing the beginning of existence, and the relationships between the one and the many. Aristotle approached this challenge through what he called the development of potentiality to actuality, which examined truth in terms of the causes that act on things.
...
According to Aristotle, there were four causes that needed to be examined in the search for truth — material, efficient, formal and final. The material cause represents the element out of which an object is created. In terms of the present discussion, one could speak of the material cause in terms of the actual chemical weapon alleged to have been used at Khan Sheikhun. The odd thing about both the Khan Sheikhun attack and the current White House statements, however, is that no one has produced any physical evidence of there actually having been a chemical weapon, let alone what kind of weapon was allegedly employed. Like a prosecutor trying a murder case without producing the actual murder weapon, Syria’s accusers have assembled a case that is purely circumstantial — plenty of dead and dying victims, but nothing that links these victims to an actual physical object.
...
Continuing along the lines of Aristotle’s exploration of the relationship between the potential and actual, the efficient cause represents the means by which the object is created. In the context of Khan Shiekhun, the issue (i.e., object) isn’t the physical weapon itself, but rather its manifestation on the ground in terms of cause and effect.
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Having defined the creation of the object (the non-existent chemical weapon) and the means by which it was created (the flawed theatrics of the White Helmets), we move on to the third, or formal cause, which constitutes the expression of what the object is. In the case of Khan Sheikhun, this is best expressed by the results of forensic testing of samples allegedly taken from victims of the chemical attack, and from the scene of the attack itself.
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Lastly, there is Aristotle’s final cause, which represents the end for which the object is—namely, what was the ultimate purpose of the chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhun. To answer this question, one must remain consistent with the framework of examination of potential to actuality applied herein. In this, we find a commonality between the four causes whose linkage cannot be ignored when assessing the truth of what happened at Khan Sheikhun, namely the presence of a single entity—the White Helmets.There are two distinct narratives at play when it comes to what happened in Khan Sheikhun. One, put forward by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, and supported by the likes of Bellingcat and the White Helmets, is that the Syrian government conducted a chemical weapons attack using a single air-delivered bomb on a civilian target. The other, put forward by the governments of Russia and Syria, and sustained by the reporting of Seymour Hersh, is that the Syrian air force used conventional bombs to strike a military target, inadvertently releasing a toxic cloud from substances stored at that facility and killing or injuring civilians in Khan Sheikhun. There can be no doubt that the very survival of the White Helmets as an organization, and the cause they support (i.e., regime change in Syria), has been furthered by the narrative they have helped craft and sell about the events of April 4 in and around Khan Sheikhun. This is the living manifestation of Aristotle’s final cause, the end for which this entire lie has been constructed.
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It is up to the discerning public to determine which narrative about the events in Syria today they will seek to embrace—one supported by a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist who has made a career out of exposing inconvenient truths, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib and beyond, or one that collapses under Aristotle’s development of potentiality to actuality analysis, as the manufactured story line promoted by the White Helmets demonstratively does.
Comments
Postel and Hersch and now Ritter
Good to see people coming around to those lies.
Edit: oops 'sch'
I want a Pony!
They may have stopped an escalation of the war.
Hersh's story nipped Trump's "Syria's planning another gas attack" gambit in the bud and likely stopped a civilian-killing US bombing rampage.
Hersch's story certainly helped,
but I think a significant segment of the US public is getting wise to the various and repeated false flag operations of the USG. The professional "opinion leaders" so beloved of the msm no longer lead nearly as much opinion as they once did. Every time they "cry wolf" and are proven to have been wrong, they lose that much more credibility. At least, among people who pay any attention to such things.
native
I've noticed that WaPo's online reporting is getting pushback
from readers. The comments section is almost totally filled with readers calling "bullshit". British and Canadian MSM websites are similar. Some of the sites are deleting or shutting down the comments sections.
Yep, I'm not surprised to hear that.
native
No comments allowed
is a sure sign of a disinformation rag.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
Beyond a reasonable doubt?
Hardly. As far as I can see, they haven't even demonstrated a likelihood of Syria's culpability. Any evidence provided by the "White Helmets" should have been ruled inadmissible from the get-go -- that outfit has been caught red-handed fabricating evidence more than once, and clearly they've been acting as an arm of British intelligence. All "evidence" that has been touched by them would have been deemed "contaminated" by any truly objective court.
native
But, but, but the White Helmets won an Oscar!
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/02/helmets-bags-oscar-documentary-170...
Entertainment industry folks’ political judgment is so lacking and/or dishonestly one-sided these days, any endorsements from them just make me wonder all the more if the people and things they oppose aren’t perhaps right about some things.
They deserve their Oscar,
for selling the biggest news hoax of the year to the US media and most of Hollywood. Though I do suppose they had some high-level help doing it. Hollywood celebrities aren't always as brilliant as they like to think they are.
native
@lotlizard
For their convincing acting or special effects? Can't be for the script... they didn't even have the right costuming. Brings to mind those old SF movies where people go out into space with no helmets, maybe little hospital oxygen tubes under their noses or just holding their breath or whatever.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
The one consistency of the White Helmets is that they keep
their Helmets and uniforms immaculate despite digging through the rubble. They must be driving the wardrobe department mad.
@CB
Maybe that famed Clinton Teflon applies to them, so that no matter how filthy they are, it never shows on them, just in a portrait gallery in an attic somewhere?
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
I have developed the ability to analyze reports and
news articles without reading them. My bullshit detector has been fine tuned to the point where all I have to read is the headline and who wrote it to be able to immediately ascertain the validity of its contents. I could have saved Ritter some time.
Yes, I have been contacted by Ripley's.
More information concerning OPCW
Recent OPCW also did not address questions previously posed by Russian OPCW rep. The decision to blame the Syrian government was already made by Apr 8, 2017, prior to any investigation. OPCW has consistently refused invites to send inspectors into Syria.
Great article by Ritter in detail and knowledge
Remember when Russia launched a bunch of cruise missiles into Syria. The MSM went into propaganda mode immediately making claims that some of the cruise missiles landed in Iran. The aim of the charges looked to be marginalize as incompetent the Russian military. Not much afterward Ritter wrote an detailed article about US cruise missiles. He said the US loses 15% of its cruise missiles: they don't leave the ship, they go off course, etc. I think it may been in the second Iraq war that Saudi Arabia removed permission for the cruise missiles to cross SA because a number of them simply fell out of the sky.
The non-sophisticated Russian weaponry is sort of a secondary propaganda theme. The Russians indiscriminately bomb areas as they lack guided bombs and missiles. Thus randomly killing civilians and destroying hospitals. I read almost by accident a little published report by NATO assessing Russian targeting in Syria, and it came to the conclusion that they are quite good.
The majority of the bombs the US has used were also unguided
In any event, dumb or guided bombs are only as good as the intelligence.
How often in the past century have innocents in foreign nations been exposed to American bombing in the name of "freedom" and "democracy"? Yes, I blame the US and its allies for these. For whomever starts a chain of events is responsible for the horrors that eventually result from them. There is a clear link right back to Zbigniew Brzezinski's comments to the Afghani Mujahideen in 1979: "Your cause is right and God is on your side!"
Any analysis must be prefaced by the reality
...that the chemical weapon attack near Damascus in 2013, which precipitated Russia removing all of Syria's chemical weapons and handing them over to the US for destruction (one might hope) — turned out to be a false flag attack that was initially blamed on the Syrian government. In both cases, the first and now the latest — the Syrian government had nothing to gain and everything to lose by initiating either attack.
Only by assimilating these relevant facts first can one proceed to arrive at a credible view using only circumstantial evidence. As for the White Helmets, keep in mind that the people promoting them as credible are the very same people who cajoled us to believe that the so-called US "consulate" in Benghazi was attacked by Libyan citizens who were angry over a video preview about a docudrama about Islam. That turned out to be a lie.
These are the only "facts."
Cui bono is an excellent filter to first apply when searching
for the truth.
In the case of the Sarin attacks there were other red flags. The targets had little to no military value, the victims were mostly non-combatants with a large percentage of women and children and the delivery of a poor quality, relatively ineffective CW was crude and haphazard.
The only gain from these operations was their high propaganda value for dissemination by the MSM. In this respect, they were highly effective.
You have to ask yourself,
why does Seymour Hersh sound credible and the White Helmets sound not credible? I'm not sure I can answer that question in simple terms, but here is Hersh in an interview about the attack with information beyond what we're supposed to focus on:
So, not only is our military coordinating with the Russians against extremist forces, but Russia knows our CIA may have assets within the leadership of extremist forces. And CIA knows Russia knows.
One could wonder if the CIA notified the White Helmets
of the pending attack. Al Nusra always embeds itself within the civilian population for protection. This is standard OP (operating procedure) for asymmetrical warfare. It is one of the reasons we see so many schools and hospitals destroyed in these conflicts.
In case anyone here doesn't know, the CW nerve agents are closely related to pesticides.
Here's an interesting report by the NYT when the paper was not a propaganda mouthpiece for the Deep State.
Within a day of the chemical attack
…it was reported that the head of the White Helmets there (who may be a medic) just received a shipment of several gas masks. This from the delivery person. In the aftermath, gas masks were used in the "official" videos that were released. In concurrent candid shots, that was not always the case. Everything they touch is filled with contradictions.
My view is that the White Helmets do help out, but they are also focused on ginning up the war through staged propaganda.
I'm going with Vanessa Beeley's assessment
@Pluto's Republic
Obviously, you'll know way more than I about all this, but going by what I've read, it seems that, outside of photo ops, they mostly aid
terrorists'moderate rebels'.Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Part of why
I find Seymour Hersh credible and the Clapper mouthpieces not credible is that Hersh's un-named military and intelligence sources reveal information that would lead to the end of the war, while Clapper's information always implies that the war must expand, become worse, and endure forever, which translates as big, bigger, and ever-expanding money for the the war machine.
One of them is lying to me. One set of military and intelligence sources is lying to me. So I have to ask, which one acts for the military industrial murderers who benefit from the lies?