The Syria Thread 2011 - Present

[American Dream]

I'm going to stop now- getting too emotional.

[MacCruiskeen]

American Dream, you didn't answer a single one of Elvis's very polite and highly pertinent questions. It's obvious why not.

You regurgitate this warmongering imperialist propaganda and then deny all responsibility for having done so. When pressed to explain yourself, you just slither slimily out of the thread.

I'm going to stop now- getting too emotional.

Just ridiculous. You are so transparently phoney.

[Rory]

I'm going to stop now- getting too emotional.

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2017/ ... yrian.html

Amnesty International's report lacked any actual evidence, with its presentation consisting instead of admittedly fabricated images, sounds, maps, and diagrams. Amnesty - lacking actual evidence - instead abused its reputation and the techniques of classical deception to target and manipulate audiences emotionally. What Amnesty International is engaged in is not "human rights advocacy," but rather politically-motivated war propaganda simply hiding behind such advocacy.

Exposing this technique of openly and shamelessly fabricating the summation of an internationally released report - promoted unquestioningly by prominent Western papers and media platforms, including the BBC, CNN, the Independent, and others - prevents Amnesty and other organizations like it from continuing to use the trappings of science and engineering as cover to deliver monstrous lies to the public.

It's great to see formerly treasured institutions being discredited, having become vectors for transparent and risible propaganda

[MacCruiskeen]

In a 13-part Twitter thread, Club des Cordeliers dismantles the Amnesty/Disney/NATO propaganda report:

1. @amnesty alleges 5000-13,000 "mass hangings" in Syria's Saydnaya Prison. Scrutiny of report reveals the number is pulled out of thin air.

https://twitter.com/cordeliers/status/8 ... 0492253184

[kool maudit]

Yes- his comments do not warrant direct response. I believe that a thinking human being can and should read critically and it should not be assumed that any and all articles represent my exact opinions- a logical impossibility anyway, since they sometimes/often take opposing positions.

Slippery, evasive, and suffused with high dudgeon.

Classic.

[Sounder]

AD wrote...
I'm going to stop now- getting too emotional.

Mac wrote...
Just ridiculous. You are so transparently phoney.

I disagree Mac, my bet is that AD is both sincere and emotionally upset by the callous disregard shown here toward the crimes of Assad.

However, it is likely there is some cognitive dissonance responsible for some of the upset.

I have a lot of friends like AD, good folk, but it is pretty hard to make them understand that our constant prescriptions (and sanctions) to make 'foreign' governments comply to 'proper' values is western exceptionalism.

That is, in a word: racism.

Subconsciously AD knows we westerners have no standing to impose our system on all non-compliant nations. The dissonance is the price we white boy westerners have to pay for the chance at saving the world.

[Elvis]

I'm going to stop now- getting too emotional.

I'm sorry my questions upset you so much that you can't muster any answers.


I can only take your reply to mean "no" you haven't read the report, "yes" you accept it uncritically anyway, and "yes" you're fine with the media repeating the grossly inflated and inflammatory 13,000 figure.

If I'm mistaken, feel free to correct my impressions after you've collected yourself.

[seemslikeadream]

Has Amy Goodman issued a retraction yet?

I just sent an email to Democracy Now about it

[conniption]

Assad tells Belgian reporter Belgium & EU merely obey 'US master' on Syria – English Subtitles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZEG8lPYFZk
Middle East Observer

Published on Feb 9, 2017

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently told Belgian media that their country and the EU merely obey 'the American master' when it comes to Syria and political decision-making in general.

Assad answered a range of other questions, the transcript for which can be found in the link below.
Source: Syrian Arab News Agency
Date: 7 February, 2017
Transcript for full interview can be found on our official website here:
http://middleeastobserver.net/video-a...

[American Dream]

Inside Bashar Assad's torture chambers

The story behind the photos begins in March 2011, when Arab Spring protests against the Assad government swept through Syria. As the military began rounding up suspected dissidents, Caesar — a military police officer — was assigned to lead a team of 11 photographers whose job it was to document the deaths of detainees brought to a military hospital from three detention centers around Damascus.

But by the summer of 2013, Caesar has told investigators, he was so sickened by what he was seeing that he made contact with Syrian rebels. "I can't do this anymore," he told them, according to David Crane, a former war-crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone who spent hours interviewing Caesar as part of a separate review of the photos commissioned by the government of Qatar.

Caesar began smuggling his photos to the rebels, providing them with thumb drives concealed in his shoes, Crane said. To protect his family, Caesar faked his death, staging an elaborate funeral, before he escaped from Syria in August 2013. He is now in hiding in Europe.

The photos, according to Crane, document "an industrial killing machine not seen since the Holocaust." They show corpses, some of them lined up in a warehouse, many appearing to be victims of starvation, their ribs protruding from emaciated bodies.

Some show men whose eyes were gouged out; others had bruises and lacerations consistent with beatings and in some cases strangulation, according to a report that Crane co-wrote about the photos released in January.

Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who had called Caesar as a witness at the closed-door hearing in July, said that when he first saw the photos he thought of his father. As a member of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, “my father had taken photos at Dachau when it was liberated, of the bodies stacked up at the ovens. This is eerily reminiscent. It's absolutely appalling.”

What's also noteworthy about the photos, according to Crane, was the methodical nature of the enterprise: Each photo includes tags with numbers and letters that identify each of the victims as well as the detention center where they were imprisoned. One purpose: so military officials who ordered their deaths could have proof "their orders were carried out," said Crane.

View at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/bashar-al-as ... soc_trk=ma

[Elvis]

The photos, according to Crane, document "an industrial killing machine not seen since the Holocaust."

I looked at the photos and they could be from anywhere. But they don't look as if they were taken in a prison, they look like they were taken in a battlefield. The captions claim that the documents in the photos say which Syrian government agency arrested and killed the victim, but the papers are blurred out. The victims' faces are blurred. The "photographer" is anonymous. How convenient.

The Syrian government has officially denounced the photos as fakes and suggested many of the corpses seen are actually of militants who died in battle.

— that's what they look like to me.

Time will probably reveal that these photos are not from the prison, but from another place and time, just like all the other recycled photos the U.S. propaganda machine uses to push its agenda. "Smoking gun" my ass!

[Nordic]

Sounder:

I disagree Mac, my bet is that AD is both sincere and emotionally upset by the callous disregard shown here toward the crimes of Assad.

You left out a few words it seems. Something like "what he believes to be the crimes of Assad even though there is no evidence for them."

[American Dream]

Exclusive: Assad is confronted with photos of his torture victims

[Sounder]

Sounder:

I disagree Mac, my bet is that AD is both sincere and emotionally upset by the callous disregard shown here toward the crimes of Assad.

Nordic wrote...
You left out a few words it seems. Something like "what he believes to be the crimes of Assad even though there is no evidence for them."

While this may be an example of a typical self-discrediting media snow job, there is no doubt that Assad has committed 'crimes' such as this in the past. However they pale in comparison to the crimes committed by western powers and proxies in their imposing of suffering on all Syrian citizens.

(You know, all Syrians as distinguished from the jihadists that intend to establish a caliphate. These are fair game, remember these were the nice people that killed the 'first wave' of revolutionaries who were too idealistic for survival purposes.)

Western powers cannot talk of morality, it only makes them sound like fools.

[American Dream]

“A wealth of evidence”

Assad used chemical weapons on civilians in effort to retake Aleppo, new reports say

By David Gilbert on Feb 13, 2017

After a week of forcefully denying allegations his regime conducted strategic executions of 13,000 prisoners in a military prison outside Damascus over a four-year period, Syrian President Bashar Assad faces two new damning reports that document atrocities carried out by his government and its ally, Russia, in their final push to retake Aleppo from rebels in late 2016. The reports detail a coordinated use of chemical weapons by Assad’s regime and present evidence that Russian warplanes dropped bombs on civilian hospitals in Eastern Aleppo.

The first report, entitled “Breaking Aleppo,” which details the scale of the atrocities inflicted on the city, directly accused the Russian government of bombing civilian locations, including hospitals, which it had previously denied ever happened. Bombing such locations are seen as a violation of international humanitarian law.

Produced by the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, the report used satellite imagery, security camera videos, and social media accounts to reconstruct attacks against civilian hospitals in rebel-held areas of the city, dispelling accounts by Moscow last year that it had not bombed those locations.

“What we have been able to present now is a wealth of evidence confirming the targeting of civilian structures, namely hospitals, which in certain cases has been denied by the Russian Ministry of Defense,” Eliot Higgins, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, said.



https://youtu.be/3CJ-KKLzyBU

The second report, published by Human Rights Watch, documents eight separate attacks by government forces involving the use of chlorine gas in rebel-held areas of Aleppo. All eight attacks took place between November 17 and December 13, as government forces, backed by Russian aircraft, pushed to recapture the key Syrian city. HRW says there were likely many more times when chemical weapons were used during the battle, but it documented only those for which it has evidence.

The eight attacks resulted in the death of at least nine civilians, including four children, as well as 200 injured.

Proof of the use of chemical weapons would amount to the most egregious breach of international laws yet by the Assad regime, already accused of multiple atrocities throughout its years-long civil war. Just three years ago Assad signed an international treaty that prohibits the use of such weapons.

This is not the first time Assad’s regime has been accused of using chemical weapons since agreeing in 2013 to relinquish the country’s chemical weapons stockpile. A U.N. panel concluded last year that the Syrian government had used chlorine canisters as weapons three times in 2014 and 2015 as the war with rebels waged on. Last August doctors warned that the frequent use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war risked “normalizing war crimes.” The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention bans the use of the toxic properties of any chemical as a weapon.

“The pattern of the chlorine attacks shows that they were coordinated with the overall military strategy for retaking Aleppo, not the work of a few rogue elements,” Ole Solvang, deputy emergencies director at HRW, said in a statement. “The United Nations Security Council shouldn’t let Syrian authorities or anyone else who has used chemical weapons get away without consequences.”

This is how one Aleppo resident described the impact of chlorine: “The smell isn’t something you can handle. The moment you’re exposed to it, your throat burns, it’s like a fire rod going in. It won’t let you swallow or breathe. Your neck starts boiling. You feel nauseated. Your eyes burn and you are not able to control the tears. Eventually, you are not able to breathe. It’s not like having your nose and mouth blocked; rather, your body won’t let the air in anymore.

There have been calls for those conducting atrocities in Syria to be held accountable at the International Criminal Court, but considering a similar report from HRW was released over three years ago, also accusing the Syrian government of using chemical weapons, it is clear that bringing those responsible to justice is no simple task. Both China and Russia have blocked U.N. resolutions to refer Syrian atrocities to the ICC, and Assad has consistently denied use of chemical weapons, saying the evidence was fabricated.

Last month, in one of his last acts as president, Barack Obama tightened sanctions against Syria as a result of the U.N. findings. Obama had said in 2012 that the use of chemical weapons would be the “red line” which, if crossed, would lead to U.S. military intervention in the conflict. But when it was shown that sarin gas had been used by Assad’s regime in 2013, Obama failed to follow through on his promise.

While there is no evidence that Russia was directly involved in the use of chemical weapons in Aleppo, it was still complicit in the attacks, HRW contends. A report by the U.N.-appointed Joint Investigative Mechanism previously found that helicopters used in the chlorine attacks were operating from the Hmeymim airbase, which was under Russian control.

On February 20, peace talks are due to be held in Geneva between the warring parties.

https://news.vice.com/story/assad-used- ... eports-say