This is a major and massive embarrassment for POTUS Trump.

Tucker Carlson interviews Peter Ford, a retired British diplomat who was ambassador to Bahrain from 1999-2003 and to Syria.

Ford references recent facts as reported by The Duran, detailing how western journalists on the ground in Douma, Syria have seen zero indication of any type of chemical attack taking place. See here and here.

A BBC interview is making the rounds today among opponents of western interventionism in Syria. The subject of the interview, Admiral Alan West, voiced some much needed skepticism about the establishment narrative around the alleged gas attack in Douma. Everybody's talking about it because West is an empire loyalist that nobody in their right mind would accuse of being an "Assad apologist" or "useful idiot of the Kremlin", as anyone else who doesn't swallow the official story hook, line and sinker is uniformly labeled.

West made some sensible comments about the White Helmets and the fact that Jaysh al-Islam had far more incentive to stage such an attack than Assad had to perpetrate it. Even more helpful was his personal account of having been aggressively pressured to make false reports about the success of the British bombing campaign in Bosnia, suggesting that those pressures can lead to bad intelligence and erroneous military responses.

"I just wonder, you know we've had some bad experiences on intelligence," West said. "When I was chief of defense intelligence, I had huge pressure put on me politically to try and say that our bombing campaign in Bosnia was achieving all sorts of things which it wasn't. I was put under huge pressure, so I know the things that can happen with intelligence."

So that's a very significant addition to the dialogue. For me, though, the most interesting comments made in that interview came not from West, but from the BBC reporter who was interviewing him.

Over the weekend, the United States led a coordinated attack - along with French and British forces - on the sovereign country of Syria. Western nations have ganged up on and attacked this sovereign state, launching countless missiles, hitting civilian targets, and, all of it was based on alleged crimes for which they had no evidence.

After the strikes Friday night, the French and British governments released the supposed evidence they had to justify the act of war carried out by allied nations in Syria. The reports admitted to not having any actual intelligence and the "evidence" was based on "open source" information widely available on the internet.

These open source accounts were little more than videos and testimonies from groups such as the White Helmets - who have been known to create fake videos, support terrorists, and much more.

Analysis from Russian news agency has quite a different perspective on US and the Syrian strike than the Western Mainstream wish to portray

Syria is still largely at the center of the geopolitical news focus. As in all military conflicts, the powers involved are each involved in their own version of "we won." In an analysis piece written by Victor Marakhovsky of RIA Novosti, the stance is that Russia won this event without so much as firing a shot. He then goes on to detail why he says what he says.

The newspiece is a translation and reinterpretation of the original piece which can be found here. We have tried to preserve the meaning of the original piece while framing it well in the English language. The Duran wishes to express its grateful acknowlegement to Victor Marakhovsky and RIA Novosti for its original report.

by Victor Marakhovsky, political scientist, about the US strategy in Syria

The formal results of a decisive attack by Western countries on Syria were summed up. Russia made a motion, proposing that the UN Security Council condemn the attack. Three permanent members of the Security Council who all participated in the attack were against this motion, so the resolution was not adopted.

In terms of raw facts concerning the attack, the figures are generally established:

• 103 rockets were launched. This is confirmed to be true.
• US President D. Trump promised that the missiles would be "new and clever", but most of the incoming missiles turned out to be the rather elderly "Tomahawks". While on approach to all three strategically important facilities, they were shot down by the rather elderly Syrian air defense systems that had been developed in the Soviet Union specifically for the purpose of fighting the Tomahawks.
• The British released eight Scalp (Storm Shadow) rockets, but, as proudly noted in the BBC, "each was five meters in length." In addition they are newer, developed only twenty years ago.
• The history with the French remains unclear: according to the leadership of France, they also released eight Storm Shadow missiles from their fighter planes and three from their ships.
• However, the Russian military cynically point out that there were no French "Rafale" aircraft spotted in the skies. So it is possible that these allies of the United States received credit for participation only to maintain the spirit of unity of these three countries.

The US, Britain and France trampled international law to launch missiles against Syria, claiming to have "evidence" of the government's use of chemical weapons. That evidence is based on terrorist lies.

After a week of outrageous tweets and proclamations by POTUS Trump, which included continued accusations that Syria's president ordered a chemical weapons attack on civilians in Douma, east of Damascus, with Trump using grotesque and juvenile terminology, such as "animal Assad," the very evening before chemical weapons inspectors of the OPCW were to visit Douma, America and allies launched illegal bombings against Syria. The illegal bombings included 103 missiles, 71 of which Russia states were intercepted.

For the past week, we were told that the US had 'evidence' and the UK had 'evidence' that Syria had used chemicals. The 'evidence' largely relied on video clips and photos shared on social media, provided by the Western-funded White Helmets (that "rescuer" group that somehow only operates in Al-Qaeda and co-terrorist occupied areas and participates in torture and executions), as well as by Yaser al-Doumani, a man whose allegiance to Jaysh al-Islam is clear from his own Facebook posts, for example of former Jaysh al-Islam leader, Zahran Alloush.

Lavrov to BBC: The Douma event was staged and it did not involve any chemical weapons. The irrefutable proof is in the visiting of the place.

Why do so many people in politics and the media want to start wars? Since I toured a sordid hospital full of wounded people in Bucharest at Christmas 1989, and even more after I saw for the first time (in Vilnius in 1991) what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, I have seen it as an absolute duty to warn against armed conflict. It is a filthy thing.

No doubt there are times when we must fight. But there are plenty more when we should not.

Any fool can kill a man in a second and ruin a city in a week. But it takes long years of nurture to raise a child to adulthood, and centuries to build a civilisation.

Yet I look around me and see the mouths of intelligent people opened wide, yelling for an attack on Syria, when the only certain outcome of that will be blood and screams and ruins, and the deaths of innocents in 'collateral damage'. What good will this do?

What is wrong with them? They are not cruel and stupid, yet they call for actions which are both.

UK broadcaster Sky News cut short Major-General Jonathan Shaw, formerly one the British Army's most senior officers, in mid-sentence, as he cast doubt on London's narrative on the alleged Syrian government gas attack in Douma.

News presenter Samantha Washington asked Shaw a narrowly-worded question, asking if Russian denials about the government's responsibility would mean it's necessary for any UK intervention in Syria to be approved by parliament.

But Shaw, who retired in 2012 to become a security expert, wanted to take the discussion back a step.

What could possibly go wrong? (Strong language)

Fuck Democracy...

Fuck Parliament...

Fuck Congressional approval...

Let's just declare war by tweets.

The military also discovered rockets of the kind previously used by Ghouta militants to indiscriminately shell Damascus.
A Syrian Army field commander speaking to the Syrian Arab News Agency said that the ammo depots were found in the town of Zamalka, about 3.5 km northeast of central Damascus.

According to the commander, the Islamist Al-Rahman Legion militant group controlling the town effectively turned one of its neighborhoods into a network of factories and depots manufacturing and storing shells and the accompanying explosives, and turning spent tank shells into improvised explosive devices. These makeshift weapons production and storage facilities were all linked by a tunnel network.

Some of the explosive materials were Saudi-made, the commander said. Along with the explosives was equipment for mixing them with C4 or chlorine to increase the destructive power of the artillery shells which militants would lob into the capital's residential neighborhoods.