A 'regime of silence' was introduced this weekend in the Syrian province of Latakia and the city of Damascus. This comes after 5 years of constant warfare, 7 months of Russian military assistance, and 2 months of a relatively successful cessation of hostilities. The Syrian Army has liberated hundreds of towns and villages in the past several months, and dozens have agreed to the ceasefire. The historic city of Palmyra has been liberated. But Turkey and Saudi Arabia continue to support terrorism in the country and block a political settlement. The so-called moderate opposition and their U.S. backers blame Syria and Russia for ceasefire violations. Syria and Russia blame Jabhat al-Nusra and Jaish al-Islam. An MSF hospital was shelled in Aleppo, and the blame-game continues.

Joining us for this episode of Behind the Headlines is Professor Tim Anderson, author of The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance, to clarify what's really going on and to cut through the propaganda of recent events. Dr. Anderson was recently in Syria to observe the parliamentary elections. In today's show, he discussed his visit, his research, and his book on the Syrian war.

Following the interview, Joe and Niall joined us to talk about the U.S. State Department insanity and current events, and Brent gave his weekly Police State Round-up. Behind the Headlines is brought to you by the SOTT Radio Network and SOTT, your one-stop source for independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events.

Live on Sundays at 12 pm Eastern.

Running Time: 01:57:13

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Here's the transcript of the show:

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books ("Whose Sarin?" and "The Red Line and the Rat Line") has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria's Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn't come from Assad's stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the U.S. could invade and overthrow Assad. "By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi's arsenals into Syria." Hersh didn't say whether these "arms" included the precursor chemicals for making sarin which were stockpiled in Libya, but there have been multiple independent reports that Libya's Gaddafi possessed such stockpiles, and also that the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi Libya was operating a "rat line" for Gaddafi's captured weapons into Syria through Turkey.

So, Hersh isn't the only reporter who has been covering this. Indeed, the investigative journalist Christof Lehmann headlined on 7 October 2013, "Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria" and reported, on the basis of very different sources than Hersh used, that "Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry." And, as if that weren't enough, even the definitive analysis of the evidence that was performed by two leading U.S. analysts, the Lloyd-Postal report, concluded that, "The US Government's Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT." Obama has clearly been lying.

A flood of uncontrolled war refugees from Syria, Libya, Tunisia and other Islamic countries destabilized by Washington's 'Arab Spring' Color Revolutions, has created the greatest social dislocation across the EU from Germany to Sweden to Croatia since the end of World War II. By now it has become clear to most that something quite sinister is afoot, something which threatens to destroy the social fabric of the very core of European civilization. What few realize is that the entire drama is being orchestrated, not by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or by faceless EU bureaucrats of the Brussels EU Commission. It is being orchestrated by a cabal of NATO-linked think tanks.

Last October 8, 2015 amid the great stream of hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into Germany from Syria, Tunisia, Libya and other lands, a newly self-confident German Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed on a popular German TV program, "I have a plan." She took the occasion to take a sharp dig at coalition partner, Bavarian CSU head, Horst Seehofer, a staunch critic of Merkel's open arms refugee position since spring 2015 that saw more than one million refugees enter Germany last year alone.

Since that point, with iron-hard resolve, the German Chancellor has defended the criminal Erdogan regime in Turkey, an essential partner in her "plan."

Argentina's prominent human rights activist Adolfo Perez Esquivel condemned a "veiled coup d'etat" in Brazil and warned Brazilian senators about the possible aftermaths with other Latin American countries, as he gave a speech during the plenary session Thursday.

"This is a soft coup as we call it here," he told senators, recalling that "similar methods" took down governments in Honduras and Paraguay in the past decade.

He warned that an interim government led by Vice-President Michel Temer could also have a negative impact on Brazil's relation with regional organizations like the Union of South American Nations and the Common Market of the South.

Opposition senators asked the stenographers to remove his speech, visibly outraged by Esquivel's words.

The senators will decide during the second week of May whether to approve the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.

"I hope that the best will come out of this chamber, for the sake of democracy and the lives of the Brazilian people," he added.

The Pentagon's plan to send additional troops to the aid of what it calls moderate forces in Syria proves that Washington is bent on toppling the country's secular government, a member of the French parliament's national defense commission told Sputnik on Friday.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the uncalled-for buildup of US forces in Syria. The Russian top diplomat said that the US-led coalition's actions in Syria were illegal as entering a country without consent from its legitimate authorities was a "big mistake."

"The Americans didn't ask an authorization from the Syrian authorities because they want to overthrow the regime but also they are trying to maintain a few of so-called moderate Islamist groups in the region," Nicolas Dhuicq, a lawmaker at the lower house National Assembly, said.

Dhuicq, who sits on the Assembly's National Defense and Armed Forces Commission, told Sputnik that Washington appeared to be aiming for dividing the Middle East along ethnic and religious lines to then overthrow secular governments in the region to replace them with purportedly "moderate" Islamists.

On Monday, US President Barack Obama said he would send 250 US personnel to Syria, in addition to 50 special operations forces already on the ground, to help locals in their fight against Daesh, a jihadist group banned in Russia and some other states.

Two car bomb explosions in the southern Iraqi town of Samawa have claimed the lives of at least 32 civilians and injured 75 more, reports Reuters citing local police. Islamic State (IS, former ISIS/ISIL) has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The initial explosion took place close to a governmental building and the second one went off some 60 meters away, at a bus station, police told Reuters.

The blasts caused fire and thick pillars of smoke to rise from the scene. Firefighting teams arrived to extinguish flames engulfing destroyed vehicles.

Russia's rising rivalry as China's top crude oil supplier in March has forced the Saudis to do something they've never done before - to sell a crude oil cargo to an independent Chinese refinery, its first spot sale to this type of buyer in a sign that the world's biggest oil exporter is trying to regain lost market share.

State-owned Saudi Aramco, the world's biggest oil exporter, this month sold 730,000 barrels of crude to an independent Chinese refinery Shandong Chambroad Petrochemicals, one of about 20 independent refineries in China nicknamed "teapots," according to Reuters.

This is Aramco's first spot sale to a teapot. The company typically sells its crude through contracts of one year or longer, and under an Official Selling Price (OSP), rather than in spot trades.

In the aftermath of thousands of Yemeni civilians' deaths at the hands of the Saudi-led coalition, Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh told RT that there is no difference between the "Saudi regime" and terror groups like Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.

"A plot has been made against the Yemeni people. An unreasonable aggression against us has been prepared. Strikes at military, economic, cultural and social targets have been conducted, the whole infrastructure [has been targeted]. A total destruction of everything is taking place... I'm talking about Saudi aggression," Ali Abdullah Saleh told RT Arabic in an exclusive interview this week.

The former Yemeni president, who headed the Middle Eastern country for decades until February 2012, said that his nation has no conflict with any country in the world, but Saudi Arabia.

"They attacked us, we didn't attack them. They are killing our women, our elderly and children. Why? We've never had any religious disputes. Why have they appeared now? We have our religious views, you have yours. Why are you [Saudis] killing the Yemeni people, who are your neighbors and brothers?" Saleh said.

ussian Defense Ministry suggests US surveillance planes should either keep their distance from Russian borders while performing flights over the Baltic Sea, or at least keep aerial transponders switched on for identification.

"There are two solutions for the US Air Force [operating in the Baltic Sea]: either do not fly near our borders, or turn on transponders for automatic identification by our radars," Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said in an official statement on Saturday.

The statement comes after a Russian fighter jet intercepted a US surveillance plane, which was spotted in international airspace above the Baltic Sea on Friday with the transponder switched off.

"The RC-135U reconnaissance plane is frequently trying to sneak up to the Russian border with the transponder off. Our anti-aircraft defense has to order our fighters off the ground simply to visually identify the type of aircraft and its ID number," Konashenkov explained.

An extraordinary political crisis has erupted in the UK over the alleged prevalence of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. Most recently, it has resulted in the suspension of a Labour MP along with the party's former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone.

Anti-Semitism by its very nature is a sensitive issue. You only have to spend five minutes trawling the internet to understand why. All manner of outlandish and racist conspiracy theories exist concerning the Jewish people - i.e. Holocaust denial; Jewish bankers control the global economy; the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world; Jewish control the Western media. Some are even more outlandish than those, dredged up from a swamp of anti-Jewish bigotry that clearly retains a following among an alarmingly sizeable constituency of knuckle-dragging racists who inhabit our world.

However, in factoring this it is also undeniable that a concerted attempt is being made throughout the West to delegitimize any criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people. Those supporters of Israel, it should be stressed, are both Jewish and non-Jewish. They share in common a commitment to supporting Israel and, in so doing, granting it an exceptionalism that no other state is granted when it comes to upholding international law and the universality of human rights, as enshrined in the UN Charter of 1945.


This is why, despite the very real existence of anti-Semitism and the obligation to confront it whenever it arises, the heart of the matter driving this issue in this context is not anti-Semitism but apartheid - namely, the system of apartheid that underpins Israel and its subjugation of the Palestinian people and their human rights and right to self-determination. By way of a reminder we are talking about the illegal military occupation of the West Bank, the existence and expansion of illegal Jewish settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the ongoing siege of Gaza; the latter involving the collective punishment of its 1.6 million inhabitants, along with periodic military assaults and the slaughter of men, women, and children.

Any one of the aforementioned would result in an uproar of condemnation from the so-called international community, with calls for sanctions and political isolation to be applied. The fact that there are multiple grounds for Israel to be so condemned and yet it is not and, moreover, receives unparalleled political, geopolitical, and economic support from Western governments, constitutes a lamentable case of hypocrisy and double standards.