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'Unpublished OPCW report' implies 'chemical attack' in Syria's Douma was staged


Sputnik
Tue, 14 May 2019 21:13 UTC
rubble Douma
© AFP 2019 / ABD DOUMANY
Syrians walk amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following reported air strikes by regime forces in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of the capital Damascus, on August 30, 2015.
The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media has obtained what they say is an unpublished report by the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission on the alleged chemical attack in Syria's Douma on 7 April 2018, indicating that the entire incident was staged.

In the wake of the purported attack, an Engineering Assessment of two chlorine cylinders observed at the scene, a document which was allegedly excluded from the final report, was conducted in order to evaluate the possible means by which they could have been delivered at the locations.

While the final report said that engineering experts had been asked to assess the trajectory of each of the two cylinders, the newly-unveiled findings lay out competing hypotheses to determine whether the holes in the roof and the positions of the cylinders could be "accounted for by anything other than cylinders being dropped from the sky".

Comment: See also:

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Megaphone

North Korea demands return of cargo ship seized by US


Fox News
Tue, 14 May 2019 20:13 UTC
North Korean cargo ship, Wise Honest
© AP Photo/Fili Sagapolutele
North Korean cargo ship, Wise Honest
North Korea has called the U.S. seizure of a North Korean cargo ship involved in banned coal exports an "unlawful robbery" and demanded the ship to be immediately returned.

Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency on Tuesday carried a statement by an unnamed foreign ministry spokesman who accused the United States of betraying the spirit of a summit agreement last June between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump.

Kim and Trump then agreed to a vague statement calling for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and improved bilateral ties. Their second meeting collapsed in February over mismatched demands in sanctions relief and disarmament.

The "Wise Honest" was detained in April 2018 as it traveled toward Indonesia and arrived in American Samoa on Saturday.
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Vader

Trump: America is 'the piggy bank that everybody wants to rob'

Charles Creitz
Fox News
Tue, 14 May 2019 20:06 UTC
trump
President Trump said Wednesday that America is the "the piggy bank that everybody wants to rob," and that his administration is helping the country's economy excel.

Speaking at a rally in the Florida Panhandle, Trump said that the United States lost many manufacturing jobs during the Obama administration.

"They let other countries raid our factories, steal our jobs and rob us blind," Trump said. "Other than that, they were very nice."
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Chess

Spain defends decision to pull frigate from US combat group headed for Gulf

Miguel Gonzalez
El Pais
Tue, 14 May 2019 20:02 UTC
Spanish frigate ‘Méndez Núñez’
© SPANISH NAVY
Spanish frigate ‘Méndez Núñez’ (l) and ‘USS Abraham Lincoln.’
Spain's acting defense minister, Margarita Robles, said on Tuesday that the Spanish frigate Méndez Núñez has been pulled out of a US-led naval group in the Persian Gulf because American authorities have changed the original mission.

Robles insisted that the decision is technical and military, not political, and that Spain respects Washington's choice. "We respect the decision and when things go back to what was planned with the Spanish Navy, we will resume [the mission]," said the minister. The Spanish frigate will rejoin the fleet once it reaches the Indian Ocean.

Speaking in Brussels at a meeting of EU ministers, Robles said that Spain and the US had reached a deal two years ago to include the Méndez Núñez, with 215 sailors on board, in a training mission that also commemorates the 500th anniversary of the first circumnavigation of the Earth by the explorers Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano.

But on May 5 Washington announced it would send the fleet led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to the Persian Gulf amid growing tension between the US and Iran.
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Light Sabers

Iran: In preparation of the 'battle space'

Alastair Crooke
Strategic Culture Foundation
Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00 UTC
Map ME revision
© Chris Broz/AFP/Ralph Peters
The Bernard Lewis Plan: A revisionist view of Middle East
Bernard Lewis, a British-American historian of the Middle East, has been formidably influential in America - his policy ideas have towered over Presidents, policy-makers and think-tanks, and they still do. Though he died last year, his baleful views still shape America's thinking about Iran. Mike Pompeo, for example, has written:
"I met him only once, but read much of what he wrote. I owe a great deal of my understanding of the Middle East to his work ... He was also a man who believed, as I do, that Americans must be more confident in the greatness of our country, not less".
The "Bernard Lewis plan", as it came to be known, was a design to fracture all the countries in the region - from the Middle East to India - along ethnic, sectarian and linguistic lines. A radical Balkanisation of the region. A retired US Army officer, Ralph Peters, followed up by producing the map of how a 'Balkanised' Middle East would look. Ben Gurion too had a similar strategic ambition for Israeli interests.

Lewis's influence however, went right to the top: President Bush was seen carrying articles by Lewis to a meeting in the Oval Office soon after September 11, and only eight days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Lewis was briefing Richard Perle's Defence Policy Board, sitting next to his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. At that key meeting of a board highly influential with the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the two called for an invasion of Iraq.
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Briefcase

AG Barr assigns Connecticut US attorney to review origins of Russia inquiry

Adam Goldman, Charlie Savage, Michael S. Schmidt
MSN
Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00 UTC
John Durham US attny Connecticut
© Bob Child/AP
United States attorney for Connecticut, John H. Durham
Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful.

John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.'s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees.

His inquiry is the third known investigation focused on the opening of an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign into possible ties between Russia's election interference and Trump associates.
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X

A US-Iran war would be a disaster, ripple effects for decades


RT
Tue, 14 May 2019 17:45 UTC
USS Abraham Lincoln Suez Canal
© Reuters/Dan Snow/U.S. Navy
USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier transits Suez Canal on way to 'send a message' to Iran.
The chant has been that the US doesn't want war, but stands ready to hit "swiftly and decisively"should Iran or its nebulous "proxies" attempt any attack against American "interests or citizens." As if on cue, such an apparent attempt came on Sunday, when oil tankers - two of them Saudi Arabian, one bound for the US - were hit by "sabotage" just off the Strait of Hormuz.

Nobody was hurt, no oil was spilled, and no-one has officially accused Iran - yet, - but unofficially, there already are reports that US officials are blaming the convenient culprit. Trump, in particular, didn't wait for confirmation, threatening the Iranians would "suffer greatly" if they "do anything."
And while analysts in even the mainstream media appear to be somewhat alarmed by the looming war, obviously spurred on by the militancy of Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, influential critical voices among Washington politicians are all but absent - despite the eerie similarities with the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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Bullseye

Having sold out Assange, Moreno continues his persecution of perceived foes. Next in line: Ola Bini

Denis Rogatyuk
The Grayzone
Sun, 12 May 2019 00:00 UTC
MorenoBini
© Ochoa/AP/Idg
Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno • Software developer Ola Bini
The US-backed, neoliberal Ecuadorian leader is persecuting Swedish software developer Ola Bini for his political sympathies, censoring critical media, and jailing progressive leadership in a sweeping crackdown.

The arrest, sentencing and the plans for the extradition of Julian Assange from the United Kingdom to the United States continue to provoke waves of condemnation from all around the world, along with disgust at the government of Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno and its increasing subordination to the US.

This was the first time in living memory of many that a government allowed a foreign law enforcement agency to enter its sovereign territory - the Ecuadorian embassy in London - and take into its custody a publisher of journalism, whose status as a refugee had been recognized internationally by the United Nations, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International and other international organizations.

As confirmed by a number of investigative articles and publications, this act of political cynicism was motivated by the acquisition of $4.2 billion in IMF loans, as well as the revelations published by Wikileaks of secret offshore bank accounts in Panama operated by Moreno's family members, known widely as the "INA Papers scandal".

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Attention

Is the Strait of Hormuz the new Gulf of Tonkin? Trump warns Iran it will 'suffer greatly' if it does 'anything'


RT
Tue, 14 May 2019 09:32 UTC
BoltedTrumpPompous
© The Hill
John Bolton • President Trump • Mike Pompeo
Blame for the "sabotage operations" that damaged four oil tankers off the coast of the UAE has been placed at the feet of "Iran or Iran-backed proxies," courtesy of anonymous "US officials" breathlessly quoted by MSM.

Anonymous officials are an integral part of a good casus belli. Their deeds should be heroic enough that merely fact-checking their story reflects badly on the journalist attempting it. What kind of cynical reporter would question the bravery of "Curveball," the informant who spilled the beans about Saddam Hussein's "mobile biological weapons laboratories," sealing the doom of a million Iraqis with the Weapons of Mass Destruction myth? Yet credulous reporters are once again repeating the conclusions of an anonymous official without asking how he arrived at them.


Comment: See also:

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Footprints

Report: A US plan specifies deployment of 120K troops to counter Iran


RT
Tue, 14 May 2019 06:14 UTC
Army drill
© Reuters/Romeo Ranoco
Donald Trump has reportedly been presented with a plan to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East to counter the so-called Iranian threat, the New York Times reported.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan disclosed the updated military plan at a meeting of Trump's top security aides on Thursday, the publication said, quoting anonymous sources inside the administration.

Several options to tackle Tehran in the region were outlined to the president during the briefing, while "the uppermost option called for deploying 120,000 troops, which would take weeks or months to complete," the Times said.

While the revisions "ordered" by "hard-liners" do not promulgate a land invasion of Iran, "the development reflects the influence of Mr. Bolton, one of the administration's most virulent Iran hawks," The Times reported. Bolton has been a long-time advocate of using military force against Tehran, even penning an op-ed in 2015 titled "Top Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran."

Comment: More from Reuters:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday denied a New York Times report that U.S. officials were discussing a military plan to send up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East to counter any attack or nuclear weapons acceleration by Iran. Trump told reporters at the White House:
"I think it's fake news, OK? Now, would I do that? Absolutely. But we have not planned for that. Hopefully we're not going to have to plan for that. And if we did that, we'd send a hell of a lot more troops than that."
The Times reported that Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated plan last week in a meeting of top national security aides that envisions sending as many as 120,000 American troops to the region if Iran attacks U.S. forces or accelerates work on its nuclear weapons.

The updated plan does not call for a land invasion of Iran, which would require far more troops, the Times reported, citing unidentified administration officials.

The plan reflects revisions ordered by Iran hawks including national security adviser John Bolton, the newspaper said.


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