Global Research

December 11, 2011 – Before watching this full 46 minute interview by ABC News with Syrian President Bashar Assad, and the disgraceful behavior of ABC’s Barbra Walters it would useful to note several facts completely dispelling the false premises from which Walters is operating from.

1. The UN human rights report on Syria consisted of no evidence, simply interviews of alleged witnesses produced by Syria’s opposition and interviewed in Geneva. The report itself was compiled in part by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council, that includes Exxon men, CIA agents, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, AlJazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO’s operations against Libya), and Boeing.

2. Violence amongst protests was confirmed and documented by even the mainstream press as early as April 2011, where protesters were committing arson on public buildings including administrative centers and police stations. Reports of snipers attacking protesters and troops simultaneously were also reported. These gunmen are now claimed to be working amongst the “Free Syrian Army.” As early as June, hundreds of Syrian troops had already been reported dead.

3. It is confirmed that Libya’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG, listed by the US State Department as a foreign terrorist organization, #26) led by Abdulhakim Belhaj is on the Turkey-Syrian border preparing militants to fight the Syrian government with the assistance of Turkey’s government. This hardly constitutes a “Syrian uprising,” but rather a foreign funded and facilitated invasion by proxy led by NATO and consisting of a very real terrorist threat.

4. Regime change in Syria was a foregone conclusion as early as 1991. General Wesley Clark in a 2007 speech in California relayed a 1991 conversation between himself and then Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz indicated that America had 5-10 years to clean up old Soviet “client regimes,” namely Syria, Iran, and Iraq, before the next super power rose up to challenge western hegemony.

5. The unrest in Syria from the beginning was entirely backed by Western corporate-financier interests and part of a long-planned agenda for region-wide regime change. Syria has been slated for regime change since as early as 1991. In 2002, then US Under Secretary of State John Bolton added Syria to the growing “Axis of Evil.” It would be later revealed that Bolton’s threats against Syria manifested themselves as covert funding and support for opposition groups inside of Syria spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations.

In an April 2011 CNN article, acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner stated, “We’re not working to undermine that [Syrian] government. What we are trying to do in Syria, through our civil society support, is to build the kind of democratic institutions, frankly, that we’re trying to do in countries around the globe. What’s different, I think, in this situation is that the Syrian government perceives this kind of assistance as a threat to its control over the Syrian people.”

Toner’s remarks came after the Washington Post released cables indicating the US has been funding Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005 and continued until today.

In an April AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course is the “Arab Spring,” and in Syria’s case, the impetus for the current unrest threatening to unhinge the nation and invite in foreign intervention.

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With these facts in mind, viewers can fully appreciate the frothing duplicity, discourtesy, and intellectual depravity displayed by Barbra Walters who “saw pictures,” read a fraudulent UN report written by authors with ties to US corporate-financier interests, and listened to an Obama speech and therefore is an expert on the premeditated, US-facilitated chaos sweeping across parts of Syria. And even as she sits in Syria’s calm capital of Damascus, invited in by Assad who has been accused of barring foreign reporters (foreign journalist Dr. Webster Tarpley’s interview while in Syria can be found here), she still insists the nation is in utter chaos, irrationally closing itself off from the world, and with a population completely turned against the Syrian government.

For the record: Assad’s reference (at 33:30) to the 1992 LA Riots and the US using troops to restore order, it should be noted that indeed the US Army and Marines were deployed, and between military and police, they killed 10 during operations to restore order throughout the city. Barbra Walters either out of ignorance or additional duplicity, claims the US didn’t kill anyone.