Following the release of the UN Mission Report regarding the Chemical Attacks of August 21 in East Ghouta , Secretary General Ban Ki Moon insinuated without overtly pointing his finger at the Syrian government:
“This is the most significant confirmed use of chemical weapons against civilians since Saddam Hussein used them in Halabja in 1988. The international community has pledged to prevent any such horror from recurring, yet it has happened again…. “
(What Ban Ki Moon does not mention is that the Halabja 1988 attack was supported by the CIA as confirmed by the release of previously classified documents).
The Introductory note to the UN Mission Report affirms that:
The Secretary-General condemns in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons and believes that this act is a war crime and grave violation of the 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare and other relevant rules of customary international law.
The international community has a moral responsibility to hold accountable those responsible and for ensuring that chemical weapons can never re-emerge as an instrument of warfare.
UN Secretary General Report of CW Investigation. New York, September 16, 2013
Nowhere in the UN Mission’s report is there any mention of who was behind the chemical attacks. The UN Mission was instructed not to make any statements in this regard.
The UN Mission, however, was fully aware that crimes against humanity had been committed and that the Al Qaeda rebels supported by the US were in possession of chemical weapons.
According to CNN, the rebels had been trained in the use of chemical weapons by Western military advisers. An earlier UN mission had confirmed that the rebels were in possession of sarin gas.
Visibly, the Mission had been instructed to “shut up”. According to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon: “It is for others to pursue this matter further to determine responsibility. We will all have our own thoughts on this.”
While UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon did not confirm who was responsible for the chemical attacks, the Western media went into high gear, accusing the government of Bashar al Assad.
According to US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers “the technical details make clear that only the regime could have carried out this chemical weapons attack”.
Russia’s minister of Foreign Affairs responded:
“We want objective professional assessment of the events of 21 of August. We have serious grounds to believe this was a provocation… But the truth needs to be established and this will be a test of the future work of the Security Council.”
The Other Report: “The Chemical Attacks in East Ghouta Used to Justify a Military Intervention in Syria”.
A day before the release of the UN Mission Report, the preliminary Report of The International Support Team for Mussalaha in Syria (ISTEAMS) entitled The Chemical Attacks in East Ghouta Used to Justify a Military Intervention in Syria was released.
Under the helm of Mother Agnes Mariam, the ISTEAMS Team based in Geneva has been working under the auspices of the International Institute for Peace, Justice and Human Rights. It has also collaborated with the UN Human Rights Commission, to which many of its findings were submitted.
In a bitter irony, this detailed report –which documents the deaths of innocent children in East Ghouta– has neither been been acknowledged by the Western media nor by the member governments of the United Nations Security Council. (preliminary ISTEAMS report).
This ISTEAMS Report reveals how the lives of innocent children were used as part of what was visibly a staged event:
“From the moment when some families of abducted children contacted us to inform us that they recognized the children among those who are presented in the videos as victims of the Chemical Attacks of East Ghouta, we decided to examine the videos thoroughly. …
Our first concern was the fate of the children we see in the footages. Those angels are always alone in the hands of adult males that seem to be elements of armed gangs. The children that trespassed remain without their families and unidentified all the way until they are wrapped in the white shrouds of the burial. Moreover our study highlights without any doubt that their little bodies were manipulated and disposed with theatrical arrangements to figure in the screening.
If the studied footages were edited and published to exhibit pieces of evidence to accuse the Syrian State of perpetrating the chemical attacks on East Ghouta, our discoveries incriminate the editors and actors of forged facts through a lethal manipulation of unidentified children. …
Thus we want to raise awareness toward the humanitarian case of this criminal use of children in the political propaganda of the East Ghouta Chemical Weapons Attack
We present this work to distinguished Spiritual Leaders, Heads of State, Members of Parliament Humanitarian actors and to any person who has heart for truth and justice and seeks to due accountability for evil deeds.“
To read the full report in pdf click here (large pdf slow download)
While the ISTEAMS Report does not establish who was behind the mass killings of innocent children, it confirms that the videos released on August 21 including those presented on September 5 to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been deliberately manipulated, that the bodies of dead children had been moved from one location to another in a staged event.
Photographs of dead children in Egypt from the Rabiha Al Adawiha massacre in Cairo were also used, presented in the video as Syrian children.
The bodies of the same children appear in different pictures pertaining to different locations: the same children in different cities, suggesting that the pictures were part of a setup: “the same children disposed in another room in another city”
The ISTEAMS study demonstrates the following: the East Ghouda tragedy was a carefully planned staged event involving the US sponsored “opposition rebel forces”.
These videos were used as supportive evidence by the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the drafting of its resolution in favor of punitive strikes directed against Syria. (Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Resolution 2021 on Syria, September 5, 2013). A key member of that Committee is Senator John McCain who is known to have had contacts with leaders of the Al Qaeda affiliated rebels.
The Senate Committee Resolution 2021 (referring to the videos) points to “clear and compelling evidence”. In the words of John Kerry in his statement before the Senate Committee: “The images [in the videos] of that day are sickening. And in my view, the world cannot ignore the inhumanity and the horror of this act.”
But those images were part of a diabolical operation which consisted in triggering atrocities including the killing of innocent children, and then using the filmed footages of these atrocities for propaganda purposes.
Who was behind this criminal project?
Read and circulate the ISTEAMS Report. Forward this article. Reveal the truth. Break the political consensus in favor of war.
