Russia’s Tass news agency claimed early on April 13th, prior to US led Air strikes, that Russian investigators have located and spoken with persons in the Syrian city of Douma who witnessed the staging of the videos that the U.S-and-UK-financed White Helmets group supplied, and which videos the U.S., French and UK Governments use to justify their planned invasion of Syria.
According to Tass’s report, two medical personnel who were on duty on 7 April when the alleged patients were being rushed into the emergency room, say that White Helmets personnel accompanied the alleged victims, and filmed them while bringing them in. According to Tass,
“When the patients were receiving first aid, unidentified people burst into the hospital, some were holding video cameras. These people started shouting, fanning hysteria. They carried hose and douched all present with water crying out that all of them had been exposed to poisonous agents.”
That is presumably describing the scene at 1:34 in the White Helmets video that was used by Qatari Government TV, Al Jazeera, on April 8th, in their report on the incident. Qatar’s royal family, the Thanis, are the main funders of the Muslim Brotherhood and have long called for the overthrow of Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, whose Government is strongly opposed to basing government upon any religious laws; Syria’s Government is founded strictly upon a secular Constitution instead. Though the Thanis, who own Qatar, are less fundamentalist than the Sauds, who own Saudi Arabia, both royal families have urged the U.S. and its other allies to overthrow the Assad government, and the White Helmets have been an important part of that allied effort.
The Tass report says that the White Helmets staged the event because “London” had told them that the Assad Government was planning to bomb in Douma during 3-6 April and that the ‘rebels’ should then film their people bringing in victims of a chemical attack there, so as to provide a basis for subsequent bombing by the UK, U.S., and allies, as an alleged humanitarian response.
The Tass account suggests but does not state that Russia’s Government has located also other witnesses, but ones who are not willing to become publicly identified — that only two are willing to be publicly identified if necessary in order to prevent an invasion.
The Tass account also implies that Russia has in its possession communications from the UK Government to the White Helmets, and will publish these communications unless the UK will back down without directly invading Syria.
No indication was given in the Tass report, to the effect that Russia has similarly acquired evidence against the U.S. Government in this matter.
If the UK Government denies the Russian allegations regarding this, then the burden of proof will be upon either the Russians or the Syrians to make public whatever evidence they have acquired backing up the Russian claims.
However, the UK and its allies haven’t, at least after the year 2000, publicly released any evidence prior to invading on the basis of secret information that they alleged to possess. Only decades later has anything substantial been made public, and only with crucial passages blacked-out, etc.; so, if Russia behaves the same way, then they will be able to claim that they are merely following what has by now become standard Western practice. Conceivably, World War III could be waged on that basis.
However, later in the day on April 13th, the names of the two willing witnesses were released, as reported by Russian Television:
The UK rejected the accusations, with British UN Ambassador Karen Pierce calling them “grotesque,” “a blatant lie” and “the worst piece of fake news we’ve yet seen from the Russian propaganda machine.”
One of the interviews published by the ministry showed a man who said his name was Halil Ajij, and who said he was a medical student working at Douma’s only operational hospital. This is how he described the origin of the footage:
“On April 8, a bomb hit a building. The upper floors were damaged and a fire broke at the lower floors. Victims of that bombing were brought to us. People from the upper floors had smoke poisoning. We treated them, based on their suffocation.”
Ajij said that a man unknown to him came and said there was a chemical attack and panic ensued. “Relatives of the victims started dousing each other with water. Other people, who didn’t seem to have medical training, started administering anti-asthma medicine to children. We didn’t see any patient with symptoms of a chemical weapons poisoning,” he said.
The first photos claiming to show the aftermath of the alleged chemical attack on April 7 were published online on the same day, and featured the bodies of many people, including children, some with foam around their mouths and noses. Footage from the hospital was released on Sunday, with the sources behind it claiming that it had been shot on Saturday.
[Major-General Igor] Konashenkov said Russia hoped that international monitors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is due to investigate the circumstances of the incident, will help establish the truth.
The OPCW investigators are due to arrive in Douma on Saturday, April 14th. If the planned invasion does not occur prior to their arrival, then the likelihood is that any such invasion will be postponed until after their report of findings is issued.
One may reasonably expect that, if the investigators are allowed by the U.S., UK, and allies, to complete their work (the U.N.’s WMD investigators were told on 17 March 2003 to abandon their work and leave Iraq so that they wouldn’t die in Bush-Blair’s invasion which occurred three days later), then extensive secret negotiations will be occurring behind the scenes, in order to determine whether a public resolution of this matter will be able to be reached that does not entail the alleged humanitarian invasion.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
