Uitgebreid
verteld Robert Fisk over zijn bevindingen in Douma. Fisk is één van
de weinigen die niet geloofde dat het winnende Syrische leger het
eigen volk zou aanvallen met gifgas..... Alweer als één van de
weinigen besloot Fisk zelf op onderzoek uit te gaan en hij vertrok
naar Douma. Terwijl de reguliere westerse (massa-) media en het
grootste deel van de westerse politici (plus zogenaamde deskundigen
en opiniemakers) keihard durven te zeggen dat het Syrische leger en
daarmee Assad schuldig is aan de 'gifgasaanval' en nee, daar heeft men geen bewijzen voor,
men lult elkaar en terreurgroep Jaysh al-Islam plus de White Helmets gewoon na.......... (de White Helmets die al heel wat 'fake news' [nepnieuws] hebben verspreid, zoals bekend zou moeten zijn bij de westerse reguliere media en politiek......)
Sterker
nog: door de voornoemde woordvoerders van de media en andere figuren
wordt de grote gifgasaanval van augustus 2013 er keer op keer
bijgesleept als een oorlogsmisdaad van het reguliere Syrische leger, terwijl
uit en te na is aangetoond dat door het westen genoemde 'gematigde
rebellen' verantwoordelijk zijn voor (ook) die aanval.......(o.a. een
VN onderzoek toonde dit aan......)
Ook nu verlaat men zich op o.a. op de terreurgroep Jaysh al-Islam
(het leger van de islam, echt een naam voor een 'gematigde rebellen
groep.....' ha! ha! ha!) en de White Helmets voor de
getuigenverklaringen....... Dit 'leger van de islam' (betekenis van Jaysh al-Islam) heeft NB toegegeven dat
het eerder gifgas heeft gebruikt in Syrië........ Onbegrijpelijk
trouwens dat het westen geen commentaar heeft op het feit dat meerdere 'gematigde
rebellengroepen' in het bezit zijn van gifgas.... Wat de White
Helmets betreft, die zijn al lang door de mand gevallen als hulp van
Al Qaida en nog een paar andere terreurgroepen, waaronder Jaysh al-Islam.......
De
conclusie die Fisk heeft getrokken, is dat er zelfs geen gifgasaanval
heeft plaatsgevonden in Douma........
Lees
het relaas van Fisk en geeft het door, de hoogste tijd dat de muur
van leugens en ongebreidelde oorlogshitserij wordt doorbroken!!
“They Were Not Gassed”: Famed Reporter Reaches Syrian 'Chemical Attack' Site
April
17, 2018 at 9:16 am
Written
by Tyler
Durden
(ZHE) — Robert
Fisk’s bombshell first-hand account for the UK Independent runs
contrary to nearly every claim circulating in major international
press concerning what happened just over week ago on April 7th in an
embattled suburb outside Damascus: not only has the veteran British
journalist found no
evidence of a mass chemical attack, but he’s encountered multiple
local eyewitnesses who experienced the chaos of that night, but who
say the gas attack never happened.
Fisk
is the
first Western journalist to reach and report from the site of
the alleged chemical weapons attack widely
blamed on Assad’s forces. Writing
from Douma in eastern Ghouta, Robert Fisk has interviewed a Syrian
doctor who works at the hospital shown in one of the well-known
videos which purports to depict victims of a chemical attack.
The
Independent: “Middle East Correspondent Robert Fisk in one of the
miles of tunnels hacked beneath Douma by prisoners of Syrian rebels.”
(source: Yara Ismail via the Independent)
Importantly,
the report, published late in the day Monday, is
causing a stir among
mainstream journalists who–minutes
after the Saudi-sponsored jihadist group Jaish
al-Islam (Army
of Islam) accused
the Syrian Army of gassing civilians–began
uncritically promoting the “Assad gassed his own people”
narrative as an already cemented and “proven” fact based on the
mere word a notoriously brutal armed group who itself
has admitted to using chemical weapons on the Syrian battlefield in
prior years. Also
notable is that no journalist or international observer was anywhere
near Douma when the purported chemical attack took place.
Controversy
ensued immediately after Fisk’s report, especially as he is
among the most recognizable names in the past four decades of Middle
East war reporting,
having twice won the British Press Awards’ Journalist of the Year
prize and as seven time winner of the British Press Awards’ Foreign
Correspondent of the Year (the NY
Times has referred
to him as“probably
the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain” while The
Guardian has
called him “one
of the most famous journalists in the world”). An Arabic speaker,
Fisk became famous for being among the few reporters in history to
conduct face-to-face interviews with Osama bin Laden, which he did on
three occasions between 1993 and 1997.
Fisk
says he was able to walk around and investigate newly liberated Douma
without Syrian government or Russian minders (in part this is likely
because he has reported from inside Syria going
back decades, in war-torn 1982 Hama, for example),
and he begins
his account as follows:
This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks–and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world– despite all the doubters–is perfectly genuine.
War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
Fisk
goes on to identify
the doctor by name – Dr. Assim Rahaibani – which is notable given
the fact that all early reporting from Douma typically relied on
“unnamed doctors” and anonymous opposition sources for early
claims of a chlorine gas attack (lately
morphed into an unverified “mixed” chlorine-and-sarin attack).
The
doctor’s testimony is consistent with that of the well-known Syrian
opposition group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which
initially reported based on its own pro-rebel sourcing that
heavy government bombardment of Douma city resulted in the
collapse of homes and underground shelters, causing civilians in
hiding to suffocate.
According
to SOHR,
which has long been a key go-to source for mainstream media over the
course of the war, “70
of them [women and children] have suffered suffocation as a result of
the demolition of home basements over them due to the heavy and
intense shelling.”
Though
outlets from The
Guardian to The
Washington Post to The
New York Times have
quoted SOHR on a near daily basis throughout the past six years of
war, the
anti-Assad opposition outlet’s reporting of mass asphyxiation
due to collapse of shelters has been notably absent from the same
publications.
Fisk
details the Syrian doctor’s testimony, who is adamant in his
emphasis that civilians were suffocating en masse, and
were not gassed:
It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic–“Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city–is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.
“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night–but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia–not gas poisoning.”
In
addition to interviewing a doctor while standing in the very hospital
featured in White Helmets footage of the events, Fisk cites the
testimonies of multiple locals in the following:
Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories–which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups.
These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian–yes, Russian–rockets and burned-out cars.
And
further fascinating is that the veteran British war correspondent
comes upon local Douma residents who have so long been trapped in an
isolated ‘fog
of war’ battlefield
environment, that they are not even aware of the international
importance that the town has played in the US coalition decision to
bomb Syria:
So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas–or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive.
I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.
…Oddly, after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find one who showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the Western air attacks. Two actually told me they didn’t know about the connection.
But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma attack.
The Evidence thriller
Evidence?
…A video montage of the Pentagon and State Department’s awkward
attempts to dodge the question of evidence*.
Concerning
the White Helmets, who
have played a dubious role throughout the war while
presenting themselves as “impartial” and “neutral” rescue
workers and film-makers, though known to operate exclusively in
al-Qaeda and other jihadist-controlled areas of Syria, Fisk
reports the following:
The White Helmets–the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story–played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the [British] Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men.
I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.
Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.
And
Fisk further narrates the strangeness of some of the reporting now
happening far outside of Douma which flatly contradicts the
testimonies of civilians still inside Douma that he encounters:
How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that “news” in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them.
Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy–as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues–and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?
They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Ms May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?
For
a prime example of what Fisk references as refugees in Turkey
“already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma seemed to
recall…” CNN
aired a segment from one such refugee camp which is absolutely
bizarre and stunning in its claims.
began
sniffing a 7-year-old Syrian girl’s backpack while concluding, “I
mean there’s definitely something that stings…” –
with the implication that empirical proof had been found of
government chemical weapons use against the little girl and her
family.
And
in the full
segment,
Damon attempts to subtly introduce the idea of a nerve agent used
against the family (though initial claims were widely reported to be
chlorine) by awkwardly including the account of the girl’s escape
from Douma: “She
could barely breath… she
felt as if her
entire nerves basically released.”
This Syrian girl hid her dolls inside a box, telling them "you're going to suffocate in here, maybe, but at least you might be safe from the bombings." CNN reports from inside a refugee camp in Syria hours after a coordinated US-led airstrike hit the area. cnn.it/2H2pCLe
Though
it’s unclear what the strange phrasing of “her entire nerves
basically released” actually means, CNN’s
Arwa Damon is ultimately claiming to be able to safely and
comfortably handle and sniff a backpack which contains residual sarin
and chlorine agents,
while simultaneously presenting the backpack as “proof” of a
chemical attack which happened a week prior (to say nothing the
clearly unscientific and bogus nature all of the above).
Notably,
in addition to Fisk’s bombshell report filed from ground zero of
the claimed chemical attack in Douma, cable
network One
America News has
also issued a report from on the ground in the newly liberated town,
finding “no evidence” – in its words – that a chemical attack
took place there.
OAN Investigation Finds No Evidence of Chemical Weapon Attack in Syria: youtu.be/lSXwG-901yU?a via @YouTube
Robert Fisk’s report for The Independent and the One America News segment constitute the first major international media reports from the location of the alleged chemical attack. But it will be interesting to see the extent to which international chemical and weapons experts either validate or refute their conclusions once the site is inspected.
Meanwhile,
the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW) Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) team arrived
in Damascus on Saturday, April 14th – after the
US-led overnight strikes which primarily hit government buildings in
the capital.
================================
* Mijn excuus, aan het Twitterbericht (van Bassam) is ook een video verbonden, weet deze niet over te nemen, hier de link naar het originele artikel.
Zie ook: 'Syrië: nieuwe gifgasaanval als 'false flag' operatie tegen Syrisch bewind in voorbereiding........'
en: 'VS bezig met voorbereiding van een 'door Syrië' gepleegde gifgasaanval, ofwel de volgende VS false flag operatie'
en: 'VS, GB en Frankrijk begaan enorme oorlogsmisdaad met aanval op Syrische doelen......'
en: 'Aanval op Syrische doelen door VS, GB en Frankrijk op moment dat de beurs 2 dagen is gesloten....'
en: 'Wapenfabrikanten die de illegale raketbeschietingen op Syrië mogelijk maakten, zagen hun aandelen met 10 miljard stijgen.........'
en: 'VS bezig met voorbereiding van een 'door Syrië' gepleegde gifgasaanval, ofwel de volgende VS false flag operatie'
en: 'Aanval op Syrische doelen door VS, GB en Frankrijk op moment dat de beurs 2 dagen is gesloten....'
en: 'Wapenfabrikanten die de illegale raketbeschietingen op Syrië mogelijk maakten, zagen hun aandelen met 10 miljard stijgen.........'
en: 'Russische volk wordt geadviseerd zich voor te bereiden op een nucleaire oorlog......
en: 'Gifgasaanval vooropgezet spel om VS actie te rechtvaardigen, waarbij GB de spelers opdracht gaf dit toneelspel snel uit te voeren........ 'False flag gelukt': Syrië gebombardeerd zonder enig bewijs voor schuld.....'
en: 'Rusland voorspelde 'de gifgasaanval' in Oost-Ghouta en de reactie daarop van de VS.....'
en: 'Rusland beschuldigd GB van het regisseren gifgasaanval Douma en zegt daar bewijzen voor te hebben'
en: 'De OPCW inspecteurs en hun werk in Douma n.a.v. 'gifgasaanval...''
en: 'OPCW team in Douma stelt dat Syrië en Rusland niets hebben veranderd dan wel verwijderd op de plaats van de 'gisfgasaanval''
en: 'The Guardian met propaganda over Syrië, die zo uit Orwells 1984 zou kunnen komen......'
en: ''False flag terror' bestaat wel degelijk: bekentenissen en feiten over heel smerige zaken..........'
en: 'Assad heeft geen gifgas gebruikt tegen de Syrische bevolking!'
en: 'Syrië: verslaggever Bartlett prikt leugens reguliere media door'
en: 'Syrië wacht andermaal een geplande gasaanval van 'gematigde rebellen........''
