Lying about Syria and Bombing
The determination of the
American ruling establishment to change the secular, authoritarian regime in
Syria, just as we have done before in Iraq and Libya, and, quite possibly, even in Iran, has
been on display for quite some time now.
We saw a strong indication of our intentions in early 2005 when George
W. Bush was president and the former and likely future prime minister of Lebanon,
Rafiq Hariri, was assassinated by a bomb. At that time there was a rush in the
American press to blame Bashar Assad, the president of Syria, for the attack,
based only upon the fact that Hariri was opposed to Syrias domination of
Lebanon.
One could argue just as persuasively
that the very purpose of the killing, like the supposed gas attacks on his own
people in 2013 and just this week, was to vilify Assad and to provide a
pretext for replacing him withchaos in Syria, after the fashion of the regime
change in Iraq and later in Libya. Always the goal is to wipe out any secular
resistance to Western and Israeli incursions, is how Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com put it at the time.
In the video that Buelahman made of my song, Were
the USA, it is of some interest that the
second time the words are sung, Maybe well invade you tooand you, we see a
map of Syria and a photograph of Bashar Assad.
Well before that I had
weighed in on the bombing that killed Hariri with the observation that if our
press was lying about who did it, it would certainly
not be the first time that they had not told the truth about an important
bombing:
On Monday, February 14 [2005], a very powerful bomb
in Beirut killed former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq
Hariri and 13 other people. No evidence has been produced as to who might
have placed the bomb. That did not stop the major American news media
from pointing the finger of suspicion at the government of Bashar Assad of
Syria, even as they were reporting the news of the tragedy, and the United
States government has withdrawn its ambassador from Syria in retaliation, as
if Bush and company were certain that Syria was to blame.
On Wednesday, February 16, the liberal opposition
newspaper, The Washington Post,
surged to the front of the pack of hounds baying for strong measures against
Syria with a lead editorial entitled, Murder in Beirut.
The despicable murder of Mr. Hariri benefits no
one outside the rogue regime in Damascus—and the world should respond
accordingly, it said. If the assassination of Mr. Hariri—the most
plausible leader of a truly independent Lebanon—looks like the panicked
act of a cornered tyrant, the shoe snugly fits Mr. Assad.
But should we really take on faith what we are told
by American government leaders and the likes of The Washington Post when it comes to shadowy political
bombings? An Associated Press article on the effects of the Beirut bomb published
in that same issue of The Washington Post,
on page A14 suggests very strongly that we should not. Notice the damage
that was done to the building that faces the street where the bomb exploded,
leaving a massive crater. The entire faade of the building is stripped
away, but all the support columns remain standing. The same thing
occurred when the Khobar Towers building,
housing U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia, was bombed.
Recall now that the United States government and
the American news media want us to believe that a similar bomb out in the
street in front of the building caused all the damage to the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. But as we look at
that damage, we see that a large section of the Murrah
Building was gouged out, caused by the collapse of not
just front row support columns, but by others farther back in the
building. The collapsing columns, as we can see from the photograph, were
also considerably farther from the street blast than were several others.
In
1995, retired Air Force weapons expert, General Benton Partin,
told us that the damage to the
support columns of the Murrah Building could not
possibly have resulted from a bomb in the street of the size of the one that
blew up the Ryder truck. Air, he pointed out, is a great absorber of
energy, and by the time the blast wave reached the columns it would exert only
a tiny fraction of the force needed to cause any of them to fall. His
argument made sense at the time, but The
Washington Post was among those who made sure that not many people heard
it. The picture they have now published of the fateful bomb in Beirut
virtually proves that General Partin was right.
The Post and the government lied to
us about what happened in Oklahoma City. Should we trust them over what
happened in Beirut?
David
Martin
February
21, 2005
If
they would lie about bombing, they would certainly lie about gassing as well.
David
Martin
April
7, 2017
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