My goal in writing about these things is to alert you to the problems and encourage you to share your concerns with people you know and with federal policy-makers. Right now, the entire gamut of political discussion all but excludes the topic nuclear war, so if some Senators, Members of Congress, and the President were to begin hearing from people that we’re concerned about the threat, and how easily it could happen, and that we want that threat removed, it would be some progress.

Why the focus on nuclear war? Because of all the pending potential disasters we may have to face, it’s the most sudden, inescapable, irrevocable. At some level, people know that, though they don’t like to think about it. Author Carl Boggs describes the reaction of the people of Hawaii when they received a false alarm about an incoming ICBM attack:

People scattered frenetically, mostly without logic or purpose or hope. Where to go? If this turned out to be one of Kim Jong Un’s powerful ICBMs, it could be over in 20 minutes. Repair to a shelter? None exist. Go to the basement? Sure suicide. Find a car or taxi and head for the hills? No time. … [T]he response was utter psychological numbness, paralysis – a dysfunctional yet comprehensible state of mind in the face of nuclear oblivion. … [T]he end seemed inescapable.

And because, as Mr. Boggs says upon hearing a talk by former nuclear war planner Daniel Ellsberg, it’s a lot less unlikely than most of us have been led to believe.

The American people have been lulled to sleep, distracted by endless media and political spectacles, while busy warmakers keep refining their insane nuclear blueprints … . More than 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pentagon elites still theorize and fantasize about the unthinkable, their demented plans far removed from the realm of political debate or even public awareness.

The risk has been with us since the 1950s, but has become scarier beginning with the US-backed coup in Ukraine, and increased with US involvement in the war on Syria. It’s been heightened by plans for “modernization” of US warheads and delivery systems – plans initiated by President Obama and continuing or expanded by President Trump. And it’s heightened further by a Pentagon plan to develop a “low-yield” warhead for the submarine-based Trident missile, and a new nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile. I believe that expanding the range of options in this way would increase the likelihood that the weapons will actually be used.

In case you think I’m overstating the problem, you should know that almost everything in “Dr. Strangelove” – the Stanley Kubrick film in which nuclear war is started by a rogue military officer – was true. “Doomsday” is an “Actual War Plan,” as Daniel Ellsberg says in a December 13, 2017 interview discussing his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

Dan Ellsberg proposes a Six-Step Program for dismantling the Doomsday Machine:

A U.S. no-first-use policy;

Probing investigative hearings on our war plans in the light of nuclear winter;

Eliminating our ICBMs;

Foregoing the delusion of preemptive damage-limiting by our first-strike forces;

Giving up the profits, jobs, and alliance hegemony based on maintaining that pretense;

Otherwise dismantling the American Doomsday Machine.

Of course none of that will happen under present circumstances. It’s Ellsberg’s goal to contribute to developing an informed electorate that, recognizing the risk, will demand such actions.

Sleepwalking to Nuclear War

I hadn’t voted for him, but I thought I saw a silver lining in the election of Donald Trump. I had feared that Hillary Clinton’s call for “no-fly” zones over Syria, despite the presence of Russian warplanes already there at the request of the Syrian government, posed a serious risk of triggering World War III. I hoped we could oppose President Trump on everything else – which is to some extent happening – while basking in replacement of the New Cold War by rapprochement with nuclear-armed Russia. But the Democrats have helped put the kibosh on that possibility by determinedly blaming their electoral loss on Russia rather than accepting responsibility for it themselves, and that has unfortunately become the focus of much of the opposition. Adam Shatz discusses many of the ways we could awaken (or not) to discover we had unwisely ignored the threat of nuclear war in “The President and the Bomb,” published in the November 16 issue of the London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n22/adam-shatz/the-president-and-the-bomb . But as Mr. Shatz observes, the problems run much deeper than President Trump.

First, there is much to fear short of total nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. For example, it appears that even a “small” nuclear exchange, between, say, India and Pakistan, could trigger nuclear winter putting two billion people at risk.

Regarding the two nuclear-armed superpowers, who between them possess some 15,000 nuclear warheads, the Cold War that ended in 1991 has lately been replaced by a New Cold War. U.S. and NATO provocations to Russia have reached a largely unheard crescendo in Ukraine, where a U.S.-backed coup installed a regime, essentially in the Russian belly, that’s riddled with neo-Nazis and hostile to Russia; in eastern Europe generally, where NATO war games have been held repeatedly just across the Russian border; and in Syria, where the U.S. continues to maintain an unlawful presence in proximity to Russian forces legitimately there at the invitation of the internationally recognized and constitutionally elected Syrian government. And in both Syria and Ukraine, there are signs the situation is becoming even more dangerous than it’s been for some time.

These situations raise the risk of unintended nuclear war, as confrontation may lead at any time to escalation spiraling out of control. Dr. William Polk, a member of the White House team that handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, describes how in a confrontational situation, the logic of events could force the Russians and us to the next step and that step also to the next and so on, to the ultimate disastrous result without anyone having initially intended it. Mr. Shatz concludes that what we once mistook for safety was more like sleepwalking. Former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin sums up the situation in similar terms:

“Under the false and demonizing imagery of ‘Putin’s Russia’ which has now taken hold in the United States and NATO world, the West is truly ‘sleepwalking’, as Kissinger, Gorbachev, [University of Kent professor Richard] Sakwa, [Princeton emeritus professor Stephen F.] Cohen and others have urgently warned, into a potential nuclear war with Russia. It is the Cuban missile crisis all over again, but actually worse now … [in part] because American policy under recent U.S. presidents has been so lacking in statesmanship, consistency or historical perspective where Russia is concerned.” (Return to Moscow, University of Western Australia, 2017, p. 255).

“Russian Meddling”

The claim of Russian meddling in the US election has brought US-Russia relations to what may be an all-time low, substantially contributing to the near-universal demonization of Russian president Vladimir Putin and of Russia itself in virtually all major media, with little or no discussion of the supposed evidence for the claim. A stellar exception is the London Review of Books, which published a critically important essay by RutgersUniversity professor Jackson Lears in the January 4, 2018 issue. Titled “What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking,” the article is an excellent overview and analysis of many of the issues the title suggests. The claim of Russian meddling in the election remains to this day evidence-free, although you would never know that from the treatment of the topic in the mainstream media. As Professor Lears observes:

Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.

But although Professor Lears refers to the reports of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity in his discussion of “Russian hacking,” it seems clear there must have been a leak, not a hack, because “the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack.” (“Was the ‘Russian Hack’ An Inside Job?”, July 25, 2017, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/25/was-the-russian-hack-an-inside-job/ .)

In any case, definitive claims about who was responsible (assuming, purely arguendo, it was a hack) face the fact that, according to Ray McGovern and William S. Binney, two members of VIPS,

On March 31, 2017, WikiLeaks released original CIA documents [the “Vault 7” trove of CIA documents] — ignored by mainstream media — showing that the agency had created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs like Cyrillic markings, for example. (“Trumped-up Claims Against Trump,” May 17, 2017, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-trump-russia-phony-20170517-story.html ).

McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years; Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, was the agency’s technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting, and created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.

In other words, as Russian president Vladimir Putin has explained,

today’s technology is such that the final address can be masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one will be able to understand the origin of that address. And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual [so] that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack. (Valdimir Putin’s televised interview on NBC (June 4, 2017), by NBC News’ Megyn Kelly, text published on the website of the President of Russia, June 5, 2017.)

Demonization of Putin and Russia

The demonization of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russia itself is just part, albeit the most dangerous part, of a disinformation campaign flowing from the mainstream media. I don’t propose to present a full treatment of the subject here. But in broad outline, it’s my understanding that when the Cold War ended in 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin accepted the advice of Western neoliberal planners and dismantled much of the Russian “safety net,” with the result that the Russian economy tanked and millions of people faced terrific hardship. Vladimir Putin has been attempting to repair that situation, and his initial success is part of the reason for his popularity in Russia. That understanding comes from a number of articles I’ve read over the years, but primarily from Tony Kevin’s book Return to Moscow, mentioned above. I’m hardly an expert on internal Russian politics. But I’ve read many of the extensive public statements Mr. Putin has made since 2007, and with my primary concern being his role in international relations and with respect to the control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, he strikes me as a statesman. Yet as investigative journalist Robert Parry observes,

The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is … where the neocons and the liberal interventionists most significantly come together. The U.S. media’s approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. … For instance, the full story of the infamous Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane coup in 2014. The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from hearing the “other side of the story.” Indeed to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a “Putin apologist” or “Kremlin stooge.” Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many “liberals” who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the assertions on faith.

One result is a needless heightening of the dangers and risks outlined in this article.

US Foreign Policy

While acknowledging the “imperial hubris” behind recent multiple US military actions, Professor Lears calls them “failed crusades” in light of which “one may suspect humanitarian intervention is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless.” But it seems to me that the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya as a functioning state, and the sustained insistence on removing from office constitutionally elected (in a landslide, in 2014) Syrian president Bashar al-Assad are fairly clear evidence that in practice “the national interest” means the hegemony (“full spectrum dominance”) of the US military and the profits of multinational corporations, motivating a deliberate program of dismantling any force in the Middle East that may prefer (or, as in the case of Gaddafi’s Libya, promote regional) independence.

Although still registered as a Democrat, I hold out little hope that the Party will change fundamentally, even if that’s what winning elections requires. In his effort to find a silver lining behind the depressing array of clouds he discusses, Professor Lears briefly mentions Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document posted at https://democraticautopsy.org, whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. I plan to review that document, but meanwhile back at election time I took the opportunity to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein – who not only proposes fundamental change but has lately, by the way, become another target of the congressional “Russiagate” investigations, so called.

The Mainstream Media Disinform the Public

Addressing the problems discussed in this essay effectively will require a shared understanding of the basic facts. On the risk of nuclear war, for example, Dan Ellsberg’s goal is to contribute to the development of an informed electorate that, recognizing the risk, will demand appropriate actions. But unfortunately we humans have a variety of mechanisms to assist us in avoiding unpleasant facts, and many of us are inclined to use them; but to make matters worse, as author Patrick Lawrence has put it, “an extraordinary proportion of our public discourse now rests on nothing but ideologically inspired disinformation.” ( https://eastwestaccord.com/tipping-patrick-lawrence/ .) Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at NYU and Princeton, calls the media’s role in this disinformation campaign “media malpractice.” As a recent illustration of it, Professor Cohen observes that new evidence that Washington broke its promise not to expand NATO “one inch eastward”—a fateful decision with ongoing ramifications—has not been reported by The New York Times or other agenda-setting media outlets; and he explains the significance of this fact. The US government, and the media, routinely blame the deterioration of relations with Russia and the New Cold War on “Russian aggression.” However, the newly disclosed evidence strengthen+s the case for directing the blame in the opposite direction, that is, at the West:

In 1990, Soviet Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed not only to the reunification of Germany, whose division was the epicenter of that Cold War, but also, at the urging of the Western powers, particularly the United States, that the new Germany would be a member of NATO. … Gorbachev made the decision based on assurances by his then–Western “partners” that in return NATO would never be expanded “one inch eastward” toward Russia. (Today, having nearly doubled its member countries, the world’s most powerful military alliance sits on Russia’s western borders.) At the time, it was known that President George H.W. Bush had especially persuaded Gorbachev through Secretary of State James Baker’s “not one inch” and other equally emphatic guarantees. Ever since Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, began the still ongoing process of NATO expansion, its promoters and apologists have repeatedly insisted there was no such promise, that it had all been “myth” or “misunderstanding,” and moreover that NATO’s vast expansion had been necessary and has been a great success, actual myths that Cohen also discusses. Now, however, the invaluable National Security Archive at George Washington University has established the historical truth by publishing, on December 12 of last year, not only a detailed account of what Gorbachev was promised in 1990–91 but the relevant documents themselves. The truth, and the promises broken, are much more expansive than previously known: All of the Western powers involved—the US, the UK, France, Germany itself—made the same promise to Gorbachev on multiple occasions and in various emphatic ways. … And yet, nearly a month [later], neither the Times nor The Washington Post, which profess to be the nation’s most important, reliable, and indispensable political newspapers, has published one word about this revelation. (Certainly the two papers are pervasively important to other media, not only due to their daily national syndicates but because today’s broadcast media, especially CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, take most of their own Russia-related “reporting” cues from the Times and the Post.)

Of course, there is an inclination on the part of some members of the public to welcome such disinformation, or simply to remain uninformed of unpleasant facts, such as the risk of nuclear war. More has been written on this subject than I can discuss here, but briefly, here are a couple of statements that provide an insightful exploration of the psychological issues that confront critics of U.S. foreign policy:

The only thing keeping westerners from seeing through the lies that they’ve been told about Syria is the unquestioned assumption that their own government could not possibly be that evil. They have no trouble believing that a foreigner from a Muslim-majority country [the reference is to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad] could be gratuitously using chemical weapons on children at the most strategically disastrous time possible and bombing his own civilians for no discernible reason other than perhaps sheer … sadism [these are references to “false flag” incidents in which, for example, one or another terrorist organization causes a chemical weapons attack and seeks to blame it on the Syrian government], but the possibility that their [own] government is making those things up in order to manufacture consent for regime change is ruled out before any critical analysis of the situation even begins.

Ominously, this morning’s newspaper reports that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plans to “hold Russia accountable” for what seems clearly to be yet another false flag use of chlorine gas.

I found it enormously helpful to read Ms. Johnstone’s essay in conjunction with another piece, by investigative reporter and photographer Vanessa Beeley, in which Ms. Beeley observes:

What we’ve been undergoing to a large extent is a form of psychological abuse, actually, by very narcissistic, hegemonic governments and officials for a very long time. It’s a form of gaslighting where actually our own faith in our ability to judge a situation, and to some extent even our own identity, has been eroded and damaged to the point where we’re effectively accepting their version of reality.

Adam Shatz in the LRB and Australian diplomat Tony Kevin both use the metaphor of sleepwalking to describe what we appear to be doing with respect to the risk of nuclear war. Hopefully, the efforts of analysts and activists to wake us up will produce enough awareness in time, before we sleepwalk into the end of the world. Unfortunately, we will have to generate that awareness without the assistance of the mainstream media, and indeed in the teeth of a pervasive disinformation campaign.

Robert Roth is a retired public interest lawyer. He received his law degree from Yale in 1971 and prosecuted false advertising and consumer fraud as an assistant attorney general for New York (1981-1991) and Oregon (1993-2007).

Notes

Carl Boggs in “Doomsday Panic in Hawaii,” January 23, 2018), https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/23/doomsday-panic-in-hawaii/ . For a useful discussion of “the myopic mindset of nuclear strategists and what we should be doing about it,” see Bo Filter, “The Prize—Extinction: Winning a Nuclear War?” (May 15-17, 2017), http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/15/winning-a-nuclear-war/ . This essay includes discussion of an important book I’ve seldom seen mentioned, Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, To Win A Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans (Black Rose Books, Montreal-New York, 1987).

Michael R. Gordon, “U.S. Plans New Nuclear Weapons,” The Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2018, p. 1.

You can read about that in Eric Schlosser’s New Yorker piece, accessible at http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in-dr-strangelove-was-true ; but for an update, see Mr. Schlosser’s “World War Three, By Mistake,” at http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake .

https://www.blackagendareport.com/daniel-ellsberg-doomsday-actual-war-plan .The book is reviewed in some detail in James Heddle, “Rational Insanity: the Mad Logic of America’s Nuclear ‘Doomsday Machine’” (January 9, 2018), at https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/09/rational-insanity-the-mad-logic-of-americas-nuclear-doomsday-machine/ .

For a brief overview on that topic see my “The Evidence-Free Claims Against Trump and Syria (Undermining Peace Efforts and Threatening More War),” June 12, 2017, posted at https://www.unz.com/article/the-evidence-free-claims-against-trump-and-syria/ . More recently, Adam Shatz discusses many of the ways we could awaken (or not) to discover we had unwisely ignored the threat of nuclear war in “The President and the Bomb,” published in the November 16 issue of the London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n22/adam-shatz/the-president-and-the-bomb .

Ira Helfand, MD, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk?”, Second Edition, 2013. For a much briefer summary, see Steven Starr, “Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction,” October 14, 2015, https://fas.org/pir-pubs/nuclear-war-nuclear-winter-and-human-extinction/ .

For a brief treatment of the Ukraine situation, see “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” by University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer, Foreign Affairs, September-October 2014, and a critique of that article and Prof. Mearsheimer’s reply in the November-December 2014 issue, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/author/john-j-mearsheimer. I posted a more elaborate discussion at https://healingjustice.wordpress.com/ . The current situation seems to be worsening rather than improving. See Gilbert Doctorow, “A Coming Russia-Ukraine War?”, https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/21/a-coming-russia-ukraine-war/ .On Syria, I wrote “What’s Really Happening in Syria: A Consumer Fraud Lawyer’s Mini-Primer,” which has been posted on the web at http://www.syriasolidaritymovement.org/2017/01/21/mini-primer-on-syria-by-former-assist-attorney-general-ny-oregon/ and also printed as a booklet, available from me at 1430 Willamette Street, # 366, Eugene, OR97401-4049. A recent brief update is by Mike Whitney, “Trump’s Plan B for Syria: Occupation and Intimidation ,” January 19, 2018, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/19/trumps-plan-b-for-syria-occupation-and-intimidation/

William K. Polk, “Cuban Missile Crisis In Reverse? The Cold War and Ukraine,” at https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/25/the-cold-war-and-ukraine/ , and “Shaping the Deep Memories of Russians and Ukrainians,” http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2014/12/shaping-the-deep-memories-of-russians-and-ukrainians-wr-polk.html .

Several pieces summarize the matter usefully and in more detail: Stephen F. Cohen, “The Scary Void Inside Russiagate,” posted at https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/15/the-scary-void-inside-russia-gate/ ; Robert Parry, “Protecting the Shaky Russia-gate Narrative,” at https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/15/the-scary-void-inside-russia-gate/ ; Ray McGovern, “The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate,” January 11, 2018, https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/11/the-fbi-hand-behind-russia-gate/ , and Dennis J. Bernstein, “The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate,” January 1, 2018, – https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/01/the-still-missing-evidence-of-russia-gate/ . For an audio summary on Russia-gate and important issues it raises, including the bipartisan attack on the right to criticize US foreign policy, listen to Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley’s “First They Came for Jill Stein” at https://soundcloud.com/user-208734627/first-they-came-for-jill-stein .

For more detailed information and background see Return to Moscow, cited above; The Putin Interviews: Oliver Stone Interviews Vladimir Putin, (Hot Books, 2017) and Dan Kovalik, The Plot To Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017).

Robert Parry, “An Apology and Explanation,” December 31, 2017, https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/31/an-apology-and-explanation/ .

(See “Jill Stein Denounces Probe over ‘Collusion with Russians’,” Aaron Mate’s interview with Dr. Stein for The Real News (December 19, 2017), at http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=20750%27%20style=%27color:#pop1 , and Mike Whitney, “Jill Stein in the Crosshairs: the Russia Investigation Shifts to Clinton’s Political Rivals” (December 28, 2017), at https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/28/jill-stein-in-the-crosshairs-the-russia-investigation-shifts-to-clintons-political-rivals/ .

This is in Professor Cohen’s discussion with John Batchelor, “The US ‘Betrayed’ Russia, but It Is Not ‘News That’s Fit to Print,’” (January 10, 2018), accessible at https://www.thenation.com/article/the-us-betrayed-russia-but-it-is-not-news-thats-fit-to-print/ . Professor Cohen’s discussion mentions other episodes of “mainstream media malpractice.” See, for additional examples and discussion, Andrew J. Bacevich, “More ‘Fake News,’ Alas, from the New York Times,” (November 8, 2017), http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/more-fake-news-alas-from-the-new-york-times/ ; and Robert Parry, “An Apology and Explanation,” December 31, 2017, https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/31/an-apology-and-explanation/ .

Caitlin Johnstone, “You Only Hate Assad Because Your TV Told You To” (May 27, 2017), http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47136.htm (first published by 21wire at http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/05/27/syria-you-only-hate-assad-because-your-tv-told-you-to/ ).

Felicia Schwartz, “U.S. Faults Russia in Suspected Gas Strike,” The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2018, p. A9. I’ve now read of a number of false flag attacks in the case of Syria, and explore them in my booklet cited in note 7. As I write there in endnote 10: “In reality, the Damascus sarin gas attack was carried out by an opposition group with the goal of forcing the U.S. to directly attack the Syrian government. Soon after the event, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity issued a statement reporting ‘the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident’. Later on, Seymour Hersh wrote two lengthy investigations pointing to Jabhat al Nusra with Turkish support being culpable. Investigative journalist Robert Parry exposed the Human Rights Watch analysis blaming the Syrian government as a ‘junk heap of bad evidence’. [ https://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/07/the-collapsing-syria-sarin-case/ ; see further, https://consortiumnews.com/2014/01/21/human-rights-watchs-syria-dilemma/ ; https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/08/un-team-heard-claims-of-staged-chemical-attacks/ .] In the Turkish parliament, Turkish deputies presented documents showing that Turkey provided sarin to Syrian ‘rebels’. A detailed examination and analysis of all fact based stories is online at whoghouta.blogspot.com. Their conclusion is that ‘The only plausible scenario that fits the evidence is an attack by opposition forces.’ Rick Sterling, http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/06/socialists-supporting-nato-and-us-empire-a-response-to-ashley-smith/ .” See also endnote 13 in my booklet. And regarding another incident, see Margaret Kimberley, “Freedom Rider: Human Rights Industry Protects Imperialism” (2/15/2017), http://www.blackagendareport.com/shamnest-international-human-slaughterhouse .

Even if the explanations don’t flat-out disprove the supposed factual basis for regarding the incidents as real rather than manufactured – “fake news” as the term is now commonly used – they certainly provide a basis for extreme doubt. Seeing this happen repeatedly, I’ve now come to think that government decision-makers like Mr. Tillerson may not at all believe their professed interpretation of these events, but rather use them as excuses for taking actions they prefer for quite different reasons.

“Gaslighting: State Mind Control and Abusive Narcissism” (May 26, 2016), http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/05/26/gaslighting-state-mind-control-and-abusive-narcissism/ .