Another day, another massacre in Syria. It is increasingly clear that large numbers of civilians have been killed once more, this time in Tremseh, near Hama, in what the UN "assessed as an extension of a Syrian Arab air force operation", although UN observers were prevented from entering the village.

The fog of war is as thick as ever in Syria. Independent reporting is not allowed, so the reporters covering the story, Arab and western, have today been trying to contact their sources in the area. Some will risk their lives once again by trying to make their way across the Turkish border into Syria to try to get closer to the truth.

But maybe they shouldn't bother. According to Charlie Skelton, "a comedy writer, journalist and olive farmer", the real story is how the news on Syria is all being orchestrated from Washington and spoon-fed to the media by a group of stooges hand-picked by shadowy forces, the Bilderberg group in particular.

In a piece entitled The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?, Skelton identifies a few officials in the Syrian National Council (SNC) who had spent time in Washington thinktanks, and from that constructs a conspiracy. This is what he means when he says "there is another story to be told".

This story, Skelton tells largely through innuendo, as there was a continuous throb of ominous music underlying even the most banal prose. The words "experts on Syria" are put in quotation marks, although it usually refers fairly straightforwardly to people who have devoted a substantial share of their working life studying Syrian society and politics, and yes, even travelling a lot to Syria.

The drumbeat of insinuation about US manipulation builds to a climax near the end where Skelton has a one-line paragraph declaring: "The bombs doors are open. The plans have been drawn up." What? How did we get from Syrians who once worked on US-based thinktanks to imminent war? I clicked on the link from the words "The plans have been drawn up" and it took me to a paper by the Brookings Institution (another Washington thinktank) on policy options for ... Iran.

The hints and nods towards conspiracy are scattered through the piece. He has a line claiming: "And let's not forget, whatever destabilisation has been done in the realm of news and public opinion is being carried out twofold on the ground." A link takes you to a report that Mossad, Blackwater and the CIA all "led operations in Homs". It is sourced to al-Manar, an affiliate of Hezbollah.

The case against the named SNC officials seems especially weak. Take the case of Bassma Kodmani, a member of the SNC executive bureau. Before the revolt, she worked for a variety of thinktanks, such as the Council of Foreign Relations, which Skelton describes as "a powerful US lobby group". This is a needlessly sinister description of America's most prestigious foreign policy talking shop and research centre, which is fairly centrist and does not push in any particular direction. It has lots of scholars, with widely different views of the world, doing their own things.

For added effect Kodmani is photographed looking glum apparently leaving this year's Bilderberg conference, but the days when that was seen as a Spectre-like organisation at which key operatives were handed their instructions to maintain global domination have long gone. Mainly because such claims are unsubstantiated and plain silly.

The affected tone of intrigue in Skelton's piece is grating but it's also beside the point. Most of the hated "mainstream media" treat the people he singles out as they should be treated, as the mouthpiece of a sprawling, dysfunctional coalition of strange bedfellows – among which the Muslim Brotherhood are probably far more powerful that these would-be American plants.

I did a search for Bassma Kodmani mentions on the Guardian, and got seven hits for this year. But four of those were pieces by Skelton, and another was a wire agency piece on the infighting inside the SNC.

To appreciate how specious Skelton's approach is, all you have to do is apply it to other situations. In Kosovo, a lot of fighters in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were complete rogues, including smugglers and car thieves. But that did not and does not change the fact Serb forces executed thousands of civilians there. To have focused exclusively on the KLA's shortcomings would have somewhat missed the point.

Likewise in Bosnia, there were also a lot of crooks in the Bosnian army, and the likes of the Reaganite Jeane Kirkpatrick and Margeret Thatcher advocated tough action on the Bosnian Serbs, as did lots of other people who turned out to be unsavoury or nutcases – but to have obsessed about their politics would have meant you would have missed the genocide.

If you are of a conspiratorial turn of mind you could do a bit of research on me after reading this article and find that I spent more than eight years in Washington (aha!) and about 18 months in Jerusalem (the Mossad connection) and you may well find pictures of me with Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic, where I maintain I was conducting interviews but which could have had a much more underhand connection.

You would be wasting your time. Even if I had been paid or programmed to falsify everything I write about Syria, my controllers would be powerless to alter people's perceptions of what is going on there. The news is streaming out by Skype, emails and satellite phones, and in the testimony of refugees. We rely heavily on our correspondents on the ground to gather information directly inside Syria. They do not spend much if any time on the phone to SNC spokespeople in Washington. Likewise most of the reports on the latest butchery in Tremseh came not from the SNC, but from rebels and activists in the area, and are treated for the time being as unconfirmed.

The bigger picture, however, is abundantly clear. A slaughter is under way, largely carried out by government forces and allied militias. Whether this should mean western military intervention is quite another question. It is hard to see how air strikes could stop the killing, but authorising the international criminal court to start a full investigation into who is responsible would seem like a step in the right direction.

Nothing could be more important than working out how to respond to the brutality in Syria. We ought to be having that debate. Investigating the pedigrees of cherry-picked individuals on each side is not the way to arrive at the right answer.

Charlie Skelton has responded to this article in a comment below.

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• This article was amended on 18 July 2012. The original incorrectly stated that Webster Tarpley was a principal source for Charlie Skelton's comments about Bassama Kodmani. This has been removed.