By Patricia Negrón

The mainstream narrative on Syria is a real-time example of the rampant manipulation of public sentiment to manufacture consent for war — war paid with American lives and tax dollars, but designed entirely to support the interests of private industry. The truth is grotesquely distorted to demonize the victims of our aggression and produce a complicit citizenry in the belief that we are ‘spreading Democracy’ across the globe. In fact, we are doing the opposite, taking millions of innocent lives in the process and forcing tens of millions more to flee their homes, leveled by relentless bombing and destruction. The pattern is well-established as evidenced by our illegal invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya . . . and Syria is no different.

As reported by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, in 2000, Qatar proposed to build a $10B, 1500Km pipeline that would traverse Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey to connect the world’s richest natural gas repository directly with Europe, which gets almost a third of its gas from Russia and was also eager to have easier, cheaper access. At the same time, Turkey would generate substantial transit fees and be able to free itself from relying on its Russian rival. Moreover, the Qatar pipeline would be of enormous benefit to Saudi Arabia’s conservative Sunni Monarchy and explains why Saudi Arabia, Hillary Clinton’s largest campaign donor during her 2016 Presidential campaign, was eager to have her in the White House. However, the Sunni Monarchy’s control of the natural gas resources would put it into direct conflict with Iran’s Shiite state, which happens to also be a close ally of Bashar Al-Assad.

But Russia sells 70 percent of its gas exports to Europe, and the Qatar pipeline would deprive the country of a critical component of its economy. In deference to his most powerful ally, Assad refused the proposed pipeline in 2009 and instead endorsed the competing Russian ‘Islamic pipeline’ which would carry gas from Iran through Syria to ports in Lebanon making Shia Iran, not Qatar, the principal supplier of energy to the European market. Further exacerbating the ensuing tension was that Israel was also determined to ‘derail the Islamic pipeline’ to diminish Iran and Syria. Immediately, it was determined by those backing the Qatari pipeline to foment a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow Assad. As such, the CIA began funding terrorists enlisted to execute the coup d’état.

Ironically, according to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Assad was moving to liberalize Syria and in his quest to ‘ westernize,’ handed over ‘thousands of invaluable files to the CIA on Jihadist radicals, who he considered a mutual enemy.’ His government was secular by design and ‘impressively diverse,’ according to Hersh. And, in fact, 80 percent of his government and military were Sunni, despite being Shiite, himself. Relatively speaking, Saudi Arabia’s record of brutality is of far greater concern than Assad’s repression. The statement by the Obama administration that ‘Assad must go’ flies in the face of logic in this context.

In the spring of 2011, small, peaceful demonstrations were taking place in Damascus demanding change to Assad’s harsh tactics. But as the Huffington Post UK reported at that time, the protests were, ‘at least in part, orchestrated by the CIA.’ In shocking contrast to the current administration and media narrative of ‘civil war’ in Syria, in September of 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress that the Sunni kingdoms offered to pay for the U.S. military to invade Syria and oust Assad saying, ‘. . . if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing, the way we’ve done it previously in other places [Iraq], they’ll carry the cost.’

And so the campaign for manufactured consent began whereby a coalition including the U.S., France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England demanded Assad step down. The CIA spent $6M on a British disinformation campaign to manufacture consent for Assad’s removal. Intelligence documents published by WikiLeaks show that, by 2012, the MidEast members of the coalition were actively ‘arming, training and funding radical Jihadist Sunni fighters’ to topple Assad and make way for the Qatari pipeline. Qatar invested $3B in the insurgency and hosted Pentagon training of insurgents on U.S. bases there. In addition, the jihadists were given intelligence and logistical support by U.S. personnel. And in the fall of 2014, the CIA armed the Jihadists with heavy artillery, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles smuggled from Libya by ratlines through Turkey to Syria, a story originally broken by American journalist Serena Shim, who died mysteriously within days after making her findings public. Hersh later reported that those ratlines were financed by the MidEast members of the coalition: Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

In late summer of 2013, Assad was blamed by the Obama administration for a chemical weapons attack near Damascus. Most significantly, Sy Hersh reported that despite broad knowledge of the fact that Jihadists also had access to sarin, and there being no concrete evidence that Assad was responsible for the attack, Obama declared that Assad had crossed a ‘red line’ and would be targeted by U.S. military. In direct contrast to Obama’s claims, Sy Hersh found among intelligence and military officers, as well as consultants, ‘intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence’ with one high-level intelligence officer calling it a ‘ruse.’ And, in fact, Hersh reported that a former intelligence official told him ‘the Obama administration had altered the available information’ similar to the ‘distortion’ of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Though the mainstream media portrayed the peaceful Syrian protests as an uprising against a tyrant, U.S. Intelligence agencies knew all along that they were arming radical Jihadists who would attempt to create a new Sunni Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq, according to a 2012 study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). With the help of U.S. and Gulf State funding, training, and logistics support, the peaceful Syrian protests for policy change became a sectarian ‘Shiite versus Sunni’ war — as was the administration’s goal. In the autumn of 2014, the New York Times reported that an Iraqi Shiite Cleric claimed the CIA created ISIS, as was seconded by Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister as well as its Treasury Secretary.

Today, the liberation of Eastern Aleppo has brought to the forefront the reality of the U.S.’s mass disinformation campaign as journalists such as Eva Bartlett’s December 9, 2016 report on her extensive research in Syria — which directly contradicts the mainstream narrative of a brutal regime attacking its own people. Ms. Bartlett’s findings confirmed those of a U.S. Peace Council that returned in July 2016 from a similar mission in Syria, neither account of which were carried by mainstream media outlets. Instead, during Aleppo’s final liberation from rebel forces, we saw only the falsified ‘last messages’ from journalists and activists recruited to further the false narrative, who were later identified as having questionable ties to the opposition forces. All appear to have survived, including journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem, who days later filed a report of his interview of a rebel armed with an assault rifle and what he claimed was a suicide vest.

So how did it happen that Americans could remain so ignorant of the reality in Syria for the last five years? Since at least 1975, the CIA has been feeding ‘stories’ to the networks and news media that are then broadcast as fact. At the same time, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, passed to prevent the use of propaganda in the U.S. and distinguish us for guaranteeing a free and objective domestic press, was eroded over the years until 2012 when it was completely gutted. At the same time, massive consolidation was happening among the networks via the Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing for tightening control of content being distributed through the nation’s news networks, all of which are run by fifteen billionaires. And, in a further exacerbation, it turns out that more recently Amazon founder Jeff Bezos inked a $600 million deal with the CIA in 2014, shortly after Bezos purchased the Washington Post — the paper that published the original ‘Russian Hack’ narrative alleged by the CIA.

It is estimated that half a million Syrians have been killed, to-date, and that ten million more have been permanently displaced from their homes in what the United Nations has declared the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II. So long as our laws continue to allow the use of propaganda on U.S. citizens, concentration of network control, and increased censorship of alternative news sources, Americans will only grow more skeptical of reports from mainstream outlets and seek other, more authentic, channels for their information. Until an objective press is restored, we must question official narratives at every turn and, even more so, be vigilant in seeking out those stories that don’t make the news.

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