By Scott Taylor
In recent weeks we have seen two major incidents occur – the March 4 poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and the April 7 attack on the embattled Syrian town of Douma.
In both cases we were told by western intelligence agencies, before any actual investigation had taken place, exactly who the culprits were. In the Skripal incident it was of course Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose bumbling secret service are supposed to have used a nerve agent in the attempted murder.
The Douma attack was pronounced to be a chemical strike by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, assisted by his ally Putin.
In both cases punishment has already been meted out by the same western countries who pride themselves on representing the rule of law, wherein the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Based on the unproven British allegations of Russian state involvement in the Skripal attack, Canada has joined 28 other countries in expelling a combined total of 150 Russian diplomats.
The Douma chemical attack is looking more like a clumsy hoax perpetrated by Islamic extremist rebels, yet Canada was among the first to give a big “attaboy” pat on the back to the U.S., UK and France for launching their punishing missile strike against Assad on April 13.
What has been missing from the vast majority of media reports is the necessary skepticism to challenge the original official versions.
False flag incidents, or staged hoaxes have been used throughout history as clumsy pretexts to initiate conflict.
On the evening of August 31, 1939, a small group of German intelligence operatives disguised themselves in Polish army uniforms, crossed the German-Polish border, and seized a German radio station. They broadcast a brief anti-German message and then to make things seem more real, they executed a hapless prisoner named Franciszek Honiok. His corpse, complete with Polish uniform, was presented as ‘proof’ of an unprovoked aggression by Poland on German soil. The operation’s code name was Grandmother died.
The very next day, September 1, with the ink not yet dry on the newspaper accounts of the Polish attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, Hitler’s massed military rolled into Poland. According to the German press, the invasion was in reprisal for this blatant Polish aggression. Hitler was simply defending his people according to the official Nazi narrative at the time.
In August 1964, the U.S. reported that one of its Navy Destroyers had been involved in one, or possibly two firefights with North Vietnamese gunboats. At that juncture, the U.S. was providing just a handful of military advisors to South Vietnam in their ongoing clash with North Vietnam.
The official version of events was that the USS Maddox was minding its own business sailing on an intelligence gathering patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, when these little North Vietnamese gunboats defied all logic, not to mention international law, and attacked the much larger U.S. warship.
In the one sided exchange, USS Maddox escaped with a single bullet hole in damage, while all three North Vietnamese ships suffered serious damage. However, that alleged attack on USS Maddox was enough for President Lyndon Johnson to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution granting him the right to combat “communist aggression” in Southeast Asia. Within months there were 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam to avenge the damage done to USS Maddox.
Following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, a tearful young Kuwaiti girl told U.S. Congress that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers dumping infants out of incubators and leaving them to die on the floor. After Saddam’s defeat the following year, it was revealed that the incubator story was totally fabricated and the ‘witness’ was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador in Washington.
In 2003, the U.S. and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That lie was exposed after the invasion, and fifteen years later, Iraq remains a failed state of violent unrest.
It does not make one an “Assad apologist” or a “Russian propagandist” to ask western leaders to show proof supporting their allegations. These same agencies have lied to us before, often with catastrophic results.
Long after the war, while in the final years of his captivity in Spandau Prison, Nazi leader Albert Speer opined that the only thing which could have prevented Hitler’s rise to power was “a free press.”
That is a powerful statement.
