NATO Secretly Authorizes Syrian Attacks

Turkish convoys heading towards the Syrian border with tanks and other military equipment. Turkey, a member of NATO, has been accused of arming rebels fighting the government in Damascus., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

NATO secretly authorizes Syrian attack

By Gordon Duff
Thu Aug 30, 2012 5:1PM GMT
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On Monday, August 27, 2012, in a meeting in Brussels, NATO military leaders in consultation with “telephonic liaison” with officers of military forces in several former Soviet Republics, major African states, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states came to a combined decision to act against Syria.

Two issues were on the agenda:

1. How climate change in Greenland will effect geopolitics, immigration and military affairs for the EU

2. Syria and the potential for Russian and Chinese intervention.

3. Iran was not an official agenda item but it is an unspoken conclusion that, if China and/or Russia stand aside for interference by NATO in Syria’s internal affairs, this will be seen as an authorization for incursions into Iran, a systematic “Balkanization” based on a prescribed formula of “manufactured and simulated internal political and social strife.”

No announcement was made, no plans or timetable published, simply a vote on authorization of force which passed unanimously by member and included non-member states unanimously.

News stories throughout North America and Europe earlier in the day were filled with reports of mass killings by the Syrian Army and the presence of Iranian troops in Syria. True or not, these stories represent a pre-staging for the NATO conference.

The critical reporting issue involves rhetoric. We moved, yesterday, from discussions of “fighting” to “systematic execution of hundreds of civilians.”

No video nor photos were included to verify neither claims nor sources given other than reports from “rebel forces.”

Recent consultation with friends in the Pentagon as to Syria’s air defense system indicated that the US has, in place, a play to destroy the command and control capability of Syria’s system.

The problems are twofold:
1. Russian technicians man the Syrian system

2. The S300P2 system Syria uses is extremely “robust”

An additional political consideration is a simple one, there is no UN authorization. Both Russia and China have vetoed even sanctions against Syria much less authorized an attack.

Thus, there is no existing authority capable of justifying an attack.

In an interview this week at the NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) conference in Tehran, attended by 120 member states, a huge defeat for NATO interests in the area, this interview yielded some substantive and surprising facts.

Press TV: Certain powers have been trying to isolate Iran, actually, by not holding such a conference at such a high ranking level. As you said, this all has failed.

Now tell us about all the sanctions against Iran which have propagated against Iran, that Iran should be isolated, but as you said it’s all been failed. What is really important is that the agenda of the 688-point draft document which talked about, as you call and urge all countries to make the world free from any nuclear weapons.

You were a senior expert in the IAEA as an inspector. Tell us about that and also with the particular focus on Israel which has not yet signed up to the NPT.

Abu Shadi: I oppose strongly any kind of accusation on any state based on intelligence information. All the accusations given to the nuclear program in Iran is based only on intelligence information. There is no single proof that Iran is deviating from its commitment from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

I am very surprised that the Security Council took four decisions, sanctions against Iran just because of rumors that the intelligence source may think there is something.

I think this policy should be changed. The Security Council and its way of veto, and its limited number only to the big powers should be changed. I think that will also be one of the points to be addressed in this conference. I believe strongly that that situation, which is actually politically influenced by the West, should be changed.

With respect to your second part about the NPT, in fact, almost all the states in the world respects the Non-Proliferation [Treaty] except the five weaponized states, which they should reduce their weapons which didn’t happen up until today, and the three or four states which did not sign the NPT including Israel. Israel is the only state in the Middle East who did not sign the NPT.

None of the Western countries who are accusing not only Iran but before also Iraq, Libya, Syria and even Egypt, did not consider any accusation to what the Israelis are doing. I believe this bias in the international organization should be stopped.

Shadi makes some particularly interesting points and raises some concerns few had noticed. His most damning statement, of course, is that the Security Council, a carryover from a war 70 years ago, certainly a demonstration of oligarchic rule at the United Nations, has been directed at Iran.

In particular, he notes that the council’s unilateral and undemocratic decisions, followed by nations, China and Russia, who defended Syria, were aimed at Iran but backed by no presentation of facts or even qualified intelligence assessments. In fact, since Colin Powell’s humiliating WMD presentation before the UN, no “American fact” has been taken seriously nor is likely to.

CNN quotes a top Powell aid:

A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life.

"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life."

Actual risks and ramifications

Top intelligence analysts in private consultation fear a larger Middle East war. “Russia and China won’t stand back, not with the US planning a unilateral move on Africa and its resources. It’s like 1947 again with Truman and the Marshall plan, encirclement, but a war over, not just resources but a world war against what has now seen as the real threat, what Americans call the “middle class.”

Thus, taking Syria without taking Iran is “not in the cards.” Here I return to the words of H. G. Wells, in his War of the Worlds. His grasp in this fiction well over a century old reflects on our times in a curious and wonderfully literate manner:

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of...

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity.”

Martians, this is how NATO and Israel look on the world, as expressed through the prose of Wells. Their gaze “cool and unsympathetic,” as drone warfare and their plans, calculated acts of false flag terror, kidnappings, assassinations, the abomination of mythical news reporting.

The end of the road, this path of “hubris” could well be world war, least of all fuel price increases that collapse the currencies and economies.

Talking of death is nothing as we are now pre-staged to look on life as nothing, all victims are “militants” if you want them dead or “collateral damage” when you err.

Iran’s position chairing NAM makes them a harder target. The general criticism by many NAM members, the dictatorial rule of the United Nations by the Security Council, has not prevented the Syrian conflict from becoming a threat to world peace.

For Iran, their choice seems, on the surface, to be in aiding Syria, negotiations, using oil leverage with India, China and others and predicting how the west is plotting.

If Iran falls, it will be only another domino.


Triple blasts kill 2, injure 11 in Damascus suburb

Thu Aug 30, 2012 8:20PM GMT
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Explosions have killed two people and injured 11 others on the outskirts of Damascus as clashes intensify between armed men and government troops across the country.

The casualties were caused late on Thursday when three blasts struck the Dahiet al-Assad area in the capital’s countryside.

Separately, two car bombs hit the mainly-Druze-and-Christian-populated suburb of Jaramana on the city’s southeastern outskirts, failing to leave any casualties.

Earlier in the day, seven Syrian government forces and at least 47 insurgents were reportedly killed in heavy clashes that erupted in the flashpoint city of Homs in the country's west.

The Syrian Army has also killed hundreds of insurgents, among them large numbers of foreign nationals, in and around the northern city of Aleppo over the past days.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011.

Damascus blames the violence on outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorists, funded and instructed by elements outside the country. It also blames Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar for funding and arming the insurgents.

There are reportedly a large number of foreign nationals and al-Qaeda militants in the armed groups fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.


Seven Syria soldiers, 47 insurgents killed in Homs

Thu Aug 30, 2012 6:26PM GMT

Seven Syrian government forces and at least 47 insurgents have been killed in heavy clashes that erupted the flashpoint city of Homs in the country's west.

The deaths occurred on Thursday in the city's Bab Hood neighborhood.

Elsewhere, two insurgents were killed and another 13 were arrested when they attempted to attack Syrian army checkpoint in the Mliha area of in the Damascus countryside.

In the northwestern city of Idlib, intensified clashes broke out between Syrian Army forces and the Liwaa al-Umma Brigade insurgents. One senior militia member identified as Abu Naser al-Libi was killed in the fighting.

Four armed men were also killed by a Syrian Army unit while attempting to enter the Seif al-Dawla neighborhood of the largest city of Aleppo.

The Syrian Army has also killed hundreds of insurgents, among them large numbers of foreign nationals, in and around the northern city of Aleppo over the past days.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011.

Damascus blames the chaos on outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorists funded and instructed by elements outside the country. It also blames Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar for funding and arming the insurgents.

There are reportedly a large number of foreign nationals and al-Qaeda militants in the armed groups fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.


Syria Army kills several insurgents in Aleppo, Idlib

Thu Aug 30, 2012 2:29PM GMT

Syrian Army forces have killed a number of insurgents in the northwestern cities Aleppo and Idlib as clashes continue between government soldiers and foreign-backed insurgents.

The Syrian Army was closing in on the insurgents on Thursday, one day after Syrian soldiers killed a group of armed men who had kidnapped a number of civilians.

Syrian government forces were also clearing the area of insurgents in Idlib, where they have managed to retake control of six areas held by the so-called Free Syrian Army.

In the capital, Syrian troops killed and arrested a number of armed men in the Damascus countryside and seized large amounts of arms and ammunitions -- among them Israeli-made weapons.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Damascus blames the chaos on outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorists funded and instructed by elements outside the country.

There are reports indicating that a large number of the armed militants are foreign nationals.