by Shawn Helton
August 31, 2013
from
21stCenturyWire Website
John Kerry:
“I’m not asking you to take my word for it.”
21st Century Wire says…
US Secretary of State John Kerry
continues to defend the claims that Syrian President
Bashar Al Assad is responsible for the August 21st chemical attacks
near Damascus, Syria, despite not having conclusive evidence…
This coming after PM David Cameron’s
crushing defeat in the House Of Commons, ending the UK’s bid to provide
military support in Syria. This is historic: the last time a PM was defeated
in parliament over a military intervention was in 1782.
Kerry, a former presidential candidate and known member of the famed
Skull & Bones Society from Yale University, has had long sordid
history of supporting unwarranted conflict in the Middle East, most notably,
his 2002 vote for the eventual 2003 invasion in Iraq.
This of course , came
after he voted against the first Gulf War
in 1991, stating:
“It is a vote about war because whether or
not the president exercises his power, we will have no further say after
this vote.”
Kerry has contradicted himself several times over the years when questioned
about US President George W Bush’s decision to
go to war in 2003, stating within months of each other:
“I believe it was the right authority for a
president to have.”
Then sometime later that year, he explained:
“I don’t believe the president took us to war
as he should have.”
Kerry’s political career has been plagued with this kind of
back-tracking and flip-flopping, rendering his latest “undeniable”
support for war in Syria more than a little suspect, especially since there
has been zero evidence to directly link Assad to these recent attacks.
Today there was a report from AP journalist Dale
Gavlak, claiming
rebel fighters within Ghouta near the capital of Syria, have taken
the blame for the recent chemical explosion, citing that, some of the militants
had mishandled chemical material, supposedly provided by Saudi Arabia.
If this is true,
this would tie into the recent report by UK Column, which describes
Syrian police discovering a rebel hideout complete with crude mortar bombs,
electrical supplies and bags of toxic agents that were made in Saudi Arabia.
This certainly gives pause to the established narrative that only Assad’s
army would have the means to produce such warfare.
John Kerry is just one character in this globalist plot for blood and oil…
Below is the latest from 'Russia Today'…
US Secretary of State
John Kerry
(AFP Photo / Jewel
Samad)
United States Secretary of State John Kerry said
Friday that the US intelligence community has concluded that the regime of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for killing more than 1,000
people with chemical gas last week near Damascus.
In a statement released in tandem with Kerry’s
remarks from the State Department headquarters in Washington, DC Friday
afternoon, the US government says they assess “with high confidence” that
the government of Pres. Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack in the
Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013.
According to the remarks made by Sec. Kerry, the
assault last week caused the deaths of at least 1,429 Syrians, including no
fewer than 426 children.
But despite days of research and an
international investigation, the US says they cannot declare with 100
percent certainty at this time that Assad’s regime was responsible.
“Our high confidence assessment is the strongest
position that the US Intelligence Community can take short of confirmation,”
the report reads in part. “We will continue to seek additional information
to close gaps in our understanding of what took place.”
Nevertheless, Kerry all but confirmed on Friday
that Assad ordered the use of nerve gas against civilians last week ("U.S.
Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on
August 21, 2013").
“[W]e know that the Syrian regime’s elements
were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking
precautions associated with chemical weapons.
We know that these were
specific instructions. We know where the rockets were launched from and at
what time. We know where they landed and when. We know rockets came only
from regime-controlled areas and went only to opposition controlled or
contested neighborhoods,” he said.
“We have a body of information, including past
Syrian practice, that leads us to conclude that regime officials were
witting of and directed the attack on August 21,” the accompanying document
claims.
“To conclude, there is a substantial body of
information that implicates the Syrian government’s responsibility in the
chemical weapons attack that took place on August 21.As indicated, there is
additional intelligence that remains classified because of sources and
methods concerns that is being provided to Congress and international
partners,” it says.
During the Friday press conference, Kerry urged
Americans and those in the international community to read the declassified
report that has been published by the US government.
One day earlier, he
said US President
Barack Obama went over the intelligence with his national
security team, who then met with leaders of Congress and the lawmakers on
the congressional national security committees.
“Its findings are as clear as they are
compelling,” he said of the report. “I'm not asking you to take my word for
it. Read for yourself, everyone, those listening, all of you, read for
yourselves the evidence from thousands of sources, evidence that is already
publicly available.”
Among that evidence, Kerry said, is proof
collected from thousands of sources suggesting the Syrian government
launched a gas attack last week.
“With our own eyes we have seen the thousands of
reports from 11 separate sites in the Damascus suburbs.
All of them show and
report victims with breathing difficulties, people twitching with spasms,
coughing, rapid heartbeats, foaming at the mouth, unconsciousness and death.
And we know it was ordinary Syrian citizens who reported all of these
horrors,” Kerry said.
The White House also released a map of
Ghouta,
displaying the areas affected by the Aug. 21 chemical weapons
attack
“And just as important,” he added, “we know what
the doctors and the nurses who treated them didn't report - not a scratch,
not a shrapnel wound, not a cut, not a gunshot sound.
We saw rows of dead
lined up in burial shrouds, the white linen unstained by a single drop of
blood.
“Instead of being tucked safely in their beds at
home, we saw rows of children lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital
floor, all of them dead from Assad's gas and surrounded by parents and
grandparents who had suffered the same fate,” the secretary continued
In addition to social media posts, videos taken
after the attacks and first-hand reports, Kerry said the US relied on
signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence to conclude Assad’s regime
ordered the attack.
Intelligence offering a glimpse into Assad’s
army, said Kerry, proved that chemical weapons officials in charge of the
nation’s arsenal of warheads were making preparations days ahead of the
attack.
According to the report, US intelligence sources
could not detect any indication in the days before the assault that
opposition affiliates, as reported by some, were planning to use chemical
weapons.
Some signals intelligence intercepted, the
report added, showed a senior Assad regime official,
“intimately familiar
with the offensive” confirming the army used chemical weapons on Aug. 21,
“and was concerned with the UN inspectors obtaining evidence.”
According to the report, the Syrian chemical
weapons personnel were directed to cease operations on the 21 and begin
shelling the surrounding area for five days,
The document also rejects the allegation that
video footage showing the Aug. 21 assault was fabricated, and concludes that
the Syrian opposition lacks the capability to fake the assault, or the
effects of nerve gas.
Earlier this week, senior US
government officials said on condition of anonymity to Associated Press
reporters that the US lacked significant evidence linking Assad to chemical
weapon use.
Multiple officials, the AP reported Thursday morning, used the
phrase “not a slam dunk” to discuss the credibility of intelligence linking
chemical weapon use directly to Pres. Assad