The US is engaged in a war in Syria, no secret to anyone there, it has been going on for a long time. Unlike other US wars, started after 9/11 ostensibly to root out those chosen to be blamed for 9/11, the US is in Syria to save the Syrian people from being subjugated by ISIS.
But the US never leaves and as ISIS seems to disappear, the US keeps bringing more and more troops in, seizing more and more territory and only has one real target, the Syrian people.
The mysterious “Caesar Act”, pushed by Trump and Israel in 2019, is designated to protect the Syrian people from what the US is constantly told is the “brutal Assad regime.” Try writing anything else and the FBI will show up on your porch. They have done that to me a few times to the extent the dogs now recognize them and treat them like honored guests.
Reporting the truth about Syria can put any American journalist in prison or worse, much worse. You don’t think “they” murder journalists in America?
Just go to Veterans Today’s Editorial Board page and scroll down to In Memoriam and see how many staff have died of other than “natural causes.” The number hit two digits some time ago, highest for any publication.
As is often the case, it is useful to supply quotes from the media that might explain where the Caesar Act originated or about its real impact. That impact, no oil for heat, food imports sanctions while the US burns Syria’s wheat or allows Turkey to steal it to sell to Italy for spaghetti, is an untold story.
The Palestinian people have been subject to an attempt to erase them from the face of the earth for 70 years now. How long for the people of Yemen or Venezuela?
Anyone remember Vietnam? More bombs were dropped there than on Nazi Germany, many times more.
Check the news, try to read something about this, you will find it impossible. Try to find even a balanced history, were such things did once exist. You will not succeed. The truth is an untold story.
It is untold because of not only Google censorship but because of a violent war on the press as well. Anything written can disappear, and anyone writing it may well disappear, also.
Phil Girardi, a former CIA officer, does write about the system in the US that created it, that’s something at least:
“The creatures that lurk through the corridors of power in Washington DC have refined corruption to the point where almost anything goes and almost no one is ever held accountable. Traditionally, Congressmen reward their various constituencies by inserting riders into larger pieces of legislation that grant money, exemptions or favors to certain groups or individuals. It is sometimes referred to as “pork.”
And no one is more corrupt in Congress than some of those at the top of the food chain, where the Speaker and the Minority leader in the House and the Majority and Minority leaders in the Senate have the final say on what gets cut and what remains.
The lugubrious Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is one of the most adept at milking the system to buy his continued reelection in a state where he is actually not very popular, with an approval rating of only 37%.
Within the current spending bill he has managed to include more than $1 billion worth of federal spending and tax breaks for some choice constituencies among the Kentucky voters. A tax break for the state’s whisky distillers alone came to a projected $426 million for 2020 and there were also breaks for the state’s thoroughbred horse industry as well as hundreds of millions of dollars more for new federal construction.
One can only wish that politicians would actually commit themselves to doing good for the American people, but the sad reality is that they spend so much time raising and distributing money that they only respond to constituents with the deepest pockets or those who make the most noise.
Rarely does anyone actually read the bills that are being voted on. Part of the omnibus spending bills was the $738 billion dollar defense policy component, and, as in the case of the larger amounts intended to keep the federal government funded, the devil is frequently found in the details.
One part of the defense spending is called the “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act,” which is intended to punish Syria and its President Bashar al-Assad with sanctions for alleged crimes committed during the country’s eight year civil war.”
The sanctions placed on Syria by Trump are unknown to the American people, they can’t be discussed in the US media, no one has heard of them.
They are based on a narrative that is largely false. The Assad government isn’t perfect, but it is more accountable than many. I have toured prisons there, visited the courts, reviewed cases and also realize that this effort was guided to an extent.
I have also spent hours with then Syrian Minister of Justice Dr. Najm Hamad al Ahmad who now writes for Veterans Today and serves on her Editorial Board as an advisor.
I also spent time investigating American prisons where torture is commonplace and totally unreported. Normal practices in American prisons involve chaining prisoners to the floors of buses and driving them around hour upon hour in freezing cold, in the Abu Ghraib “stress position.”
Oh, had we forgotten Abu Ghraib?
Then there is the Coca Cola interrogation. Guards shake up a can of Coca Cola and pull the tab while holding it under a prisoner’s nose. It is a thousand times more painful than the simulated drowning that Donald Trump loved so well. From the UK Guardian:
Donald Trump said he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”, or simulated drowning, at the Republican debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Saturday.
We can assure you that Donald Trump brought back much worse than waterboarding. Is the uninvestigated death of longtime Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein one such instance?
Let us also remember than, prior to 2006, the Pentagon had ordered US troops to totally ignore Geneva Convention protocols on outright torture and summary executions of detainees.
Let us also remember that the secret prisons built under Bush, not just Guantanamo but the massive complex in Poland, allegedly closed in 2008, is likely still in operation despite the fact that a congressional investigation found that most held there were detained for no reason at all, not just innocent, but simply picked up off the streets by gangsters hired by the CIA just to inflate numbers to justify bloated spending.
Not only did none of the Bush era practices stop, but they also increased under Trump as did the coverup. From Human Rights Watch:
The president of the United States, Donald Trump has made the International Criminal Court (ICC) the latest target of his administration’s contempt for the global rule of law. The sanctions and family visa bans he authorised on June 11 for use against ICC officials are tools usually reserved for human rights violators, not those seeking to hold them to account in fair trials.
The Trump administration’s sanctions, threatened since 2018, are aimed at deterring judicial scrutiny of the conduct of US officials in Afghanistan and Israeli officials in Palestine.
This is the nation that judges Syria, the nation that starves the Syrian people and does it to protect, it says, the Syrian people from their own elected government.
Do we want to go there, discuss elections? The US came within a hare’s breath of having to remove Trump from office at gunpoint, after losing an election by over 7 million votes and a violent coup attempt.
We “go here” today for a simple reason, perhaps more than one. It is the US that passes judgement on the Syrian people.
It isn’t just torture and rendition, it isn’t sanctions or oil theft or burning crops, it’s also terrorism as military policy, its false flag terrorism at home in America and around the world to feed public opinion, to hand feed a controlled press and to control a narrative and bury the things we so unpleasantly brought forward here today.
Thus, as the US finds itself increasingly irrelevant in the Middle East, Syria also increasingly becomes the focus of America’s last gasp in Western Asia.
The US is ‘doubling down’ in Syria, building up forces, really training terrorist groups, stealing oil and now threatening to give the Kurds helicopters.
Reminds me of something from 2005. I was riding around with PM Barzani in his tan Range Rover. They were hard to get so he had the handles and other wear areas inside taped up for protection. We had a couple of security cars with us, had been to meetings with Tribal leaders. I was the UN rep for the KRG at the time.
Anyway, we turned into a walled compound. I had been taking pictures with my Canon 3MP camera, a Sureshot? No smart phones with big cameras then.
As we came into the gate, he reached over and smacked my arm down, the one holding the camera. I had just photographed a row of Apache helicopters the US had given to the Kurds, that long ago, sitting across from a row of M1A tanks.
What did we learn there? We learned who wasn’t in charge at all, but I had known that all along of course. We learned the US was playing games, buying loyalty with weapons, weapons Congress didn’t want the Kurds to have, that we still claim they don’t have, can’t have, weapons now 16 years old.
Now they are being replaced with new “non-existent” weapons.
Today, we have now caught the US training pilots for other Kurdish groups and giving them helicopters as well, these inside Syria. The groups are, of course, from Turkey, promised Syrian land, homes of Syrian people, cash from selling Syrian oil and Syrian wheat and big payoffs from the drug money coffers of the CIA.
There will be no Biden withdrawal from Syria just like the Trump withdrawal was fake, with troops pouring in, new bases being built, new airbases and a total blackout in the US about what the US is doing there.
The miles long parade of oil trucks we saw Russian pilots destroy years ago are there again, parading into Turkey, cash to finance what? Where does the money go?
The new US trick is renaming ISIS as “Maghaweir Thowra.” The US is reforming ISIS inside Jordan, with help from Saudi Arabia. ISIS leaders imprisoned in Hasakah and elsewhere were broken out by Navy SEALS and flown to Saudi Arabia for health checkups and then moved to Jordan where they were formed into new units and brought back into Syria from the South.
There, they live in al Tanf under US protection while running long range patrols and occupying bases throughout the Syrian Eastern Desert. From there, they partner with ISIS groups along the Iraqi border and coordinate with US backed groups near the Syrian oil fields, groups of “protection forces” now led by former ISIS commanders.
In Idlib, al Qaeda has been running its own caliphate for nearly a decade now, protected by the White Helmets and western intelligence agencies, albeit a much smaller caliphate than it once was when it also controlled the biblical city of Aleppo as well, known then as Aram.
The US occupation and war on Syria will persist as long as the lies that foment it persist.
This, in itself, is another story, but a story that touches all other stories, a story of the nature of truth and why truth matters so little to those employed to dissemble, manipulate and disinform.
What I suggest is this, those involved in creating the false narrative that supports endless war, that justifies apartheid and genocide, need to be held accountable.
How do we find them? That task is easy, Google never censors them, they get awards, they are financed, televised, published, honored and enriched.
Some are among the armies in the shadows, the “influencers” easily identified by their “toolbox” of chaos theory and psychological warfare ploys.
The sick policies all decent men hate exist only because they are supported by pillars of lies. How many nations, how many peoples are targeted? Can we count that high?
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
