By Finian Cunningham

May 30, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  It can’t get more absurdly audacious than this. The Trump administration is accusing Syria’s government forces of using once again – allegedly – internationally banned chemical weapons against civilians.

The US has provided no evidence to support its accusations. This time, it seems to have run out of “material”, relying on bombastic assertion and the dubious “word” of Washington alone. Yes, that’s how desperately hard-up the master weaver of false flags has become. “It is because, er, well, we say it is.”

The American claims come (there’s the giveaway clue) just when the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian ally are moving to clear the country of the last-remaining anti-government militant stronghold in northeast Idlib province. These aren’t cuddly “moderate rebels” the Western media would have you believe. They are affiliated to the barbaric, internationally outlawed Al Qaeda network and myriad offshoots. The terrorists who supposedly carried out 9/11 whom the US has been purportedly waging a war against for the past two decades.

Moreover, the Syrian, Russian offensive has been brought on because the terrorists repeatedly broke ceasefire agreements by firing on Syrian citizens in nearby Aleppo city and the Russian airbase at Hmeimim.

So, what the breathless US claims about chemical weapons is really about is to hamper the Syrian, Russian offensive routing the terrorist enclave plaguing Syria. That’s because despite all the rhetoric about fighting terrorism, the Americans and their NATO allies have covertly sponsored the same terrorists over the past eight years to destabilize Syria for regime change. Having an enclave in Syria not under government control is a convenient way for the foreign enemies of President Assad to maintain a destabilizing influence on the country, to ensure that it never fully recovers from the eight-year war that these foreign enemies orchestrated, but for all intents and purposes have lost.

Additionally, the hackneyed old “chemical weapons against civilians” ruse could be used to justify the Americans launching missile strikes on Syria and intervening directly for its regime-change objective. With the buildup of US firepower in the Persian Gulf ostensibly to counter alleged Iranian aggression, Washington has got the military resources in place if it choses to redirect them for aggressing Syria. (Double-think alert!)

What makes this all so brazen is the flagrant nature of false flags with chemical weapons that the Americans and their NATO allies have been complicit in. Just last week it emerged that the UN-affiliated Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) suppressed its own expert opinion which concluded that a chemical weapon incident last year in Syria was most likely contrived by Western-backed terrorists as a false flag. The incident was in Douma near the capital Damascus last April. At the time, the Western media dutifully broadcast the sensational claims that it was the Syrian government forces which had dropped the deadly munitions from the air. Within a week of the alleged atrocity, the Americans, British and French launched a barrage of over 100 air strikes, killing several Syrian civilians, in what they claimed was “retaliation” for Syrian government “barbarity” against civilians. (Sick bag please for the overwhelming double-think.)

Many observers at the time of the Douma incident strenuously pointed out the anomalies of the claim that Syrian government forces were to blame. Witness accounts, including local doctors, testified that the whole scenario was set up by jihadists and their White Helmets accomplices. The chemical munitions were not dropped from the sky by aircraft, it was reliably claimed; they were delivered on the ground by the so-called “rebels”. An OPCW expert corroborated that account. Yet his report was suppressed by the OPCW chiefs. The Hague-based organization seems to have been pressured politically to conceal the truth. Why? Because it would show the US, Britain and France were guilty of a huge war crime by attacking Syria with air strikes based on a complete lie.

Notably and damnably, too, the Western news media have not reported on the OPCW cover-up. Because the corporate-controlled networks, newspapers and state-owned news services like the BBC are part of the propaganda machine. They don’t sell truth, they sell war. And they’re not going to admit that.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.

This article was originally published by "Strategic Culture Foundation"-