I beseech you, sir, to consider the possibility that the supposed chlorine gas attack at Douma, Syria may have been a carefully constructed propaganda fraud on the part of the rebels encircled in Douma. Such a fraud would have as its purpose the elicitation of exactly the kind of response that we are seeing in the Western media. The rebels have been defeated in East Gouta Their fighters and families are being evacuated to Turkish occupied Jarabulus by air-conditioned bus. How would it benefit the Syrian government to make such an attack in this situation?
I hope that you will determine the exact facts of what occurred at Douma before any action is taken.
I recommend that you send someone competent to Syria to make an on the ground investigation.
W. Patrick Lang
Colonel (Ret.) US Army
Reprinted from Sic Semper Tyrannis blog.
W. Patrick Lang Colonel (Ret.) US Army is recommending that Mattis send someone competent to Syria to make an on the ground investigation?
Does that not seem incongruent with Trump’s Bosses pre-planned decisions?
Right now everyone is busy looking for that $1 Billion Dollars in Saudi Cash.
There is an underlying problem that too many players are no longer interested in truth. Take the art market. The marketvalue of a piece of art depends on what people want to give for it, and what they give for it depends on what others want to give for it . You’d like this market value to have at least a strong link to something solid, some notion of ‘real value’, but this can be so elusive.
Likewise reputation is a PR problem. You can try to link it to something of real value, or you just consider it a matter of a good PR strategy and budget.
Who is interested in the truth of events? You’d think people want to know but the media want the story, of action and reaction and if the players want this Douma incident to be an instance of the Syrian army using chemical weapons on innocent civilians then that’s the story. Do the politicians and governments want to know truth or do they just decide what it will be and sell it?
The question Mattis will ask is ‘why should I care about the truth?’. Well one reason is that the truth may come out and undercut the narrative. If nobody important is interested in this truth however there is no compelling reason to spend effort on finding out truth because it will not enter the competition in any significant way.