Why is George Monbiot lying about April's Syria chemical weapons attack in Idlib?

[Tony Gosling]

A lesson from Syria: it’s crucial not to fuel far-right conspiracy theories
The way discredited stories spread after a 
chemical weapons massacre in Syria should be a matter of serious concern
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/15/lesson-from-syria-chemical-weapons-conspiracy-theories-alt-right
@GeorgeMonbiot Wednesday 15 November 2017 06.00 
GMT Last modified on Wednesday 15 November 2017 07.54 GMT
What do we believe? This is the crucial 
democratic question. Without informed choice, 
democracy is meaningless. This is why dictators 
and billionaires invest so heavily in fake news. 
Our only defence is constant vigilance, rigour 
and scepticism. But when some of the world’s most 
famous crusaders against propaganda appear to 
give credence to conspiracy theories, you wonder 
where to turn..............................

George's complete article is at the bottom where, 
I hope you'll agree, it belongs
First, from Robert Parry though, Gary Webb's 
friend, who exposed the Iran Contra scandal



Did Al Qaeda Dupe Trump on Syrian Attack?

November 9, 2017   By Robert Parry
Special Report: Buried deep inside a new U.N. 
report is evidence that could exonerate the 
Syrian government in the April 4 sarin atrocity 
and make President Trump look like an Al Qaeda dupe, reports Robert Parry.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/09/did-al-qaeda-dupe-trump-on-syrian-attack/

A new United Nations-sponsored 
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByLPNZ-eSjJdcGZUb0hqalFOa0hhdEZ3WlBvZmRnajFRV3pr/view>report 
on the April 4 sarin incident in an Al 
Qaeda-controlled town in Syria blames Bashar 
al-Assad’s government for the atrocity, but the 
report contains evidence deep inside its “Annex 
II” that would prove Assad’s innocence.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer 
USS Ross fires a tomahawk land attack missile 
from the Mediterranean Sea at Syria, April 7, 
2017. (Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Robert S. Price)

If you read that far, you would find that more 
than 100 victims of sarin exposure were taken to 
several area hospitals before the alleged Syrian 
warplane could have struck the town of Khan Sheikhoun.

Still, the Joint Investigative Mechanism [JIM], a 
joint project of the U.N. and the Organization 
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW], 
brushed aside this startling evidence and 
delivered the Assad guilty verdict that the 
United States and its allies wanted.

The JIM consigned the evidence of a staged 
atrocity, in which Al Qaeda operatives would have 
used sarin to kill innocent civilians and pin the 
blame on Assad, to a spot 14 pages into the 
report’s Annex II. The sensitivity of this 
evidence of a staged “attack” is heightened by 
the fact that President Trump rushed to judgment 
and ordered a “retaliatory” strike with 59 
Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airbase on the 
night of April 6-7. That U.S. attack reportedly 
killed several soldiers at the base and nine 
civilians, including four children, in nearby neighborhoods.

So, if it becomes clear that Al Qaeda tricked 
President Trump not only would he be responsible 
for violating international law and killing 
innocent people, but he and virtually the entire 
Western political establishment along with the 
major news media would look like Al Qaeda’s “useful idiots.”

Currently, the West and its mainstream media are 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/world/middleeast/mulet-syria-chemical-russia-interview.html>lambasting 
the Russians for not accepting the JIM’s 
“assessment,” which blames Assad for the sarin 
attack. Russia is also taking flak for 
questioning continuation of the JIM’s mandate. 
There has been virtually no mainstream skepticism 
about the JIM’s report and almost no mention in 
the mainstream of the hospital-timing discrepancy.

Timing Troubles

To establish when the supposed sarin attack 
occurred on April 4, the JIM report relied on 
witnesses in the Al Qaeda-controlled town and a 
curious video showing three plumes of smoke but 
no airplanes. Based on the video’s metadata, the 
JIM said the scene was recorded between 0642 and 
0652 hours. The JIM thus puts the timing of the 
sarin release at between 0630 and 0700 hours.

The photograph released by the White House of 
President Trump meeting with his advisers at his 
estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017, regarding 
his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria.

But the first admissions of victims to area 
hospitals began as early as 0600 hours, the JIM 
found, meaning that these victims could not have 
been poisoned by the alleged aerial bombing (even 
if the airstrike really did occur).

According to the report’s Annex II, “The 
admission times of the records range between 0600 
and 1600 hours.” And these early cases – arriving 
before the alleged airstrike – were not isolated ones.

“Analysis of the 
 medical records revealed that 
in 57 cases, patients were admitted in five 
hospitals before the incident in Khan Shaykhun,” Annex II said.

Plus, this timing discrepancy was not limited to 
a few hospitals in and around Khan Sheikhoun, but 
was recorded as well at hospitals that were 
scattered across the area and included one 
hospital that would have taken an hour or so to reach.

Annex II stated: “In 10 such cases, patients 
appear to have been admitted to a hospital 125 km 
away from Khan Shaykhun at 0700 hours while 
another 42 patients appear to have been admitted 
to a hospital 30 km away at 0700 hours.”

In other words, more than 100 patients would 
appear to have been exposed to sarin before the 
alleged Syrian warplane could have dropped the 
alleged bomb and the victims could be evacuated, 
a finding that alone would have destroyed the 
JIM’s case against the Syrian government.

But the JIM seemed more interested in burying 
this evidence of Al Qaeda staging the incident ­ 
and killing some expendable civilians ­ than in 
following up this timing problem.

“The [JIM] did not investigate these 
discrepancies and cannot determine whether they 
are linked to any possible staging scenario, or 
to poor record-keeping in chaotic conditions,” 
the report said. But the proffered excuse about 
poor record-keeping would have to apply to 
multiple hospitals over a wide area all falsely 
recording the arrival time of more than 100 patients.

The video of the plumes of smoke also has come 
under 
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/07/nyts-new-syria-sarin-report-challenged/>skepticism 
from Theodore Postol, a weapons expert at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who noted 
that none of the three plumes matched up with 
damage to buildings (as viewed from satellite 
images) that would have resulted from aerial bombs of that power.

Postol’s finding suggests that the smoke could 
have been another part of a staging event rather 
than debris kicked up by aerial bombs.

The JIM also could find no conclusive evidence 
that a Syrian warplane was over Khan Sheikhoun at 
the time of the video although the report claims 
that a plane could have come within about 5 kilometers of the town.

A History of Deception

Perhaps even more significantly, the JIM report 
ignored the context of the April 4 case and the 
past history of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front staging 
chemical weapons attacks with the goal of 
foisting blame on the Syrian government and 
tricking the U.S. military into an intervention 
on the side of Nusra and its Islamic-militant allies.

Photograph of men in Khan Sheikdoun in Syria, 
allegedly inside a crater where a sarin-gas bomb landed.

On April 4, there was a strong motive for Al 
Qaeda and its regional allies to mount a staged 
event. Just days earlier, President Trump’s 
administration had shocked the Syrian rebels and 
their backers by declaring “regime change” was no 
longer the U.S. goal in Syria.

So, Al Qaeda and its regional enablers were 
frantic to reverse Trump’s decision, which was 
accomplished by his emotional reaction to videos 
on cable news showing children and other 
civilians suffering and dying in Khan Sheikhoun.

On the night of April 6-7, before any thorough 
investigation could be conducted, Trump ordered 
59 Tomahawk missiles fired at the Syrian air base 
that supposedly had launched the sarin attack.

At the time, I was told by an intelligence source 
that at least some CIA analysts believed that the 
sarin incident indeed had been staged with sarin 
possibly flown in by drone from a Saudi-Israeli 
special operations base in Jordan.

This source said the on-the-ground staging for 
the incident had been hasty because of the 
surprise announcement that the Trump 
administration was no longer seeking regime 
change in Damascus. The haste led to some 
sloppiness in tying down all the necessary 
details to pin the atrocity on Assad, the source said.

But the few slip-ups, such as the apparent 
failure to coordinate the timing of the hospital 
admissions to after the purported airstrike, 
didn’t deter the JIM investigators from backing 
the West’s desire to blame Assad and also create 
another attack line against the Russians.

Similarly, other U.N.-connected investigators 
downplayed earlier evidence that Al Qaeda’s Nusra 
was staging chemical weapons incidents after 
President Obama laid down his “red line” on 
chemical weapons. The militants apparently hoped 
that the U.S. military would take out the Syrian 
military and pave the way for an Al Qaeda victory.

For instance, U.N. investigators 
<https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/08/un-team-heard-claims-of-staged-chemical-attacks/>learned 
from a number of townspeople of Al-Tamanah about 
how the rebels and allied “activists” staged a 
chlorine gas attack on the night of April 29-30, 
2014, and then sold the false story to a 
credulous Western media and, initially, to a U.N. investigative team.

“Seven witnesses stated that frequent alerts 
[about an imminent chlorine weapons attack by the 
government] had been issued, but in fact no 
incidents with chemicals took place,” the U.N. 
report said. “While people sought safety after 
the warnings, their homes were looted and rumours 
spread that the events were being staged. 
 
[T]hey [these witnesses] had come forward to 
contest the wide-spread false media reports.”

Dubious Evidence

Other people, who did allege that there had been 
a government chemical attack on Al-Tamanah, 
provided suspect evidence, including data from 
questionable sources, according to the report.

Nikki Haley, United States Permanent 
Representative to the UN, addresses the Security 
Council’s meeting on the situation in Syria on
April 27, 2017 (UN Photo)

The report said, “Three witnesses, who did not 
give any description of the incident on 29-30 
April 2014, provided material of unknown source. 
One witness had second-hand knowledge of two of 
the five incidents in Al-Tamanah, but did not 
remember the exact dates. Later that witness 
provided a USB-stick with information of unknown 
origin, which was saved in separate folders 
according to the dates of all the five incidents 
mentioned by the FFM [the U.N.’s Fact-Finding Mission].

“Another witness provided the dates of all five 
incidents reading it from a piece of paper, but 
did not provide any testimony on the incident on 
29-30 April 2014. The latter also provided a 
video titled ‘site where second barrel containing 
toxic chlorine gas was dropped tamanaa 30 April 14’”

Some other witnesses alleging a Syrian government 
attack offered curious claims about detecting the 
chlorine-infused “barrel bombs” based on how the device sounded in its descent.

The U.N. report said, “The eyewitness, who stated 
to have been on the roof, said to have heard a 
helicopter and the ‘very loud’ sound of a falling 
barrel. Some interviewees had referred to a 
distinct whistling sound of barrels that contain 
chlorine as they fall. The witness statement 
could not be corroborated with any further information.”

However, the claim itself is absurd since it is 
inconceivable that anyone could detect a chlorine 
canister inside a “barrel bomb” by “a distinct whistling sound.”

The larger point, however, is that the jihadist 
rebels in Al-Tamanah and their propaganda teams, 
including relief workers and activists, appear to 
have organized a coordinated effort at deception 
complete with a fake video supplied to U.N. 
investigators and Western media outlets.

For instance, the Telegraph in London 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10798575/Footage-emerges-of-new-chlorine-attack-in-Syria.html>reported 
that “Videos allegedly taken in Al-Tamanah 
 
purport to show the impact sites of two chemical 
bombs. Activists said that one person had been killed and another 70 injured.”

The Telegraph quoted supposed weapons expert 
Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat and a 
senior fellow at the fiercely anti-Russian 
Atlantic Council, as endorsing the Al-Tamanah claims.

“Witnesses have consistently reported the use of 
helicopters to drop the chemical barrel bombs 
used,” said Higgins. “As it stands, around a 
dozen chemical barrel bomb attacks have been 
alleged in that region in the last three weeks.”

The Al-Tamanah debunking in the U.N. report 
received no mainstream media attention when the 
U.N. findings were issued in September 2016 
because the U.N. report relied on rebel 
information to blame two other alleged chlorine 
attacks on the government and that got all the 
coverage. But the case should have raised red 
flags given the extent of the apparent deception.

If the seven townspeople were telling the truth, 
that would mean that the rebels and their allies 
issued fake attack warnings, produced propaganda 
videos to fool the West, and prepped “witnesses” 
with “evidence” to deceive investigators. Yet, no 
alarms went off about other rebel claims.

The Ghouta Incident

A more famous attack – with sarin gas on the 
Damascus suburb of Ghouta on Aug. 21, 2013, 
killing hundreds – was also eagerly blamed on the 
Assad regime, as The New York Times, Human Rights 
Watch, Higgins’s Bellingcat and many other 
Western outlets jumped to that conclusion despite 
the unlikely circumstances. Assad had just 
welcomed U.N. investigators to Damascus to 
examine chemical attacks that he was blaming on the rebels.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper 
(right) talks with President Barack Obama in the 
Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national 
security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of 
Director of National Intelligence)

Assad also was facing the “red line” threat from 
President Obama warning him of possible U.S. 
military intervention if the Syrian government 
deployed chemical weapons. Why Assad and his 
military would choose such a moment to launch a 
deadly sarin attack outside Damascus, killing 
mostly civilians, made little sense.

But this became another rush to judgment in the 
West that brought the Obama administration to the 
verge of launching a devastating air attack on 
the Syrian military that might have helped Al 
Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and/or the Islamic State win the war.

Eventually, however, the case blaming Assad for 
the 2013 sarin attack 
<https://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/07/the-collapsing-syria-sarin-case/>collapsed.

An analysis by genuine weapons experts – such as 
Theodore Postol, an MIT professor of science, 
technology and national security policy, and 
Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military 
contractor Tesla Laboratories – found that the 
missile that delivered the sarin had a very short 
range placing its likely firing position in rebel territory.

Later, reporting by journalist Seymour Hersh 
<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/16/was-turkey-behind-syria-sarin-attack-2/>implicated 
Turkish intelligence working with jihadist rebels 
as the likely source of the sarin.

We also learned in 2016 that 
<https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/10/neocons-red-faced-over-red-line/>a 
message from the U.S. intelligence community had 
warned Obama how weak the evidence against Assad 
was. There was no “slam-dunk” proof, said 
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. 
And Obama cited his rejection of the Washington 
militaristic “playbook” to bomb Syria as one of 
his proudest moments as President.

With this background, there should have been 
extreme skepticism when jihadists and their 
allies made new claims about the Syrian 
government engaging in chemical weapons attacks. But there wasn’t.

The broader context for these biased 
investigations is that U.N. and OPCW 
investigators have been under 
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/08/u-n-enablers-of-aggressive-war/>intense 
pressure to confirm accusations against Syria and other targeted states.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick 
Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA 
Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of 
Staff Andy Card (on right). (White House photo)

Right now, the West is blaming Russia for the 
collapsing consensus behind U.N. investigations, 
but the problem really comes from Washington’s 
longtime strategy of coercing U.N. organizations 
into becoming propaganda arms for U.S. geopolitical strategies.

The U.N.’s relative independence in its 
investigative efforts was decisively broken early 
this century when President George W. Bush’s 
administration purged U.N. agencies that were not 
onboard with U.S. hegemony, especially on interventions in the Middle East.

Through manipulation of funding and selection of 
key staff members, the Bush administration 
engineered the takeover or at least the 
neutralizing of one U.N.-affiliated organization after another.

For instance, in 2002, Bush’s Deputy 
Under-Secretary of State John Bolton spearheaded 
the takeover of the OPCW as Bush planned to cite 
chemical weapons as a principal excuse for invading Iraq.

OPCW Director General Jose Mauricio Bustani was 
viewed as an obstacle because he was pressing 
Iraq to accept OPCW’s conventions for eliminating 
chemical weapons, which could have undermined Bush’s WMD rationale for war.

Though Bustani was just reelected to a new term, 
the Brazilian diplomat was forced out, to be 
followed in that job by more pliable bureaucrats, 
including the current Director General Ahmet 
Uzumcu of Turkey, who not only comes from a NATO 
country but served as Turkey’s ambassador to NATO 
and to Israel. [For details, see 
Consortiumnews.com’s 
“<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/08/u-n-enablers-of-aggressive-war/>U.N. 
Enablers of ‘Aggressive War.’”]

Since those days of the Iraq invasion, the game 
hasn’t changed. U.S. and other Western officials 
expect the U.N. and related agencies to accept or 
at least not object to Washington’s geopolitical interventions.

The only difference now is that Russia, one of 
the five veto-wielding members of the Security 
Council, is saying enough is enough – and 
Russia’s opposition to these biased inquiries is 
emerging as one more dangerous hot spot in the New Cold War.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of 
the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press 
and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest 
book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in 
<https://org.salsalabs.com/o/1868/t/12126/shop/shop.jsp?storefront_KEY=1037>print 
here or as an e-book (from 
<http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Stolen-Narrative-Washington-ebook/dp/B009RXXOIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350755575&sr=8-1&keywords=americas+stolen+narrative>Amazon 
and 
<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/americas-stolen-narrative?keyword=americas+stolen+narrative&store=ebook&iehack=%E2%98%A0>barnesandnoble.com).




A lesson from Syria: it’s crucial not to fuel far-right conspiracy theories
George Monbiot
The way discredited stories spread after a 
chemical weapons massacre in Syria should be a matter of serious concern
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/15/lesson-from-syria-chemical-weapons-conspiracy-theories-alt-right

@GeorgeMonbiot
Wednesday 15 November 2017 06.00 GMT Last 
modified on Wednesday 15 November 2017 07.54 GMT
What do we believe? This is the crucial 
democratic question. Without informed choice, 
democracy is meaningless. This is why dictators 
and billionaires invest so heavily in fake news. 
Our only defence is constant vigilance, rigour 
and scepticism. But when some of the world’s most 
famous crusaders against propaganda appear to 
give credence to conspiracy theories, you wonder where to turn.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical 
Weapons (OPCW) last month published its 
investigation into the chemical weapons attack on 
the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun, which killed 
almost 100 people on 4 April and injured around 
200. After examining the competing theories and 
conducting wide-ranging interviews, laboratory 
tests and forensic analysis of videos and photos, 
it concluded that the atrocity was caused by a 
bomb filled with sarin, dropped by the government of Syria.

There is nothing surprising about this. The 
Syrian government has a long history of chemical 
weapons use, and the OPCW’s conclusions concur 
with a wealth of witness testimony. But a major 
propaganda effort has sought to discredit such 
testimony, and characterise the atrocity as a “false-flag attack”.

This effort began with an article published on 
the website Al-Masdar news, run by the Syrian 
government loyalist Leith Abou Fadel. It 
suggested that either the attack had been staged 
by “terrorist forces”, or chemicals stored in a 
missile factory had inadvertently been released 
when the Syrian government bombed it.

The story was then embellished on Infowars – the 
notorious far-right conspiracy forum. The 
Infowars article claimed that the attack was 
staged by the Syrian first responder group, the 
White Helmets. This is a reiteration of a 
repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory, casting 
these rescuers in the role of perpetrators. It 
suggested that the victims were people who had 
been kidnapped by al-Qaida from a nearby city, 
brought to Khan Shaykhun and murdered, perhaps 
with the help of the UK and French governments, 
“to lay blame on the Syrian government”. The 
author of this article was Mimi Al-Laham, also 
known as Maram Susli, PartisanGirl, Syrian Girl 
and Syrian Sister. She is a loyalist of the Assad 
government who has appeared on podcasts hosted by 
David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku 
Klux Klan. She has another role: as an “expert” 
used by a retired professor from the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology called 
Theodore Postol. He has produced a wide range of 
claims casting doubt on the Syrian government’s 
complicity in chemical weapons attacks.

In correspondence with the chemical weapons 
expert Dan Kaszeta, Postol revealed that the 
“solid scientific source” he used to support his 
theory about the origin of sarin used in Syria 
was “Syrian Sister”. When Postol and Susli both 
appeared on a podcast run by the Holocaust 
“revisionist” Ryan Dawson, Postol explained why 
he had chosen to work with her: “I was watching 
her on Twitter. I could see from her voice 
 that 
she was a trained chemist.” First, Postol claimed 
that the crater from which the sarin in Khan 
Shaykhun had emanated was most probably caused 
not by a bomb dropped from the air but by an 
explosive device laid on the ground (a hypothesis 
examined and thoroughly debunked by the OPCW 
report). Then he claimed that there was “no 
evidence to support” the notion that sarin had 
been released from the air, and proposed there 
was strong evidence to suggest that the mass 
poisoning had been caused by a bomb that hit a rebel weapons depot.

He further claimed that a French intelligence 
report contradicted the story that sarin had been 
dropped from a plane, as it suggested that sarin 
had been dropped by helicopters in a different 
place. (In reality, he had confused the attack in 
April 2017 with one in April 2013). Each of these 
contradictory hypotheses was patiently explored 
and demolished at the time by bloggers and analysts.

The Guardian visited Khan Shaykhun (also known as 
Khan Sheikhun) in the aftermath of the attack – 
the only news organisation in the world to do so. 
It established that there had been no weapons 
depot near the scene of the contamination. 
Surrounding warehouses were abandoned. Birdseed 
and a volleyball net were all that existed 
inside. None had been attacked in recent months. 
The contamination came from a hole in the road 
from where the remains of a projectile protruded.

But eight days after the Khan Shaykhun attack 
John Pilger, famous for exposing propaganda and 
lies, was interviewed on the website Consortium 
News. He praised Postol as “the distinguished MIT 
professor”, suggested that the Syrian government 
could not have carried out the attack – as he 
claimed it had destroyed its chemical arsenal in 
2014 – and maintained that jihadists in Khan 
Shaykhun “have been playing with nerve gases and 
sarin 
 for some years now. There’s no doubt 
about that.” Despite many claims to the contrary, 
I have found no credible evidence that Syrian jihadists have access to sarin.

On 26 April Noam Chomsky, interviewed on 
Democracy Now, claimed that Postol, whom Chomsky 
called “a highly regarded strategic analyst and 
intelligence analyst”, had produced a “pretty 
devastating critique” of a White House report 
that maintained the Syrian government was 
responsible. Although Chomsky accepted that a 
chemical attack had taken place and said it was 
plausible that the Syrian government could have 
carried it out, this interview helped trigger a 
frenzy of online commentary endorsing Postol’s 
hypotheses and dismissing the possibility that 
the Assad government could have been responsible. 
The atmosphere became toxic: when I challenged 
Postol’s claims, people accused me of being an 
Isis sympathiser, a paedophile being blackmailed 
by the government, and a Mossad agent. But the madness had only just begun.

People accused me of being an Isis sympathiser, a 
paedophile being blackmailed by the government, and a Mossad agent
In June the investigative journalist Seymour 
Hersh published an article in the German paper 
Die Welt, based on information from a “senior 
adviser to the US intelligence community” who 
maintained that there had been no sarin strike on 
Khan Shaykhun. Instead, a meeting of jihadist 
leaders in “a two-storey cinder-block building” 
had been bombed by the Syrian air force with the 
support of the Russians and with Washington’s 
full knowledge. Fertilisers and disinfectants in 
the basement, Hersh claimed, could have caused 
the mass poisoning. (Again, this possibility was 
examined and discredited by the OPCW).

So which building was he talking about? I asked 
Hersh to give me its coordinates: the most basic 
evidence you would expect to support a claim of 
this nature. The Terraserver website provides 
satellite imagery that makes it possible to check 
for any changes to the buildings in Khan 
Shaykhun, from one day to the next. But when I 
challenged him to provide them, first he sent me 
links to claims made by Postol, then he told me 
that the images are not sufficiently “precise and 
reliable”. As every building is clearly visible, 
I find this claim is hard to understand.

Scepticism of all official claims is essential, 
especially when they involve weapons of mass 
destruction, and especially when they are used as 
a pretext for military action – in this case 
Tomahawk missiles fired on the orders of Donald 
Trump from a US destroyer on 7 April. We know 
from Iraq not to take any such claims on trust. 
But I also believe there is a difference between 
scepticism and denial. While in the fog of war, 
there will always be some doubt, as the OPCW’s 
report acknowledges, there is no evidence to 
support the competing theories of what happened 
at Khan Shaykhun. Propaganda by one side does not 
justify propaganda by another.

In Vox earlier this month, the writer David 
Roberts suggested that America is facing “an 
epistemic crisis” caused by the conservative 
rejection of all forms of expertise and 
knowledge. Politics in the US and elsewhere is 
now dominated by wild conspiracy theories and 
paranoia – the narrative platform from which 
fascism arises. This, as Roberts proposes, 
presents an urgent threat to democracy. If the 
scourges of establishment propaganda promote, 
even unwittingly, groundless stories developed by 
the “alt right”, we are in deeper trouble than he suggests.
 From South America, where payment must be made 
with subtlety, the Bormann organization has made 
a substantial contribution. It has drawn many of 
the brightest Jewish businessmen into a 
participatory role in the development of many of 
its corporations, and many of these Jews share 
their prosperity most generously with Israel. If 
their proposals are sound, they are even provided 
with a specially dispensed venture capital fund. 
I spoke with one Jewish businessmen in Hartford, 
Connecticut. He had arrived there quite unknown 
several years before our conversation, but with 
Bormann money as his leverage. Today he is more 
than a millionaire, a quiet leader in the 
community with a certain share of his profits 
earmarked as always for his venture capital 
benefactors. This has taken place in many other 
instances across America and demonstrates how 
Bormann’s people operate in the contemporary 
commercial world, in contrast to the fanciful 
nonsense with which Nazis are described in so much “literature.”

So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish 
participation in Bormann companies that when 
Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv 
to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the 
Jewish and German communities of Buenos Aires. 
Jewish leaders informed the Israeli authorities 
in no uncertain terms that this must never happen 
again because a repetition would permanently 
rupture relations with the Germans of Latin 
America, as well as with the Bormann 
organization, and cut off the flow of Jewish 
money to Israel. It never happened again, and the 
pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of 
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an 
Argentinian safe haven, protected by the most 
efficient German infrastructure in history as 
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>http<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/   
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