Washington’s public relations operations for the military contracting firms that surround the US Capitol aren’t by for-profit PR firms, so much as they’re by ‘non-profit’ foundations and think tanks, which present that ‘non-profit’ cover for their sales-promotion campaigns on behalf of the real beneficiaries: owners and top executives of these gigantic ‘defense’ contracting corporations, such as Lockheed Martin, and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Among the leading propagandists for invading Iraq back in 2002 were Kenn Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, both with the Brookings Institution; and both propagandists still are frequently interviewed by American ‘news’ media as being ‘experts’ on international relations, when all they ever really have been is salesmen for US invasions, such as that 2003 invasion, which destroyed Iraq and cost US taxpayers $3 trillion+ or $4.4 trillion – benefiting only the few beneficiaries and their agents, such as the top executives of these ‘non-profits,’ which receive a small portion of the take, as servants usually do.
More recently, Brookings’s Shadi Hamid headlined on 14 September 2013, «The US-Russian Deal on Syria: A Victory for Assad», and the PR-servant there, Dr Hamid, argued that
«Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is effectively being rewarded for the use of chemical weapons, rather than ‘punished’ as originally planned… Assad and his Russian backers played on Obama’s most evident weakness, exploiting his desire to find a way – any way – out of military action… One might be forgiven for thinking that this was Assad’s plan all along, to use chemical weapons as bait, to agree to inspections after using them, and then to return to conventional killing».
Three weeks after that Brookings ‘expert’ had issued it, the great investigative journalist Christof Lehmann, on 7 October 2014, headlined and offered facts to the exact contrary at his nsnbc news site,
«Top US and Saudi Officials Responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria», and he opened by summarizing his extensive case: «Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry».
Then, on 14 January 2014, the MIT professor Theodore Postal and the former UN weapons-inspector Richard Lloyd performed a detailed analysis of the rocket that had delivered the sarin, and found that it had been fired from territory controlled by the anti-Assad rebels, not by Assad’s forces. Then, yet another great investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, bannered in the London Review of Books, on 17 April 2014, «The Red Line and the Rat Line: Seymour M Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels», and he reported that what had actually stopped Obama from invading Syria was Obama’s embarrassment at British intelligence having discovered that Obama’s case against Assad regarding the gas attack was fake.
Obama suddenly needed a face-saving way to cancel his pre-announced American bombing campaign to bring down the Assad government, since he wouldn’t have even the UK as an ally in it:
«Obama’s change of mind [weakening his ardor against Assad] had its origins at Porton Down, the [British] defense laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff».
Did Dr Hamid or any other Brookings ‘expert’ ever issue a correction and make note of of their earlier falsehoods, or did they all instead hide this crucially important reality – that not only was the rocket fired from rebel territory but its sarin formula was different from that in Syria’s arsenals, and the actual suppliers were the US, Sauds, Qataris, and Turks – did they not correct their prior war-mongering misrepresentations, but instead hide the fact that the Obama allegations had been exposed to have been frauds and that Obama himself had been one of the planners behind the sarin gas attack? They hid the truth.
Back on 14 June 2013, a Brookings team of Dr Hamid, with Bruce Riedel, Daniel L Byman, Michael Doran, and Tamara Cofman Wittes, had headlined, «Syria, the US, and Arming the Rebels: Assad’s Use of Chemical Weapons and Obama’s Red Line», and they alleged that, although «President Obama has been extremely reluctant to get involved in Syria», «Regime change is the only way to end this conflict», and they applauded the «confirmation that the Assad regime used chemical weapons in Syria», but doubted that Obama would bomb Syria hard enough and often enough. None of them ever subsequently acknowledged that, in fact, they had misstated (been suckered by a US government fraud, if even they had believed it), and that Obama actually drove this hoax harder than his Joint Chiefs of Staff had advised him to.
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