There was just one small problem: the film footage shown by ABC News was faked, it was not of Turks massacring helpless Kurds. It was, instead, film footage of a nighttime arms demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky.

“Interventionists will do anything to prevent US troops from ever coming home, and their favorite tactic is promoting ‘mission creep.’ – Ron Paul

https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/

by Boyd Cathey

Friends,

There it was for all to see Sunday night, October 13…right there on ABC Nightly News (and then re-shown on “Good Morning America”): grotesque and horrible film footage of Turkish army units shelling and massacring our defenseless Kurdish allies and their families in northeastern Syria. You could hear Lindsey Graham wailing at top voice: “Stop the atrocities! Stop the genocide!”

There was just one small problem: the film footage shown by ABC News was faked, it was not of Turks massacring helpless Kurds. It was, instead, film footage of a nighttime arms demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky. ABC News’ announcer, David Muir, intoned that the situation in Syria “is rapidly spiraling out of control.”

ABC’s Tom Llamas, earlier on Sunday, breathlessly reported: “This video right here appear[s] to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS. Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies.”

“This video, obtained by ABC News, appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tal Abyad,” senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell, who is in Syria, said Monday on Good Morning America.

When finally confronted by the fake video, a spokesman for ABC replied defensively:

“We’ve taken down video that aired on ‘World News Tonight Sunday’ and ‘Good Morning America’ this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy,” a spokesman told the Washington Examiner. “ABC News regrets the error….”

But did you see any corrections on air?

Which raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions: how did ABC get the footage? Did they not know its provenance? What was the reason for screening it?

I think we know the answers to those queries. But in answering them, another even deeper consideration arises: here we have a mouthpiece of the Deep State Swamp and a leading minion of the Mainstream Media, agents of the Washington Establishment once again attempting to manipulate public opinion to defend the “national consensus” in favor of globalism, and to persuade viewers that what is black is actually white…and that Donald Trump is, well, abetting war crimes and criminality.

Fascinatingly, Fox avoided mentioning it or commenting on it—this from the so-called “conservative network”—until Lou Dobbs mentioned the fake video on October 16 on his program “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” Dobbs, of course, is one of the very few commentators still on Fox who actually favors the American withdrawal from the never-ending conflict in Syria.

And the reason, again, is obvious. Fox News by and large (with a couple of notable exceptions) is zealously pro-intervention and resolutely opposed to the pull-back of American “advisers.” Thus, the virtual black out. Who says the Neoconservatives don’t engage in their own censorship?

And so do the lemmings in Congress. They voted in the House of Representatives 354 to 60 to condemn the president’s withdrawal order, and that number included 129 Republicans congressmen, despite that fact that support for reducing American presence is well over 57% among the Republican base.

It seems to make no difference to the Republican and conservative Inside-the-Beltway elites. Always, it seems, they join with their friends on the further Left to defend the continuing efforts to impose egalitarianism, democracy, and the triumph of a globalist “new order” all around the world, paid for by American taxpayers and with returning American body bags.

The news from northeastern Syria is actually hopeful, although you will not hear that from Fox News or from most members of Congress. Because of the American pull-back, the Syrian Kurds have turned to the legitimate government of Syria for cooperation and protection: to the government of Bashar al-Assad which, with substantial Russian support, has done most of the fighting against ISIS and cleared most of the country of those terrorists.

Here, succinctly, is how Ron Paul correctly described it:

“Interventionists will do anything to prevent US troops from ever coming home, and their favorite tactic is promoting ‘mission creep.’ As President Trump Tweeted, we were told in 2014 by President Obama that the US military would go into Syria for just 30 days to save the Yazidi minority that they claimed were threatened. Then that mission crept into ‘we must fight ISIS’ and so the US military continued to illegally occupy and bomb Syria for five more years.

“Even though it was the Syrian army with its Russian and Iranian allies that did the bulk of the fighting against al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, President Trump took credit and called for the troops to come home. But when the military comes home, the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex loses its cash cow, so a new rationale had to be invented.

“The latest ‘mission creep’ was that we had to stay in Syria to save our ‘allies’ the Kurds. All of a sudden our military presence in Syria was not about fighting terrorism but rather about putting US troops between our NATO ally Turkey and our proxy fighting force, the Kurds. Do they really want us to believe that it is ‘pro-American’ for our troops to fight and die refereeing a long-standing dispute between the Turks and [Marxist] Kurds?

“It was a colossally dumb idea to train and arm the Kurds in Syria in the first place, but after spending billions backing what turned out to be al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria to overthrow the Assad government, Washington found that the Kurds were the only willing boots remaining on the ground. While their interest in fighting ISIS was limited, they were happy to use Washington’s muscle in pursuit of their long-term goal of carving out a part of Syria (and eventually Turkey) for themselves.

“We can never leave because there will be a slaughter, Washington claimed (and the media faithfully repeated). But once again, the politicians, the mainstream media, and the Beltway ‘experts’ have been proven wrong. They never understand that sending US troops into another country without the proper authority is not a stabilizing factor, but a de-stabilizing factor. I have argued that were the US to leave Syria (and the rest of the Middle East) the countries of the region would find a way to solve their own problems.

“Now that the US is pulling back from northern Syria, that is just what is happening.

“On Sunday the Kurds and the Syrian government signed an agreement, brokered by the Russians, to put aside their differences and join together to defend against Turkey’s incursion into Syrian territory.

“Now ‘our Kurdish allies’ are fighting alongside the army of Syrian President Assad – who we are still told by US officials ‘must go.’ Washington doesn’t understand that our intervention only makes matters worse. The best way to help the Kurds and everyone else in the region is to just come home.”

That says it all too well.

*****

Here then are two columns that add to this: the first is a superb summary by Pat Buchanan; then, I remit a slightly edited column I first authored on October 13, “President Trump is Right on Syria.” It was picked up and published by The Unz Review”:

See here and here.

Be seeing you