FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Former U.K. Diplomats Decry ‘Stampede to War’ over Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack
April 11, 2018 (EIRNS)—RT today reports on extensive comments from the U.K.’s former Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford, and former U.K. Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, pointing to the “dodgy” evidence of an alleged Syrian government chemical weapons attack in Douma.
Ford was quoted from a “heated” debate on BBC Radio Scotland, in which he said he doubted that President Bashar Assad had committed the alleged attack:
“We have to engage our brains as well as our emotions here, not be stampeded by those videos which are described as being unverified, but which, by dint of being repeated over and over again, come to acquire a spurious credibility,”
Ford stated. “We have to ask ourselves, what are the sources in this stampede to war?”
The only correct response, he remarked, is to get inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to the site of the alleged attack. He also said that in August 2016, jihadis mounted a chlorine gas attack and “tried to make it look like a regime operation.” Today, he said,
“mark my words, [the jihadis will make it look like the regime did it] and it will get the warmongers coming to tell us that Assad is defying us and we must go in more heavily into Syria.”
When the hostile BBC host demanded to know what would be the jihadis’ motivation, Ford replied, “A child can see that the intention was to produce hysteria.”
In a post to his own blog, under the headline “The Four Horsemen Gallop By,” Craig Murray charges that Theresa May and the media have moved on from the Skripal case, and are now focused on the alleged chemical attack in Douma.
“It ... ‘could only be’ by the Russian-backed Assad regime, except there is no evidence of that either, and indeed neutral verified evidence from Douma is non-existent,”
he points out.
“There is a reckless disregard for evidence based on the pretexts for all this. Indeed, the more the evidence is scrutinized, the dodgier it seems. Finally, there is a massive difference between mainstream media narrative around these events and a deeply skeptical public, as shown in social media and in comments sections of corporate media websites.
“The notion that Britain will take part in military action against Syria with neither investigation of the evidence nor a parliamentary vote is worrying indeed. Without [UN] Security Council authorization, any such action is illegal in any event.”
