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PRESS RELEASE


British Wrote the Script
for Military Hit on Syria

Jan. 4, 2011 (EIRNS)—The Obama Administration has created a secret committee to prepare "options" for aiding the Syrian opposition, according to a posting on The Cable, a blog of the Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine on Dec. 28. Led by the senior director of the National Security Council, Steve Simon, this "unusually small" group of officials from the State Department, Pentagon, Treasury, and other relevant agencies aims to bypass the normal channels of Inter-agency Policy Committee, Deputies' Committee, and Principals' Committee meetings. An important participant is Fred Hof of the State Department, who called the Syrian government a "dead man walking" last December.

One major option under consideration is aiding the Syrian National Council (SNC), the London-based opposition organization which has recently called for international military intervention in Syria. A top advisor to the SNC, Ausema Monajed, recently put out a paper titled "Safe Area for Syria," which is virtually a word-for-word reprint of the call issued on Dec. 20 by the Henry Jackson Society of London, a British Round Table descendant committed to the Empire program of perpetual war and the end of the nation state. The title for the piece chosen by the Society was even more explicit: "Intervention in Syria?"

The brief for a military attack on Syria was written by Michael Weiss, communications director of the Jackson Society, which serves as the controller of the American neocons who basically ran the policy of the previous Presidential Administration of George W. Bush. These included James Woolsey, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and Josh Muravchik, with Obama's choice as Moscow Ambassador, Michael McFaul—all under the direction of such British luminaries as the Rt. Hon. Michael Ancram, 13th Marquess of Lothian, grandson of Round Table Leader Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian—and Sir Richard Dearlove, Tony Blair's choice for head of British SIS, 1999-2004.

The brief opens by calling for some "pretext" (their word) for foreign armed intervention. If the Security Council will not do so, any mere condemnation of the Assad government might serve as such a "pretext," the British author says. Otherwise, the UN General Assembly could pass an exceptional resolution.

The military intervention proposed could begin with a pre-emptive campaign of air strikes by British, French, Turkish, and U.S. special forces, followed by a ground operation led by the same, to set up a "Syria Safe Area"—"a Syrian Benghazi"—to provide an operating base for rebels. Throughout, Weiss puts out the "cakewalk" argument used in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion: Syria is militarily weak and can offer no effective resistance. Iran will complain, he says, but not intervene. Hezbollah can do nothing. Russia will not act, no matter what they say.

Weiss's blueprint was taken over and "edited" by Monajed, executive director of the London-based "Strategic Research and Communication Centre," and spokesman for the SNC. The Centre provides the "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" with the figures it puts out on the number of people purportedly killed by the Assad regime. That "Observatory" happens to be the sole source of the death counts in Syria appearing in the world media; even the UN Human Rights Commission relies on them.

According to former CIA official Phil Giraldi, CIA analysts are highly skeptical of those figures, as well as of the accounts of mass defections from the Syrian Army, and pitched battles between deserters and loyal troops, but they are quite aware that the rebels are being armed, trained, and financed by foreign governments.

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