Neocons Take Aim at Syrian Peace Talks

Exclusive: Syrian peace talks have finally begun, but many powerful interests – including U.S. neocons – are determined to see the talks fail. The Washington Post’s neocon editorial page is urging President Obama to give up on “feckless diplomacy” and threaten war, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial page is still beating the drums for U.S. military intervention in Syria, but its latest demand for violent reprisals against the Syrian government dropped a key element in the previous propaganda campaign: the claim that President Bashar al-Assad had “gassed his own people.”

Without admitting that those earlier Sarin gas allegations have fallen apart, the Post editors simply moved on to new accusations — that the Syrian government tortured thousands of captives who were subsequently killed. Those claims came from an anonymous “defector” who claims he took photographs to document the deaths and then turned the images over to the anti-Assad government of Qatar.

Of course, the Post editors treat the new allegations as flat fact, much as they did with earlier charges against the Syrian regime – and with the Bush-43 administration’s claims in 2002-03 that Iraq was hiding stockpiles of WMD. The Post was catastrophically wrong in the Iraq case, but none of those top editors lost their jobs over the fiasco. Instead, they’re still around treating the new Syrian accusations with the same lack of professional skepticism that they displayed regarding Iraq.

But what’s interesting about the Post’s editorial on Thursday calling for the Obama administration to threaten a U.S. military assault if the Assad regime doesn’t comply with U.S. government demands is that the editorial makes no direct reference to the Sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of Syrians on Aug. 21.

Last summer, the Obama administration and the mainstream U.S. news media blamed that Sarin attack on the Syrian government with the same certitude and outrage as we’re now seeing over the “torture photos.”

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http://consortiumnews.com/2014/01/23/neocons-take-aim-at-syrian-peace-talks/