Mick Hartley

The Syrian government, helped by its Russian and Iranian allies, continues to bombard Eastern Ghouta. The latest information suggests that the weapons used have included chlorine gas. North Korean specialists have been seen recently at Syrian sites, confirming the open secret that Pyongyang has been supplying Damascus with chemical weapons for years.

It all goes back to the red line. Remember the red line? In 2012 Obama warned that any use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would be crossing a red line. American military action would follow swiftly and assuredly. Assad then used chemical weapons…..and nothing happened. Those nice Russians guaranteed that the chemical stockpiles would be destroyed, and Obama was happy:

"Assad gave up his chemical weapons," Obama told the American public in May 2015. "That's not speculation on our part. That, in fact, has been confirmed by the organization internationally that is charged with eliminating chemical weapons."

But, inexplicably, the chemical attacks kept on happening.

In Tablet, Syrian author and chemical attack survivor Kassem Eid describes the duplicity of the Obama administration – notably Samantha Power – in enabling the continuation of the Syrian genocide, hiding the truth to justify its policy of inaction:

I first met then-Ambassador Samantha Power in the U.S.-U.N. Mission on April 14, 2014. That was two months after I fled Syria and less than a year after I survived Assad’s sarin-gas attack. When I met Ambassador Power, she told me that she was trying so hard to persuade President Obama to act decisively against the Assad regime and that she was ashamed of Obama’s inaction. She then told me about her personal experience as a journalist and activist while she was covering the Yugoslav wars and the genocide in Bosnia.

I was touched by what I perceived to be Ambassador Power’s sincerity and personal experience that led her to write A Problem From Hell, which explained how politicians lie in order to avoid intervening to stop genocide. I was so honored that she gave me an autographed copy of her famous book, and in return, I gave her a copy of A Book of Syria’s Dead,which contains the names of the first 100,000 Syrians who had been killed up until that time. In that moment, I never thought that a day would come when I would find out that she was just lying to my face. Samantha Power is exactly like the genocide-enabling politicians that she wrote about herself in her book.

The Assad regime taught us in schools that there was no Holocaust and hid the truth of the crematoriums and the concentration camps where millions of Jews were brutally killed. But the Obama administration also refused to act on—or reveal—direct eyewitness testimony it received of the crematorium in Saydnaya Prison in Syria, where an estimated 100,000 people were brutally killed and then burned to ashes to hide the truth. I’d begged the U.S. administration during my meetings at the State Department back in 2014 to investigate the Saydnaya Prison and Qasioun mountain because my fellow activists in those areas had repeatedly told me since 2012 how they smelled the awful stench of burning flesh. But all I got were empty promises. If a bunch of Syrian activists knew about the crematorium, there’s no doubt in my mind that Obama knew about it from intelligence reports. I strongly suspect he made sure those reports weren’t made public to avoid having to take action against Assad. It was the Trump administration that finally showed the world this reality last year and publicized the truth that Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and President Obama tried to hide….

Ambassador Power, Ben Rhodes, and President Obama owe an apology to the Syrian and the American people for covering up the evidence of war crimes and genocide in Syria and twisting facts to serve their political agenda and public image.