At least 200 Killed in Syrian Village: Opposition Activists

[Hissyspit]

Source: Reuters

BEIRUT (Reuters) - At least 100 people were massacred on Thursday by Syrian government forces in a village in the province of Hama, opposition activists quoted witnesses and residents as saying.

The village of Tremseh was shelled by Syrian troops and later stormed by Shabbiha militia, they said. Several people in the village were killed by the shelling and more were shot later in the head execution-style, they added.

@Reuters: UPDATE: DEATH TOLL IN SYRIAN FORCES' ATTACK ON VILLAGE IN SYRIA'S HAMA REGION IS MORE THAN 200, MOSTLY CIVILIANS - OPPOSITION ACTIVISTS

Read more: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE86B1DO20120712?irpc=932

[David__77]

1. Hopefully only armed combatants were killed, but that's doubtful.

As in any asymmetrical warfare, the unarmed middle feels the pain the most and their squeezed between the vise.

[maddezmom]

2. Syrian regime suspected of using Soviet-made cluster bombs: HRW

Human Right Watch on Thursday said Syrian regime forces appear to be using Soviet-made cluster bombs against rebel hideouts in a mountainous region of Hama province.

Two videos posted online on Tuesday appear to show unexploded submunitions and a bomb canister in Jabal Shahshabu, northwest of the city of Hama, said the New York-based group.

It quoted a local militant as saying the region has come under constant bombardment from the air and ground over the past two weeks, targeting rebels and their cave hideouts.




“These videos show identifiable cluster bombs and submunitions,” said Steve Goose, arms division director at HRW.

“If confirmed, this would be the first documented use of these highly dangerous weapons by the Syrian armed forces during the conflict,” said Goose.



more:http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/07/12/226012.html

[sulphurdunn]

3. So, has the West decided

to abandon the Syrian resistance?

[stockholmer]

4. 'OPPOSITION ACTIVISTS' = NATO/US/UK pro-empiric invasion stooges

Houlah turned out to be a rebel-perpetrated massacre, not the Syrian government, and this will very likely end up the same.

So sick of the select war-drum beating for NATO-approved militarism (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc), whilst other, much larger genocides and mass murder on a national scale have been ignored by the empiric war machine (Guatemala- 200,000+ dead, Dem Republic of Congo- 5 million dead, Darfur- 300,000+ dead,etc.)

Not to mention the NON-ACTION by the US/UK/NATO etcdog of war, when Bahrain, aided by the Saudis, brutally suppressed their own Arab spring uprisings. In fact, the US went ahaead and sent the fascist monarchy there millions in arms AFTER the slaughter.

Human Rights Watch: Obama Sends Bahrain Arms Despite Continuing Repression (using legal loopholes)

http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/02/08/us-wrong-time-bahrain-arms-deal

The Obama administration’s decision to move forward on a $1 million arms sale to Bahrain sends the wrong signal to a country that is engaged in serious human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said today.

“Bahrain has made many promises to cease abuses and hold officials accountable, but it hasn’t delivered,” said Maria McFarland, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “Protesters remain jailed on criminal charges for peacefully speaking out and there has been little accountability for torture and killings – crimes in which the Bahrain Defense Force is implicated.”

In a January 27, 2012 statement, the State Department announced that it intended to go forward with the sale of approximately $1 million of equipment to Bahrain while maintaining “a pause on most security assistance for Bahrain pending further progress on reform.” The State Department asserted that the equipment included spare parts and maintenance of equipment needed for Bahrain’s external defense and support of US Navy Fifth Fleet operations and that it did not include items that could be used against protesters. But the State Department has not made public a full list of the equipment to be sold.


snip

------------------------------------------------------

further background:

An independent commission in Bahrain recently found that torture has been systemic http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE7A03NW20111101 since protests broke out last year. The commission urged reform, but the United Nations has recently said http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/21/us-bahrain-rights-idUSTRE7BK1N620111221 that Bahrain was failing to prosecute human rights abuses http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/kristof-repressing-democracy-with-american-arms.html?_r=2&smid=fb-share and was continuing its use of excessive force against civilians.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has quietly moved forward http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/27/obama_administration_selling_new_arms_package_to_bahrain with a new package of arms sales to the regime in Bahrain, after international pressure forced them to delay its planned $53 million arms sale. Using legal loopholes that only require congressional authorization for sales of $1 million or more, the administration split the arms package and moved forward with the new sales without notifying the public.

[Odin2005]

5. This pro-Assad crap reminds me of the pro-Milosivic crap...

...and the pro-Mugabe crap.



Goings on in Bahrain is irrelevant to Assad being a butcher.

[stockholmer]

6. it's NOT pro Assad. it is anti empiric wars, and the US makes Assad look like a piker when it comes

to butchery and systematic killing. Just because time and distance have removed the slaughter of millions of brown people from your backyard field of vision does not make history, both far and near-term in scope, go away.

Face it, selective support for this so-called humanitarian intervention in Syria is a vote for the war-pig apparatus of the West as currently constituted, just like it was in Libya, Iraq, and countless other examples.

ps- The Bahrain example is absolutely germane, as it points out blatant hypocrisy. A 'city on a hill' stays on the hill, casting out hope by example, not death from above by drone bombs.

Neo-Con Cliff May: Syria Has Nothing to do with Humanitarian Concerns

FDD's Clifford May admits Syria is a proxy war with Iran and Russia, Neo-Cons in bed with Al Qaeda. Human rights merely a pretense.

Video: Clifford May begins by playing the "humanitarian card" but ends admitting the entire conflict is a proxy war with Iran, and by implication, Russia. Amid a myriad of lies directed at Iran, May proposes worldwide occupation is necessary to maintain American "influence in the long run," a notion that sounds suspiciously a lot like Empire.


http://landdestroyer.blogspot.se/2012/06/neo-con-syria-has-nothing-to-do-with.html

Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Clifford May in an article titled, "The Battle of Syria: Assad’s survival would be a victory for Iran — and a defeat for the US," openly dispels the commonly held notion among the West's remaining public support, that their meddling in Syria's ongoing strife has anything to do with humanitarian concerns. In fact, May openly states that defeating Syria as a proxy of Iran is far more important than "the dearth of sincere Muslim freedom fighters" or "humanitarian concerns."

May also makes mention of "strange bedfellows" in the current conflict, by quoting a fellow commentator who stated, "the McCain wing of the Republican party, and the rest of Washington’s progressive, Islamophilic clerisy” are aligning with “al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muslim Brotherhood icon Yusuf al-Qaradawi.”

Aligning with Al Qaeda indeed, something that, while May claims is a spontaneous convergence of interests, was actually being planned as early as 2007, as stated in Seymour Hersh's article, "The Redirection" in the New Yorker. And just like May concedes now, Hersh painted a picture of US-Israeli-Saudi machinations to destroy Lebanon and Syria as a means of undermining and toppling Iran - and using sectarian extremists to do so. Hersh specifically mentioned that many of the militant groups the West was arming and staging for this operation now unfolding in Syria today, were affiliated with Al Qaeda. The 2007 article specifically states:

"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."

snip



Brookings Institution's Middle East Memo #21 "Assessing Options for Regime Change (.pdf)," makes no secret that the humanitarian "responsibility to protect" is but a pretext for long-planned regime change.

[Odin2005]

7. All that is irrelavent to the fact that Assad is a butcher.

There was a lot of geopolitical BS during the Bosnian War between the US and Russia, that does not mean Milosivic was not a monster.

And if you are wondering why I bring up Bosnia so much, it's because I remember seeing news of the horrible shit going on there as a child. it made me a Wilsonian Interventionist.

[stockholmer]

8. an example of Western media Bosnian pro-war false propaganda: The Picture That Fooled The World

this is a reprint from the British magazine LM, the original appeared in German in the magazine Novo

http://www.srpska-mreza.com/lm-f97/LM97_Bosnia.html

This image of an emaciated Muslim caged behind Serb barbed wire, filmed by a British news team, became a worldwide symbol of the war in Bosnia. But the picture is not quite what it seems. German journalist Thomas Deichmann reveals the full story:


The picture reproduced on these pages is of Fikret Alic, a Bosnian Muslim, emaciated and stripped to the waist, apparently imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence in a Bosnian Serb camp at Trnopolje. It was taken from a videotape shot on 5 August 1992 by an award-winning British television team, led by Penny Marshall (ITN) with her cameraman Jeremy Irvin, accompanied by Ian Williams (Channel 4) and the reporter Ed Vulliamy from the Guardian newspaper.

For many, this picture has become a symbol of the horrors of the Bosnian war - 'Belsen '92' as one British newspaper headline captioned the photograph (Daily Mirror, 7 August 1992). But that image is misleading.

The fact is that Fikret Alic and his fellow Bosnian Muslims were not imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence. There was no barbed wire fence surrounding Trnopolje camp. It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished.

The barbed wire in the picture is not around the Bosnian Muslims; it is around the cameraman and the journalists. It formed part of a broken-down barbed wire fence encircling a small compound that was next to Trnopolje camp. The British news team filmed from inside this compound, shooting pictures of the refugees and the camp through the compound fence. In the eyes of many who saw them, the resulting pictures left the false impression that the Bosnian Muslims were caged behind barbed wire.

snip

-------------------------------------------------------

[Odin2005]

9. I should have known you were a Milsovic apologist, too.

[oberliner]

11. LM was sued for libel and paid substantial damages

The LM controversy

The journalists' reports were used as evidence in war crimes tribunals in The Hague. But the picture also sparked controversy; five years after its original publication, the magazine LM (formerly Living Marxist) published an article entitled 'The Picture that Fooled the World', claiming that the reporting had been misconstrued to give a misleading impression of the camp as a concentration camp run by Serbs for Bosniaks and Croats rather than just a collection centre for refugees. It was alleged that Alić's emaciated condition was the result of of a childhood bout of tuberculosis.[4] Ed Vulliamy retorted that those who had died in Trnopolje and Omarska camps were those ‘most horribly insulted’ by the LM suggestions. Alić denied LM allegations and testified against his tormentors in a libel action in the UK High Court brought by ITN against LM. Following dramatic evidence given by the camp doctor Idriz Merdžanić the jury found against LM and awarded substantial damages to ITN and the journalists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fikret_Ali%C4%87

Poison in the well of history

Living Marxism accused ITN of distorting the truth about Bosnia. Now, it faces ruin after losing the ensuing libel battle

Excerpt:

The truth emerged with time. Omarska turned out to be the kind of place where one prisoner was forced to bite the testicles off another, who had a live pigeon stuffed into his mouth to stifle the screams as he died in agony. The yard at Omarska was a killing field, prisoners obliged to load the mutilated corpses of their friends on to trucks by bulldozer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2000/mar/15/pressandpublishing.tvnews

[reorg]

13. some lies will never die

the camp in question was not Omarska, it was in Trnopolje.

On 6 August 1992, the international media broadcast pictures of a supposed Bosnian Serb death camp for Muslim prisoners of war. These pictures were taken from footage shot 5 August at a facility in the Bosnian town of Trnopolje (pronounced turn-OP-ul-yay). The film crew from the British news station, ITN, was led by reporter Penny Marshall, and accompanied by reporters Ian Williams and Ed Vulliamy.

Unfortunately for ITN, there is a hard record of what their film crew actually saw in Bosnia on 5 August 1992. That's because Serbian Television (RTS) covered the visit. An RTS crew followed ITN as they inspected a detention center in the town of Omarska and a refugee center at Trnopolje (pronounced turn-OP-ul-yay.), where the supposed death camp footage was shot. So RTS filmed the same things ITN filmed and sometimes filmed the ITN reporters as well. Based on this RTS footage, Emperor’s Clothes produced a movie which proves that ITN did not film a death camp. Rather, pictures of the refuge center at Trnopolje were doctored and misrepresented to create the illusion of a concentration camp.

http://emperors-clothes.com/villainy.htm

Here is some video footage from the scene on the "death camp" fence:

and this is Fikret Alic, the thin man in the picture, explaining 18 years later what had happened to him in the summer of 1992:

He was in Trnopolje from August 5th to August 14th (9 days) and escaped from this "death camp" by simply dressing up as a woman (no further explanation is given). Before he was in Trnopolje, he was in another camp, Keraterm, starting July 14th, he says. On May 23rd he had been dismissed from work and told to never return. From then on he was living out in the forests for several weeks until he was arrested and apparently mistreated in Keraterm. The tale comes across a little confusing - he says he was beaten up for 60 days, by his neighbor(?), among others(?), yet his days in the camps between July 14th and August 14th only amount to 31 days if I am counting correctly. Somewhere along the line he caught a disease, "abdominal gangrene" and couldn't hold his stool, which may have contributed to his emaciated appearance in the infamous picture.

So, the jurors were not convinced that ITN DELIBERATELY falsified their report to convey the impression that Trnopolje was a "death camp" in a supposed "holocaust" of Bosnian Muslims. Okay, perhaps they thought that doctoring pictures and showing a sick man behind barbed wire instead of realistic impressions of the scene was only normal, given that Serbs were monsters and Milosevic the new Hitler.

[Comrade Grumpy]

16. Have you read post #14 on this thread?

[Posteritatis]

12. Oy. Living in such a nice, simple, clean, manichean world must be comfortable. (nt)

[oberliner]

10. There is some crazy stuff on this thread

Though, without it, posts about Syria and the massacres there basically just sink without comment or much notice.

It's amazing what DU gets worked up about and what doesn't generate a reaction.

[reorg]

14. Syria 'massacre' dead mostly rebels: activist

Most of the people killed in the Syrian village of Traimseh were rebel fighters, an opposition activist said on Friday, adding the bloodbath followed a Free Syrian Army attack on an army convoy.

"At this stage, though we do not yet have the final count, the number of civilians killed by shelling is not more than seven," Jaafar, an activist at the anti-regime Sham News Network, told AFP. "The rest were members of the (rebel) Free Syrian Army."

"An army convoy was on its way to the region of Hama when it was attacked by the FSA," he said. "The army staged a counter-attack with the support of (pro-regime) reinforcements from (nearby) Alawi villages. The FSA resisted for an hour before it was defeated."

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/new-syrian-massacre-hama-province

[Comrade Grumpy]

15. So the "massacre" was the FSA getting its ass kicked.

That's a bit different from a real massacre. I wonder how many people who looked at this thread got down to the end of it, where the truth comes out.