Vanessa Beeley has published one of her “investigative” things claiming it a propaganda myth that Syria uses barrel bombs against civilians. Her idiosyncratic exposés usually focus on discrediting rescue workers & a small boy who survived a Russian bombing attack but now she’s tackling the heavy subject of illegal munitions.
A barrel bomb is an improvised explosive made from a barrel filled with shrapnel, chlorine gas, high explosives dropped from a helicopter or plane. Because they are unguided & indiscriminate, they are considered weapons of terror & illegal under international law. There have been thousands of reports (with photos & videos) of their use on civilians by Assad.
Assad denies using barrel bombs & since he cuts her checks, Beeley complies with one of her “investigations.” The problem with answering Beeley is that her exposés involve more smearing of those many sources that disagree with her than actual investigative work. Since her field work in Syria is under the aegis of Assad, she is always accompanied by one of his officials & her security provided by the Syrian army. That makes her reports not independent at all but of the “embedded” kind.
Her spurious investigative method is mainly vilifying all the investigations which contradict her, including by Human Rights Watch, a UN special commission, Bellingcat, Syrian human rights monitoring groups, & Syrians reporting from bombing zones. Like the dutiful & likely well-remunerated propagandist she is, Beeley smears them all as funded or linked to Soros, the Saudis, CIA, or “jihadist terrorists”. Mainstream media is just fake news when they report the findings.
Beeley who denies Assad’s use of barrel bombs then cites Craig Murray who said barrel bombs are being used by Assad “though on a pretty small scale”. Well what’s a “pretty small scale” in a counter-revolution that’s gone on for nearly 6 years & when used against hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians?
Murray wrote a piece last year which is shared & cited over & over again by Assadists which says if he were in a bombing zone he would rather be bombed with barrel bombs than with conventional ones. He has co-thinkers in Assadists Paul Larudee who writes for Counterpunch & Robert Parry who writes for Global Research who claim barrel bombs are far less lethal & destructive than conventional bombs. That’s contrary to everything ever written about barrel bombs but the fact that Assadists even use that argument speaks to their derangement.
One question remains for our inveterate propagandist: if Assad is not using barrel bombs, is he then using conventional ones? Because something has to explain all that massive damage & the claim that militias did it is as persuasive as the claim that evil fairies from outer space did.
Video is from Darayya, a suburb of Damascus, posted in July 2016.