Iran and Syria updates - global chess games continue with Iran threatening to back out of Moscow talks now....

http://www.infowars.com/syrian-rebels-tried-to-get-me-killed-says-channel-4-correspondent-2/

Syrian Rebels Set Trap for British Journalists

Tony Cartalucci
Infowars.com
Saturday, June 9, 2012

While the New York Times publishes Goebbels-esque war propaganda pieces titled, “Assad, the Butcher,” presuming to know the details about an unconfirmed “massacre” the UN is just now in the beginning stages of investigating – a disturbing and very telling incident unfolded that is very much confirmed. British Channel 4′s Alex Thomson, one of the few Western journalists not only in Syria legally, but attempting to cover both sides of the conflict, was purposefully led by rebels into a trap designed to have him and his team killed by government troops.

Image: UK’s Channel 4 News’ Alex Thomson narrowly escaped a trap set for him and his team in Syria, by rebels hoping to use his death as propaganda. Ironically, it would have been Thomson’s own countrymen and colleagues, particularly BBC, who would have maximized the effect of the rebels’ insidious plot had they succeeded. Killing journalists and carrying out manufactured atrocities, then blaming it on a targeted government is a pastime for Western media houses.

“Set up to be shot in Syria’s no man’s land?” featured on Thomson’s personal Channel 4 blog describes a tale of violence on both sides – very uncharacteristic of Western and particularly British media coverage. While BBC was busy posting fake pictures for their one-sided Houla Massacre coverage, Thomson was busy trying to interview belligerents on both sides of the Syrian conflict.

Thomson’s narrative describes what appears to be a bifurcation between “rebel” forces. On one hand, there are organized fighters that appear to solely committed to fighting the Syrian Army. On the other hand, there appears to be a more insidious “third party” involved, a third party implicated by Thomson as having intentionally led him and his team into a deadly trap. This is a narrative that corroborates statements made by the Syrian government itself, as well as independent geopolitical analysts from around the world – that there exists a substantiation third party, consisting of foreign mercenaries and sectarian extremists carrying out the bulk of the violence and atrocities.

Thomson describes his ordeal after accompanying UN monitors out to “Free Syrian Army” held territory:

“We decide to ask for an escort out the safe way we came in. Both sides, both checkpoints will remember our vehicle.

Suddenly four men in a black car beckon us to follow. We move out behind.

We are led another route. Led in fact, straight into a free-fire zone. Told by the Free Syrian Army to follow a road that was blocked off in the middle of no-man’s-land.

At that point there was the crack of a bullet and one of the slower three-point turns I’ve experienced. We screamed off into the nearest side-street for cover.
Another dead-end.

There was no option but to drive back out onto the sniping ground and floor it back to the road we’d been led in on.

Predictably the black car was there which had led us to the trap. They roared off as soon as we re-appeared.”

I’m quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian Army. Dead journos are bad for Damascus.”

Alex Thomson concluded his account by saying, “in a war where they slit the throats of toddlers back to the spine, what’s the big deal in sending a van full of journalists into the killing zone? It was nothing personal.”

The obvious question that comes to mind upon reading Thomson’s account, along with emerging evidence that the Western press willfully lied about the Houla Massacre and is attempting to do so again regarding killings in Hama, is that “if rebels are willing to try and kill foreign journalists for propaganda value – men and women merely trying to do their job, to share with the world the truth about unfolding events in Syria – just to blame the deaths on the Syrian government, why wouldn’t they kill men, women and children to blame on the Syrian government as well?”

Another pertinent question would be, “what if the rebels had succeeded in their insidious plan to have Thomson and his team killed? Would the Western press commit themselves to due diligence in ascertaining the truth surrounding the circumstances of their deaths? Or would headlines read, “BRITISH JOURNALISTS SLAUGHTERED BY ASSAD!”

It is above all ironic, that the West’s insidious leadership who long planned Syria’s division, destruction, and downfall, and the Western media that serves this agenda, are able to invoke so much genuine sympathy and concern for human life in people around the world, when they themselves lack any at all.

http://www.debka.com/article/22069/Russia-and-Iran-back-away-from-the-Syrian-conflict-dump-it-in-America%E2%80%99s-lap-

Russia and Iran back away from the Syrian conflict, dump it in America’s lap

DEBKAfile Special Report June 8, 2012, 8:31 PM (GMT+02:00)

Tags:  Syria   US   Russia   Iran   UN   IAEA 

US official Fred Hoff, Ambassador Michael McFaul in Moscow

After the hopeless gridlock at the special UN session on the Syrian crisis Thursday, an American delegation headed by Fred Hoff, the Secretary of State’s special adviser on Syria, drew a blank in the talks it conducted at the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow Friday, June 8, with Syrian expert, Mikhail Bogdanov.
DEBKAfile’s Moscow sources report exclusively that Moscow has flatly rejected President Barack Obama’s proposal to post 5,000 armed UN monitors in Syria, most of them Russian troops, as the core of a new plan to resolve the Syrian crisis. The Russians may consider convening an international conference, but only if its remit is limited to offering a basis for negotiations between the Assad regime and the opposition and new political reforms. On no account must it deal with Bashar Assad’s removal.
Moscow’s position has grown tougher in the last few days. After Russian officials stated this week that keeping the Assad regime in power was not a priority, Bogdanev said Friday: Moscow isn’t discussing ways to promote Bashar al-Assad’s ouster with Washington. “We aren’t holding such talks.”

He stressed that the only way forward on the Syrian issue was by expanding Annan’s peace plan.
However, the only thing that all the participants at the UN could agree on was that the Annan peace plan had failed. And now that the US mission to Moscow has run into another dead end, the violence in Syria will continue to run riot with no world power or body prepared to step in and stop it.
Adding to the complications, the Syrian conflict and the Iranian nuclear controversy are becoming inextricably intermeshed. The US official Hoff knew he was arriving in Moscow at a grave disadvantage after Iran indicated to the six world powers that it was seriously considering not turning up for their third round of nuclear talks in Moscow on June 18-19.

Its pretext: The West had failed to come up with “serious proposals.”
(DEBKA-Net-Weekly 544 was first out Thursday night, June 7 with the news that Tehran was backing out of the negotiations.)

Most of all, Tehran took umbrage over US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s demand that Iran come to the talks prepared with “concrete steps to curb its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent purity.”
When she spoke, Clinton knew there was not the slightest chance of the Iranians accepting this demand.Tehran also pulled in its horns at International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters in Vienna when confronted Friday, June 8, with demands to open up its suspect nuclear sites to international inspection.

These related developments all point in one direction: US President Barack Obama’s deep reluctance to intervene directly in Syria and preference for Russia and Iran to take over have run up against equally powerful reluctance in Moscow and Tehran to put their hands in the Syrian fire or take part in any international effort to quench its flames.
Indeed, the Russians and Iranians believe that as the flames of the civil war already raging there spread, the US president will be blamed by the American public and the Arab world for the horrendous sectarian bloodbath.
And if Obama and America's European allies do decide on military intervention, they will be too late and find themselves pulled down into a bottomless quagmire.