[First published as the lead letter in the Toronto Star (11 September 2013),

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editors/2013/09/10/the_case_against_backing_syria_strike.html.]

[Index: Canadian politics, US aggression, Syria]

[Date: September 2013]

The Case Against Backing Syria Strike

Re: Assad is testing us, Baird warns, Sept. 8

Michael Keefer

External Affairs Minister John Baird's concern over the atrocities being inflicted
on Syrian civilians is commendable. But he should examine the relevant evidence before
throwing Canada's support behind a plan for bombing Syria that will result in the deaths
of far more than the 25,000 civilians whom he imagines as the victims of the next poison
gas attack.
Carla Del Ponte, of the UN Independent International Commission on Syria,
stated in May that there was strong, concrete evidence (though not incontrovertible
proof) that rebelsand not Assad's regimehad used nerve gas in previous attacks on
civilians.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an organization of former senior
U.S. intelligence officers, informed President Barack Obama on September 6 that sources
within U.S. intelligence are telling us, categorically, that ... Bashar al-Assad was NOT
responsible for the chemical incident of August 21, that this incident was not the result
of an attack by the Syrian army, and that CIA Director John Brennan is perpetrating a
pre-Iraq-War-type fraud on members of Congress, the media, the publicand perhaps
even you.
They add that there is a growing body of evidence, mostly from sources

affiliated with the Syrian opposition, that this incident was a pre-planned provocation
by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters intended to bring the
United States into the war.
Contrary to Baird's belief, it is not Assad but Obama who is testing us. Obama
wonders whether we have forgotten the lies about WMDs that legitimized the invasion of
Iraq in 2003as well as the principles enunciated at the Nuremberg trials, according to
which aggressive war is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Michael Keefer,
Professor Emeritus, University of Guelph,
Toronto

Postscript

I sent this letter to the Toronto Star on September 8, 2013, and with it all of my
relevant contact information. Two days later, having received no acknowledgment, I sent
my letter in a second time, accompanied this time by a note pointing out that it had raised
matters not just of opinion, but of quite crucial evidence and of international law, and
indicating that I thought the newspaper's Atkinson Principles (which are stated on the
Star's website) implied respect for issues such as these.
Shortly after noon on September 11, I received from Kathy English, the Star's
Public Editor, a boiler-plate expression of regret. After explaining that the paper receives
many many letters to the editor from readers expressing their views on news and issues of
the day and publishes more than a dozen of these on any given day, but doesn't make a
practice of contacting people whose letters are not chosen for publication, Ms. English
thanked me for taking time to express our [sic] views.
I replied, thanking her for the information, but noting that the point was now
moot, since my letter had appeared in print that morning. I added: May I take the small

typo in your last sentence as a Freudian slip, an acknowledgment that 'our views' on the
so-far narrowly averted US bombing of Syria are the same? To which she responded:
I'm sorry I did not see that your letter was indeed published. A typo, indeed!