Top Tweets for #Implicitly

This is a shameless attempt to deceive the public by twisting facts and ignoring key findings in the UN Commission of Inquiry's report on Syria’s coastal massacres in March. Syria’s Foreign Minister publicizes a highly misleading formal response that claims the UN's findings “align” with the conclusions of the state’s own fact-finding committee, which is simply not true: - 1: The UN report found that the March events involved killings, torture, and other abuses “in a manner that was both widespread and systematic.” This contradicts the central claim by the state-commissioned fact-finding committee, which denied any systematic violence, framing events as "chaotic and driven partly by revenge". Only someone intent on deceiving the public could present these two fundamentally opposing conclusions as being in alignment. - 2: The UN report names three Syrian army divisions: 62nd (Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade), 76th (Hamza Division), 400th (ex-HTS brigades) as having committed killings, torture, and other abuses. This directly contradicts the fact-finding committee’s account, which largely attributed responsibility to Assad’s remnants and vague “external actors,” while making no mention of these three divisions. Plus the UN report links the “systematic and widespread” nature of the crimes to these divisions. So if the committee’s reference to “external actors” included them, that would amount to outright misinformation, a deliberate attempt to shield the military officials commanding them from further investigation and public scrutiny. This would hardly be surprising, given who they are and the deep mistrust Syrians already hold toward at-least two of them for their previous involvement in egregious human rights abuses: - Mohammad al-Jassem (Abu Amsha) 62nd Division - Saif Boulad (Saif Abu Bakr) 76th Division - Mohammad Khair Hassan Shuaib (Abu al-Khair “Taftanaz”) 400th division (Also serves as Deputy Minister of Defense) By March, all three divisions were already integrated into the Ministry of Defence under the new Syrian army structure, meaning their commanders operated under the state’s military umbrella at the time of the atrocities. Had the committee released its full report, we would know whether it falsely exonerated these groups from involvement in the massacres or cynically labelled them as “external actors.” In either case, the committee’s investigation would constitute to a categorical failure. - 3: Al-Shaibani claims: "That report was made public in July and subjected to media scrutiny in a transparent press conference" referring to the findings of the Fact-finding committee. There is nothing transparent about releasing only a summary, stripped of vital information, in a way that evades public scrutiny and denies legal experts the ability to review the findings, a "trust me bro" approach, rendering them baseless. This is underscored by the fact that the very UN report Al-Shaibani claims to align with explicitly states: “The Commission calls on the Syrian authorities to make public the full report of the national fact-finding committee to enable scrutiny and follow-up.” Without the release of the entire report, along with the methodology used in the investigation, the fact-finding committee’s findings should not be taken seriously. Not to mention the fact that the committees claim of independence from the state is laughable: At one point in the press conference on July 22nd, Yassir Al Farhan the committee chair, said the "state had provided us with all the information we requested about the identified suspects". Minutes later in the same briefing, Farhan claimed that “no government entity knew the identities or backgrounds of these names before we submitted the report.” This is a direct contradiction. It suggests the committee is being dishonest in its portrayal on the very subject of its independence and raises serious concerns about possible state interference in the investigation. ---------------------- It is beyond me how foreign state representatives (such as the UK and Germany) can respond to the UN report by claiming it aligns with the fact-finding committee's enquiry, a claim that suggests many of them haven’t actually read the report and are instead relying on second-hand reactions. This is deeply disturbing. Foreign states, international bodies, human rights groups, and many individuals appear to be giving the interim government a pass simply by comparing it to the Assad regime and being satisfied with any token cooperation they receive, an extremely low bar to clear.