Hudson points to our story from March reporting that the United States and Israel decided to escalate tensions inside Syria and confront Assad’s military directly under the weapons of mass destruction pretext.

Events over the past week have borne this assertion out. The Obama administration says it will continue its investigation of phantom chemical weapons while Senator John McCain of Arizona has called for international troops to prepare a Syrian invasion under the pretext of securing chemical weapon stockpiles.

On Sunday, Senator Lindsay Graham said “there’s a growing consensus in the U.S. Senate that the United States should get involved” in a Syrian intervention. Congress now accepts the Syrian government chemical weapons pretext without question, a fact demonstrated by Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., who said on Face the Nation that it’s clear the order to use chemical weapons came from the al-Assad regime.

Despite the mindless stampeded toward war under the chemical weapons pretext – virtually the same pretext used to turn Iraq into a hellish failed state – a small number of establishment media journalists have questioned the claim.

“Why use them knowing that you risk losing the diplomatic support of Russia and China, knowing you risk bringing in western intervention, and therefore risk losing the gains you’ve made militarily in the past few weeks?” asks Tim Marshall, the foreign affairs editor of Sky News. “Why now? It doesn’t make sense. If the evidence of use was overwhelming, the question would still remain. But the evidence is underwhelming.”