John Kerry insists that it is “undeniable” that the Syrian government conducted a chemical weapons attack against civilians, and then made a “cynical attempt to cover it up” by hiding the evidence.

Several chemical weapons experts, including former US Chemical Corps officer Dan Kaszeta, have disputed claims that the Assad regime conducted such an attack. Yet from Kerry’s perspective, the absence of evidence that such an atrocity took place is irrefutable proof that it occurred.

The Syrian regime has been under relentless scrutiny by the Obama administration, which has been indecently eager to find or contrive the justification for an attack. The New York Times recently reported that administration officials have identified the Clinton administration’s “humanitarian” terror-bombing of Serbia in 1999 as a framework for a similar assault on Syria.

The NATO-led 78-day onslaught of Serbia followed reports of a “massacre” of ethnic Albanians in a village called Racak. That nearly abandoned village was controlled by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a hybrid totalitarian group supported by both Osama bin Laden and his quondam ally the CIA. The world was invited to believe that Serbian police had dragged innocent people out of their homes and executed them near a ditch in a miniature recreation of Babi Yar. Independent reporting on the alleged January 15, 1999 massacre revealed that the incident was actually a firefight between the US-backed terrorist guerrillas — who controlled the village — and Serbian police.

The regime of Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic (who would later die in a UN-run prison cell at The Hague) was predictably corrupt and vicious, but it never posed a threat of any kind to the United States. Nor was it slaughtering ethnic Albanians in Kosovo: In 1998, the rate of death by violence in Kosovo — which was plagued with ethnic strife — was about the same as in Atlanta. What was needed, according to Clinton administration officials, was a “trigger” of some kind. The clash at Racak was thus re-purposed as a “massacre,” which led to an ultimatum being presented to Milosevic during “negotiations” in Rambouillet, France. The Clintonoids knew that Milosevic wouldn’t agree to their terms, which would have required that Serbia simply surrender Kosovo to international control. But this was what was intended: As one State Department official smugly remarked: “The Serbs need some bombing, and that’s exactly what they’re going to get.”

While the Obama administration is clearly following the Kosovo model in its campaign against Syria, it made at least one significant modification by orchestrating a false flag chemical weapons attack. A report last January disclosed an email exchange between officials of a British-based military contractor discussing a Washington-approved plan to stage a chemical attack in Syria that would be blamed on the government in Damascus.

That report’s credibility is buttressed by unassailable evidence of Washington’s previous use of surrogates to carry out chemical weapons attacks. Yesterday, just before Kerry theatrically accused Syria of a crime against humanity, Foreign Policy magazine publicized a newly declassified CIA document confirming that Washington had supported Saddam Hussein’s use of nerve gas against Iran in 1983. This occurred during a war that began when Saddam, with Washington’s support, attacked Iran.

The murderous cynicism of those who presume to rule us might be the world’s only inexhaustible resource.

The Best of William Norman Grigg