Posted on 08/27/2013 9:15:31 AM PDT by mojito
There is a reason to be cautious. Both sides in the Syrian civil war have committed atrocities and both sides have misrepresented photos and falsified reports. But the burden appears to be on the government’s side.
Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), which is above partisanship as well as devoted to saving lives, has reported that the hospitals it supports in Damascus have treated thousands of victims for neuro-toxicity. Their reports say that the symptoms are a result of the presence of Sarin gas.
A former British Army chemical weapons expert says that the scale of the attack, the numbers affected and the consistency of symptoms observed on videos provided to world media by opposition websites is a staggering enterprise. The expert emphasised that it is difficult to imagine that rebel forces would have the resources to have undertaken a fraudulent staging of the dead and the wounded.
Sarin gas kills and disappears quickly. If the Syrian Army did not launch this attack and it was the fault of the rebels, then why didn’t the Syrian regime allow, indeed encourage, the U.N. inspectors, staying in a hotel only an estimated 15 minute drive from the massacre, to go to the site last Wednesday instead of delaying permission? What’s more, immediately after the alleged chemical weapons attack took place, the Syrian Army launched an offensive and heavily shelled the area.
So if it is reasonable to assume that this attack was carried out by an artillery unit of the Syrian Army, the puzzling question is “why?”
(Excerpt) Read more at english.alarabiya.net ...
*don’t think he had anything to do with it.
At no point during any interview I have seen with Assad (a handful maybe) have I ever thought I was hearing from the guy who was actually in charge.
drunknsage: Thank you for your report [and God speed in finding a job, a “perfect” job].
Pinging to the interesting thread article and #16 and #7 for background info. Thank you for all of the pings. So much to read, I am working myself backwards in the time I have to catch up.
Thank you for your post and research!
Not only is the article well reasoned, its author is educated and at least as well informed as anybody outside of Syria.
Still, I think he discounted the probability that it was a false flag attack overmuch. In his ultimate sentence, he speculates that an overzealous Syrian Army artillery officer launched the VX gas canisters. Even so, it may have an officer with terrorist sympathies creating an even better false flag attack.
Paranoid? Yes. But as the article indicates, a gas attack does not serve Assad’s interests. And we’re talking about the Middle East.
Obama accuses Assad. Assad denies. When two pathological liars make mutually contradictory statements of this nature, who do you believe? It seems more rational to believe the version that comports with the interests of the actors. Obama needs a diversion from his scandals. Assad does not need America to make a kinetic military response for crossing a red line; he has enough trouble.
Don’t forget, it was Sarah’s idea for Abraham to take Hagar to give him a son.
I think one must remember that, as in the past, chemical weapons are used to instill fear more than do damage to the enemy. Also, why would Assad assume we’re going to do anything now when we haven’t up until this point?
Something changed.
There’s always a woman behind everything.
The second observation: if the weapons are so controlled, under control rather than just sitting on a shelf for anyone to arbitrarily use, this wasn't some rogue attack, why would Assad use them on civilian targets rather than hitting a rebel stronghold at known location?
Final observation, REGARDLESS,what the hell does this have to do with US interests?
Interesting article. Thanks for posting. One other theory would be that the Syrian military had chemical weapons as a just in case, though they planned to use them only as an absolute last resort, because the repercussions would likely be fatal to the regime.
They obviously didn’t want anyone to know that they were keeping them at all.
If you were the rebels and you had access to the internet, you would know that your best chance of becoming the new power in Syria would be to somehow get the government to use the weapons.
So you try to force a small unit that you know has the weapons into a no-win situation where they will use them, but you fail repeatedly.
Then you go for plan B:
The next time a Syrian army officer offers to defect (and there have been plenty of army defections) , you say: stay right where you are, get access to the chemical weapons, fire off a few rounds into a civilian area, and THEN defect. By doing so you will bring the same coalition that toppled Ghaddafi to topple Assad.
Now imagine you are the Syrian regime reacting to this scenario. The situation on the ground is a mess, the defector (or defectors) has deliberately muddled your understanding of what actually happened there, and so you think a rogue commander or two used your ‘final resort’ weapon because his unit was being overrun, even though you had given them explicit orders not to.
You don’t want the UN to find out that you were even keeping the last resort weapons, and you definitely don’t want them to discover what the rogue unit has done (because you know how the UN/NATO will react) so you close off the area until you can figure out what happened. A few days later, you still don’t really know what happened but your continued blockage of the inspectors is becoming the equivalent of a guilty plea, so you let them in.
Regardless, the question that Obama does not answer is what specifically does this have to do with US interests?
Obama funded the rebels, has publicly cheered the rebels efforts and called for regime change. AND NOW claims that the instability he helped create is one reason to go in?
This is just another Egypt & Libya, an effort to support the spread of Islam. Obama isn't fooling me.
It gives the UN personnel the opportunity to say they were on site before they lie? False credibility?
Agree. None of this has anything to do with US interests.
My post is just a hypothesis to explain the topic of the article which is: why would Assad use chemical weapons when he certainly knew that the cost to his administration (US/NATO etc) would vastly outweigh the “benefit” (a few hundred civilian opponents maimed and dead — a result he achieved in many other places with regular weapons). But then, if he didn’t use the weapons, who did and why, and further why did his administration seem to be covering up the attack if they knew it wasn’t them.
Maybe it was staged...maybe they weren’t dead at all...I keep finding little snippets claiming these were actors.
I know you can photoshop...I know you can do all sorts of things but google up gas attack faked and look for yourselves.
I keep seeing pretty peacefull folks who don’t look like they have been in an agony of sarin.
I don’t know...but if this is a ploy by der fascist marxist to bolster his sagging numbers, I have a mighty skeptical eye.....
These “rebels” are al queda infiltrated and led in some cases...why are we piously claiming they couldn’t possibly lie?
Me no know, kemosabe....
One possible explanation is that it was a bombardment of conventional munitions from government forces which hit a rebel store of chemical weapons / chemicals. (Therefore it is feasible that neither side intended to release the chemicals at that moment.)
But it is not too far fetched to say that rebels would do it to their ‘own’ people if it suited their purpose. I remember speaking to a peacekeeper soldier returning from Bosnia one of whose tasks was to plot artillery fire coming in to a besieged town. It was obvious to him that when the besiegers let up for a couple of days then the ‘besieged’ would lob some stuff into their people to keep the heat on.
This new article completely supports my theory that this was a very sick plan by a rebel-aligned army officer:
“Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned”
This is exactly how the regime would have reacted tot he Plan B i described above.
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