Adele Edisen Wrote:Did Syrian "Rebels" Cross Red Line?
UN Has Testimony That Syrian Rebels Used Sarin Gas - Investigator
By Reuters

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's
civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent
sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34834.htm [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=00173fBSEKrruxBpWiama0z5r0YVkxzPGx1jkeq7vZwhT3ApyXXsj-ySkchF1RvshDdCVurqfFR290hK9jXsXscQi4qCDu6xoceBmxRR6INcrTgjIHXSmvGl5-GMUOUl-YSz8FSDHeLsuDt-qOWLiXEfb9iSd2BNXGPojkODH-07Q4=]

Quote:The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

Adele Edisen Wrote:Did Syrian "Rebels" Cross Red Line?
UN Has Testimony That Syrian Rebels Used Sarin Gas - Investigator
By Reuters

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's
civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent
sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

Quote:Bridget Kendall Diplomatic correspondent, BBC News

This is not the first time rebel forces in Syria have come under suspicion for using chemical weapons.

The Syrian government has accused them, and some independent commentators have speculated some groups could conceivably have got hold of stocks when storming government facilities.

But allegations about sarin gas use, possibly by Syrian rebels, coming from a senior UN official is a different matter. Carla del Ponte is a former war crimes prosecutor and serves on a UN commission looking into human rights abuses in Syria. So any comments from her carry weight.

However, this is hardly a formal UN position. She was speaking informally in TV and radio interviews, and freely admits that looking at the use of chemical weapons in Syria is not part of her remit.

All her team did was collect testimony, which they will now, no doubt, pass on to the separate UN team of weapons inspectors waiting in Cyprus for permission to enter Syria to make a full investigation.

In the meantime her comments are likely to make Western governments even more cautious in their preliminary assessments.

Quote: There is no mystery anymore. Israel has been a major player in the Syrian conflict. The Syrian conflict has been an open arena for all the enemies of Syria dubbed for historical irony as "friends of Syria" to help themselves to the destruction of Syria the country and not the regime. In fact, all the enemies of Syria would have preferred a deal that would keep the regime intact in order to reassure Israel.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey were the visible players in Syria, but US and Israel were not far behind (or ahead). After all, the Western media are quite explicit that Qatar and Saudi Arabia would not act without the consent and orders from the White House. This is the second major bombing by Israel in Syria, but Israel has been most likely as it was in Iraq complicit in the assassinations of Syrian scientists and its opponents. There has never been a civil war or an internal conflict in the Arab world in which Israel has not played a major role. Some American media noted the presence of Mossad agents in Syria; Free Syrian Army gangs have been working with them.

The US and Israel have decided that the war criminal gangs of the FSA are the chosen militias that can receive US (and presumably Israeli) military aid. Those are very much like the warlords of Afghanistan: criminals who are willing to chant the right slogans and to issue the right press releases in return for large sums of cash and Western assistance.

Watching Saudi and Qatari media today was a return to the past: the spokespeople (let us call them spokesmen as they all are men in this pitiful "revolution" that was ostensibly led by secular and feminist women, according to the early pre-prepared narrative in the Western media and college campus presentations) of the Syrian exile opposition were actually gleeful that their country is being bombed by Israel. They used the same language that Bashir Gemayyel used to justify his relationship with Israel during the long years of the Lebanese civil war (and prior). They spoke about accepting help from anyone, "even Satan." We know this code language. And some spokesmen of the opposition started to play their assigned role in the Israeli psychological operation by suddenly announcing that "large sections" of the Syrian Army have started to defect basically as soon as the bombing had begun.

This was never a "revolution". I among other leftists in Lebanon signed a petition early on after the events in Deraa in which we denounced the regime and mocked and dismissed its narrative of armed groups roaming the country and shooting at people. I now figure that I was dead wrong: I do believe that armed groups were pre-prepared and armed to strike when orders (from Israel and GCC countries) arrive. They had a mission and it had nothing to do with the cause of liberation of Syria from a tyrannical regime.

The regime is still silent; probably resorting to its dreaded line about determining "the time and place of the battle with Israel." But the battle never comes and responses to Israeli attacks never come either. The Golan is still occupied and the regime (like the opposition) is only willing to use its firepower inside Syria (or inside Lebanon in previous years) but not against Israel. Similarly, the Syrian armed groups have been flirting with Israel for a while now and their game has been exposed today. Their token statement of "neutrality" is belied by the statements of opposition "activists" on various opposition Facebook pages.

The US government and media play their usual roles. Never question what Israel does anywhere in the world. Justifications are provided instantly, and it was not a coincidence that the New York Times had a front page story about poor little Israel and how it has to fend for itself to defend itself from the conflict and turmoil in Syria. Only a week ago, David Ignatius of the Washington Post, having received different propaganda marching orders from the Israeli government, reported that Israel was in fact calm and just enjoying the carnage in Syria.

The conflict in Syria has long been outside of the hands of the Syrian people. It is not that a local-internal conflict became regional and international over a two years period. No, it was regional-international from the start. The US and its clients in the Arab counter-revolution movement were ready to steer Arab uprisings in a direction that pleases US and Israel. The fall of Mubarak required the fall of the Assad regime although the US and Israel are discovering that they can continue to do business with the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is not to say that the Syrian people don't have more than a hundred reasons to overthrow the Syrian regime. They do, but this was not about the underlying causes of revolt in Syria. The Qatari, Saudi, Turkish, Israeli, and US beef with the Syrian regime was never about democracy. The Syrian regime had brutally repressed revolts and uprisings before and there were no criticisms heard and the Saudi government (and later the Qatari) was willing to bankroll the Assad dynasty provided that the two work together in Lebanon and in the region.

It is not that the there is no Syrian revolution (and there is not), but the outcome of the conflict in Syria is now certainly not going to be democratic. You can make that prediction on the basis of the sponsors of the "revolutionaries" and the ideology (and practices) of the active armed groups in Syria. But the Syrian armed groups are being fooled by US and Israel into thinking that the Syrian throne is now within their reach, while the two sides hope for a longer protracted conflict that would exhaust and fatigue the entire Syrian nation and would distract them from considering harming Israeli interests.

The Syrian regime has shown in the past that it was willing to do business under the table with Israel. The Syrian National Coalition and all the active armed groups in Syria have proven that they are willing to align with Israel before they reach power and to do business over the table. That can only bode ill for the future of Syria.

Quote:'Israel may be behind Syrian chemical weapons use'

By JPOST.COM STAFF
05/04/2013 23:30

Former Bush administration official says Syrian chemical weapons use might've been "false flag operation" of Israel.

Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. Photo: Screenshot
A former senior official in the Bush administration said on Thursday the use of chemical weapons in Syria might have been a "false flag operation" of Israel, meant to implicate Syrian President Bashar Assad.
"We don't know what the chain of custody is. This could've been an Israeli false flag operation, it could've been an opposition in Syria... or it could've been an actual use by Bashar Assad. But we certainly don't know with the evidence we've been given. And what I'm hearing from the intelligence community is that that evidence is really flakey," retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, told Cenk Uygur in an interview with Current TV.

Given this "flimsy evidence," Wilkerson doesn't believe a red line has been crossed in Syria, and that the US should not base its intervention in the war-torn country based on such evidence.
Wilkerson criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu harshly, saying there is a "geostratigically, geopolitical inept regime in Tel Aviv right now."


"We saw really startling evidence of that in the fact that [US] President [Barack] Obama had to tell Bibi Netanyahu, 'pick up the phone, you idiot, and call Ankara and get yourself out of this strategic isolation you're in right now, do a reconciliation with Turkey, the most powerful country in the region,' otherwise Bibi probably wouldn't have done it," he said.
He also said the prime minister was "clueless" as to the grave security situation Israel is in.

America is Losing its Covert Syria War: US Sponsored Al Nusra Rebels Defeated by Syrian Armed Forces

Quote:Syria mutilation footage sparks doubts over wisdom of backing rebels

Anti-Assad fighter appears to eat internal organ of dead government soldier in horrific footage

Ian Black and Martin Chulov
The Guardian, Tuesday 14 May 2013 18.42 BST
Jump to comments (255)

Free Syrian Army fighters walk on rubble of damaged buildings in Juret al-Shayah in Homs
Free Syrian Army fighters in Homs, cradle of the Farouq Brigades. Photograph: Yazan Homsy/Reuters

Horrific video footage of a Syrian rebel commander eating the heart or lung of a dead government fighter has aroused furious international controversy, fuelling an already heated debate over western support for the armed uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The grisly film had been circulating for several days, attracting extensive comment on social media networks such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. But in the face of an often vicious propaganda war between the government and rebels, early doubts about the film's authenticity faded when the perpetrator, named as Khaled al-Hamad, admitted that he had mutilated the corpse of an unnamed soldier as an act of revenge.

"We opened his cell phone and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he [the dead soldier] was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there," Hamad told the Time news website.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), an independent monitor, said: "The figure in the video cuts the heart and liver out of the body and uses sectarian language to insult Alawites [Assad's minority sect]. At the end of the video [the man] is filmed putting the corpse's heart into his mouth, as if he is taking a bite out of it."

Hamad, also known as Abu Sakkar, said he also had video footage of himself using a saw to cut a Shabiha government militiaman into "small and large pieces".

Yasser Taha, a fellow fighter, told the Guardian an unnamed female relative of Abu Sakkar had been raped and killed by government soldiers. Time said he had in fact eaten the dead man's lung, not his liver or heart.

The Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC), the main western and Arab-backed anti-Assad political grouping, quickly condemned the incident as a crime and pledged to bring the perpetrator to justice.

Atrocities have been reported since the start of the Syrian conflict in March 2011, but few images have been as repulsive as this one. Film of prisoners apparently being buried alive turned out to have been faked, but other shocking footage proved genuine.

"It is not enough for Syria's opposition to condemn such behaviour or blame it on violence by the government," said Nadim Houry of HRW. "The opposition forces need to act firmly to stop such abuses."

The SOC said: "Such an act contradicts the morals of the Syrian people as well as the values and principles of the Free Syrian Army. The FSA has been [fighting] and continues to fight for the dignity of every Syrian striving for freedom.

"The FSA is a national army above all, formed to defend civilians and deliver the Syrian people from the mentality of revenge and crime. It completely rejects the ill-treatment of the wounded and the disfigurement of the dead."

The video is a blow to faltering western efforts to raise and mentor a credible opposition force to fight for democracy, in the event that the Assad regime falls.

International revulsion seems likely to affect discussions in western capitals about supporting the FSA. Britain and France have been seeking to amend or drop the EU arms embargo on Syria. The Obama administration has signalled that it may start openly supplying the rebels but has not done so yet. The CIA has reportedly been co-ordinating arms deliveries by anti-Assad Gulf states.

Opposition supporters complained that one savage act was getting massive global media coverage while the death of an estimated 80,000 people was being tolerated by the international community.

"This distressing incident is one example of warfare gone completely askew, but it clearly doesn't represent the Syrian opposition at large," said Julien Barnes-Dacey of the European Council for Foreign Relations in London. "It doesn't compare in scale with massacres and atrocities committed by the Syrian regime. But it does play into fears about where the conflict is going and whether arming the rebels is the right approach."

Sakkar was a well-known member of the Farouq Brigades, a unit that rose from the ruins of the Baba Amr suburb of Homs and became one of the rebels' best resourced fighting forces.

During the first 18 months of the war, the Farouq Brigades were seen as a cohesive militia with mainstream leanings, which could credibly fight under the banner of the FSA. Then and now, the FSA has struggled to assemble a command-and-control structure to control the large numbers of rebel-aligned groups, which mostly answer to local leaders.

"It highlights the fact that we are not talking about a centrally controlled and well-organised rebel force," Barnes-Dacey said. "These are rebels fighting in distinct areas according to their own needs and ambitions. Some are driven by a thirst for revenge, criminalisation, sectarianism … These are the array of forces that have been unleashed in Syria today."

Farouq became established in Idlib, where it was backed by Qatar and at times Saudi Arabia. Late last year, Sakkar formed a splinter group, which he called the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade.

For the last six months this small unit has joined the fray in Qusayr, which borders Lebanon and is seen as a strategic crossroads by regime and rebels.

Sakkar's sectarian rhetoric has hardened considerably lately, and he has often been recorded denouncing Alawites and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia that is heavily involved in battles near Homs.

Hamad told Time that Syria's revolution started peacefully. "They [the Alawites] were the ones who killed our children in Baba Amr and raped our women," he said. Then, referring to the recent massacre of Sunni villagers in Bayda, near Baniyas attributed by rebels to the regime he added: "They were the ones who slaughtered the children and women in Bayda. We didn't start it; they started it."

Swearing to avenge every death, he said: "Our slogan is, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

Additional reporting by Mona Mahmood