+- Deep Politics Forum (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora)
+-- Forum: Deep Politics Forum (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/forum-1.html)
+--- Forum: Geopolitical Hotspots (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/forum-20.html)
+--- Thread: A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria (/thread-6670.html)
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - David Guyatt - 09-10-2013
Quote:The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks towards Damascus and facing them the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Moskva and supported by Chinese warships. Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to reach their destination.I saw a similar report too Keith, but I have to say I'm still bemused by the whole thing.
It was claimed by a Lebanese newspaper quoting diplomatic sources that the missiles were launched from a NATO air base in Spain and they were shot down by the Russian ship-based sea-to-air defence system. Another explanation proposed by the Asia Times says the Russians employed their cheap and powerful GPS jammers to render the expensive Tomahawks helpless, by disorienting them and causing them to fail. Yet another version attributed the launch to the Israelis, whether they were trying to jump-start the shoot-out or just observed the clouds, as they claim.
It would be fascinating and intriguing and a complete game-changer if this report were true. But I can't help but wonder if it is?
I knew there were Russian warships present - which included four landing ships, one destroyer, one frigate - and these were later added to by the Moskva, a cruiser, an additional frigate and landing ship. Not exactly battle force projection, in my totally inexpert opinion. And Putin apparently stated that the vessels were there to protect Russian "national security interests" and not as a threat to "other nations" (whatever that may mean?).
What about the Chinese ships though? Well, actually "ship" not ships. It's an amphibious dock landing ship (see HERE ).
Whereas the US 6th Fleet is a really powerful force, with one or more aircraft carriers, each one accompanied by six cruisers an destroyers, plus a sub Task Force and upto 175 aircraft. Not to mention cruise missiles. If the US were committed to attacking Syria, I doubt that these Russian and Chinese vessels would ever care to stop them. But I might easily be wrong, of course. THESE are the US and NATO vessels present in the area.
For the time being I'm holding my water about this, as it strikes me another game is going on in town. One we know nothing about yet. Just a guess though.
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - Peter Lemkin - 09-10-2013
David Guyatt Wrote:Quote:The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks towards Damascus and facing them the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Moskva and supported by Chinese warships. Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to reach their destination.I saw a similar report too Keith, but I have to say I'm still bemused by the whole thing.
It was claimed by a Lebanese newspaper quoting diplomatic sources that the missiles were launched from a NATO air base in Spain and they were shot down by the Russian ship-based sea-to-air defence system. Another explanation proposed by the Asia Times says the Russians employed their cheap and powerful GPS jammers to render the expensive Tomahawks helpless, by disorienting them and causing them to fail. Yet another version attributed the launch to the Israelis, whether they were trying to jump-start the shoot-out or just observed the clouds, as they claim.
It would be fascinating and intriguing and a complete game-changer if this report were true. But I can't help but wonder if it is?
I knew there were Russian warships present - which included four landing ships, one destroyer, one frigate - and these were later added to by the Moskva, a cruiser, an additional frigate and landing ship. Not exactly battle force projection, in my totally inexpert opinion. And Putin apparently stated that the vessels were there to protect Russian "national security interests" and not as a threat to "other nations" (whatever that may mean?).
What about the Chinese ships though? Well, actually "ship" not ships. It's an amphibious dock landing ship (see HERE ).
Whereas the US 6th Fleet is a really powerful force, with one or more aircraft carriers, each one accompanied by six cruisers an destroyers, plus a sub Task Force and upto 175 aircraft. Not to mention cruise missiles. If the US were committed to attacking Syria, I doubt that these Russian and Chinese vessels would ever care to stop them. But I might easily be wrong, of course. THESE are the US and NATO vessels present in the area.
For the time being I'm holding my water about this, as it strikes me another game is going on in town. One we know nothing about yet. Just a guess though.
While we don't know the true events that played out there/then....keep in mind that it can't be evaluated on a normal military chessboard or desktop battlefield...it is likely easier for the Russians to make some American missiles fail than for the US to then strike at the Russian ships [no matter how few or small]...for Russia still maintains a huge nuclear [and other] threat[s], and could revenge such an attack, if a ship were sunk or sailors harmed. Ditto the Chinese. While unlikely, I wouldn't want to place odds on the USA coming out the winner of such an event...there may well be NO winners! [you can't scrape off the burn of the 'toast' after a nuclear exchange - no matter how limited]
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - David Guyatt - 10-10-2013
Aha! Maybe this is the answer, a solution Obama wished for?
From Voltaire.net
Quote:Although the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, loudly praised himself for the vote on Resolution 2118 concerning chemical weapons in Syria, this text marks both the victory of Russia and that of President Bashar al -Assad. The vote carries within itself two consequences that permanently ruin the Franco-British claims on the country.The consequences of Resolution 2118
by Thierry Meyssan
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 7 OCTOBER 2013FRANÇAIS DEUTSCH PORTUGUÊS ESPAÑOL ITALIANO РУССКИЙ عربي
CSTO troops stand ready to deploy in Syria if the Security Council so requests.Once past the amazement of the U.S. spinout in Syria, a new political situation is emerging corresponding point by point to plans developed jointly by Russia and Syria in June 2012, that is to say, before the Geneva 1 Conference. At the time, the Kremlin looked forward to negotiating an agreement with Washington to both solve the Syrian crisis and allow Obama to get out of his stifling huddle with Israel. But the plan, which would have become a project of shared governance in the Middle East, assumed the presence of Russian troops in Syria. General Hassan Tourekmani had proposed at the time that troops interpositioned and mandated by the United Nations be deployed by the Collective Security Treaty Organization ("Russian NATO"), since there already was a United Nations Force on Syrian soil charged with observing disengagement in the Golan.The idea of ​​this deployment has made headway. The CSTO signed a Protocol with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in September of 2012, which allows it, as with NATO, to subcontract actions of the Security Council. Over the past year, the CSTO prepared 50,000 men who can be projected in less than two weeks. But Moscow was afraid of falling into a trap: it was in order to destroy the Red Army that the CIA created, in 1979, with Saudi Arabia, the international jihadist movement today called Al- Qaeda. Would Syria be the new Afghanistan of the Russian army?Given U.S. hesitation, the project was stalled, but not abandoned. However, the solution to the chemical weapons crisis opens new possibilities.First, Resolution 2118 does not just support the Russian plan to destroy the remains of the Syrian chemical program of the 80's, it implicitly requires the maintenance of President Bashar al -Assad in power for at least one year so that he can supervise this destruction. So, not only do the major Western powers no longer demand his departure, but they now favour an extension of his mandate and a postponement of the upcoming presidential election.
The meeting of heads of state of the CSTO was preceded by a meeting of foreign ministers. Russian Sergey Lavrov explained the international situation regarding Syria. He stressed that if the jihadists present there were not neutralized on site, they would soon be transferred to other countries, notably in Central Asia.Second, Syria's transmission of the list of its chemical weapons stockpiles to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) makes them vulnerable, since this list is sure to reach "the opposition army." Despite its efforts, the Syrian Arab Army cannot simultaneously fight international jihadists across the territory and defend its arsenals. Anticipating this situation, the heads of state of the CSTO, gathered around Vladimir Putin in Sochi on September 23 (that is to say, four days before the vote on Resolution 2118 in the Security Council), gave the order to be ready to secure the destruction of chemical weapons, should the Security Council so request. Armenian, Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Russian and Tajikistan troops would not be deployed to intervene between the two camps as envisaged a year and a half ago, but to defend the arsenals of the state. Their task would be much simpler and more effective.In this perspective, the 2500 men of the CSTO who must participate in maneuvers in Kazakhstan from October 7 to 11, will perform a simulation.
![[Image: zoom-32.png]](http://www.voltairenet.org/squelettes/elements/images/zoom-32.png)
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - Magda Hassan - 11-10-2013
[TABLE="width: 95%"]
[TR]
[TD]BBC Complaints
PO Box 1922
Darlington
DL3 0UR4 October 2013To Whom It May Concern
I wish to complain that the report purporting to show the aftermath of an alleged incendiary bomb attack in Aleppo, transmitted by the BBC on 29 August and published on the BBC news website here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-23892594 contains a large degree of fabrication.
I understand that the first thirty seconds of the report were filmed by an unnamed non-BBC party, and so presume that, as Panorama reporter Ian Pannell is visible between 1:44 and 1:46 (walking, at the left of the picture) and again at 2:18 beside Dr Rola, that the remainder of the report, from 0:30 onwards, was filmed by BBC cameraman Darren Conway. Please correct me if I am wrong and if any part of the footage beyond 0:30 was filmed by other BBC employees or non-BBC third parties.
The piece begins with Ian Pannell's narration over a short piece of the non-BBC footage stating "an old blanket to cover a corpse". However what is shown from 00:16 to 00:23 is a blanket being draped over a ledge.
At 2:08 in the report a man with a naked back and tattered blue shirt on his left shoulder is seen climbing down from a truck, as the voice of the British doctor (Dr Rola) is heard asking "more coming? More? More?". The suggestion is that these are fresh casualties arriving at the "basic hospital"; however the same man with the tattered blue shirt had already been shown walking into the hospital, from 1:44 onwards. It is clear that the footage has been edited and the words of Dr Rola crafted to create the impression of a larger number of alleged victims than were in fact present.
The supposed eyewitness Mohammed Abdullatif, who speaks from 2:55, is plainly reading out a letter, drafted by a person or persons unknown, from a cue card; he commences with the words "Dear United Nations" and proceeds to stumble over unfamiliar text ("…you're recalling peace you're calling for peace"). The obvious conclusion is that the spontaneity and passion are artificial.
In the section commencing immediately after Mr Abdullatif's recitation, at 3:02, a number of alleged victims are shown, including the man seen twice earlier in the tattered blue shirt. This group is initially fairly static and quiet; then at 3.03 the man in the tattered blue shirt looks into the camera, and at 3.04, as he raises his left arm, the entire group suddenly begins to writhe and moan in unison. The adolescent in the white shirt, second from the right in the shot, rises to the floor with perfect ease and equanimity, and is clearly not in the least distress. The seemingly prostrate young man in red, third from the right, had previously had no difficulty climbing down from the back of the truck at 2:08. Viewed several times over, this obviously stage-managed sequence quickly becomes risible, and because the white cream on the skin of the alleged victims seen here is of a piece with that seen on other alleged victims throughout the report, the inescapable conclusion is that all of them are equally fake.
The text under the BBC online piece talks of "napalm-like burns"; Ian Pannell states "the injuries and debris suggests something like napalm or thermite" (1:52) and Dr Rola suggests (2:30) that the supposed injuries are the result of "maybe napalm, something similar to that".
These statements betray at best a basic lack of journalistic acumen, and, in the case of Dr Rola, medical knowledge. The most cursory web research reveals the vast difference in severity between burns caused by napalm which sticks to the skin and generates temperatures of 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius and the supposed injuries of the alleged victims in the Panorama footage.
Kim Phuc, a napalm bombing survivor known from a famous Vietnam War photograph has said "Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm#Effects_on_people. It is entirely implausible to suggest that the relatively composed woman featured from 2:38 to 2:44, the shaking child Ahmed featured from 2:45 to 2:54 (who appears to nod as if in communication to someone off-screen at 2:46 before turning to speak to the camera), and the adolescent featured from 3:20 to 3:27 who repeats, rather than "gasps" as your reporter would have it, the word for "water" are suffering "the most terrible pain you can imagine". Footage of genuine napalm victims would likely be far too horrific and distressing to broadcast and to describe the alleged injuries depicted in these scenes as "napalm-like" is an insult to those who have suffered the reality.
Other aspects of this story are extremely dubious.
Wikipedia states that "One firebomb released from a low-flying plane can damage an area of 2,500 square yards" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm#Effects_on_people. In the footage of the Panorama crew's visit to the site of the alleged incendiary bomb attack, commencing at around 00:30, a modestly sized crater surrounded by some charring to the immediate vicinity only is visible. The infant's swing seen from 1:00 onwards, just yards away from the alleged impact crater, would surely have been incinerated in a firebombing attack, suggesting that it may have been placed at the scene after the event as "window dressing".
The ages of many of the alleged victims in the footage seems at odds with the description of the site of the attack as a "playground". The man in the tattered blue shirt featured heavily in the footage, the man on the stretcher from 2:00, the woman being carried on a stretcher at 2:27 and the woman featured from 2:38 are all adults. Nowhere in the report are any victims that would seem to fit the age range suggested by the infant's swing and the small girl's shoe shown seen at 1:11.
The Panorama team might also have speculated as to what kind of a "playground" possesses a swimming pool, visible from 0:33 onwards. "Courtyard" would perhaps be a more accurate and less emotive term to describe the scene of the incident.
The background and affiliations of the charity Hand in Hand for Syria and of Dr Rola are also worthy of scrutiny.
I can fully understand that a medic working in a violent and politically fraught situation may wish to conceal her identity altogether, however as Dr Rola is willing to appear on camera it seems oddly reticent for her to conceal her last name. Moreover, Dr Rola appeared on Newsnight on 30 August http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23909554, as well as on other BBC output, expressing her disappointment at the UK parliament's decision to reject possible military action against the Syrian government.
In addition to the very startling scenario of a medical doctor implicitly calling for military strikes which would inevitably lead to deaths and injuries, as this website puts ithttp://wikispooks.com/wiki/Dr_Rola "You do not volunteer to appear on the flag-ship BBC Politics TV program advocating for a military bombing campaign with any realistic expectation let alone right to remain anonymous".
I do not accept all the assertions and suggestions of the Wikispooks page, for instance, while it seems clear that Dr Rola uses more than one surname ("Hallem" here http://atfal.co.uk/the-team.html and "Alkurdi" here http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anaesthesia/people/Alkurdi) I do not agree that the Dr Rola who appeared on Newsnight on 30 August is not the same woman who appears in the Panorama footage I am complaining about. I have also been unable to verify the site's claims that the incident took place during Syrian school holidays, when there is no clear reason why children would be in a school playground, or that the Arabic language website that is linked to hosts a comment from a contributor, said to be from the vicinity of the attack, stating that the building in the report is in fact "a fairly standard construction villa with a swimming pool on the other side of the buttressed wall".
However the site does make the indisputable point that the Hand in Hand for Syria logohttp://www.handinhandforsyria.org.uk/index.php is clearly based on the flag of the Syrian opposition, specifically the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Armyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_opposition. It is entirely negligent of the BBC to fail to inform its viewers of the crucial fact of this affiliation.
In short, I am shocked and astonished that the BBC should present as genuine such self-evidently falsified and stage-managed scenes, which would appear to have almost certainly been manufactured by parties with an interest in seeing western intervention in Syria on the side of opposition forces.
I trust you will seek a full explanation from Ian Pannell, Darren Conway and the Panorama editorial department as to how this patently fraudulent footage came to be presented as authentic.
I await your response to all the points I have raised above, which I shall be sharing widely, with great interest.
Yours sincerely
Robert
PS I have just seen the follow up piece by Ian Pannell "Syria: Agony of victims of napalm-like' school bombing" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24288698.
Some further points arise which I would ask you to please clarify:
The words spoken by Dr Rola have been altered between the two reports.
In the original item http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-23892594 (from 2:18 to 2:32) Dr Rola's words are:
"..It's just absolute chaos and carnage here, erm we've had a massive influx of what looks like serious burns, er seems like it must be some sort of, I'm not really sure, maybe napalm, something similar to that.."
In the newer item, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24288698 (from 2:00 to 2:13) these have been changed to:
"..It's just absolute chaos and carnage here, erm we've had a massive influx of what looks like serious burns, er seems like it must be some sort of chemical weapon, I'm not really sure.."
The audio in both of these segments is identical, with all the same inflections, up to the point "…must be some sort of.." after which the soundtrack in one or the other has been overdubbed. Please can you provide the name of the individual who carried this out, when it was done and to what purpose?
The two segments are shot from slightly different angles, and it is not immediately clear to me whether it is the same scene filmed from two different angles or whether they are two different "takes" filmed moments apart. If the former is the case, please can you provide the names of both camera people involved, and say whether they are both BBC employees; if the latter, please can you explain why a large part of the audio from one has been dubbed onto the other, and in at least one case subsequently interfered with?
Ahmed Darwish (previously reported as being 15 years old, now 13, an understandable error), seems to have developed burns to his upper and lower lips (2:46) which were not in evidence in the original footage.
The plea of the young girl Siham, featured in the text of the piece ("Please let it be over now", she said. "We need to find a way out. We've had all we can take.") seems remarkably politicised and reflective for someone of her age, alleged to be "suffering with 70% burns".
Dr Saleyha Ahsan, featured from 2:15 to 2:24, is a filmmaker with a military background:
http://oneworldaction.wordpress.com/100-unseen-powerful-women/arts-and-media/saleyha-ahsan/
http://knightayton.co.uk/female-presenters/saleyha-ahsan
Please can you confirm whether Dr Ahsan had any involvement in the making or editing of any of the footage in the two reports?
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE]
[TR]
[TD]Responses
- Re: Complaint to BBC re: Panorama Aleppo "school playground" "incendiary bomb"/ "napalm" reports- marknadim Today, 6:06 pm
- Re: Complaint to BBC re: Panorama Aleppo "school playground" "incendiary bomb"/ "napalm" reports- Robert Today, 7:11 pm
- Re: Complaint to BBC re: Panorama Aleppo �school playground� �incendiary bomb�/ �napalm� reports- spike Today, 8:19 pm
- Re: Complaint to BBC re: Panorama Aleppo �school playground� �incendiary bomb�/ �napalm� reports- Robert Today, 8:40 pm
- Re: Complaint to BBC re: Panorama Aleppo "school playground" "incendiary bomb"/ "napalm" reports- walter Today, 9:42 pm
- Re: Complaint to BBC re: Panorama Aleppo �school playground� �incendiary bomb�/ �napalm� reports- spike Today, 8:19 pm
- Re: Complaint to BBC re: Panorama Aleppo "school playground" "incendiary bomb"/ "napalm" reports- Robert Today, 7:11 pm
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
http://www.globalresearch.ca/bbc-media-fabrications-on-alleged-incendiary-bomb-attack-in-aleppo-syria/5353099
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - Magda Hassan - 12-10-2013
Not just the BBC
Quote:https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/10/11-1Big Media Mum on Syria Pundits' Ties to Defense Industry
Report finds prominent corporate media pundits and highly-cited think tanks had largely undisclosed intelligence and arms industry links
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Media pundit and Raytheon board member Stephen Hadley, pictured in this September 5 appearance on CNN, is just one of many 'experts' whose defense industry ties went largely undisclosed (Photo: Screen Shot / CNN)Media discourse in the buildup to potential U.S.-led attacks on Syria was monopolized by experts and think tanks with links to arms and intelligence industries. Despite this conflict of interest, these financial relationships were not disclosed in a vast majority of media appearances, the non-profit research organization Public Accountability Initiative revealed in a report released Friday.
Twenty-two commentators presented as experts during the so-called corporate media debate about military attacks on Syria have ties to "large defense and intelligence contractors like Raytheon, smaller defense and intelligence contractors like TASC, defense-focused investment firms like SCP Partners, and commercial diplomacy firms like the Cohen Group," the report finds. Of 111 appearances in major media outlets, the ties of these 22 commentators were disclosed a total of 13 times. A majority of these commentators voiced support for a U.S.-led attack on Syria.
Stephen Hadley is just one of the analysts profiled by the study. "[H]e has voiced strong support for a strike on Syria in appearances on Bloomberg TV, Fox News, and CNN, as well as in a Washington Post op-ed," the study reads. "Though he has a financial stake in a Syria strike as a current Raytheon board member, and is also a principal at consulting firm RiceHadleyGates, he was identified all four times only as a former National Security Adviser to George W. Bush."
Ali Issa, organizer with the War Resisters League, told Common Dreams these revelations are disturbing but not shocking. "That the Washington Post gave room to Raytheon's director is not surprising," he said. "Otherwise, how could the U.S. maintain its deeply unpopular policy of spending $1.3 trillion on military-related spending this year alone?"
In addition to these commentators, seven think tanks with industry ties were "cited 144 times in major US publications from August 7th, 2013 to September 6th, 2013," the report finds. The Brookings Institution, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and The Institute for the Study of War were the most frequently referenced of the think tanks profiled.
Report authors say the failures cited are not unique to this year's Syria debate. During the Bush administration era, defense industry-tied expertswhose conflicts of interests were often not disclosed by the mediabuilt support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, they note. The report authors charge, "[T]he media continues to present former military and government officials as venerated experts without informing the public of their industry ties."
Issa told Common Dreams, "What we see in the Syria debate case is the powerful media and public-relations arm of the military-industrial complex."
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - David Guyatt - 13-10-2013
Magda Hassan Wrote:Not just the BBC
Quote: Big Media Mum on Syria Pundits' Ties to Defense Industryhttps://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/10/11-1
Report finds prominent corporate media pundits and highly-cited think tanks had largely undisclosed intelligence and arms industry links
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Twenty-two commentators presented as experts during the so-called corporate media debate about military attacks on Syria have ties to "large defense and intelligence contractors like Raytheon, smaller defense and intelligence contractors like TASC, defense-focused investment firms like SCP Partners, and commercial diplomacy firms like the Cohen Group," the report finds. Of 111 appearances in major media outlets, the ties of these 22 commentators were disclosed a total of 13 times. A majority of these commentators voiced support for a U.S.-led attack on Syria.
Stephen Hadley is just one of the analysts profiled by the study. "[H]e has voiced strong support for a strike on Syria in appearances on Bloomberg TV, Fox News, and CNN, as well as in a Washington Post op-ed," the study reads. "Though he has a financial stake in a Syria strike as a current Raytheon board member, and is also a principal at consulting firm RiceHadleyGates, he was identified all four times only as a former National Security Adviser to George W. Bush."
Ali Issa, organizer with the War Resisters League, told Common Dreams these revelations are disturbing but not shocking. "That the Washington Post gave room to Raytheon's director is not surprising," he said. "Otherwise, how could the U.S. maintain its deeply unpopular policy of spending $1.3 trillion on military-related spending this year alone?"
In addition to these commentators, seven think tanks with industry ties were "cited 144 times in major US publications from August 7th, 2013 to September 6th, 2013," the report finds. The Brookings Institution, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and The Institute for the Study of War were the most frequently referenced of the think tanks profiled.
Report authors say the failures cited are not unique to this year's Syria debate. During the Bush administration era, defense industry-tied expertswhose conflicts of interests were often not disclosed by the mediabuilt support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, they note. The report authors charge, "[T]he media continues to present former military and government officials as venerated experts without informing the public of their industry ties."
Issa told Common Dreams, "What we see in the Syria debate case is the powerful media and public-relations arm of the military-industrial complex."
Ah, the vast stench of profit in spreading human misery.
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - Magda Hassan - 16-10-2013
Clearest Indication Yet That Some Chemical Weapon Sites in Syria Are Under Rebel Control
Posted on October 15, 2013 by Jim WhiteOne of the underlying assumptions for folks who joined the rush to claim that the UN report on the August 21 chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus proved the attack was carried out by Syrian government forces was that only government forces had access to the refined versions of chemical weapons that the Assad regime had amassed. That aspect of the story began to crumble quickly once the accidental diplomacy kicked in and it became clear that chemical weapons inspectors would need cooperation from both the Syrian government and rebel forces to gain access to all sites where chemical weapons are present.Today's New York Times presents the clearest indication yet that it isn't just access routes to chemical weapons sites that the rebels control, but that the rebels control some of the sites themselves:
A Western diplomat in the Arab world said that though the Syrian government was legally responsible for dismantling its chemical weapons under an international agreement, its opponents should also cooperate in the process, because several chemical weapons sites were close to confrontation lines or within rebel-held territory.
Somehow, though, the Times only discusses this very important piece of information in light of the need for rebels to grant access to the sites to the OPCW without noting that the rebels had direct access to chemical weapons (or their immediate precursors) previously belonging to the Syrian government. This admission by a "Western diplomat" completely invalidates the assumption that rebels had access only to crude, "home-made" versions of chemical weapons.Today's news fully underscores the need for a true ceasefire (as I have been shrilly pointing out for some time now):
"The international community also expects full cooperation from the opposition," the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a delicate issue. "However divided the opposition might be, it would look very bad if the government was seen to be cooperating fully, while inspections were held up because of problems with the opposition."
The inspection team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the watchdog group in charge of implementing the agreement along with the United Nations, has not publicly cited any specific instance of opposition fighters' impeding access to chemical weapons sites. As with agencies that deliver relief aid, the inspectors face a complicated and uncertain process that requires cease-fires with multiple parties among fluid lines of combat.
Clearly, a general ceasefire by all parties would be much better than the current, piecemeal arrangement where it appears that localized agreements are put into place for individual excursions by the inspectors.The inspection team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the watchdog group in charge of implementing the agreement along with the United Nations, has not publicly cited any specific instance of opposition fighters' impeding access to chemical weapons sites. As with agencies that deliver relief aid, the inspectors face a complicated and uncertain process that requires cease-fires with multiple parties among fluid lines of combat.
Finally, it should also be noted that however the Obama administration got to the diplomatic route involving the OPCW, we got new details over the weekend on how the Bush administration orchestrated the removal of the previous head of OPCW because he wanted to send inspectors into Iraq in 2001-2002 to verify that Iraqi chemical weapons had been destroyed in the 1990′s:
More than a decade before the international agency that monitors chemical weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize, John R. Bolton marched into the office of its boss to inform him that he would be fired.
"He told me I had 24 hours to resign," said José Bustani, who was director general of the agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. "And if I didn't I would have to face the consequences."
/snip/
But Mr. Bustani and some senior officials, both in Brazil and the United States, say Washington acted because it believed that the organization under Mr. Bustani threatened to become an obstacle to the administration's plans to invade Iraq. As justification, Washington was claiming that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, possessed chemical weapons, but Mr. Bustani said his own experts had told him that those weapons were destroyed in the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf war.
"Everybody knew there weren't any," he said. "An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade."
What a different place the world would be today if Bolton and his neocon buddies hadn't held such sway during the George W. Bush presidency."He told me I had 24 hours to resign," said José Bustani, who was director general of the agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. "And if I didn't I would have to face the consequences."
/snip/
But Mr. Bustani and some senior officials, both in Brazil and the United States, say Washington acted because it believed that the organization under Mr. Bustani threatened to become an obstacle to the administration's plans to invade Iraq. As justification, Washington was claiming that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, possessed chemical weapons, but Mr. Bustani said his own experts had told him that those weapons were destroyed in the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf war.
"Everybody knew there weren't any," he said. "An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade."
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/10/15/clearest-indication-yet-that-some-chemical-weapon-sites-in-syria-are-under-rebel-control/
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - David Guyatt - 23-10-2013
The implication, if I reading it right, is that Saudi's involvement in Syrian affairs hitherto was with Washington's knowledge, approval and urging - why else complain now?
Quote:Kerry holds urgent talks as US-Saudi rift deepens over Middle East policy
Secretary of state on charm offensive amid criticism from Riyadh that the US is not providing sufficient help to Syrian rebels
Follow Dan Roberts by email[SUP]BETA[/SUP]
- Dan Roberts in Washington
- theguardian.com, Tuesday 22 October 2013 22.57 BS
John Kerry admitted: 'We know the Saudis were obviously disappointed that the [Syria] strike didn't take place.' Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Getty Images
A deepening diplomatic rift between Saudi Arabia and the US burst open on Tuesday after secretary of state John Kerry acknowledged that Washington's key strategic ally had serious misgivings about US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Kerry held urgent talks with his Saudi counterpart in Paris on Monday amid complaints from Riyadh that the US was not doing enough to help Sunni-dominated rebels in Syria following a decision not launch US military action.
"We know that the Saudis were obviously disappointed that the [Syria] strike didn't take place," Kerry told reporters in London on Tuesday.
"It is our obligation to work closely with them as I am doing," he added, referring to multiple meetings he had on Monday with Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. "The president asked me to come and have the conversations that we have had."
Kerry insisted relations remained fundamentally sound, but news of the meetings appears to confirm reports in the Wall Street Journal that the Saudis had threatened to scale back their regional co-operation with the US in protest at what it saw as a misguided Middle East strategy.
The Journal said Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who is leading the kingdom's efforts to support rebels fighting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, had invited diplomats to Jeddah over the weekend to voice Riyadh's frustration with the Obama administrationand its regional policies.
Reuters also quoted Prince Bandar telling European diplomats that the kingdom would be making a "major shift" in relations with Washington over perceived inaction towards the conflict in Syria, and a possible rapprochement with Iran over its nuclear program.
Saudi Arabia is understood to be upset at perceived US weakness over Iran and wants more aggressive steps taken to prevent Tehran's development of nuclear weapons technology and Egypt, where the US has severed military ties with the new government in protest at crackdowns on demonstrators.
Speaking to reporters at the State Department daily briefing, US spokeswoman Marie Harf admitted all three issues were causing tension but also insisted "the fundamental relationship with the Saudis is a strong one".
"We we working together on some challenging issue,s and we share the same goals, whether it's ending the civil war on Syria, getting back to a democratic government in Egypt, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons," said Harf.
"The question of how you get there all on these issues is what we're working through right now with the Saudis and other international partners."
Harf said that a two-hour lunch between Kerry and the Saudi foreign minister remained "productive and enjoyable".
"They have a warm friendship, and even during moments of disagreement have always found ways to have an honest and open discussion," added Harf.
"Obviously we talked about some of the challenging issues that we want to confront together. We share the same goals whether it's Syria, Egypt or Iran."
These are the latest signs that a US policy of rapprochement with Iran is causing friction with existing allies in the region, following similar concerns expressed by Israel.
Washington is also struggling to maintain good relations with France, Brazil, and Germany over separate arguments about surveillance by the National Security Agency.
But the row with Saudi Arabia threatens to destabilise one of the strongest diplomatic ties in Washington, based historically on mutual oil and security interests. Last week, Riyadh snubbed a US-backed offer to take a seat on the United Nations security council.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said this was "of course its own decision" but added that a seat on the UNSC "affords member states the opportunity to engage directly on issues of great importance, including issues like Syria, Iran, Egypt and the Middle East peace process."
He said the US will continue "close bilateral co-operation with Saudi Arabia on the host of shared challenges we face, including those issues that the security council takes up directly".
"We also have core relationship in national security areas that is very stable and important to US interests as well as Saudi interests," added Carney.
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - Magda Hassan - 09-12-2013
Whose sarin?
Seymour M. Hersh
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded without assessing responsibility had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order a planning document that precedes a ground invasion citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad's government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a red line': Assad's government gassed to death over a thousand people,' he said. We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.' Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.
He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad's culpability: In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad's chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.' Obama's certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: No one with whom I've spoken doubts the intelligence' directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.
But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration's assurances of Assad's responsibility a ruse'. The attack was not the result of the current regime', he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information in terms of its timing and sequence to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, "How can we help this guy" Obama "when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?"'
The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report includes no political or economic information, but provides a summary of important military events around the world, with all available intelligence about them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two days 20 and 21 August there was no mention of Syria. On 22 August the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal change in the command structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day. It was not until 23 August that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the administration knew no more than the public.
Obama left Washington early on 21 August for a hectic two-day speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania; according to the White House press office, he was briefed later that day on the attack, and the growing public and media furore. The lack of any immediate inside intelligence was made clear on 22 August, when Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, told reporters: We are unable to conclusively determine [chemical weapons] use. But we are focused every minute of every day since these events happened … on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.' The administration's tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama's press secretary, told reporters without providing any specific information that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not responsible are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn't occur'.
The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad's office. The document said that the NSA's worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there'. But it was a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad's forces apparently later recognised'. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)
The Post report also provided the first indication of a secret sensor system inside Syria, designed to provide early warning of any change in status of the regime's chemical weapons arsenal. The sensors are monitored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that controls all US intelligence satellites in orbit. According to the Post summary, the NRO is also assigned to extract data from sensors placed on the ground' inside Syria. The former senior intelligence official, who had direct knowledge of the programme, told me that NRO sensors have been implanted near all known chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are designed to provide constant monitoring of the movement of chemical warheads stored by the military. But far more important, in terms of early warning, is the sensors' ability to alert US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for changes in the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American intelligence on early warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin, has a shelf life of a few days or less the nerve agent begins eroding the rocket almost immediately: it's a use-it-or-lose-it mass killer. The Syrian army doesn't have three days to prepare for a chemical attack,' the former senior intelligence official told me. We created the sensor system for immediate reaction, like an air raid warning or a fire alarm. You can't have a warning over three days because everyone involved would be dead. It is either right now or you're history. You do not spend three days getting ready to fire nerve gas.' The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21 August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.
The sensors had worked in the past, as the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system picked up signs of what seemed to be sarin production at a chemical weapons depot. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian army was simulating sarin production as part of an exercise (all militaries constantly carry out such exercises) or actually preparing an attack. At the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that using sarin was totally unacceptable'; a similar message was also passed by diplomatic means. The event was later determined to be part of a series of exercises, according to the former senior intelligence official: If what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and say, "Knock it off," why didn't the president issue the same warning three days before the gas attack in August?'
The NSA would of course monitor Assad's office around the clock if it could, the former official said. Other communications from various army units in combat throughout Syria would be far less important, and not analysed in real time. There are literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,' he said, and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in and the useful return would be zilch.' But the chatter' is routinely stored on computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event the use of sarin and reached to find chatter that might relate,' the former official said. This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.' The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.
*
The White House needed nine days to assemble its case against the Syrian government. On 30 August it invited a select group of Washington journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay, the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited), and handed them a document carefully labelled as a government assessment', rather than as an assessment by the intelligence community. The document laid out what was essentially a political argument to bolster the administration's case against the Assad government. It was, however, more specific than Obama would be later, in his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it stated, knew that Syria had begun preparing chemical munitions' three days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more details. He said that Syria's chemical weapons personnel were on the ground, in the area, making preparations' by 18 August. We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.' The government assessment and Kerry's comments made it seem as if the administration had been tracking the sarin attack as it happened. It is this version of events, untrue but unchallenged, that was widely reported at the time.
An unforseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the Free Syrian Army's leadership and others about the lack of warning. It's unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the crime,' Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail was more blunt: Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people including more than 400 children.' (The number of deaths attributable to the attack varied widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by the Obama administration, to many fewer. A Syrian human rights group reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans Frontières put it at 355; and a French report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In other words, it was little more than a guess.)
Five days later, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement to the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: Let's be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible attack took place. The intelligence community was able to gather and analyse information after the fact and determine that elements of the Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to using chemical weapons.' But since the American press corps had their story, the retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post, relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page that American intelligence was able to record each step' of the Syrian army attack in real time, from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials'. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the narrative.
So when Obama said on 10 September that his administration knew Assad's chemical weapons personnel had prepared the attack in advance, he was basing the statement not on an intercept caught as it happened, but on communications analysed days after 21 August. The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops. The White House's government assessment and Obama's speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical attack. They put together a back story,' the former official said, and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used was the template that goes back to December.' It is possible, of course, that Obama was unaware that this account was obtained from an analysis of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas attack, rather than from direct evidence. Either way he had come to a hasty judgment.
The press would follow suit. The UN report on 16 September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note that its investigators' access to the attack sites, which came five days after the gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces. As with other sites,' the report warned, the locations have been well travelled by other individuals prior to the arrival of the mission … During the time spent at these locations, individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.' Still, the New York Times seized on the report, as did American and British officials, and claimed that it provided crucial evidence backing up the administration's assertions. An annex to the UN report reproduced YouTube photographs of some recovered munitions, including a rocket that indicatively matches' the specifics of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket. The New York Times wrote that the existence of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency'.
Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop'. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent pointed directly' to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere were not based on actual observations'. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, totally nuts' because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was unlikely' to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as leading weapons experts'. The pair's later study about the rockets' flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.
*
The White House's misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned al-Nusra, the Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist organisation. Al-Nusra is known to have carried out scores of suicide bombings against Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim sects inside Syria, and to have attacked its nominal ally in the civil war, the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA). Its stated goal is to overthrow the Assad regime and establish sharia law. (On 25 September al-Nusra joined several other Islamist rebel groups in repudiating the FSA and another secular faction, the Syrian National Coalition.)
The flurry of American interest in al-Nusra and sarin stemmed from a series of small-scale chemical weapons attacks in March and April; at the time, the Syrian government and the rebels each insisted the other was responsible. The UN eventually concluded that four chemical attacks had been carried out, but did not assign responsibility. A White House official told the press in late April that the intelligence community had assessed with varying degrees of confidence' that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks. Assad had crossed Obama's red line'. The April assessment made headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation. The unnamed official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence community assessments are not alone sufficient'. We want,' he said, to investigate above and beyond those intelligence assessments to gather facts so that we can establish a credible and corroborated set of information that can then inform our decision-making.' In other words, the White House had no direct evidence of Syrian army or government involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted in the press coverage. Obama's tough talk played well with the public and Congress, who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.
Two months later, a White House statement announced a change in the assessment of Syrian culpability and declared that the intelligence community now had high confidence' that the Assad government was responsible for as many as 150 deaths from attacks with sarin. More headlines were generated and the press was told that Obama, in response to the new intelligence, had ordered an increase in non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But once again there were significant caveats. The new intelligence included a report that Syrian officials had planned and executed the attacks. No specifics were provided, nor were those who provided the reports identified. The White House statement said that laboratory analysis had confirmed the use of sarin, but also that a positive finding of the nerve agent does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination'. The White House further declared: We have no reliable corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.' The statement contradicted evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies.
Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin'. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.
On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra's nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,' the consultant said. It was not a bunch of "we believes".' He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin. A sample of the sarin that had been used was also recovered with the help of an Israeli agent but, according to the consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic.
Independently of these assessments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuming that US troops might be ordered into Syria to seize the government's stockpile of chemical agents, called for an all-source analysis of the potential threat. The Op Order provides the basis of execution of a military mission, if so ordered,' the former senior intelligence official explained. This includes the possible need to send American soldiers to a Syrian chemical site to defend it against rebel seizure. If the jihadist rebels were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that Assad would not fight us because we were protecting the chemical from the rebels. All Op Orders contain an intelligence threat component. We had technical analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I & W [indications and warnings] people working on the problem … They concluded that the rebel forces were capable of attacking an American force with sarin because they were able to produce the lethal gas. The examination relied on signals and human intelligence, as well as the expressed intention and technical capability of the rebels.'
There is evidence that during the summer some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by the prospect of a ground invasion of Syria as well as by Obama's professed desire to give rebel factions non-lethal support. In July, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provided a gloomy assessment, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in public testimony that thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces' would be needed to seize Syria's widely dispersed chemical warfare arsenal, along with hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers'. Pentagon estimates put the number of troops at seventy thousand, in part because US forces would also have to guard the Syrian rocket fleet: accessing large volumes of the chemicals that create sarin without the means to deliver it would be of little value to a rebel force. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, Dempsey cautioned that a decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could have unintended consequences: We have learned from the past ten years, however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state … Should the regime's institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.'
The CIA declined to comment for this article. Spokesmen for the DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American intelligence agency, including the DIA, assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin'.
The administration's public affairs officials are not as concerned about al-Nusra's military potential as Shedd has been in his public statements. In late July, he gave an alarming account of al-Nusra's strength at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. I count no less than 1200 disparate groups in the opposition,' Shedd said, according to a recording of his presentation. And within the opposition, the al-Nusra Front is … most effective and is gaining in strength.' This, he said, is of serious concern to us. If left unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements' he also cited al-Qaida in Iraq will take over.' The civil war, he went on, will only grow worse over time … Unfathomable violence is yet to come.' Shedd made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he was not allowed to: the reports his office received were highly classified.
*
A series of secret dispatches from Syria over the summer reported that members of the FSA were complaining to American intelligence operatives about repeated attacks on their forces by al-Nusra and al-Qaida fighters. The reports, according to the senior intelligence consultant who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is more worried about the crazies than it is about Assad'. The FSA is largely composed of defectors from the Syrian army. The Obama administration, committed to the end of the Assad regime and continued support for the rebels, has sought in its public statements since the attack to downplay the influence of Salafist and Wahhabist factions. In early September, John Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing with a sudden claim that al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority players in the Syrian opposition. He later withdrew the claim.
In both its public and private briefings after 21 August, the administration disregarded the available intelligence about al-Nusra's potential access to sarin and continued to claim that the Assad government was in sole possession of chemical weapons. This was the message conveyed in the various secret briefings that members of Congress received in the days after the attack, when Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive against Syrian military installations. One legislator with more than two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came away from one such briefing persuaded that only the Assad government had sarin and the rebels did not.' Similarly, following the release of the UN report on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: It's very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.'
It is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power's office, but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration. The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,' the former senior intelligence official told me. The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: "Look at what I've got!" It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama's hand: "This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react." Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were alerted that he was going to attack weren't so sure it was a good thing.'
The proposed American missile attack on Syria never won public support and Obama turned quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare complex. Any possibility of military action was definitively averted on 26 September when the administration joined Russia in approving a draft UN resolution calling on the Assad government to get rid of its chemical arsenal. Obama's retreat brought relief to many senior military officers. (One high-level special operations adviser told me that the ill-conceived American missile attack on Syrian military airfields and missile emplacements, as initially envisaged by the White House, would have been like providing close air support for al-Nusra'.)
The administration's distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama's willingness to walk away from his red line' threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.
The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September by the Security Council, dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces such as al-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm: no party in Syria should use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer [chemical] weapons.' The resolution also calls for the immediate notification of the Security Council in the event that any non-state actors' acquire chemical weapons. No group was cited by name. While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad's stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone. There may be more to negotiate.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria - Magda Hassan - 12-12-2013
NATO's War on Syria Just Got Dirtier
West scrambles to cover up Syria false flag revelations as Pulitzer Prize-winner & Syria's Electronic Army expose all.
West scrambles to cover up Syria false flag revelations as Pulitzer Prize-winner & Syria's Electronic Army expose all.
By Tony Cartalucci
December 11, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who had warned as early as 2007 of US-Israeli-Saudi plans to use Al Qaeda as proxies to overthrow the Syrian government, has published another groundbreaking report titled, "Whose Sarin?" In it, Hersh states (emphasis added):
[TABLE][TR]
[TD]Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded without assessing responsibility had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order a planning document that precedes a ground invasion citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
The lengthy report goes on in detail, covering the manner in which Western leaders intentionally manipulated or even outright fabricated intelligence to justify military intervention in Syria - eerily similar to the lies told to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the escalation of the war in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
![[Image: alalam_635027850603818309_25f_4x3.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-btpx7oXoQC8/Uqda96yMQGI/AAAAAAAAH2A/kdruKfaM-vw/s1600/alalam_635027850603818309_25f_4x3.jpg)
Image: The Syrian Arab Army is decisively winning the the war through conventional means and would only invite the one possible method of changing that, foreign invention, through the use of chemical weapons. Commonsense, the evidence, and even the liars who would say otherwise, all point to NATO-backed terrorists as the culprits behind chemical weapon use in Syria's ongoing conflict.
....[TABLE]
[TR]
[TD]The report also reveals that Al Nusra, Al Qaeda's Syrian franchise, was identified by US intelligence agencies long ago for possessing chemical weapons. These are the same terrorists Hersh warned about in his 2007 article titled, "The Redirection: Is the Administration's new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" which prophetically stated (emphasis added):
"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Hersh has now warned the public of both a conspiracy by the West to use terrorists to overthrow the sovereign government of Syria (which has unfolded exactly as was predicted years ago), as well as their use of chemical weapons. He has also exposed the systematic manner in which the West has lied about the August 21, 2013 gas attack in Damascus.
As Hersh summed up his latest report, he asked a fundamental question those still insisting the Syrian government was behind the attack have failed to answer:
[TABLE][TR]
[TD]The administration's distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama's willingness to walk away from his red line' threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
The West abandoned its plans for military intervention in Syria because the world rejected its narrative, and despite assurances that the West had air tight intelligence, after many months still, the lid is tightly closed. It is clear that the West desired military intervention in the worst way, and had it possessed real intelligence linking the attacks to the Syrian government, it surely would have revealed it. As Hersh points out, they never had such evidence to begin with and depended entirely on their ability to sell yet another pack of lies to the public.
Armchair "Experts" to the Rescue
But even with the West's capitulation in Syria, and months passing without a shred of credible evidence produced, hacks among Western media continue to perpetuate the original narrative. Among these are of course corporate-financier funded think-tanks and propaganda fronts like the Brookings Institution, Foreign Policy Magazine, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), and establishment papers like the Guardian. In the middle of it all is couch-potato self-proclaimed weapons expert, Eliot Higgins, a representation of the West's propaganda 2.0 campaign.
UK-based Higgins lost his job and now spends his days combing social media sites for "evidence" he then analyzes and reports on. The Western media, with its propagandists expelled from Syria and many of its "sources" in Syria exposed in humiliating attempts to fabricate and manipulate evidence, quickly picked Higgins up and elevated his armchair blogging to "expert analysis." Since then, Higgins has joined the already discredited "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" another UK-based individual, as the basis upon which the West's Syrian narrative spins.
The Guardian's Brian Whitaker, who has maintained a particularly suspicious proximity to Higgins and his work, recently published a startling condemnation of venerated Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh. In a hit piece titled, "Investigating chemical weapons in Syria - Seymour Hersh and Brown Moses go head to head," "Brown Moses" referring to Eliot Higgins' alias, Whitaker claims:
In the blue corner, Seymour Hersh, one of America's most famous and highly paid investigative reporters. In the red corner,
Eliot Higgins, who sits at home in an English provincial town trawling the internet and tweets and blogs about his findings under the screen name Brown Moses.
Eliot Higgins, who sits at home in an English provincial town trawling the internet and tweets and blogs about his findings under the screen name Brown Moses.
On Sunday, in a 5,000-word article for the London Review of Books, Hersh suggested Syrian rebels, rather than the regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attacks near Damascus on August 21.
On Monday, Higgins responded on the Foreign Policy website, demolishing the core of Hersh's argument in a mere 1,700 words.
While seeking to re-ignite the "whodunnit" debate about chemical weapons, Hersh's article unwittingly revealed a lot about the changing nature of investigative journalism. Hersh is old-school. He operates in a world of hush-hush contacts often-anonymous well-placed sources passing snippets of information around which he constructs an article that challenges received wisdom.
The Hersh style of journalism certainly has a place, but in the age of the internet it's a diminishing one as the web-based work of Higgins and others continually shows.
Whitaker is desperately attempting to keep the wheels on the establishment's new propaganda 2.0 vehicle - manipulating social media, much the way Hersh describes intelligence being manipulated, to create any outcome necessary to bolster a predetermined narrative.
What he doesn't address is the fact that Higgins' work almost entirely depends on videos posted online by people he does not know, who may be misrepresenting who they are, what they are posting, and their motivations for doing so - such is the nature of anonymity on the web and why this evidence alone is useless outside of a larger geopolitical context.
Both Whitaker and Higgins, who maintain that the Syrian government was behind the attacks, fail to address another glaring reality. A false flag attack is designed to look like the work of one's enemy. In other words, terrorists in Syria would use equipment, uniforms, weapons, and tactics that would pin the crime on the Syrian government. All Higgins has proved, thus far, is that the superficial details of the operation made for a convincing false flag attack.
Claims the Militants Can't Produce or Properly Handle Chemical Weapons are False
Whitaker hails Higgins' Foreign Policy piece arrogantly titled, "Sy Hersh's Chemical Misfire," but in reality, all Higgins does is point out specifics of the attack, some of which are confirmed, some of which are implied - all of which could either have been the work of the government or militants. The question Higgins fails to answer is what motivation would the government have had to carry out the attacks with the UN based just miles away and with government forces already decisively winning the war with conventional weapons? The only possible scenario that would lead to the Syrian government losing this conflict now would be foreign military intervention - and the best way to make that happen would be by using chemical weapons.
Toward the end of Higgin's piece, he, like his friends at the Guardian, attempt to claim Al Nusra, contrary to Hersh's report, are most likely not capable of producing sarin. He states (emphasis added):
I asked chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta for his opinion on that. He compared the possibility of Jabhat al-Nusra using chemical weapons to another terrorist attack involving sarin: the 1996 gassing of the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
"The 1994 to 1996 Japanese experience tells us that even a very large and sophisticated effort comprising many millions of dollars, a dedicated large facility, and a lot of skilled labor results only in liters of sarin, not tons," Kaszeta said. "Even if the Aug. 21 attack is limited to the eight Volcano rockets that we seem to be talking about, we're looking at an industrial effort two orders of magnitude larger than the Aum Shinrikyo effort. This is a nontrivial and very costly undertaking, and I highly doubt whether any of the possible nonstate actors involved here have the factory to have produced it. Where is this factory? Where is the waste stream? Where are the dozens of skilled people -- not just one al Qaeda member -- needed to produce this amount of material?"
Of course, to call Al Nusra a nonstate actor is not entirely truthful. Al Nusra and other extremist networks inside of Syria have had the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel's backing since at least as early as 2007. Since 2011, Qatar and Turkey have also played immense roles in supporting Al Nusra - with NATO-member Turkey providing them sanctuary and even logistical support. Higgins and his "expert" ask where the factories, waste streams, and skilled people are - the answer is most likely somewhere within one of the many axis nations supporting Al Nusra. They certainly have the capacity to both manufacturer the gas and transport it into Syria - or conversely - provide Al Nusra with the supplies and personal to do it inside of Syria.
Higgins and his "expert's" attempt to make Al Nusra sound like cave dwelling simpletons running on a shoestring budget, when even the US State Department admitted by 2012 that the terrorist organization was operating at a national level, carrying out hundreds of attacks across the country. In an attempt to cover up the growing influence the Western-backing of Al Qaeda was creating within Syria, tales of vast "Twitter donations" were spun to explain how Al Nusra was expanding faster than so-called moderates who were receiving billions of dollars in equipment, training, vehicles, and weapons by the West and its regional allies. In reality, that torrent of cash and supplies was going intentionally into the hands of Al Nusra and other extremist groups.
Clearly, if anyone in Syria, beside the government, was going to produce and deploy chemical weapons, it would be Al Nusra.
Higgins, Whitaker, and other journalists have also maintained the West's official narrative that not only are they sure the government did it because the "evidence" suggests so and because the militants do not possess chemical weapons, but also because the militants fighting the government don't possess the training to carry out the attacks. Higgins has done a masterful job proving that all the militants would need is a flatbed truck and a metal tube to launch the ordinance implicated in the attacks. As far as training in handling chemical weapons, CNN itself revealed the United States had long since taken care of that.
[TABLE][TR]
[TD]CNN's December 2012 report titled, "Sources: U.S. helping underwrite Syrian rebel training on securing chemical weapons," stated that:
The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday.
The training, which is taking place in Jordan and Turkey, involves how to monitor and secure stockpiles and handle weapons sites and materials, according to the sources. Some of the contractors are on the ground in Syria working with the rebels to monitor some of the sites, according to one of the officials.[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Syrian Electronic Army E-Mails Exposes A Deceitful, Depraved Western Media
While perhaps Higgins and company missed that CNN report, it is now revealed that at least Higgins, and several other journalists were told by an American contractor on the ground inside of Syria, that militants had gained access to chemical weapons and more importantly, were planning to use them in a false flag attack - this months before the August 21 attack in Damascus.
The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has released e-mails this week between American contractor Matthew Van Dyke and members of the Western media, including Higgins. The e-mails indicated that militants had chemical weapons and were planning to use them in an attack to frame the Syrian government - serving as impetus for wider foreign intervention. SEA's emails have been confirmed by Higgins himself in a series of self-incriminating tweets where he goes, point-by-point, attempting to provide explanations for the damning revelations.
![[Image: SkidMark_Moses_SEA_Admission_Dec9_2013.jpg]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5RgNihDNwmg/Uqc5TzDrXNI/AAAAAAAAH04/DGtLAlnUSw0/s1600/SkidMark_Moses_SEA_Admission_Dec9_2013.jpg)
....
The e-mails reveal multiple correspondences regarding chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorists aimed at using them in a false flag operation, Higgins' and Van Dyke's mutual "benefactor" located in Virginia, "near DC" (Langley, Virginia?), and job offers for Higgins from NGOs and a defense contractor involving "open source intelligence," the new buzzword used by Higgins and Whitaker in regards to the new form of propaganda they both participate in.
![[Image: Vandick_clip_image002.jpg]](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pLo9YUTZYrM/UqdAJi6gLwI/AAAAAAAAH1I/0HbWoRzJerk/s1600/Vandick_clip_image002.jpg)
![[Image: NVC.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iglwGjqc0BY/UqdBAum8E-I/AAAAAAAAH1g/Lsf1BeDGVgg/s1600/NVC.jpg)
![[Image: sc_2.png]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gu9dWdTgnp0/UqdNE8e67PI/AAAAAAAAH1w/SNdd4yutMuI/s1600/sc_2.png)
![[Image: sc_4.png]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QmlSK5wK3rg/UqdAOjBAK2I/AAAAAAAAH1U/W2Kln2AQ2OI/s1600/sc_4.png)
Being a Propagandist is Lucrative
The e-mails illustrate prior knowledge of chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorists who fully planned on using them in a false flag operation. Higgins and others had this information, and now, have Seymour Hersh's report as well, yet they still pose the argument that the militants had neither the ability nor the means to carry out the attacks. In fact, it appears that the Western media and underlings like Higgins went out of their way specifically to discredit the notion from even being considered. In other words, a concerted cover-up.
The e-mails above, and others in the large cache also reveal the possible motivation for these lies. So-called journalists and researchers peddling the West's narrative appear to have a wide range of lucrative offers presented to them, as well as funding for them to continue doing the work they are already involved in. This of course is only the case so long as their narratives mesh with the institutions, corporations, and individuals cutting the checks.
Why would Higgins even mention the possibility of a false flag attack, when all that would do is alienate him from the establishment he is so eagerly trying to be a part of? His recent piece in Foreign Policy and the Guardian's ceaseless promotion of his work are favors that demand reciprocation - in the form of toeing the line and selling a narrative Higgins and others know is deceitful.
That Higgins, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy are prepared to throw veteran journalist Seymour Hersh under the bus to protect their interests, gives us a look into the depths of depravity within which this "new" media Whitaker celebrates, operate.
Worst of all for the West, is that the transparency and accountability they claim to uphold, had to be kept in check by the SEA - an organization wanted by the FBI as "terrorists." We would be led to believe by the likes of Whitaker, Higgins, and Van Dyke that the Syrian government and their supporters are the villains, but in their own words and actions we see the truth.
Note: The full extent of SEA's leaked e-mails exposes Van Dyke and the journalists he associates with as utterly depraved, deceitful, unprincipled individuals each driven by untethered greed and narcissism. The e-mails also reveal that "aid ships" are used to bring in weapons and foreign fighters, that the Syrians are almost entirely behind the government and that the so-called revolution was "fake." Van Dyke is exposed as having conspired to kill a man and his entire family over a trivial personal dispute and much, much more. Readers are encouraged to comb through the archives, and to follow SEA on Twitter @Official_SEA16.
This article was originally published at Land Destroyer