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The article below is reprinted from the US Labor Against War website. It questions claims about the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime that are being used to prepare for western military intervention in Syria. Given the record of the US and Britain in previous WMD claims, it is worth pondering the questions that remain concerning the situation in Syria. In addition, it is instructive that the massacre in Egypt of protesters by the Army has not been subject to analysis under the 'responsibility to protect' doctrine that was applied to Libya in 2011 and is being wheeled out again in regard to Syria.
Evidence
Indicates that Syrian Government Did Not Launch a Chemical Weapon Attack
Against Its People
by Washington's Blog , Global Research August 25th, 2013 |
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August 24, 2013
CBS News reports that the U.S. is finalizing plans for war against
Syria – andpositioning ships to
launch cruise missilesagainst the Syrian government –
based on the claim that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against
its people.
The
last time the U.S. blamed the Syrian government for a chemical weapons
attack, that claim waswas
debunked.
But
is the claim that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its
people true this time?
It’s
not surprising that Syria’s close ally – Russia – is expressing
doubt. Agence France-Presse (AFP) notes:
Russia,
which has previously said it has proof of chemical weapons use by the rebels,
expressed deep scepticism about the opposition’s claims.
The
foreign ministry said the timing of the allegations as UN inspectors began
their work “makes us think that we are once again dealing with a premeditated
provocation.”
But Russia isn’t the only
doubter.
“At
the moment, I am not totally convinced because the people that are helping
them are without any protective clothing and without any respirators,” said
Paula Vanninen, director of Verifin, the Finnish Institute for Verification
of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
“In
a real case, they would also be contaminated and would also be having
symptoms.”
John
Hart, head of the Chemical and Biological Security Project at Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute said he had not seen the telltale
evidence in the eyes of the victims that would be compelling evidence of
chemical weapons use.
“Of
the videos that I’ve seen for the last few hours, none of them show pinpoint
pupils… this would indicate exposure to organophosphorus nerve agents,” he
said.
Gwyn
Winfield, editor of CBRNe World magazine, which specialises in chemical
weapons issues, said the evidence did not suggest that the chemicals used
were of the weapons-grade that the Syrian army possesses in its stockpiles.
“We’re
not seeing reports that doctors and nurses… are becoming fatalities, so that
would suggest that the toxicity of it isn’t what we would consider military
sarin. It may well be that it is a lower-grade,” Winfield told AFP.
Western
experts on chemical warfare who have examined at least part of the footage
are skeptical that weapons-grade chemical substances were used, although they
all emphasize that serious conclusions cannot be reached without thorough
on-site examination.
Dan
Kaszeta, a former officer of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps and a leading
private consultant, pointed out a number of details absent from the footage
so far: “None of the people treating the casualties or photographing them are
wearing any sort of chemical-warfare protective gear,” he says, “and despite
that, none of them seem to be harmed.” This would seem to rule out most types
of military-grade chemical weapons, including the vast majority of nerve
gases, since these substances would not evaporate immediately, especially if
they were used in sufficient quantities to kill hundreds of people, but
rather leave a level of contamination on clothes and bodies which would harm
anyone coming in unprotected contact with them in the hours after an attack.
In addition, he says that “there are none of the other signs you would expect
to see in the aftermath of a chemical attack, such as intermediate levels of
casualties, severe visual problems, vomiting and loss of bowel control.”
Steve
Johnson, a leading researcher on the effects of hazardous material exposure
at England’s Cranfield University who has worked with Britain’s Ministry of
Defense on chemical warfare issues, agrees that “from the details we have
seen so far, a large number of casualties over a wide area would mean quite a
pervasive dispersal. With that level of chemical agent, you would expect to
see a lot of contamination on the casualties coming in, and it would affect
those treating them who are not properly protected. We are not seeing that
here.”
Additional
questions also remain unanswered, especially regarding the timing of the
attack, being that it occurred on the exact same day that a team of UN
inspectors was in Damascus to investigate earlier claims of chemical weapons
use. It is also unclear what tactical goal the Syrian army would have been
trying to achieve, when over the last few weeks it has managed to push back
the rebels who were encroaching on central areas of the capital. But if this
was not a chemical weapons attack, what then caused the deaths of so many
people without any external signs of trauma?
***
The
Syrian rebels (and perhaps other players in the region) have a clear interest
in presenting this as the largest chemical attack by the army loyal to Syrian
President Bashar Assad to date, even if the cause was otherwise, especially
while the UN inspectors are in the country. It is also in their interest to
do so whilst U.S. President Barack Obama remains reluctant to commit any
military support to the rebels, when only the crossing of a “red line” could
convince him to change his policy.
The
rebels and the doctors on the scene may indeed believe that chemical weapons
were used, since they fear such an attack, but they may not have the
necessary knowledge and means to make such a diagnosis. The European Union
demanded Wednesday that the UN inspectors be granted access to the new sites
of alleged chemical attacks, but since this is not within the team’s mandate,
it is unlikely that the Syrian government will do so.
Stephen
Johnson, an expert in weapons and chemical explosives at Cranfield Forensic
Institute, said that the video footage looked suspect:
There are, within some of
the videos, examples which seem a little hyper-real, and almost as if they’ve
been set up. Which is not to say that they are fake but it does cause some
concern. Some of the people with foaming, the foam seems to be too white, too
pure, and not consistent with the sort of internal injury you might expect to
see, which you’d expect to be bloodier or yellower.
Chemical and biological weapons researcher Jean Pascal Zanders
said that the footage appears to show victims of asphyxiation, which is not consistent with the use
of mustard gas or the nerve agents VX or sarin:
I’m
deliberately not using the term chemical weapons here,” he said, adding that
the use of “industrial toxicants” was a more likely explanation.
1.
Why would Syria’s Assad invite United Nations chemical weapons inspectors to
Syria, then launch a chemical weapons attack against women and children on
the very day they arrive, just miles from where they are staying?
2.
If Assad were going to use chemical weapons, wouldn’t he use them against the
hired mercenary army trying to oust him? What does he gain attacking women
and children? Nothing! The gain is all on the side of the US Government
desperate to get the war agenda going again.
As I
type these words, US trained and equipped forces are already across the
border into Syria, and US naval forces are sailing into position to launch a
massive cruise missile attack into Syria that will surely kill more Syrians
than were claimed to have died in the chemical attack.
Last time there was a chemical weapon attack in Syria, Bush
administration office Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said that he thought Israel might have given
chemical weapons to the Syrian rebels to frame the government.
British MP George Galloway just floated the same theory in
regards to the new chemical weapon attack.
Of
course, we don’t know who carried out the attack, or what weapon was used.
But given the well-documented fact that the U.S. has been planning
regime change in Syria for 20
years straight – and planned to use false ploys for 50
years – it is worth being skeptical until all of the evidence is in.
Pictures
showing that the Syrian army used chemical weapons against rebel-held Eastern
Ghouta just east of Damascus are … likely to be viewed sceptically because
the claims so much resemble those made about Saddam Hussein’s possession of
weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) before the US and British invasion of Iraq
in 2003.
***
Like
the Iraqi opposition to Saddam, who provided most of the evidence of WMDs,
the Syrian opposition has every incentive to show the Syrian government
deploying chemical weapons in order to trigger foreign intervention.
***
But
the obvious fact that for the Syrian government to use chemical weapons would
be much against their own interests does not prove it did not happen.
Governments and armies do stupid things. But it is difficult to imagine any
compelling reason why they should do so since they have plenty of other means
of killing people in Eastern Ghouta, such as heavy artillery or small arms,
which they regularly use.
***
The
evidence so far for the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian army is
second-hand and comes from a biased source.
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A number of questions have been raised in the last few days about the
civil-liberties implications of the National Security Agency’s
seven-year-old programs to gather data on telephone and e-mail
conversations—the programs characterized by President Obama on Friday as
“modest encroachments” on privacy. Three questions ought to be given
more thorough examination.
1. Why were the programs secret?
It is difficult to see how earlier exposure of the programs’ existence would have aided terrorists, who have known at least since the 1990s that U.S. intelligence was searching communications worldwide to track them down. It is possible, however, that the secrecy of the programs stems from the Obama administration’s fear that public awareness of “modest encroachments” on privacy would make further efforts to encroach more difficult.
A former Air Force secretary told Reuters that a “growing unease about domestic surveillance could have a chilling effect on proposed cyber legislation that calls for greater information-sharing between government and industry.” Since the revelation, more lawmakers have signed on to legislation that would strengthen the privacy protections in the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The notion here, then, is that the programs were secret not to protect people from terrorism, but to protect the government from inconvenient public and Congressional opposition.
2. What have the programs accomplished?
There has been a lot of ominous stammering from Congress and the Obama administration about terrorist plots that have been disrupted by the programs. But thus far, only two concrete examples have been mentioned—not a great many for seven years of effort.
First, there have been suggestions that the NSA programs helped apprehend an American who had done surveillance work for the terrorist gunmen in Mumbai, India, in 2008. His efforts, however, were of limited importance to the event, and his eventual arrest didn’t prevent the attack.
The second was the 2009 Zazi case, in which three Afghan-Americans trained in Pakistan before returning to the United States and plotted to set off bombs in the New York subway system. Given the perpetrators’ limited capacities, it is questionable whether the plot would ever have succeeded. Furthermore, the plot was disrupted not by NSA data-dredgers but by standard surveillance: British intelligence provided a hot tip about Zazi based on e-mail traffic to a known terrorist address—one that had long been watched.
At that point, U.S. authorities had good reason to put the plotters on their radar. Having NSA’s megadata collection may have been helpful, but it seems scarcely to have been required. Actually, it is not clear that even the tip was necessary because the plotters foolishly called attention to themselves by using stolen credit cards to purchase large quantities of potential bomb material.
A set of case studies of the 53 post-9/11 plots by Islamist terrorists to damage targets in the United States suggests this is typical. Where the plots have been disrupted, as in the Zazi case, the task was accomplished by ordinary policing. The NSA programs scarcely come up at all.
When asked on Wednesday if the NSA’s data-gathering programs had been “critical” or “crucial” to disrupting terrorist threats, the agency’s head testified that in “dozens” of instances the database “helped” or was “contributing”—though he did seem to agree with the word “critical” at one point. He has promised to provide a list of those instances. The key issue for evaluating the programs, given their privacy implications, will be to determine not whether the huge database was helpful but whether it was necessary.
3. How much do the programs cost?
After 9/11, U.S. intelligence concluded that there were thousands of Al Qaeda operatives in the country. That perspective impelled a vast and hasty increase in spending on intelligence and policing, and at least 263 military and intelligence agencies have been created or reorganized. For its part, the Department of Homeland Security has set up a vast array of “fusion centers” to police terrorism, but is unable to determine how much they cost. It estimates that somewhere between $289-million and $1.4-billion were awarded to them from 2003 to 2010—a gap of over a billion dollars that is impressive even by Washington standards.
As it turned out, the number of Al Qaeda operatives actually in the United States registered at zero or nearly so, and the threat of terrorism in the country proved to be far more limited than initially feared. Accordingly, there might logically have been some judicious cutbacks in the funds devoted to the expensive quest to find terrorists who mostly didn’t exist—a process some in the FBI call “ghost chasing.”
However, the reaction has continually been to expand the enterprise, searching for the needle by adding more and more hay. Far overdue are extensive openly published studies that rationally evaluate homeland-security expenditures.
The NSA’s formerly secret surveillance programs have been part of the expansionary process. If they have done little to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States, and if we are now having what President Obama has characterized as a “healthy” debate about the programs, it seems reasonable to suggest that the debaters should at least be supplied with information about how much the programs cost.
Knowing the cost would scarcely help the terrorists. It might, however, amaze American taxpayers. Perhaps that’s another reason the programs have been kept secret.
1. Why were the programs secret?
It is difficult to see how earlier exposure of the programs’ existence would have aided terrorists, who have known at least since the 1990s that U.S. intelligence was searching communications worldwide to track them down. It is possible, however, that the secrecy of the programs stems from the Obama administration’s fear that public awareness of “modest encroachments” on privacy would make further efforts to encroach more difficult.
A former Air Force secretary told Reuters that a “growing unease about domestic surveillance could have a chilling effect on proposed cyber legislation that calls for greater information-sharing between government and industry.” Since the revelation, more lawmakers have signed on to legislation that would strengthen the privacy protections in the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The notion here, then, is that the programs were secret not to protect people from terrorism, but to protect the government from inconvenient public and Congressional opposition.
2. What have the programs accomplished?
There has been a lot of ominous stammering from Congress and the Obama administration about terrorist plots that have been disrupted by the programs. But thus far, only two concrete examples have been mentioned—not a great many for seven years of effort.
First, there have been suggestions that the NSA programs helped apprehend an American who had done surveillance work for the terrorist gunmen in Mumbai, India, in 2008. His efforts, however, were of limited importance to the event, and his eventual arrest didn’t prevent the attack.
The second was the 2009 Zazi case, in which three Afghan-Americans trained in Pakistan before returning to the United States and plotted to set off bombs in the New York subway system. Given the perpetrators’ limited capacities, it is questionable whether the plot would ever have succeeded. Furthermore, the plot was disrupted not by NSA data-dredgers but by standard surveillance: British intelligence provided a hot tip about Zazi based on e-mail traffic to a known terrorist address—one that had long been watched.
At that point, U.S. authorities had good reason to put the plotters on their radar. Having NSA’s megadata collection may have been helpful, but it seems scarcely to have been required. Actually, it is not clear that even the tip was necessary because the plotters foolishly called attention to themselves by using stolen credit cards to purchase large quantities of potential bomb material.
A set of case studies of the 53 post-9/11 plots by Islamist terrorists to damage targets in the United States suggests this is typical. Where the plots have been disrupted, as in the Zazi case, the task was accomplished by ordinary policing. The NSA programs scarcely come up at all.
When asked on Wednesday if the NSA’s data-gathering programs had been “critical” or “crucial” to disrupting terrorist threats, the agency’s head testified that in “dozens” of instances the database “helped” or was “contributing”—though he did seem to agree with the word “critical” at one point. He has promised to provide a list of those instances. The key issue for evaluating the programs, given their privacy implications, will be to determine not whether the huge database was helpful but whether it was necessary.
3. How much do the programs cost?
After 9/11, U.S. intelligence concluded that there were thousands of Al Qaeda operatives in the country. That perspective impelled a vast and hasty increase in spending on intelligence and policing, and at least 263 military and intelligence agencies have been created or reorganized. For its part, the Department of Homeland Security has set up a vast array of “fusion centers” to police terrorism, but is unable to determine how much they cost. It estimates that somewhere between $289-million and $1.4-billion were awarded to them from 2003 to 2010—a gap of over a billion dollars that is impressive even by Washington standards.
As it turned out, the number of Al Qaeda operatives actually in the United States registered at zero or nearly so, and the threat of terrorism in the country proved to be far more limited than initially feared. Accordingly, there might logically have been some judicious cutbacks in the funds devoted to the expensive quest to find terrorists who mostly didn’t exist—a process some in the FBI call “ghost chasing.”
However, the reaction has continually been to expand the enterprise, searching for the needle by adding more and more hay. Far overdue are extensive openly published studies that rationally evaluate homeland-security expenditures.
The NSA’s formerly secret surveillance programs have been part of the expansionary process. If they have done little to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States, and if we are now having what President Obama has characterized as a “healthy” debate about the programs, it seems reasonable to suggest that the debaters should at least be supplied with information about how much the programs cost.
Knowing the cost would scarcely help the terrorists. It might, however, amaze American taxpayers. Perhaps that’s another reason the programs have been kept secret.