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Monday, August 26, 2013

Syria, Sarin gas and other lies

First of all, the Chemical Weapons Industry was birthed in the United States and when the U.S. Congress outlawed export of all Chemical Weapons from the United States and mandated the destruction of the Chemical Weapons stockpiled here in the United States, U.S. Military Intelligence and the CIA pillaged all they could and sent them to both Iran and Iraq to destroy as many people as they could in the Iran-Iraq war. The Chemical Weapons experts in the U.S. knew that the rockets we had stockpiled would backfire and destroy a user's own troops - this is exactly what happened to Iran. Another genocide that Ollie North was involved in.



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Passing Gas in Syria and Endless Israeli “False Flag” Attacks



“I am comfortable that Assad deployed a nerve agent in East Damascus.”Michael Shrimpton, Veterans Today
Michael Shrimpton
Michael Shrimpton
In my opinion, no serious analyst of affairs in the Middle East takes the claim that the Assad government has used chemical weapons in Syria as accurate and true–which means that at least one of my colleagues here at Veterans Today is not a serious analyst of Middle East affairs.  
The very idea that the government of Syria would launch a nerve agent attack as a UN inspection team is about to arrive to investigate previous gas attacks is politically absurd.
That is on a level with the bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists and was blamed on a Canadian to provide pseudo-justification for passing extreme “anti-terrorism” legislation by Canada’s neo-con government, which appears to be playing “catch up” in its efforts to compete with its own version of the PATRIOT Act.  These are obvious “false flag” attacks.
Both are examples of the kind of blatant propaganda brought to us by Israel in the past, including the attack on the King David Hotel in Palestine in 1946 by Irgun terrorists dressed as Arabs, the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, and the bombing of its own Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and–when too few Jews were killed–of its own Jewish Community Center in 1994.
Israel’s involvement in the atrocities of 9/11 has been copiously documented–right down to the painting of the Twin Towers being hit by aircraft on the side of a truck from Urban Moving Systems, which was used to bring the “Dancing Israels” from Liberty State Park, where they had been filming the demolition of the World Trade Center and celebrating in Arab clothing. This is only the latest in a long line of fabricated events in the tradition of the Mossad’s motto, “Make War by Deception”.

Any competent analyst could see it coming when Benjamin Netanyahu baited Barack Obama into “drawing a red line” representing an action by the Syrian government that would require a response by the United States. When he said that the use of chemical weapons would be a “game changer”, we all knew that Netanyahu would see that it was done.  How any serious person could be taken in by such blatant stunts is beyond me. I am shocked that someone at VT should fall into that category.
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Experts Doubt Syrian Chemical Weapons Claims


Washington’s Blog
(August 24, 2013)- CBS News reports that the U.S. is finalizing plans for war against Syria – and positioning ships to launchcruise missiles against 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 was was 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.
AFP reports:
“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.
Haaretz reports:
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?
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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.
Michael Rivero asks:
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.
Indeed, many are asking whether this is Iraq War 2.0.   For example, the Independent writes:
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.
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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.

Jim Fetzer is a former Marine Corps officer, McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a journalist and editor for Veterans Today.

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Posted by on Aug 25 2013, With 3960 Reads, Filed under WarZone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.