{"id":18027,"date":"2013-09-03T14:40:47","date_gmt":"2013-09-03T20:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=18027"},"modified":"2013-09-03T14:40:47","modified_gmt":"2013-09-03T20:40:47","slug":"western-media-cant-seem-to-kill-evidence-that-syria-rebels-launched-chemical-weapons-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=18027","title":{"rendered":"Western Media can’t seem to kill Evidence that Syria Rebels Launched Chemical-weapons Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many \u2013 from alternative news outlets to mainstream to governments \u2013 find the Obama administration\u2019s justification for launching an attack on Syria full of holes.<\/em>
\n
\nSuspicions That Rebels Launched Chemical-weapons Attack Refuse to Die<\/strong>
\nBy Russ Wellen, 3 September, 2013 – Foreign Policy in Perspective<\/p>\n

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad once again denied, in so many words, that his regime was responsible for chemical-weapons attacks. In an interview with Le Figaro, he said, \u201cI\u2019m not at all suggesting that the Syrian army does or does not possess such weapons.\u201d Then he reiterated what he said in an earlier interview:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s suppose that our army wishes to use WMD: is it really going to do so in an area where it is actually present and where soldiers have been wounded by these weapons, as the UN inspectors found during their visit to the hospital where they were being treated? Where is the logic in that?<\/p>\n

However far-fetched, according to Washington group-think and what\u2019s now conventional wisdom, a hotly disputed article by Dave Gavlak at Mint Press News based in Minneapolis suggests that\u2019s in our best interest not to discard the-rebels-did-it scenario just yet. Gavlak writes:<\/p>\n

\u2026 from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.<\/p>\n

However implausible to most, the tale \u201cmany\u201d tell is too plausible to ignore. In other words, it sounds too realistic and detailed to be the work of their imaginations. Based on the excerpt below, see what you think.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry,\u201d said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta.<\/p>\n

Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion.<\/p>\n

\u2026 Abdel-Moneim said his son and the others died during the chemical weapons attack. That same day, the militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, which is linked to al-Qaida, announced that it would similarly attack civilians in the Assad regime\u2019s heartland of Latakia on Syria\u2019s western coast, in purported retaliation.<\/p>\n

The next touches are especially convincing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t tell us what these arms were or how to use them,\u201d complained a female fighter named \u2018K.\u2019 \u201cWe didn\u2019t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them,\u201d she warned. \u2026 A well-known rebel leader in Ghouta named \u2018J\u2019 agreed. \u201cJabhat al-Nusra militants do not cooperate with other rebels, except with fighting on the ground. They do not share secret information. \u2026 And unfortunately, some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set off the explosions,\u201d \u2018J\u2019 said.<\/p>\n

Feeding those suspicions, the Independent reports<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was Prince Bandar\u2019s intelligence agency that first alerted Western allies to the alleged use of sarin gas by the Syrian regime in February.<\/p>\n

More on Prince Bandar, Russia and the Chechens in a future post. Meanwhile, if you still need to hear reservations about the Syrian regime mounting the attacks from a source more respectable than Mint Press News, Hannah Allam and Mark Seibel summed them up for McClatchy yesterday:<\/p>\n

The case Secretary of State John Kerry laid out last Friday contained claims that were disputed by the United Nations, inconsistent in some details with British and French intelligence reports or lacking sufficient transparency for international chemical weapons experts to accept at face value.<\/p>\n

The first reservation cited:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Obama administration dismissed the value of a U.N. inspection team\u2019s work by saying that the investigators arrived too late for the findings to be credible and wouldn\u2019t provide any information the United State didn\u2019t already have.<\/p>\n

U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq countered that it was \u201crare\u201d for such an investigation to begin within such a short time and said that \u201cthe passage of such few days does not affect the opportunities to collect valuable samples.\u201d<\/p>\n

Second:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another point of dispute is the death toll from the alleged attacks on Aug. 21. Neither Kerry\u2019s remarks nor the unclassified version of the U.S. intelligence he referenced explained how the U.S. reached a tally of 1,429, including 426 children.<\/p>\n

\u2026 Anthony Cordesman [of the Center for Strategic and International Studies] criticized Kerry as being \u201csandbagged into using an absurdly over-precise number\u201d of 1,429, and noted that the number didn\u2019t agree with either the British assessment of \u201cat least 350 fatalities\u201d or other Syrian opposition sources. \u2026 He added that the blunder was reminiscent of \u201cthe mistakes the U.S. made in preparing Secretary (Colin) Powell\u2019s speech to the U.N. on Iraq in 2003.\u201d<\/p>\n

Third \u2013 and an embarrassing and possibly deadly gaffe on the part of the United States:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another eyebrow-raising administration claim was that U.S. intelligence had \u201ccollected streams of human, signals and geospatial intelligence\u201d that showed the regime preparing for an attack three days before the event. \u2026 That claim raises two questions: Why didn\u2019t the U.S. warn rebels about the impending attack and save hundreds of lives? And why did the administration keep mum about the suspicious activity when on at least one previous occasion U.S. officials have raised an international fuss when they observed similar actions? …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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Many \u2013 from alternative news outlets to mainstream to governments \u2013 find the Obama administration\u2019s justification for launching an attack on Syria full of holes. Suspicions That Rebels Launched Chemical-weapons Attack Refuse to Die By Russ Wellen, 3 September, 2013 – Foreign Policy in Perspective Syrian President Bashar al-Assad once again denied, in so many more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[2000],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18028,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18027\/revisions\/18028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}