Syria reported to have use Chemical Warfare

[Cain]

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[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Ladies and germs, I present Our Brave Allies, the Syrian Rebels:

Syrian rebel forces killed as many as 190 civilians and seized more than 200 hostages during a military offensive in August, Human Rights Watch says.

In a report, HRW says the deaths occurred in pro-government Alawite villages in rural Latakia governorate.

It said the findings "strongly suggest" crimes against humanity were committed.

Rebels and government forces have both been accused of abuses since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began more than two years ago.

Syrian opposition forces comprise many groups, some of which are allied to al-Qaeda.

HRW says it conducted an on-site investigation and interviewed more than 35 people, including survivors and fighters from both sides of the offensive.

In its 105-page report, it says that in the early hours of 4 August opposition fighters overran government positions in the Latakia countryside of northern Syria and occupied more than 10 Alawite villages.

I remember reading about this at the time....in the socialist Arab web.  No-one else was reporting on it at the time.  No, instead they were reading Elizabeth O'Bagy's content-lite love poems to the martial and moral superiority of the Syrian rebels in the Wall Street Journal.

Well shit.

[Cain]

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[Junkenstein]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24767571

Israeli aircraft have carried out a strike near the Syrian coastal city of Latakia, a US official says.

The official said the strike targeted Russian-made missiles intended for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

Latakia is a stronghold of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, where his Alawite community is concentrated.

This is believed to be the fifth or sixth Israeli attack in Syria this year. Israel does not comment on specific operations.

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Israeli officials have repeatedly said it would act if it felt Syrian weapons, conventional or chemical, were being transferred to militant groups in the region, especially Hezbollah.

Israel, force for world peace.

[Cain]

Sy Hersh has some important news about the Ghouta Massacre:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

'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.

So, we kinda already knew they were cherry-picking evidence.  Still, knowing that the Syrian government had already neutralised wiretaps on Assad's inner circle means there can be no direct evidence of Assad ordering an attack, contrary to statements at the time.

This is far more interesting, though:

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.

US intelligence agencies cannot find the above document, which suggests a foreign origin.  I cannot help but wonder if it is Russian, given how Putin so helpfully pulled Obama out of the Syria mess.  It certainly contrasts with John Brennan, who concluded Assad was guilty because...well, because the Saudis told him, and Brennan apparently believes everything that comes out of Riyadh.

Al-Qaeda having an operational chemical weapons capability is one of the nightmare scenarios of US intelligence.  It's ranked somewhere below nuclear terrorism, but not by much.  And if the Saudis were aware of it, and using it to try and provoke a US intervention in Syria...well, that could explain a lot. 

If Obama has any backbone at all, he should be negotiating with Iran and Hezbollah about how best to bury al-Nursa.  And current negotiations over Iran's nuclear program may even be a precursor to that.

[LMNO]

That first bit, about cherry-picking intel... Do you think that's a deliberate move of anti-rationalism, or does it just not occur to them that confirmation bias exists outside the internet?

[Cain]

Probably a mix of the two. 

[Cain]

So, remember when we assured the Free Syrian Army would prevent weapons from falling into Islamist hands, and so the West must arm them to the teeth to defeat both Assad and Al-Qaeda?

Yeah, about that...

This week, the US and Britain suspended non-lethal aid – such as communications equipment and trucks – to rebels in northern Syria, after bases belonging to the largely moderate, Western-backed Free Syrian Army were ransacked and their equipment seized by the Islamic Front. This rebel-on-rebel fratricidal orgy sums up so much that has gone wrong with Syria's revolution.

And who backs the Islamic Front?  Only Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia, fed up with American hesitation to provide arms or drop bombs, impatient with the Free Syrian Army's weakness, and eager to check Iranian influence at a time when Washington and Tehran are moving closer together, is throwing its weight behind members of the Islamic Front, particularly the Damascus-based Army of Islam. Riyadh sees these groups as the only way to contain the growing influence of al-Qaeda. It is also gambling that the Front's members won't turn their guns outside the region or give sanctuary to jihadists once Assad falls. Washington and London do not agree; hence the suspension of aid.

This has important implications for the West's entire approach to Syria. Six out of the seven groups in the Islamic Front have explicitly rejected US and Russia-backed peace talks, the so-called Geneva II conference set for January 22, and some have threatened to try for treason those moderate rebels who attend. It is, therefore, impossible to imagine anything productive coming out of next month's talks, whose main purpose appears to be keeping up appearances of diplomacy. Those who might attend – like the Syrian National Coalition, the political body linked to the moderate rebels – have little ability to influence events on the ground; those with the influence, like the Islamic Front, will not show up (nor is it clear that the Assad regime would talk to them if they did). The US might threaten the Islamists with a terrorism designation if they don't participate, but it is hard to see this working.

The French are already voicing serious doubts about Geneva II talks:

Mr Fabius said France was working on making the talks scheduled for next month in Switzerland a success, but that there was "a great deal of doubt".

The moderate anti-government groups which France has been working with were "in serious difficulty", he said.

The US, UN and Russia have been struggling for months to get the talks, known as Geneva II, off the ground.

The French are of course correct in their assessments, but France has been getting cosy with Saudi Arabia recently.  And what does Saudi Arabia want?

To my mind, Saudi Arabia has looked at this state of affairs and decided that the best policy is one of obstinately supporting the insurrection until Assad is driven out, no matter how protracted and nasty the process is.

I think Saudi Arabia is reacting to the US abdication of leadership to assert its own bloody-minded realist strategy for the Middle East (and, in the process, discredit Qatar as amateur soft power enthusiasts without the belly to do the dirty work needed to neutralize the Iranian challenge).

Perhaps Saudi Arabia is living the neo-con Clean Break dream in reverse.  Instead of carrying the fight from Iraq to Syria, and then Iran, as Dick Cheney dreamed, militant Islamists backed by Saudi Arabia (or powerful elements within Saudi Arabia) are closing in on the overthrow of the Assad regime and creating the social, political, and military conditions for an anti-Maliki insurrection in Iraq's Sunni heartland.

With the prospect of the chaos in Syria slopping over into Iraq and endangering Maliki's pro-Iranian administration, I don't think Saudi Arabia is going to be too interested in putting the brakes on Syria's headlong rush into collapse.

[Cain]

Bump.  Important new news about the attacks has been released:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/01/15/214656/new-analysis-of-rocket-used-in.html

A team of security and arms experts, meeting this week in Washington to discuss the matter, has concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered sarin in the largest attack that night was too short for the device to have been fired from the Syrian government positions where the Obama administration insists they originated.

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The authors of a report released Wednesday said that their study of the rocket's design, its likely payload and its possible trajectories show that it would have been impossible for the rocket to have been fired from inside areas controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

This is consistent with what the UN inspectors also concluded, that the weapons were launched from rebel territory.

But John Kerry and the perpetual assholes at the CIA, NSA, DIA all concluded Assad was so guilty of this attack that they couldn't even spare the time to determine he was responsible.  No, he had to die right now.

Remember that.  It's been over a decade since Iraq, and people are still pulling this bullshit.  And it almost worked.  As much as it pains me to write it, we have a lot to thank Ed Miliband and Vladimir Putin for.

[LMNO]

So, the rebels used sarin as a false flag attack, or something?  What happened to the "rogue general" theory?

[Junkenstein]

But John Kerry and the perpetual assholes at the CIA, NSA, DIA all concluded Assad was so guilty of this attack that they couldn't even spare the time to determine he was responsible.  No, he had to die right now.

Remember that.  It's been over a decade since Iraq, and people are still pulling this bullshit.  And it almost worked.

What's a fucking scary picture is the indications that the people western governments support are in actuality the ones firing CW. It's more confirmation of what's been suspected for some time and makes the current clusterfuck of disarming/disposing little more than show.

There's a horrible part of me that suspects some people are going to be very, very happy with a hunt for chemical weapons in Syria. It's not Iraq, but you take the war you've got, right?

[Cain]

So, the rebels used sarin as a false flag attack, or something?  What happened to the "rogue general" theory?

The maths didn't add up.  The UN and US intelligence agencies determined based on the lines of control and the delivery mechanism, that it had to be a rebel attack.

The most likely explanation is a false-flag attack, yes.  Al-Nusra were, allegedly, smuggling components for CW in that area.  And, as we know, Saudi Arabia desperately wants international intervention, and at the time, Saudi Arabia were supporting Al-Nursa (no longer, I think, with the establishment of the Islamic Front.  But events in Iraq may supersede concerns about the Syrian wing of Al-Qaeda).

[Cain]

But John Kerry and the perpetual assholes at the CIA, NSA, DIA all concluded Assad was so guilty of this attack that they couldn't even spare the time to determine he was responsible.  No, he had to die right now.

Remember that.  It's been over a decade since Iraq, and people are still pulling this bullshit.  And it almost worked.

What's a fucking scary picture is the indications that the people western governments support are in actuality the ones firing CW. It's more confirmation of what's been suspected for some time and makes the current clusterfuck of disarming/disposing little more than show.

There's a horrible part of me that suspects some people are going to be very, very happy with a hunt for chemical weapons in Syria. It's not Iraq, but you take the war you've got, right?

Yes and no. Western governments preferred the "moderate" Free Syrian Army, following on the Qatari model to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to take power.

Saudi Arabia and Israel, by contrast, want a smoking hole where Damascus once stood, and warlords rampaging over Syria to the degree it can no longer act as an Iranian proxy on the Mediterranian.

The thing is, Israel and Saudi Arabia has a certain amount of...sway in western intelligence agencies, and with certain political parties.  So when the CW attack happened, the Israeli 8200 Unit (their NSA) claimed they had proof that Assad was behind it.  Saudi Arabia claimed the same, and had even be claiming they had proof of previous attacks.

Saudi Arabia and Israel don't want any skin in this game.  If they actually have to fight...well, the Israeli Army's reputation is mostly in tatters after Lebanon and rightly so, and the Saudi Arabian Army couldn't take on a bunch of goat herders without the US providing backup.  And war is expensive.  Much better to let the war-tards in the US and UK work themselves into a frenzy over the perfidy of Assad's regime, to the point they do the dirty deed.

Saudi Arabian/Israeli strategy in Syria is diametrically opposed to ours, since we'd, you know, like for Syria to continue existing, and not become "Afghanistan on the Med 2.0" (we already have 1.0 with Libya). 

[Cain]

Anyone finding the timing of all these torture pictures coming out of Syria suspicious?

If so, you're not the only one.  While I wouldn't be surprised to discover Assad's regime were responsible for starving and beating prisoners to death, that there is only a single source for these photos, and that he is clearly working with Qatar and they should all come out just as the Geneva II talks are getting underway should cause some at least some suspicion.

It does make me wonder if Qatar is now working with Saudi Arabia and has adopted it's maximalist strategy for state collapse.  What these photos do is make the question of Assad leaving power and Syria with immunity for his crimes almost unthinkable.  Assad wont leave without immunity, and as long as he stays, the fighting will continue.

Of course, the fighting will continue anyway.  Geneva II is kinda hilarious, in that it mostly results in the losers trying to dictate terms to the winners of the Syrian Civil War, like with the exclusion of Iran from the talks.  I only assume Assad is even bothering with the talks so his cronies can go shopping in Geneva and get around the issue of Syrian sanctions.

[LMNO]

It's like a bunch of High School kids planning a party, but the guy with the ID who buys beer has better things to do, so the rest of 'em are like, "you guys want to hang out anyway?"