WND has the story Evidence: Syria gas attack work of U.S. allies.  I found the link to this in one of the comments to the article discussed in my previous post The rush to judgment on Syria is a catastrophic and deadly error.

This WND story was written by Jerome R. Corsi.  This is what WND has for his bio:

Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., is a WND senior staff reporter. He has authored many books, including No. 1 N.Y. Times best-sellers “The Obama Nation” and “Unfit for Command.” Corsi’s latest book is the forthcoming “What Went Wrong?: The Inside Story of the GOP Debacle of 2012 … And How It Can Be Avoided Next Time.”

From what I had heard about his books, I always considered Corsi a bit of a nutter (Even a nutter might be right once in awhile, maybe not as often as a stopped watch, though.), so I am hesitant to even mention anything he writes.  However, the videos in his presentation are important if they are to be believed.  I have no way of knowing if they are to be believed.  I don’t know who to believe at this point. But as the UK Guardian pointed out, some of the people we have not believed in the past have turned out to be more truthful and foresighted than the people I want to believe.  (Bush was not one of the people I wanted to believe, but Obama was. Corsi was also not one that I wanted to believe. The links to his book above show why i didn’t, and probably still don’t.)

From the Corsi article, here is but one sample video.

A separate YouTube video from Syrian television shows a government-captured arsenal of what appears to be nerve gas weapons seized from a rebel stronghold in Jobar, Syria.

There are several other videos of more or less veracity. When these videos claim they intercepted a radio communication, at least they play you the audio for you to hear the emotional state of the speakers, and there is a translation in subtitles. In this world where you can trust nothing, at least we have some questions to ask the other side of this argument.

Either side is capable of carrying out false flag operations. Either side is also capable of filming their false flag operations. We need to be aware of that. If we cannot figure out which flag being flown is false or if a false flag is being flown, we need to slow down and do a lot more investigation. If the false flag operation is that of the CIA/US, then there is little hope for a rational discussion. Scratch that, there is no hope.

August 29, 2013

I have been doing some Googling to see what reliable reports I can find about the use of sarin gas in Syria by the rebels. I don’t claim that any of the items I post below are any more or less reliable that what I have already posted.

There is (Video) Syrian Rebels CAUGHT And ARRESTED With Sarin In Turkey In 5/2013. This video originates from RT news. The R in RT used to stand for Russia or Russian, I believe.

Arutz Sheva 7 from Israel reports Russia Accuses Syrian Rebels of Using Sarin Gas.

Truth Out has the report Chemical Weapons Experts Still Skeptical About US Claim That Syria Used Sarin from June 15, 2013. What I find interesting about this article is some information that you might be able to use to judge the veracity of videos about the sarin attacks of any flavor.

“It’s not unlike Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn’t bark,” said Jean Pascal Zanders, a leading expert on chemical weapons who until recently was a senior research fellow at the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies. “It’s not just that we can’t prove a sarin attack, it’s that we’re not seeing what we would expect to see from a sarin attack.”
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Zanders, however, said that much about that report bears questioning. Photos and a video accompanying the report showed rebel fighters preparing for chemical attacks by wearing gas masks. Sarin is absorbed through the skin, and even small amounts can kill within minutes.

He also expressed skepticism about the article’s description of the lengthy route victims of chemical attacks had to travel to get to treatment, winding through holes in buildings, down streets under heavy fire, before arriving at remote buildings hiding hospitals.

Zanders, who also has headed the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and was director of the Geneva-based BioWeapons Prevention Project, noted that had sarin been the chemical agent in use, the victims would have been dead long before they reached doctors for treatment.

Zanders also said he’s skeptical of sarin use because there have been no reports of medical personnel or rescuers dying from contact with victims. Residue from sarin gas would be expected to linger on victims and would infect those helping, who often are shown in rebel video wearing no more protection than paper masks.

Le Monde reported that one doctor treated a victim with atropine, which is appropriate for sarin poisoning. But that doctor said he gave his patient 15 shots of atropine in quick succession, which Zanders said could have killed him almost as surely as sarin.

The UK Telegraph has the story The rush to judgment on Syria is a catastrophic and deadly error.

His [British Prime Minister Cameron] problem is that the British and American foreign policy, intelligence and military establishments have made a series of dreadful mistakes over the past 15 years. It can be stated with complete fairness that the Stop the War Coalition (a miscellaneous collection of mainly far-Left political organisations, by no means all of them reputable, which marches through London this Saturday in protest) has consistently shown far more mature judgment on these great issues of war and peace than Downing Street, the White House or the CIA.
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More surprising still, the Stop the War Coalition has often proved better informed than these centres of Western power, coolly warning against the diet of propaganda masquerading as bona fide intelligence.
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The rush to judgment by Britain and the US looks premature, especially in view of the record of our intelligence agencies in providing misleading and fabricated evidence as a justification for war before 2003. (This time it is said that they have been convinced by intercept evidence, but this too can prove seriously misleading.)
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The moral authority of Britain and America in the Middle East is shaky, as an article published in Foreign Policy magazine last week reminds us. It provides documentary evidence that the US helped Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launch a series of chemical weapons attacks upon Iran in the late 1980s, an offensive that killed approximately 20,000 Iranian troops – which dwarfs the number of victims of the Syrian attack. Iran, of course, is Assad’s closest ally. Our moral indignation over chemical weapons looks selective.

One of the comments on this story pointed to some videos of questionable authenticity showing the rebels launching sarin gas attacks.  More about that in the next blog post Evidence: Syria gas attack work of U.S. allies.

Reader Supported News has the article Elizabeth Warren’s Secret by David Dayen, Salon.

The senator tells Salon how one senator can wield tremendous power – and (kind of) addresses those ’16 rumors

It’s been well-documented that the 113th Congress specializes in getting nothing consequential done. While the nation’s supply of named post offices is apparently well-stocked, anything more critical has generally stalled out, with little hope to break the gridlock.

So let’s say you’re a high-profile freshman senator walking into this den of inertia, and you want to make your large following proud and advance your agenda, but you’re in no position to do that legislatively? How do you, Elizabeth Warren, find your way through this minefield, and even chalk up successes?

A very nice article that gives a lot of insight about how a Senator can change the way things are done even without making legislative changes.  Part of what I like about the way Elizabeth Warren works is that she understands you have to change the terms of the debate before you present legislation.  If you don’t do that, you end up like the feckless President who bargains himself down before he even faces his opposition.

The President defers to Congress to dream up the legislation to advance his agenda.  All the while that this process is playing out, the opposition has a heyday framing the debate on terms unfavorable to the President’s agenda.  At the very tail end, the President jumps in and is forced to debate the topic on the opposition’s terms.  His own terms never even get a chance to be part of the debate.

Here is the scenario if the President used the Warren strategy.  You start talking about the issue.  You make some high profile appearances where you set the terms of the debate.  After the conversation seems to be going in your desired direction, you propose some specific legislation.  Since you have set the tone of the debate, the opposition is forced to debate you on your terms and hardly has time to get to their debating points.  Notice that you don’t move to the succeeding steps until you have some indication that your point of view has sunk in sufficiently to weather whatever storm the opposition can try to raise.  If you are not making the progress you want at each phase, you adjust your tactics, and keep trying until it works.  I often don’t have the stomach for this in my world, but that is why Obama was elected as the country’s President and I was not (at least one of the reasons :-).

France24 has the article Intercepted call ‘proves Syria used chemical weapons’.

US intelligence intercepted a panicked phone call between Syrian army officials shortly after the chemical weapons attack on civilians in a suburb of Damascus on August 21, according to the magazine Foreign Policy.

Further down in the article we have this added detail:

“Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defence exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers after a nerve gas strike killed more than 1,000 people,” Foreign Policy said on Tuesday.

I can imagine the phone call.

High Official: What the heck is going on? Did you use chemical weapons?

Officer: No, of course we didn’t use chemical weapons. It was probably the rebels that did it.

Based on this frantic call, the US concludes that the Syrian government used chemical weapons. You can take that to the bank.

The article further goes on to say:

Meanwhile, German magazine Focus has reported that Israeli intelligence services also intercepted a phone call between Syrian officials regarding the use of chemical weapons.The conversation was then relayed to the US, according to an unnamed former Mossad official quoted in the magazine.

There you have it, the phone call was intercepted by two ‘reliable’ sources who have no reason to lie.

Somehow I would like to see an independent translation of the intercepted call to see if I would interpret the call in the same way as the CIA/Mossad did.  I would also like to hear the recording so I can judge the panic level.  It’s not that I am suspicious of motives at all.  It’s just that if I am asked to approve the bombing of another country, I don’t want to take one side’s word for what the evidence is without hearing what the other side has to say.