Official story of sarin attack debunked

Theodore A. Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a series of reports that convincingly debunk the claim that the Syrian government attacked civilians with sarin two weeks ago.

He said, among other things, that—

The video evidence shows workers at the site roughly 30 hours after the alleged attack that were wearing clothing with the logo “Idlib Health Directorate.”

These individuals were photographed putting dead birds from a birdcage into plastic bags.  The implication of these actions was that the birds had died after being placed in the alleged sarin crater.

However, the video also shows the same workers inside and around the same crater with no protection of any kind against sarin poisoning. These individuals were wearing honeycomb face masks and medical exam gloves. They were otherwise dressed in normal streetwear and had no protective clothing of any kind.

The honeycomb face masks would provide absolutely no protection against either sarin vapors or sarin aerosols. The masks are only designed to filter small particles from the air.  If there were sarin vapor, it would be inhaled without attenuation by these individuals.  If the sarin were in an aerosol form, the aerosol would have condensed into the pours in the masks, and would have evaporated into a highly lethal gas as the individuals inhaled through the mask.  It is difficult to believe that such health workers, if they were health workers, would be so ignorant of these basic facts.

In addition, other people dressed as health workers were standing around the crater without any protection at all.

I don’t know for sure what happened.  What Prof. Postol’s report proves is that President Trump committed an act of war against a sovereign nation for reasons not supported by evidence.  Although the attack resulted in relatively few casualties and little damage, it may well have destroyed the possibility of peace with Syria and Russia.

Why I trust the ayatollahs on nuclear weapons

Ayatollah Khameini

The Ayatollah Seyyid Hosseini Khameini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, said that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons because this is contrary to Islamic teachings.

I believe him.  The reason that I believe him is that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq used chemical weapons, including mustard gas and nerve gas, in his 1980-1988 war against Iran, and Iran never developed or used poison gas of its own.

The then Ayatollah Ruhbollah Khomeini ruled that use of chemical weapons, and also nuclear weapons were contrary to Islamic law.  Instead Iran defended itself against the invaders by sacrificing its young men in human wave attacks.

When I consider the history of how the United States developed and used atomic weapons, and our “balance of terror” strategy during the cold war, I cannot imagine my government behaving with such restraint under such circumstances.  In fact, if I were an Iranian leader today, threatened with attack by war hawks in the USA and Israel, I would want nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

I think Iran’s ayatollahs have earned the right to be believed on this issue.

Syria’s chemcal weapons slated for destruction

Remember Syria’s chemical weapons?  The last of them recently are being over to be destroyed under U.S. supervision.  Reed Richardson noted in The Nation that this represents a huge foreign policy success by the Obama administration in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Nine months after entering into joint negotiation with the Russians and Syria’s tyrannical President Bashar al-Assad, the last of that country’s 1,300 tons of declared chemical weapons began a journey to a chemical weapons-eating ship in the Mediterranean for destruction by the US.  This follows the rapid destruction of all of Syria’s chemical munitions last fall.

And while a dozen chemical weapon facilities inside Syria still remain to be destroyed, Ahmet Üzümcü, Director-General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), was uncharacteristically upbeat about what the US-brokered deal had just accomplished in the middle of the Syrian civil war:

The mission to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons program has been a major undertaking marked by an extraordinary international cooperation.  Never before has an entire arsenal of a category of weapons of mass destruction been removed from a country experiencing a state of internal armed conflict.  And this has been accomplished within very demanding and tight time frames.

via The Nation.

Remember that the justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction—a goal that already had been accomplished by international agreement and international inspections.

The successful removal of all of Syria’s chemical weapons stores and munitions has now eliminated a nightmare scenario where extremist groups like ISIS capture them, either by chance or through a full-on successful coup of Assad.

If that seems unlikely, consider that the former scenario almost happened last week, when ISIS insurgents gained control over one of Saddam Hussein’s old chemical weapons complexes at Muthanna in southern Iraq.

Fortunately, post-Desert Storm inspections carried out by UNSCOM—a kind of prototype for the OPCW—had rendered all of these weapons useless years ago, long before Bush invaded.

via The Nation.

One of the favorite sayings of American statesmen is that “all options are on the table.”   Bombing and invasion are not necessarily the only options, the best options or the first options to consider—although, of course, diplomacy is strengthened if there is potential military force behind it.

What can the U.S. usefully do in Syria?

President Obama is asking Congress for authority to bomb Syria, but he said he has no intention of invading Syria.  Bombing will result in the deaths of some Syrians and some damage to Syria’s war-making capability, but it will not threaten the power of President Bashar al-Assad.  In fact it will strengthen his power, by turning the Syrian people and Arab people generally more against the United States than they already are.

What then can you about President Assad?  We don’t know his role, if any, in the gas attacks.  Maybe he ordered them.  Maybe his brother or some other element of the Syrian army ordered them.  Maybe a pro-government or anti-government militia carried them out.  Maybe the gas attacks were a deception operation by the Saudi or some other foreign government.

If there is proof that he ordered the nerve gas attacks, then we should bring a criminal case at the Hague.  There is a precedent for trying heads of state for crimes against humanity.  He could be tried in his absence.  Admittedly, Assad could not be brought to justice unless he was captured outside his country or his regime was overthrown, but these limitations are not nothing.  Of course all this is contingent on Assad actually being guilty of ordering the gassing of civilians, which at present is not at all certain.

What then can we do to help the Syrians?  Writer Charles Stross had a thought.

Nerve agents like Sarin aren’t black magic; they’re close relatives of organophosphate insecticides.  Medical treatments exist.  In particular there’s a gizmo called a NAAK, or Nerve Agent Antidote Kit. The drugs it relies on (neostigmine, atropine, and diazepam) are all more than fifty years old and dirt cheap; they won’t save someone who has inhaled a high lethal dose, but they’ll stabilize someone who’s been exposed, hopefully for long enough to get them decontaminated and rush them to a hospital for long-term treatment.  Mass Sarin attacks are survivable with prompt first aid and hospital support.

We should be distributing gas masks, field decontamination showers, NAAK kits, and medical resources to everyone in the conflict zones.  Government, civilian, rebels, it doesn’t matter.  By doing so we would be providing aid that was (a) life-saving (b) cheap, and (c) put a thumb on the side of the balance in favor of whoever isn’t using nerve gas. We’d also be breaking with the traditional pattern of western involvement in the region, which is to break shit and kill people, mostly innocent civilians who were trying to keep their heads down.  It wouldn’t fix our bloody-handed reputation, but it’d be a good start.

via Charlie’s Diary.

The other thing we Americans could do is to provide help and asylum for refugees, especially Christian refugees.  Syria, like Egypt, was a Christian country before it was a Muslim county, and still has a large Christian minority.  They will inevitably become the scapegoat for anything done by the supposedly Christian United States.

Did Syria use illegal poison gas weapons?

Map by The Independent

[Added 9/17/13]  The United Nations report indicates that the Syrian military used sarin gas on civilians.  Click on UN Report Conclusive: Sarin Gas Was Used On a Large Scale, Linked to Syrian Regime for a summary by Juan Cole for Informed Comment.

If I were a dictator trying to put down a rebellion, and the world’s most heavily-armed superpower told me that the one thing that would unleash their attack on me is the use of poison gas, I don’t think I would use poison gas.

And if I did use poison gas, I would use it in a decisive way, that would end the rebellion once and for all.  So I have been skeptical about charges that the Syrian government used poison gas against rebel forces.  But a report by Doctors Without Borders / Medecins Sans Frontieres provides strong circumstantial evidence that thousands of people have symptoms of being victims of poison gas.  [New Scientist magazine published a similar report.  Added 8/30/13.]

I don’t think the rebel forces could have been the ones to use poison gas.  It would have been virtually impossible to cover up.  So while it still doesn’t make sense to me that the Syrian government would use poison gas, my experience of life tells me that people sometimes do things that don’t make sense.

Juan Cole, on his Informed Comment web log, suggested a reason why the Syrian government might have used gas and thought they could get away with it. Or maybe there is some other explanation.  I don’t know.  Neither do Joe Biden or John Kerry.

If gassing of civilians really is the main issue, the best thing is to wait for the report of the UN inspectors in Syria.