Israel Says It Has Proof That Syria Has Used Chemical Weapons

[Ed Anger]

Well, cnn sez WH sez that sarin has been used.

We are now at BONERCON 4.

[Warspite]

Some seriously confused messaging going on by the administration right now.

[Ed Anger]

CNN is beating the war drums.

[derspiess]

Some seriously confused messaging going on by the administration right now.

Like we've never seen that before

[jimmy olsen]

Hagel interview can be seen here.


http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/25/17913974-white-house-us-believes-syrian-regime-used-chemical-weapons?lite

By Kristen Welker, Jim Miklaszewski, Courtney Kube and Tracy Connor, NBC News

The White House said Thursday that the U.S. believes "with some degree of varying confidence" the Syrian government has used chemical weapons — specifically the nerve agent sarin — against its own people.

A letter from the White House to members of Congress said the assessment was based on "physiological samples" but called for a United Nations probe to corroborate it and nail down when and how they were used.

"We are continuing to do further work to establish a definitive judgement as to whether or not the red line has been crossed and to inform our decision-making about what we'll do next," a White House official said.

"All options are on the table in terms of our response," the official added.

Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters at the Capitol that the U.S. believes chemical weapons were used twice, but the letter doesn't specify that.

"Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin," the letter said.

"We do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime," it added.

"Thus far, we believe that the Assad regime maintains custody of these weapons, and has demonstrated a willingness to escalate its horrific use of violence against the Syrian people."

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he had not seen the evidence supporting the assessment, but added that use of chemical agents "violates every convention of war."

Sarin is a man-made nerve agent that has been used in terrorist attacks in Japan and possibly during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. In large doses, it can cause convulsions, paralysis and death.

The U.S. has long believed that Syria was stockpiling chemical weapons. Intelligence reports indicate that it has sarin and the nerve agent tabun along with traditional chemicals like mustard gas and hydrogen cyanide. A 2011 CIA report said Syria was also developing the potent nerve agent VX, which could render a city uninhabitable for days.

Syria's information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, said in an interview with Russian TV that the government has not and will not use chemical weapons and blamed potential evidence of their existence on "armed terrorist groups," the state news agency reported.

A spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army, Fahd Almasri, claimed Syria has launched chemical attacks in nine places and was poised to do so again at the Lebanon border and in Damascus "when Assad knows he is finished."

"Now is the moment to find a solution very quickly," Almasri told NBC News in a phone interview.

President Obama has said the verified use of chemical weapons by the regime would be a "red line" and a "game-changer" for U.S. and international military intervention in the Syrian civil war.

"Precisely because the President takes this issue so seriously, we have an obligation to fully investigate any and all evidence of chemical weapons use within Syria," said the letter, which was signed by Obama's legislative director, Miguel Rodriguez.

The letter was a response to a request from a bipartisan group of senators who asked the White House for answers after the Israeli military's top intelligence analyst cited photographs of people "foaming from the mouth" as evidence of chemical weapons use.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the development "deeply troubling."

"While more work needs to be done to fully verify this assessment...it is becoming increasingly clear that we must step up our efforts," Corker said.

"I should make clear, however, that it if it comes to the use of military force, before the president takes any action to commit U.S. forces to any effort in Syria or elsewhere, I expect him to fully consult with the Senate and seek an authorization for the use of military force."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the assessment could spark a dangerous reaction from Damascus.

"I am very concerned that with this public acknowledgement, President Assad may calculate he has nothing more to lose and the likelihood he will further escalate this conflict therefore increases," Feinstein said.

The White House official called for a high level of scrutiny — but also caution.

"Given our own history with intelligence assessments, including intelligence assessments related to weapons of mass destruction, it's very important that we are able to establish this with certainty and that we are able to present information in a way that is airtight," the official said.

NBC News' Kasie Hunt, Kelly O'Donnell, Robert Windrem and Charlene Gubash contributed to this story

[mongers]

BTW, this adds to US reluctance to get involved. What if the US crushes the Syrian gov't, and the rebels the US supported end up engaging in an Islamic pogrom against the Alawites as a result - which is not an impossible scenario? Involvement may end up with an unlimited commitment to rule the place just to avoid the humiliation of being complicit in massacre.

It's not just Alawites, if the Assad regime falls there won't be a single extented Christian family left in the country with a few short years. 
All the other minorities are likely to fare rather badly, goodness what will happen with the Kurds in the North-East.

[mongers]

Incidentally, has anyone been checking on the casualty figures being collected by the various human rights/NGOs ?

The latest figures I saw, showed a couple of interesting trends, namely rebel and government casualties are very similar in total, to with a few hundred dead.

And the good/bad news item, relatively few genuine civilians have been killed as compared to those involved in the fighting, by this I mean they were well under 50% of the total.
The bad news component of that, we often see civilian deaths in civil wars outnumber military deaths by multiples, perhaps ten to one. So the potential is there for the Syrian civil war to get an awful lot more bloody, women and children becoming the major victims. 

A side note, my impression it the rebels have played a blinder by mobilising social media, especially youtube/video services, to tell the 'story' of massive civilian casualties.

[jimmy olsen]

This looks like some relatively solid proof.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/sarin-tainted-blood/

Syrian Blood Tests Positive for Sarin Gas, U.S. Spies Say

    By Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman
    04.25.13
    1:11 PM

Updated 4:49 p.m.

The U.S. intelligence community has uncovered strong evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria. Several blood samples, taken from multiple people, have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, an American intelligence source tells Danger Room. President Obama has long said that the use of such a weapon by the Assad regime would cross a "red line." So now the question becomes: What will the White House do in response?

In March, the Assad regime was accused of using chemical weapons during an attack on the city of Aleppo. The blood samples were taken by Syrian opposition groups from alleged victims of that strike. But American analysts can't be entirely sure where the blood came from or when the precisely exposure took place.

"This is more than one organization representing that they have more than one sample from more than one attack," the source tells Danger Room. "But we can't confirm anything because no is really sure what's going on in country."

What's clear is that the samples are authentic, and that the weapons were almost certainly employed by the Assad regime, which began mixing up quantities of sarin's chemical precursors months ago for an potential attack, as Danger Room first reported.

"It would be very, very difficult for the opposition to fake this. Not only would they need the wherewithal to steal it or brew it up themselves. Then they'd need volunteers who would notionally agree to a possibly lethal exposure," the source adds.

The U.S. military tests for evidence of nerve gas exposure by looking for the presence of the enzyme cholinesterase in red blood cells and in plasma. (Sarin messes with the enzyme, which in turn allows a key neurotransmitter to build up in the body, causing rather awful muscle spasms.) The less cholinesterase they find, they more likely there was a nerve gas hit.

The problem is, some pesticides will also depress cholinesterase. So the military employs a second test. When sarin binds to cholinesterase it loses a fluoride. The pesticides don't do this. This other test exposes a blood sample to fluoride ions, which reconstitutes sarin if it's there, in which case it can be detected with mass spectrometry.

Blood samples are drawn from a pricked finger tip into a 10 milliliter tube. They can be kept fresh for about a week before they have to be used in the blood analyzer, a gizmo about the size of a scientific calculator that produces varying shades of yellow depending on the cholinesterase level.

According to the Financial Times, one blood sample was analyzed by American analysts, while the other was examined by Britain's Defence Science Technology Laboratory.

Exactly when the results came back isn't clear. But only days ago, the Obama administration was throwing cold water on reports from Israeli and British officials of chemical weapon use in Syria. ("We have not come to the conclusion that there has been that use," White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Tuesday.) But that changed Thursday morning, when the White House issued a letter (.pdf) to Senators Carl Levin and John McCain confirming the sarin discovery.

"Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specially the chemical agent sarin. This assessment is based on physiological samples," the letter reads.  "Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions."

It's not at all clear how the Obama administration will now respond. While everyone from the President on down has warned the Assad regime not to use its chemical arms, the White House has been extremely careful not to "pin the administration down on any particular course of action while at the same time not giving Assad any comfort," Steven Simon, who served as the National Security Council's director for the Mideast until December, tells Danger Room. "There's no automaticity to any response."

That was underscored by a White House official briefing reporters on background on Thursday afternoon. The official, who refused to be quoted by name, said that the next step for the administration would be "further investigation," including by the United Nations, to confirm that chemical weapons were used deliberately by the Assad regime.

But the U.N. is already looking into the claims that chemical weapons were used during the March attack in Aleppo. One of the many reasons that the Obama administration has been very careful about going public with these sarin reports is that they're worried about spoiling that U.N. inquiry. "It could bias the investigation and hurt the U.N.'s ability to get in country," the intelligence source tells Danger Room.

The White House official said it would be premature to declare that Obama's red line has been crossed. "It's precisely because we take the red line seriously that we feel like there needs to be clear, factual, evidentiary bases for our decisions," the official said. "Given our own history with intelligence assessments, including intelligence assessments related to weapons of mass destruction" — a reference to the infamous incorrect assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons before the Iraq invasion — "it's very important that we are able to establish this with certainty."

Members of Congress with access to intelligence immediately went further.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a statement saying, "It is clear that 'red lines' have been crossed and action must be taken to prevent larger scale use." Feinstein appeared to mean military action to remove Assad from power: "I urge the United Nations Security Council — including Russia — to finally take strong and meaningful action to end this crisis in Syria."

Her House counterpart, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), was a bit more cautious. "President Obama correctly said that Syria's use of chemical weapons would be a red line for the United States," Rogers said in his own statement this afternoon. "Now that we have confirmed their use, the question is what is our plan for transition to a post-Assad Syria? I have laid out several steps, short of boots on the ground. The world is waiting for American leadership."

[Viking]

Incidentally, has anyone been checking on the casualty figures being collected by the various human rights/NGOs ?

The latest figures I saw, showed a couple of interesting trends, namely rebel and government casualties are very similar in total, to with a few hundred dead.

And the good/bad news item, relatively few genuine civilians have been killed as compared to those involved in the fighting, by this I mean they were well under 50% of the total.
The bad news component of that, we often see civilian deaths in civil wars outnumber military deaths by multiples, perhaps ten to one. So the potential is there for the Syrian civil war to get an awful lot more bloody, women and children becoming the major victims. 

A side note, my impression it the rebels have played a blinder by mobilising social media, especially youtube/video services, to tell the 'story' of massive civilian casualties.

I'm not sure where you get your numbers. At the "Casualties of the Syrian civil war" page at Wikipedia the various sources are reasonably consistent with a total of 70,000 dead (plus minus 10,000 depending on source) and of these up to 50,000 were identified as civilians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil_war

[KRonn]

So now it appears there will be a likely intervention, the US/NATO, maybe UN but that depends on Russia and China going along. I'm not happy over another US involvement in another very messy situation. Given how the radicals have joined the rebels I almost want Assad to retain power now. It'd be either a nasty secular dictatorship continuing or a new nasty theocratic dictatorship if the rebels win, with a lot more bloodshed of "undesirables" having to exodus the country if the rebels win and the extremists gain some power, which is likely they would if they're helping to win the fight.

[Viking]

So now it appears there will be a likely intervention, the US/NATO, maybe UN but that depends on Russia and China going along. I'm not happy over another US involvement in another very messy situation. Given how the radicals have joined the rebels I almost want Assad to retain power now. It'd be either a nasty secular dictatorship continuing or a new nasty theocratic dictatorship if the rebels win, with a lot more bloodshed of "undesirables" having to exodus the country if the rebels win and the extremists gain some power, which is likely they would if they're helping to win the fight.

Given it's status as a french former colony I suggest we let the french take the lead and therefore we will be able to completely ignore the UN.

[derspiess]

This looks like some relatively solid proof.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/sarin-tainted-blood/

No chain of custody.  We're not going to go to war on the rebels' word that the samples were taken from the actual victims in question and not tampered with.

[PDH]

No chain of custody.  We're not going to go to war on the rebels' word that the samples were taken from the actual victims in question and not tampered with.

   Ok, Mr Waffle-Obama

[Razgovory]

This looks like some relatively solid proof.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/sarin-tainted-blood/

No chain of custody.  We're not going to go to war on the rebels' word that the samples were taken from the actual victims in question and not tampered with.

We did ten years ago.

[Viking]

This looks like some relatively solid proof.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/sarin-tainted-blood/

No chain of custody.  We're not going to go to war on the rebels' word that the samples were taken from the actual victims in question and not tampered with.

Assuming that they have tissue samples as well. Artificial lungs can oxygenate blood so putting sarin instead of oxygen into one of those machines can artificially create sarin tainted blood samples. We don't even know if this happened recently since blood can be preserved and I'm pretty sure nobody has studied the effects of sarin poisoning on blood preservation.