U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry last week accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons, even though United Nations officials have said there’s no such evidence.
Kerry’s claim is the basis of President Obama’s effort to try and rally Congress to support a military attack on Syria.
What the U.S. government doesn’t talk about-these reports:
In May of this year, UN investigators reported that rebel forces, not the Bashar al-Asaad government, had used chemicals, specifically lethal sarin, causing casualties in the civil war. According to a May 5 report from Reuters:
The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.
“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.
“This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,” she added, speaking in Italian.
Then, a second report on May 30 revealed alleged terrorists in Turkey possessing sarin, with the suspected intent of taking it to Syria. Global Research noted a report from Turkey’s state media Zamen:
…agents from the Turkish General Directorate of Security (Emniyet Genel M√ºd√ºrl√ºƒü√º) seized 2 kg of sarin gas in the city of Adana in the early hours of yesterday morning. The chemical weapons were in the possession of Al Nusra terrorists believed to have been heading for Syria.
Sarin gas is a colourless, odorless substance which is extremely difficult to detect. The gas is banned under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.
The EGM identified 12 members of the AL Nusra terrorist cell and also seized fire arms and digital equipment. This is the second major official confirmation of the use of chemical weapons by Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria after UN inspector Carla Del Ponte’s recent statement confirming the use of chemical weapons by the Western-backed terrorists in Syria.
Last week, Foreign Policy magazine carried an Aug. 26 investigative report headlined “Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran.” The article states:
The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America’s military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.
In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.
Then, on Aug. 29, Liberation, an American newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, with offices located throughout the U.S., traced the major uses of chemical weapons, citing nine cases beginning with all sides involved in World War I. The article noted that, during that war:
Gas attacks killed 90,000 soldiers and civilians, while being linked to another 1.2 million casualties. Over 10 percent of all chemists in the United States were involved in the production of chemical weapons during the war, and the government ordered 3,000 tons of its own homegrown type of gas.
The article went on to list Britain’s use of chemical weapons in Mesopotamia in 1920; the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; the U.S. military’s dropping of over 20 million gallons of the deadly chemical Agent Orange over Vietnam; the U.S. use of depleted uranium in the 1991 and 2003 attacks on Iraq; the 2005 U.S. military assault on Fallujah with white phosphorous; Israel’s assaulting Gaza with white phosphorous in 2008-9; and the military’s testing of radioactive chemicals in St. Louis, MO communities in 1953-54 and 1963-65.
So, is the Obama administration really concerned about Syria’s use of chemical weapons? Or could it want to attack the Middle East country for another reason? Peculiar Progressive discussed another reason last week in this article: “Syria: Symbol of Our Government’s Endless-War Addiction.”
