{"id":38983,"date":"2014-01-27T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=38983"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:20:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:20:03","slug":"no-really-the-sarin-attack-wasnt-assads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/01\/no-really-the-sarin-attack-wasnt-assads\/","title":{"rendered":"No, Really, the Sarin Attack Wasn\u2019t Assad\u2019s"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent report by highly respected experts shows that it\u2019s almost certain that the Assad regime wasn\u2019t responsible for the sarin attack on the suburbs of Damascus.<\/i><\/p>\n

Benghazi has given conservatives another chance to sink their teeth into a conspiracy (and Hillary Clinton\u2019s pant leg) and hold on for dear life. Its most recent installment is their\u00a0\u201cknee-jerk\u00a0claim,\u201d as Media Matters\u2019 Eric Boehlert<\/a> referred to it earlier this month,\u00a0that\u00a0David Kirkpatrick\u2019s\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/i>series,\u00a0A Deadly Mix In Benghazi<\/a>, \u201cwas really an elaborate effort to aid Hillary Clinton if she runs for president in three years.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the meantime, conservatives are neglecting another controversy that\u2019s morphing into a conspiracy \u2015 allegations that Syria\u2019s Assad regime launched a sarin gas attack on Damascus\u2019s Ghouta suburb. The Obama administration was prepared to use that as a pretext for military intervention (until, of course, Secretary of State Kerry said of Assad, \u201cHe could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week\u201d and Russia jumped into the void).<\/p>\n

You\u2019d think that conservatives would jump all over the charge that President Obama was prepared to lead us into war without proof. Unfortunately for them, they\u2019re too divided between hawks favoring intervention and, on the other hand, libertarians and Tea Party types opposed to intervention, especially when they could care less about the people to whose aid the United States would ostensibly be coming.<\/p>\n

In any event, a recent report on the sarin attack seems to prove Seymour Hersh<\/a> right yet again. In December, in the London Review of Books,<\/i> he wrote:<\/p>\n

In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order \u2013 a planning document that precedes a ground invasion \u2013 citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.<\/p>\n

On January 15 at McClatchy, Matthew Scofield wrote about the new report.<\/p>\n

A new study suggests the U.S. intelligence assessments of the August 2013 chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, Syria, were flawed. The study says the design of rocket used in the attack, 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 Syrian government.<\/p>\n

In the report, titled \u201cPossible Implications of Faulty U.S. Technical Intelligence,\u201d Richard Lloyd, a former United Nations weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argue that the question about the rocket\u2019s range indicates a major weakness in the case for military action initially pressed by Obama administration officials.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse for how quickly the administration rushed to judgment on the Assad regime\u2019s guilt.<\/p>\n

Lloyd, who has spent the past half-year studying the weapons and capabilities in the Syrian conflict, disputed the assumption that the rebels are less capable of making rockets than the Syrian military.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Syrian rebels most definitely have the ability to make these weapons,\u201d he said. \u201cI think they might have more ability than the Syrian government.\u201d<\/p>\n

If conservatives were smart, they would drop Benghazi like an old bone and instead chomp down and begin chewing on the Obama administration\u2019s insistence that the Assad regime launched a chemical-weapon attack. Both single-minded and short-sighted, it ignited a sequence of events guaranteeing that, to administer the dismantlement of his chemical-weapons program, Assad remains in office.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 fpif.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent report by highly respected experts shows that it\u2019s almost certain that the Assad regime wasn\u2019t responsible for the sarin attack on the suburbs of Damascus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syria-in-context"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}