Russia gave UN 100-page report in July blaming Syrian rebels for Aleppo sarin attack
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which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP
reporting, purports to show dead bodies after an attack on Ghouta, Syria
on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2013. | Uncredited/AP
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- On the Web | More Middle East coverage from McClatchy
By Matthew Schofield | McClatchy Foreign Staff
BERLIN — Russia
says a deadly March sarin attack in an Aleppo suburb was carried out by
Syrian rebels, not forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, and it has
delivered a 100-page report laying out its evidence to the United
Nations.
A statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry website late Wednesday said the report included detailed scientific analysis of samples that Russian technicians collected at the site of the alleged attack, Khan al Asal in northern Syria. The attack killed 26 people.
A U.N. spokesman, Farhan Haq, confirmed that Russia delivered the report in July.
The report itself was not released. But the statement drew a pointed comparison between what it said was the scientific detail of the report and the far shorter intelligence summaries that the United States, Britain and France have released to justify their assertion that the Syrian government launched chemical weapons against Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. The longest of those summaries, by the French, ran nine pages. Each relies primarily on circumstantial evidence to make its case, and they disagree with one another on some details, including the number of people who died in the attack.
The Russian statement warned the United States and its allies not to conduct a military strike against Syria until the United Nations had completed a similarly detailed scientific study into the Aug. 21 attack. It charged that what it called the current “hysteria” about a possible military strike in the West was similar to the false claims and poor intelligence that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Russia said its investigation of the March 19 incident was conducted under strict protocols established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international agency that governs adherence to treaties prohibiting the use of chemical weapons. It said samples that Russian technicians had collected had been sent to OPCW-certified laboratories in Russia.
“The Russian report is specific,” the ministry statement said. “It is a scientific and technical document.”
The Russian statement said Russian officials had broken the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ code of silence on such probes only because Western nations appear to be “preparing the ground for military action” in retaliation for the Aug. 21 incident.
A U.N. team spent four days late last month investigating the Aug. 21 incident. The samples it collected from the site and alleged victims of the attack are currently being examined at the chemical weapons organization’s labs in Europe. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged the United States to delay any strike until after the results of that investigation are known. But U.S. officials have dismissed the U.N. probe, saying it won’t tell them anything they don’t already know.
White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said U.S. officials were unmoved by the Russian report and held the Assad government responsible for both the Khan al Asal attack in March and the Aug. 21 attack outside Damascus.
“We have studied the Russian report but have found no reason to change our assessment,” she said.
Independent chemical weapons experts contacted by McClatchy said they were not familiar with the report and had not read the Russian statement, which was posted as Secretary of State John Kerry was appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to make the Obama administration’s case for a retaliatory strike on Syria as punishment for the August attack. But they were cautious about the details made public in the Russian statement.
Richard Guthrie, formerly project leader of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said the Russian statement on the makeup of the sarin found at Khan al Asal, which the Russians indicated was not military grade, might reflect only that “there are a lot of different ways to make sarin.”
He added: “The messy mix described by the Russians might also be the result of an old sarin stock being used. Sarin degrades (the molecules break up) over time and this would explain a dirty mix.”
He also said there could be doubts about the Russian conclusion that the rockets that delivered the sarin in the March 19 incident were not likely to have come from Syrian military stocks because of their use of RDX, an explosive that is also known as hexogen and T4.
“Militaries don’t tend to use it because it’s too expensive,” Guthrie said. He added in a later email, however, that it’s not inconceivable that the Syrian military would use RDX “if the government side was developing a semi-improvised short-range rocket” and “if there happened to be a stock available.”
“While I would agree that it would be unlikely for a traditional, well-planned short-range rocket development program to use RDX in that role, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that, as the Syrian government did not seem to have an earlier short-range rocket program, it may have been developing rockets with some haste and so using materials that are at hand,” he wrote.
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, questioned a Russian assertion that the sarin mix appeared to be a Western World War II vintage.
“The Western Allies were not aware of the nerve agents until after the occupation of Germany,” he wrote in an email. “The USA, for example, struggled with the sarin (despite having some of the German scientists) until the 1950s, when the CW program expanded considerably.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry posted the statement shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin had asked a Russian interviewer what the American reaction would be if evidence showed that Syrian rebels, not the Assad regime, had been behind a chemical weapons attack.
The report dealt with an incident that occurred March 19 in Khan al Asal, outside Aleppo, in which 26 people died and 86 were sickened. It was that incident that the U.N. team now probing the Aug. 21 attack was originally assigned to investigate, and the Russian statement noted that the investigation had been sidetracked by the sudden focus on the later incident.
Haq, the U.N. spokesman, acknowledged that the most recent attack “has pushed the investigation of the Aleppo incident to the back burner for now.” But he said that “the inspectors will get back to it as soon as is possible.”
The statement’s summary of the report said that neither the munitions nor the poison gas in the Khan al Asal attack appeared to fit what is possessed by the Syrian government. The statement said Russian investigators studied the site, sent the materials they found to study to the Russian laboratories of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and followed agreed-upon United Nations investigation standards.
According to the statement, the report said the shell “was not regular Syrian army ammunition but was an artisan-type similar to unguided rocket projectiles produced in the north of Syria by the so-called gang ‘Bashair An-Nasr.’”
The Russian analysis found soil and shell samples contained a sarin gas “not synthesized in an industrial environment,” the statement said. The report said the chemical mix did not appear to be a modern version of the deadly agent but was closer to those “used by Western states for producing chemical weapons during World War II.”
The statement said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons team had examined Syrian soldiers injured in the March attack and said that no reaction to the more recent alleged chemical account should be considered without also considering that the rebels, too, have used chemical weapons.
“It is obvious that any objective investigation of the incident on Aug. 21 in East Ghouta is impossible without considering the circumstances of the March attack,” the statement said. Ghouta is the area near Damascus where the Aug. 21 attack took place.
(Lesley Clark contributed to this report from St. Petersburg, Russia.)
A statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry website late Wednesday said the report included detailed scientific analysis of samples that Russian technicians collected at the site of the alleged attack, Khan al Asal in northern Syria. The attack killed 26 people.
A U.N. spokesman, Farhan Haq, confirmed that Russia delivered the report in July.
The report itself was not released. But the statement drew a pointed comparison between what it said was the scientific detail of the report and the far shorter intelligence summaries that the United States, Britain and France have released to justify their assertion that the Syrian government launched chemical weapons against Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. The longest of those summaries, by the French, ran nine pages. Each relies primarily on circumstantial evidence to make its case, and they disagree with one another on some details, including the number of people who died in the attack.
The Russian statement warned the United States and its allies not to conduct a military strike against Syria until the United Nations had completed a similarly detailed scientific study into the Aug. 21 attack. It charged that what it called the current “hysteria” about a possible military strike in the West was similar to the false claims and poor intelligence that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Russia said its investigation of the March 19 incident was conducted under strict protocols established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international agency that governs adherence to treaties prohibiting the use of chemical weapons. It said samples that Russian technicians had collected had been sent to OPCW-certified laboratories in Russia.
“The Russian report is specific,” the ministry statement said. “It is a scientific and technical document.”
The Russian statement said Russian officials had broken the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ code of silence on such probes only because Western nations appear to be “preparing the ground for military action” in retaliation for the Aug. 21 incident.
A U.N. team spent four days late last month investigating the Aug. 21 incident. The samples it collected from the site and alleged victims of the attack are currently being examined at the chemical weapons organization’s labs in Europe. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged the United States to delay any strike until after the results of that investigation are known. But U.S. officials have dismissed the U.N. probe, saying it won’t tell them anything they don’t already know.
White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said U.S. officials were unmoved by the Russian report and held the Assad government responsible for both the Khan al Asal attack in March and the Aug. 21 attack outside Damascus.
“We have studied the Russian report but have found no reason to change our assessment,” she said.
Independent chemical weapons experts contacted by McClatchy said they were not familiar with the report and had not read the Russian statement, which was posted as Secretary of State John Kerry was appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to make the Obama administration’s case for a retaliatory strike on Syria as punishment for the August attack. But they were cautious about the details made public in the Russian statement.
Richard Guthrie, formerly project leader of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said the Russian statement on the makeup of the sarin found at Khan al Asal, which the Russians indicated was not military grade, might reflect only that “there are a lot of different ways to make sarin.”
He added: “The messy mix described by the Russians might also be the result of an old sarin stock being used. Sarin degrades (the molecules break up) over time and this would explain a dirty mix.”
He also said there could be doubts about the Russian conclusion that the rockets that delivered the sarin in the March 19 incident were not likely to have come from Syrian military stocks because of their use of RDX, an explosive that is also known as hexogen and T4.
“Militaries don’t tend to use it because it’s too expensive,” Guthrie said. He added in a later email, however, that it’s not inconceivable that the Syrian military would use RDX “if the government side was developing a semi-improvised short-range rocket” and “if there happened to be a stock available.”
“While I would agree that it would be unlikely for a traditional, well-planned short-range rocket development program to use RDX in that role, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that, as the Syrian government did not seem to have an earlier short-range rocket program, it may have been developing rockets with some haste and so using materials that are at hand,” he wrote.
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, questioned a Russian assertion that the sarin mix appeared to be a Western World War II vintage.
“The Western Allies were not aware of the nerve agents until after the occupation of Germany,” he wrote in an email. “The USA, for example, struggled with the sarin (despite having some of the German scientists) until the 1950s, when the CW program expanded considerably.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry posted the statement shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin had asked a Russian interviewer what the American reaction would be if evidence showed that Syrian rebels, not the Assad regime, had been behind a chemical weapons attack.
The report dealt with an incident that occurred March 19 in Khan al Asal, outside Aleppo, in which 26 people died and 86 were sickened. It was that incident that the U.N. team now probing the Aug. 21 attack was originally assigned to investigate, and the Russian statement noted that the investigation had been sidetracked by the sudden focus on the later incident.
Haq, the U.N. spokesman, acknowledged that the most recent attack “has pushed the investigation of the Aleppo incident to the back burner for now.” But he said that “the inspectors will get back to it as soon as is possible.”
The statement’s summary of the report said that neither the munitions nor the poison gas in the Khan al Asal attack appeared to fit what is possessed by the Syrian government. The statement said Russian investigators studied the site, sent the materials they found to study to the Russian laboratories of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and followed agreed-upon United Nations investigation standards.
According to the statement, the report said the shell “was not regular Syrian army ammunition but was an artisan-type similar to unguided rocket projectiles produced in the north of Syria by the so-called gang ‘Bashair An-Nasr.’”
The Russian analysis found soil and shell samples contained a sarin gas “not synthesized in an industrial environment,” the statement said. The report said the chemical mix did not appear to be a modern version of the deadly agent but was closer to those “used by Western states for producing chemical weapons during World War II.”
The statement said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons team had examined Syrian soldiers injured in the March attack and said that no reaction to the more recent alleged chemical account should be considered without also considering that the rebels, too, have used chemical weapons.
“It is obvious that any objective investigation of the incident on Aug. 21 in East Ghouta is impossible without considering the circumstances of the March attack,” the statement said. Ghouta is the area near Damascus where the Aug. 21 attack took place.
(Lesley Clark contributed to this report from St. Petersburg, Russia.)
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/09/05/201268/russia-releases-100-page-report.html#.UijKpD9ui6E#storylink=cpy
Is
President Obama a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood? “That would
explain a lot” his detractors might say. “What would that explain?” you
might shoot back. Umm…
Let’s go back to the start of the latest “Barack Obama is secretly a
Muslim” nonspiracy. A few days ago, Shadi Hamid, the Director of
Research at the Brookings Doha Center, posted a couple of pictures of a
local Egyptian paper on Twitter.
Said paper claims that President Obama is a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and further, the paper says it has proof.
“If you missed it, ‘liberal’ Egyptian newspaper has front page headline
claiming Obama as full-on member of Muslim Brotherhood international,”
Hamid wrote.
“Newspaper also claims that son of MB leader threatened Obama with
release of ‘papers’ revealing his MB membership,” he continued.
The paper also alleges that President Obama’s half-brother Malik is an
al Qaeda activist.
So far, the story is being ignored by the mainstream media. Al Jazeera
included it as a footnote in their blog, and a handful of smaller sites
have picked it up.
But even right-leaning blogs, of which this kind of story is often both
the bread and the butter, seem to openly doubt the dubious claims.
obama muslim brotherhood
Jonathan Spyer, senior research fellow at the Global Research in
International Affairs Center and an Arabic speaker, told The Blaze that
the Egyptian populace are frustrated with President Obama and his
policies, which they see as pro-Muslim Brotherhood.
President Obama was supportive of the democratically-elected Mohamed
Morsi, himself a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but distanced himself
from the Egyptian president after he started leaning toward the
despotic.
“There is some degree of justification in their accusations,” Spyer
said. But…
“There is also a large degree of paranoid anti-American and
anti-western sentiment in Egypt. As a result, the anger against the
Administration has rapidly and predictably turned into conspiracy
theories according to which Obama’s admittedly astonishingly naive and
misguided attitude toward the Muslim Brotherhood can in fact be
explained by the claim that he is a secret member of it.”
Eric Trager, an Egypt scholar at The Washington Institute for Near East
Policy added: “This sort of conspiracy theorizing is sadly common within
the Egyptian media. It reflects Egyptians’ inability to take
responsibility for the choices that they’ve made in the past few years –
specifically, their choice to elect the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate
in the June 2012 presidential election.”
Trager also regards the conspiracy theory that President Obama is
somehow a Muslim Brotherhood member as a sign of “fascistic tendencies”
that are “hardening in Egyptian politics.”
He adds, “fascists always need an external enemy to justify their
support for, or execution of, repressive policies.”
“Newspapers have run more and more bizarre and farcical stories over the
last few months, but this one indeed seems to be the oddest story to
have yet been printed,” writes MEMO, a Middle East media bias watchdog.
But even if you have no respect for expert opinion and analysis, several
respected and nonpartisan fact-checkers (yeah, we know WaPo doesn’t
count) have taken down the “Barack Obama is a Muslim” nonspiracy time
and time again over the years, with a bunch of actual facts and evidence
(where nonspiracists have a marked lack thereof).
There are pictures of President Obama eating hot dogs during Ramadan,
for pete’s sake.
Additionally, many otherwise harsh critics of President Obama don’t take
stock in the Muslim rumor at all. Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter
thinks it’s absolutely ridiculous, and believes that he’s probably an
Atheist based on her own observations.
Oh, and then Muslims actually hate him. There’s that.
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/935849/president-obama-member-of-muslim-brotherhood-egypt-paper-claims-to-have-proof/#fb4kyhKkYhaZCPYC.99
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/935849/president-obama-member-of-muslim-brotherhood-egypt-paper-claims-to-have-proof/#fb4kyhKkYhaZCPYC.99
President
Obama, Member Of Muslim Brotherhood? Egypt Paper Claims To Have Proof
Is President Obama a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood? “That
would explain a lot” his detractors might say. “What would that
explain?” you might shoot back. Umm…
Let’s go back to the start of the latest “Barack Obama is secretly a
Muslim” nonspiracy. A few days ago, Shadi Hamid, the Director of
Research at the Brookings Doha Center, posted a couple of pictures of a
local Egyptian paper on Twitter.
Said paper claims that President Obama is a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and further, the paper says it has proof.
“If you missed it, ‘liberal’ Egyptian newspaper has front page headline
claiming Obama as full-on member of Muslim Brotherhood international,”
Hamid wrote.
“Newspaper also claims that son of MB leader threatened Obama with
release of ‘papers’ revealing his MB membership,” he continued.
The paper also alleges that President Obama’s half-brother Malik is an
al Qaeda activist.
So far, the story is being ignored by the mainstream media. Al Jazeera
included it as a footnote in their blog, and a handful of smaller sites
have picked it up.
But even right-leaning blogs, of which this kind of story is often both
the bread and the butter, seem to openly doubt the dubious claims.
obama muslim brotherhood
Jonathan Spyer, senior research fellow at the Global Research in
International Affairs Center and an Arabic speaker, told The Blaze that
the Egyptian populace are frustrated with President Obama and his
policies, which they see as pro-Muslim Brotherhood.
President Obama was supportive of the democratically-elected Mohamed
Morsi, himself a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but distanced himself
from the Egyptian president after he started leaning toward the
despotic.
“There is some degree of justification in their accusations,” Spyer
said. But…
“There is also a large degree of paranoid anti-American and
anti-western sentiment in Egypt. As a result, the anger against the
Administration has rapidly and predictably turned into conspiracy
theories according to which Obama’s admittedly astonishingly naive and
misguided attitude toward the Muslim Brotherhood can in fact be
explained by the claim that he is a secret member of it.”
Eric Trager, an Egypt scholar at The Washington Institute for Near East
Policy added: “This sort of conspiracy theorizing is sadly common within
the Egyptian media. It reflects Egyptians’ inability to take
responsibility for the choices that they’ve made in the past few years –
specifically, their choice to elect the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate
in the June 2012 presidential election.”
Trager also regards the conspiracy theory that President Obama is
somehow a Muslim Brotherhood member as a sign of “fascistic tendencies”
that are “hardening in Egyptian politics.”
He adds, “fascists always need an external enemy to justify their
support for, or execution of, repressive policies.”
“Newspapers have run more and more bizarre and farcical stories over the
last few months, but this one indeed seems to be the oddest story to
have yet been printed,” writes MEMO, a Middle East media bias watchdog.
But even if you have no respect for expert opinion and analysis, several
respected and nonpartisan fact-checkers (yeah, we know WaPo doesn’t
count) have taken down the “Barack Obama is a Muslim” nonspiracy time
and time again over the years, with a bunch of actual facts and evidence
(where nonspiracists have a marked lack thereof).
There are pictures of President Obama eating hot dogs during Ramadan,
for pete’s sake.
Additionally, many otherwise harsh critics of President Obama don’t take
stock in the Muslim rumor at all. Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter
thinks it’s absolutely ridiculous, and believes that he’s probably an
Atheist based on her own observations.
Oh, and then Muslims actually hate him. There’s that.
So if President Obama is a Muslim Brotherhood gold member, he’s a bad
one. Can’t he just be a bad president, especially with regard to
international policy, instead?
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/935849/president-obama-member-of-muslim-brotherhood-egypt-paper-claims-to-have-proof/#fb4kyhKkYhaZCPYC.99
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/935849/president-obama-member-of-muslim-brotherhood-egypt-paper-claims-to-have-proof/#fb4kyhKkYhaZCPYC.99
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