There have been reports that the Syrian Government used Chemical Weapons and people have been killed and as Washing Post reports that the ‘US is mulling unilateral action’, while Britain is against it.
There was a report in the Christian Science Monitor that the earlier claims to this effect have been found to be untrue.
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The images flooded in only hours after the Aug. 21 chemical attack in Damascus’s eastern suburbs. And they soon reached the very highest rungs of the U.S. government: “As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head of a man who held up his dead child, wailing while chaos swirled around him,” said Secretary of State John Kerry in his impassioned Aug. 26 speech. “[T]he images of entire families dead in their beds without a drop of blood or even a visible wound; bodies contorting in spasms; human suffering that we can never ignore or forget.”
Social media also forms a key part of the British intelligence assessment about the attack. As a result of the videos, “there is little serious dispute that chemical attacks causing mass casualties … took place” in Damascus, according to an open letter from the chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee to Prime Minister David Cameron.
The local activists who filmed these videos, then, have accomplished what years of hectoring from the official Syrian opposition have been unable to do — bring the world to the brink of military intervention against Bashar al-Assad‘s regime.(foreignpolicy.com)
CSM’s earlier report on the Chemical attack>
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BEIRUT
An alleged chemical weapons attack near Aleppo yesterday, for which the Syrian regime and the opposition traded accusations of responsibility, almost certainly did not feature a lethal agent proscribed under international convention, say chemical weapons experts after considering the available evidence.
Video footage and eyewitness accounts suggest that if a chemical agent was used in a missile attack on Khan al-Aasal that reportedly killed 31 people and wounded more than 100, it was most likely a riot-control agent designed to cause irritation, which is not generally lethal.”
Let’s look at some of the images of this attack.
Meanwhile, news emerges that the US helped Saddam Hussein to Gas Iran.
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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.
The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq‘s favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration’s long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn’t disclose.
U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein’s government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture>
So the new script is being played out, to invade Syria.