US Presents Evidence

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listed on Friday what Americans know about the chemical massacre in Syria but he didn’t say how they know it. We must take his word for that.

So how do they know? Trails lead to the National Security Agency (NSA) — the American electronic intelligence service that tracks everything on telephone and Internet lines practically all over the world, which we know thanks to Edward Snowden’s disclosures.

As web portal Foreign Policy has found out, the NSA eavesdropped on a certain telephone call on Aug. 21, a couple of hours after missiles with chemical explosives were fired on the outskirts of the Syrian capital city. A high-ranking official in the Syrian Department of Defense called the leader of a chemical corps unit and demanded an explanation of why so many were killed — around 1,000. From the very beginning, it was commonly known that chemical weapons were used, thanks to video records from the site of attack uploaded to the Internet by the Syrian rebels. One can see in those records tens of bodies, including those belonging to women and children, without any visible injuries. Three local hospitals, which cooperate with the organization Doctors Without Borders, reported that they admitted 3,500 patients who presented symptoms of poisoning by gas similar to sarin. They noted 355 fatalities.

What wasn’t certain was who used the poison gas — the rebels accused the governmental army and vice versa.

The eavesdropped conversation doesn’t dispel the doubts, though it shows that over 1,000 people probably died by accident. This year, the Syrian army has already used sarin several times against the rebels, but on a small scale (as an additive to tear gas which is used to disperse demonstrations all over the world). Such a mixture paralyzes but rarely kills. That’s why there were so few fatalities before Aug. 21.

However, it looks like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad agrees with Winston Churchill’s opinion when he was in office as minister [of munitions]. He said in a session of the British government in May 1919: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. […] I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: Gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror ….”

Churchill called for to use deadly gases against disobedient Arabs in the British protectorate of Mesopotamia (later Iraq) but in the end his idea wasn’t implemented. Only Assad carried it out almost 100 years later.

Unfortunately, the soldiers added too much sarin to the mixture on the unlucky Wednesday, which caused death of over 1,000 people and an angry call from the [Syrian] department [of defense]. That would mean that Assad didn’t order gassing hundreds of people that day (though he had accepted “Churchill doctrine” for months).

It has also leaked out that Americans have one more piece of evidence — Israelis registered that chemicals were delivered to the Syrian army unit before the attack. John Kerry spoke about it without citing any source. In his opinion, the collected evidence combined with commonly known video records and doctors’ reports is enough.

The use of chemical weapon is usually confirmed by tests of soil and victims’ blood samples. Such evidence can be delivered only by the U.N. inspectors who carried out the examination in Damascus.