The attack on Syria

[red_elk]

I think the doctor and medical student (who was obviously under duress/reading a script) in his video who claimed all the patients they were treating and the 70+ people who died suffered suffocation from a dust storm to obviously be a Syrian (or Russian) scam to cast doubt, flat out lie.

The OPCW reports doesn't add any evidence confirming your version - if these people were telling the truth, there was no need to put them under duress.
But the fact that no traces of nerve agent were found, confirms that rebels were lying about nerve gas attack in the hospital.
And people who used this as pretext for attack against Syria most likely knew that rebels staged it.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Does the OPCW report say anything about a dust storm? They never touched that aspect at all, to confirm or deny, did they? The medical student was obviously reading a script, much more obvious than Skirpal, looking to the side far more often and obviously than Skirpal was glancing down. Hers looked more genuine, and all your side can get from her statement is she will 'go back to Russia in the long term' (or is it just a ploy to give Russians hope that she does so she doesn't get put on a hit list if she outright blames Russia and says she will never go back?).

1. Is chlorine a chemical weapon?
......I know chlorine is more readily accessible, so chlorine is easier for the rebels to get their hands on.....so the fact it was chlorine lends itself more to the possibility of rebels, but it doesn't mean it couldn't have been Syria, if we were to assign % chance of who was responsible.
2. Is chlorine a banned chemical weapon?
...if not it should be.
3. What are the symptons of a chlorine attack vs. a nerve agent attack?
....Funny how 'the western media' only focuses on the fact that chlorine was found, while Russian media only focuses on the fact no 'nerve agent' was found.
4. How long does chlorine remain in the soil for evidence to be found? (likely chance of the evidence they found was left over from previous bombings/war., and the odds the previously chlorine-bombed spots were the exact same spots as the new bombs....)
5. Odd how journalists favorable to the regime were allowed in when OPCW were blocked.

 

[red_elk]

Does the OPCW report say anything about a dust storm?

Does it suppose to? It's not a weather forecast studio.
OPCW did its job - the rebels claimed that people were exposed to nerve agent and OPCW was looking for its traces. Didn't find any.

The medical student was obviously reading a script

I did the same on several occasions in my life, such as diploma defense. If I read something from paper, it doesn't mean that it's written by somebody else, much less that I'm lying or under duress. Yulia Skripal was also reading from her own notes, which were shown on TV.

Hers looked more genuine, and all your side can get from her statement is she will 'go back to Russia in the long term'

What else she could realistically say? She couldn't say she's being held against her will and not allowed to contact with friends and relatives, which certainly looks like a possibility. But she definitely could blame Russia in attack, if she believed that's the case. Litvinenko did it at the first opportunity.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Does it suppose to? It's not a weather forecast studio.

Exactly, so of course it doesn't 'provide evidence' of my claim because it was never supposed to be part of their report. What you didn't mention is that it doesn't support the claim that goes against my claim either.

I did the same on several occasions in my life, such as diploma defense.

And your notes were to the side and above you? How odd. At least Skripal's was down in front of her, where most people would put their notes.

What else she could realistically say?

You may recall there was many who thought her speech was scripted, I would't be surprised if you weren't one of them. If she wasn't allowed to say certain things, why would she be allowed to say she wanted to go back to Russia? If she was free to say that, they why wouldn't the rest of her statement be genuine.

 

[red_elk]

Exactly, so of course it doesn't 'provide evidence' of my claim because it was never supposed to be part of their report.

One of your claims was that student and doctor testaments were flat out lie - I only replied that it is not substantiated by anything and that OPCW report doesn't make it more likely too.

And your notes were to the side and above you? How odd.

What position of notes have to do with... anything?

If she wasn't allowed to say certain things, why would she be allowed to say she wanted to go back to Russia? If she was free to say that, they why wouldn't the rest of her statement be genuine.

The rest of her statement might be genuine, but she is obviously not allowed to say everything.

 

[innonimatu]

Is it ending, finally?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has begun what will be a total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, declaring on Wednesday they have succeeded in their mission to defeat Islamic State and were no longer needed in the country.

A decision to pull out completely, confirmed by U.S. officials, coincides with the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops finishing up a campaign to retake territory once held by Islamic State militants.
[...]
But in a campaign to defeat Islamic State in Syria, Obama ordered air strikes from September 2014 and then troops into the country the following year.
The White House declined to offer a timeline for withdrawal and did not confirm explicitly that Trump had ordered a total withdrawal. U.S. officials confirmed that decision to Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
One U.S. official said Washington aimed to withdraw troops within 60 to 100 days and said the U.S. State Department was evacuating all its personnel in Syria within 24 hours. A second official said they could leave even sooner.

I do wonder if this is part of a deal with Turkey, over the saudi thing. Odd things happen in the Middle East.

In any case if this happens Trump will have delivered on one more electoral promise. It takes an outsider to downsize the empire's worldwide network of bases?

 

[Bugfatty300]

More likely a Christmas present for Trump's benefactors in Russia. Maybe now Putin's soldiers can blunder about without getting "spanked like children."

 

[Broken_Erika]

More likely a Christmas present for Trump's benefactors in Russia. Maybe now Putin's soldiers can blunder about without getting "spanked like children."

And Turkey. The Turks are apparently getting ready for a new campaign to crush the Syrian Kurds once and for all, for the glory of the gloriously glorious Sultan Erdogan the glorious.

 

[JollyRoger]

Trump apparently announced this out of the blue. The White House and Department of Defense referred questions to the other as neither was apparently in the loop.

 

[inthesomeday]

Do conservatives generally believe that American troops in Syria would have possibly prevented Erdogan’s genocide of the Kurds? Maybe by accident.

Trump admires Erdogan. Even if the troops had stayed in Syria for decades they wouldn’t have done anything to protect the Kurds, only served as a destabilizing force in the Levant. The Kurds must continue to protect themselves

 

[red_elk]

US failed to meet their strategic objective, regime change. Since last year it didn't make much sense to continue their illegal military presence in Syria.
As for the Kurds, after Turkish occupation of Afrin, they already knew that they chose wrong allies. Now, Assad is the least evil for them.

 

[Lexicus]

In any case if this happens Trump will have delivered on one more electoral promise. It takes an outsider to downsize the empire's worldwide network of bases?

He's not downsizing anything, don't worry. Whatever drawbacks happen in Syria will likely to be compensated for by escalation in less visible conflict zones, notably a lot of Africa.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Yeah I mean as bad as Obama was with drones Trump is a million times worse, he's loosened standards and basically gave the military carte-blanche authroity to bomb anyone and anything, civilians be damned, so highlighting "Trump meeting a campaign promise" is another botched attempt to be contrarian. I mean Trump has spent the last year being a blowhard mouthpiece for Saudi Arabia and glorifying selling tens of millions of dollars to weapons to them. But yeah, downsizing the empire. Sure thing.

 

[tetley]

The U.S. should never have been pursuing regime change in Syria any more than Putin should be pursuing regime change in the Ukraine. Two wrongs don't make a right, though. This battle-for-the-client-states at the expense of the millions of refugees should not be happening.

 

[r16]

totally wrong in the sense it clears New Turkey to fight Iran , or something , but it has to wait the local elections .

 

[red_elk]

This is an opportunity for the Syrian government, to restore control over large part of the country.
Assad should offer Rojava some level of autonomy and protection against possible Turkish invasion in exchange for returning under central government authority.

 

[innonimatu]

News about that OPCW report from last year, about Douma.

A dissenting group of scientists and others recently published online what they say is a report prepared by an employee of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)

You can access the report here. http://syriapropagandamedia.org/wp-...-at-the-Douma-incident-27-February-2019-1.pdf

It strongly suggests that supposed gas cylinders found in bombed buildings in Douma, Syria, were *not* dropped by helicopters on those buildings. May I stress that I offer no alternative explanation as to how they got there. I have no information on this. The condition of these cylinders was simply not consistent with the idea that they had been dropped from helicopters and had then pierced the roof of the building where they were found.

But its findings do not seem to have been taken into account in the OPCW’s final report on the event.
[...]
This section is important because the alleged dropping of these cylinders by a Syrian military helicopter is at the centre of the narrative espoused by those who argue that Syria did use poison gas at Douma last April.

The leaked document differs sharply from this. SO I set out first of all to discover if the OPCW disputed the claim that the leaked document came from within its organisation. As you will see from the response below (As it is mostly flannel, I have highlighted the key words), it does not dispute this.

I have received the following reply from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons:
[...]
"Pursuant to its established policies and practices, the OPCW Technical Secretariat is conducting an internal investigation about the unauthorised release of the document in question"

The truth, that this "chemical attack" was a set-up cynically used to justify further attacks against Syria, perhaps even a deliberate "false flag" operation, has slowly coming out. Not that it hadn't been obvious from the start, but the official story is just crumbling now that the propaganda campaign has ceased.

However, the most important truths to retain from this episode is that the media happily parrots the propaganda lines of the governments, and that many international (and also the "non-governmental") organizations that are supposed to be impartial are under tremendous pressure to be anything but.

 

[red_elk]

Nobody cares, it seems.
Nobody asks questions why Assad would use chemical weapons against hospital, after rebels already agreed to surrender
Nobody cares about OPCW report which says plainly that rebels lied and there are no traces of nerve agent in hospital and in patients blood.

Thing is, provocation didn't help, they lost.

 

[Ajidica]

I haven't gone into the report @innonimatu but what makes this report by an OPCW advisor more accurate than the previous OPCW report, beyond that it agrees with you?

Nobody asks questions why Assad would use chemical weapons against hospital, after rebels already agreed to surrender.

I was under the impression the best understanding regarding alleged Syrian use of chemical weapons is that it was carried out by elements on the ground operating outside the orders of the Syrian military higher-ups.

 

[innonimatu]

I haven't gone into the report @innonimatu but what makes this report by an OPCW advisor more accurate than the previous OPCW report, beyond that it agrees with you?

I was under the impression the best understanding regarding alleged Syrian use of chemical weapons is that it was carried out by elements on the ground operating outside the orders of the Syrian military higher-ups.

No, the allegation started with the claimn on the media of nerve agents, which was debunked within a few days, after the territory was cleansed of the islamic fanatics who had held it and sampling of the sites proved that there were none.

Then the allegations shifted to the use of chlorine, and specifically to those two cannisters. The OPCW report later claimed that the canisters had been airdropped, and only the syrian government could have done that. What has evident even then was that those claims were not based on technical evaluations of the canisters in place. They were just stated without evidence to back them. And what we know now is that the limited studies that the OPCW has made or ordered contradicted those claims, but were suppressed from the report. An honest report would have mentioned them. The preliminary report had been careful not to claim anything about the gas cylinders, but after that I guess political pressure was applied. We do have one former head of the OPCW whose sons were threatened by a certain mustachioed personage...

In early 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was putting intense pressure on Bustani to quit as director-general of the OPCW — despite the fact that he had been unanimously re-elected to head the 145-nation body just two years earlier. His transgression? Negotiating with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to allow OPCW weapons inspectors to make unannounced visits to that country — thereby undermining Washington’s rationale for regime change.
[...]
By March 2002, however, Bolton — then serving as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security Affairs — arrived in person at the OPCW headquarters in the Hague to issue a warning to the organization’s chief. And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn’t mince words. “Cheney wants you out,” Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice president of the United States. “We can’t accept your management style.”

Bolton continued, according to Bustani’s recollections: “You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don’t comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you.”

There was a pause.

“We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York.”

You cannot be so naive as to think things have changed.