McClatchy: To Some, U.S. Case for Syrian Gas Attack and Need For Strike Has Too Many Holes [View all]

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/09/02/201027/to-some-us-case-for-syrian-gas.html#emlnl=Daily_News_Update

Posted on Monday, September 2, 2013

To some, US case for Syrian gas attack and need for strike has too many holes

By Hannah Allam and Mark Seibel | McClatchy Washington Bureau

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The case Secretary of State John Kerry laid out last Friday contained claims that were disputed by the United Nations, inconsistent in some details with British and French intelligence reports or lacking sufficient transparency for international chemical weapons experts to accept at face value.

After the false weapons claims preceding the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the threshold for evidence to support intervention is exceedingly high. And while there’s little dispute that a chemical agent was used in an Aug. 21 attack outside of Damascus – and probably on a smaller scale before that – there are calls from many quarters for independent, scientific evidence to support the U.S. narrative that the Assad regime used sarin gas in an operation that killed 1,429 people, including more than 400 children.
Some of the U.S. points in question:

- The Obama administration dismissed the value of a U.N. inspection team’s work by saying that the investigators arrived too late for the findings to be credible and wouldn’t provide any information the United State didn’t already have.

- U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq countered that it was “rare” for such an investigation to begin within such a short time and said that “the passage of such few days does not affect the opportunities to collect valuable samples,” according to the U.N.’s website. For example, Haq added, sarin can be detected in biomedical samples for months after its use.

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