| Submit your comments on this article |
| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Chemical evidence fades as UN team under fire |
| 2013-08-27 |
| [OMANOBSERVER] As UN weapons inspectors came under fire in Syria yesterday, the evidence of an apparent large-scale chemical weapons attack they are seeking is already fading from the scene. The longer it takes the 20-member team to get to the spot where rockets carrying nerve agents are said to have killed hundreds of people on August 21, the harder it will be for the mission led by Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom to find meaningful remnants of toxic munitions. With Western powers considering military strikes against Syria if they conclude it has used gas-laden rockets in an escalation of the country's two-and-half-year civil war, reliable evidence will be key to their deliberations. Traces of chemicals on munitions fragments, buildings and impact craters will already have degraded. It will also have become difficult to detect anything in the urine of inhabitants in the outskirts of Damascus. Perpetrators will have had days to try to cover up proof of the attack, experts said. Ralf Trapp, a disarmament expert who worked for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is supplying experts to the UN team, said traces of chemicals in a victim's urine fade within days, though blood could contain traces for weeks. "They should be collected as soon after the incident as possible, preferably within a couple of weeks after the alleged use," Trapp said. Some feared that the UN team would arrive too late to gather any meaningful samples. Former UN adviser George A Lopez Of the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, accused Syria of applying "calculated manoeuvres" on the ground in Damascus to counter UN and world reaction. "Syrian forces continued conventional shelling of the area, while locals and others cleared away bodies," he said. "This hastened breakdown and contamination of chemical compounds needed to provide undeniable proof of the type of gas, its concentration level, and its source to the inspectors, who may still be one or more days away from taking soil and other samples." In a conflict that is dividing world powers, inspectors will also have to safeguard the integrity of the samples. They have to make sure containers and vials transported to the laboratories for analysis follow a strict chain of custody, with fibre-optic seals and accompanied by exhaustive documentation "to be able to demonstrate that the samples have not been tempered with", Trapp said. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #19 Didn't a Cult in Japan let of some homemade Sarin on a subway back in the 90's. This could be some home cooking - might explain the fatal to injured ratio. Poor product with an equaly poor delivery. |
| Posted by: retired LEO 2013-08-27 23:44 |
| #18 And all the rest of Allawites, and Christians, and Kurds, and Druze? It's not over until the Sunni Arabs win... |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2013-08-27 17:38 |
| #17 Leave. The Saudis would give him a safe haven/em> And all the rest of Allawites, and Christians, and Kurds, and Druze? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2013-08-27 16:12 |
#16 And besides all that, I ask you, if you had your back to the wall with your enemies threatening your life and the lives of your family, what would you do? Leave. The Saudis would give him a safe haven, if only to remove Iranian influence in the area. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2013-08-27 15:50 |
#15 how come the rescue workers without protective gear don't drop dead? Short-lifespan agent? Some of them break down quite quickly in the presence of oxygen or sunlight, as a "feature" to allow quick exploitation of any gaps their use might create in enemy troop formations. And considering that both Saddam and Assad built gas programs specifically for use against civilian populations, that feature would be sensible in that case, too. You don't want to clear some rebels off an oil well only to find you can't get people into the site to restore it to service for 60 days, and what's the use of a village you can't give to an allied tribe? |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2013-08-27 15:49 |
| #14 Evidence? We don't need no stinkin' evidence. We have the New York Times and ABC. We have videos! And now we have a bunch of froggy doctors without borders. It's time to act! No need to consult Congress. John McCain said it's OK. Just do it. Posted by Ebbang Uluque A two day penalty attack. I'll show you...YOU racist white Russian hater YOU! I thought weez buddies, and you put Snowdenski up in Hong Kong and told me to pi** off? Now he's going to Fabrique and Mio's... having a good time while I'm stuck here with an angry FLOTUS. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-08-27 14:53 |
| #13 I remember seeing pictures of people exposed to depleted uranium bullets that turned out to be people killed by Saddams gas attack and Saddam and his enablers simply relabled the video. Do we have any evidence this video came from Syria? |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2013-08-27 14:38 |
| #12 ...ditto Pappy, there could easily be a skunk in the woodpile on this one Quite. It's akin to going into the metaphorical room with the understanding that everyone you will meet in there has both an agenda and a knife. Neither of them are for your benefit. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2013-08-27 12:27 |
| #11 Something happened, but a WMD chemical attack where 90% of people survive is not a chemical attack, it's probable some toxic spill. Looks like it was bigged up, totally don't trust MSF. Wonder what really happened... |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2013-08-27 12:20 |
| #10 And besides all that, I ask you, if you had your back to the wall with your enemies threatening your life and the lives of your family, what would you do? And even besides that, whoever used those weapons, if they used them, where did they get them??? Isn't it at least within the realm of possibility that these are left over weapons from the Iran/Iraq war that Donald Rumsfeld gave to Saddam Hussein? And if we gave chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein to use against Ayatolla Khomeini, why is it so morally reprehensible for Bashar Assad to use them against a ragtag band of bat shit crazy jihadis? I'm sorry. I just don't see anybody on the moral high ground here. What I see is a geopolitical game in which I can only guess at the real objectives because Barack Obama and John Frickin' Kerry are sure as hell not going to come clean. It could be our government is poking very cautiously, timidly, actually in an extremely chicken shit kinda way, at Iran...at least I can hope for that. More likely we are once again doing the bidding of the Soddies who have been watching their little proxy rebels get their butts kicked and now they need a little help. Evidence? We don't need no stinkin' evidence. We have the New York Times and ABC. We have videos! And now we have a bunch of froggy doctors without borders. It's time to act! No need to consult Congress. John McCain said it's OK. Just do it. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2013-08-27 11:50 |
| #9 An occasional recurrence of gout, a few no-see'um bites from my grounds keeping assignments, but nothing 'scorbutic'. :-( ....ditto Pappy, there could easily be a skunk in the woodpile on this one. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-08-27 10:46 |
| #8 I'm sure the scorbutic ranthers in this crappy blog will spin the words of a secular french non-governmental organization with a decades-long track record of independent apolitical service (that is often in direct conflict with US policy) into evidence of a vast conspiracy. The question should be be whether or not chemical weapons were used. "Strongly indicate mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent" is a probable indicator. Bhopal was also a site of "mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent." If one wants to be maintain the appearance as a "secular body with a decades-long track record of independent apolitical service," then one needs to limit one's conclusions to facts. The question also is - who used them. Speaking as someone who has spent a few years in the Middle East, I wouldn't accept anyone telling me it was raining unless I went outside, far away from buildings, into an open field, and saw for myself. And then I'd still call someone and ask them to verify satellite data. Meaning that I wouldn't take the word of anyone in the region telling me who used chemical weapons. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2013-08-27 10:33 |
| #7 And those Home Depot shop masks.... |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-08-27 07:47 |
| #6 (1) Modern nerve gases don't land people in hospitals. (2) Something bothered me about the video, and yesterday somebody in Jerry Pournelle's blog solved it for me: how come the rescue workers without protective gear don't drop dead? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2013-08-27 07:32 |
| #5 "Lame", That certainly was lame. Nothing here, move along. |
| Posted by: Dale 2013-08-27 02:19 |
| #4 I'm sure the scorbutic ranthers in this crappy blog will spin the words of a secular french non-governmental organization with a decades-long track record of independent apolitical service (that is often in direct conflict with US policy) into evidence of a vast conspiracy. Posted by Lame name With all respect and conspiracies aside, I'm sure you won't mind if I reject the esteemed organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) as an arbiter of threats to US national security or diviner of US foreign policy. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-08-27 01:46 |
| #3 Doctors without Border are very scientifically cautious about the cause of the illness or who or what caused it, but they are f*cking sure it is a violation of international law against bio and chemical weapons use. Well played. No wonder the stampede for US intervention. |
| Posted by: badanov 2013-08-27 01:29 |
| #2 evidence of a vast conspiracy. Nah, we just want to know: who done it? Neither side occupies the moral high ground and the one thing they both have in common is that each is worse than the other. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2013-08-27 00:54 |
| #1 Médecins sans Frontières has said hospitals it supports in Damascus treated thousands of patients for neurotoxicity, the first independent indication of the use of poison gas in a deadly incident on Wednesday in the Syrian capital. The medical charity said the hospitals received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on Wednesday morning, of which 355 reportedly died. Dr Bart Janssens, director of operations at the charity, said: "Medical staff working in these facilities provided detailed information to MSF doctors regarding large numbers of patients arriving with symptoms including convulsions, excess saliva, pinpoint pupils, blurred vision and respiratory distress." “MSF can neither scientifically confirm the cause of these symptoms nor establish who is responsible for the attack,” the reported symptoms of the patients, in addition to the epidemiological pattern of the events—characterised by the massive influx of patients in a short period of time, the origin of the patients, and the contamination of medical and first aid workers—strongly indicate mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent. This would constitute a violation of international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons.” I'm sure the scorbutic ranthers in this crappy blog will spin the words of a secular french non-governmental organization with a decades-long track record of independent apolitical service (that is often in direct conflict with US policy) into evidence of a vast conspiracy. |
| Posted by: Lame name 2013-08-27 00:38 |