http://rt.com/news/g20-political-tension-syria-473/
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Submitted by George Washington on 09/05/2013 13:58 -0400
Despite pleasant views of St. Petersburg and a large list of economic challenges on world leaders’ agendas, political tension was apparent at the start of the G20 summit as the US faced questions regarding its stance on Syria and the NSA spying program.
Gorgeous weather and the serenity of Konstantinovsky Palace – where the first day of the G20 summit kicked off – could seem a bit misleading as the world’s largest economic powers braced for political battles, RT’s Aleksey Yaroshevsky reported from Strelnya.
The situation in Syria took center stage in summit discussions, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s opening call to “not mix up and bundle” economic and political issues. The two-and-a-half year conflict escalated after a chemical weapons attack took place outside of Damascus on August 21. The US believes it has evidence connecting the Syrian government to the attack. All eyes are currently on Congress as it decides whether to support a US strike on Syria.
Although a meeting on Syria was not officially scheduled to take place at the summit, Putin suggested leaders spoke about the topic at dinner.
Putin’s words came soon after his much anticipated handshake with US President Barack Obama. Recently strained Russian-American relations have become another focus of the media’s attention.
The two leaders are not scheduled to meet privately in St. Petersburg. However, neither Washington nor Moscow have ruled out the possibility of discussing pressing bilateral issues on the sidelines of the summit.
Syria on everyone’s mind
At the G20 dinner, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon addressed the situation in Syria, urging that any response to alleged chemical weapons use in Syria first go through the UN.
"I sincerely hope that all the leaders of the five permanent Security Council members and some non-permanent members who are now here fully meet their obligations to the Syrian people," Ban said.
The Secretary General earlier stated that the UN values the cooperation and assistance of the Syrian government regarding the investigation in Syria.
The US has accused Russia of holding the UN Security Council (UNSC) “hostage” over Syria by blocking the White House’s push for support in the UNSC.
"Even in the wake of the flagrant shattering of the international norm against chemical weapons use, Russia continues to hold the council hostage and shirk its international responsibilities," US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power told reporters.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, stated Russia’s position on Syria to reporters. He called for Russia’s partners, including the US, to take part in an “objective assessment of the situation,” dismissing the idea that Russia blocks the work of the UN Security Council on the Syrian conflict.
Only after UN investigators have their say on the alleged chemical attack in Syria would it be possible to say who perpetrated the attack, Peskov stressed. He added that Russia “cannot accept the proof that, in our view, is not a proof at all, that is far from being convincing.”
Amid speculations that President Obama has arrived in St. Petersburg to gain support on launching a“punitive” strike against Syrian President Bashar Assad, Italian Premier Enrico Letta stated that the G20 summit is the “last opportunity” for finding a political solution to the Syrian crisis, adding that concerns over the situation there has hit “maximum” levels.
This could well sum up the notions coming from the briefings, bilateral meetings, and joint talks of the BRICS group during the summit’s first day.
Obama started off the event by meeting with French President Francois Hollande, the only remaining European supporter of a strike on Syria. Meanwhile, Putin met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has consistently called for a peaceful solution to the conflict.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang told RT at the summit that it is “vitally important” that any move on Syria be based on the UN investigation, stressing that China is “against the use of chemical weapons by any countries or organizations.”
“China and Russia are both appealing to the countries concerned to be serious about the possible consequences of the use of military means without the mandate of the UN Security Council,” Qin added.
Leaders of the BRICS group, which includes the economies of Russia, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, then jointly expressed their concerns that a military strike against Syria could have “an extremely negative effect” on the global economy.
They also stressed that the only legitimate body that can approve any kind of action on Syria is the UN Security Council, and that facts should not be manipulated to justify an attack.
Ahead of a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Obama said that “joint recognition that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is not only a tragedy but also a violation of international law that must be addressed.”
Will Washington go it alone?
However, when it came to statements by America’s key EU and NATO allies, it became increasingly apparent that “the US might have to go it alone” with its forceful action against Assad, RT’s Anissa Naouai reported.
“The European Union is certain that the efforts should be aimed at a political settlement,” the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, told reporters at the G20 briefing, appealing to the whole international community.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has defined her country’s position on Syria, saying that she does not believe military intervention is the answer, and that Germany will support a political solution.
French President Hollande, whose country was divided over supporting a strike on Syria, said that he expects some “political progress,” calling for a unified EU position on the issue. It was not immediately clear if Hollande had a change of heart in his readiness to join the US in military intervention.
In addition, Pope Francis called on world leaders attending the G20 summit in Russia to seek peace in Syria through diplomatic means, laying aside the “futile pursuit” of a military solution.
“To the leaders present, to each and every one, I make a heartfelt appeal for them to help find ways to overcome the conflicting positions and to lay aside the futile pursuit of a military solution,” Francis wrote.
NSA in the spotlight
Another cloud over the G20 summit is the NSA scandal, with many countries seeking an explanation from the US after spying tactics were revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The relationship between US and Russia has been tense since Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in August. In retaliation, Obama cancelled plans to meet with Putin in Moscow ahead of the G20 summit.
One of the most recent revelations said that the NSA’s spying program allegedly targeted the communications of the presidents of Mexico and Brazil.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff met with Barack Obama on Thursday to discuss revelations that the US had spied on her private communications, Reuters quoted a White House official as saying.
Rousseff may cancel her visit to the White House in October unless the US extends a public apology for the alleged spying, according to senior Brazilian official.
Brazil gave the US until Friday to issue a written explanation of the NSA spying reports.
The US will try to resolve the situation through “diplomatic and intelligence channels,” deputy US national security adviser Ben Rhodes said.
"We understand how important this is to the Brazilians. We understand their strength of feeling on the issue," he added. "What we're focused on is making sure the Brazilians understand exactly what the nature of our intelligence effort is."
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto told RT that America would have to cough up some extravagance to try and mend relations that have been damaged by the NSA spying revelations.
“The Mexican government called on the US to conduct a thorough investigation into who is responsible for the spying if it really happened,” Nieto said. He asked Obama about “actions his administration would take in order to make this investigation happen and clarify the issues that have been surfaced recently…certain measures have to be taken, there must be consequences.”
Under the surface , the concerns of manipulation cloud the waters.....
http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/29/verify-chemical-weapons-use-before-unleashing-the-dogs-of-war/
The Obama administration has selectively used intelligence to justify military strikes on Syria, former military officers with access to the original intelligence reports say, in a manner that goes far beyond what critics charged the Bush administration of doing in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel’s famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.
The doctored report was leaked to a private Internet-based newsletter that boasts of close ties to the Israeli intelligence community, and led to news reports that the United States now had firm evidence showing that the Syrian government had ordered the chemical weapons attack on August 21 against a rebel-controlled suburb of Damascus.
The doctored report was picked up on Israel’s Channel 2 TV on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine in Germany, the Times of Israel, and eventually by The Cable in Washington, DC.
According to the doctored report, the chemical attack was carried out by the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother.
However, the original communication intercepted by Unit 8200 between a major in command of the rocket troops assigned to the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division, and the general staff, shows just the opposite.
The general staff officer asked the major if he was responsible for the chemical weapons attack. From the tone of the conversation, it was clear that “the Syrian general staff were out of their minds with panic that an unauthorized strike had been launched by the 155th Brigade in express defiance of their instructions,” the former officers say.
According to the transcript of the original Unit 8200 report, the major “hotly denied firing any of his missiles” and invited the general staff to come and verify that all his weapons were present.
The report contains a note at the end that the major was interrogated by Syrian intelligence for three days, then returned to command of his unit. “All of his weapons were accounted for,” the report stated.
The New York Times reported this morning that the White House is now backing off its claims to have a “smoking gun that directly links President Bashar al-Assad to the attack.”
The new argument is more deductive: since the Assad regime has chemical weapons and chemical weapons were used in Mouadhamiya, therefore the Syrian regime must have been the ones to use them.
But even that line of reasoning falls down when confronted with evidence known to the U.S. intelligence community, and presumably, to Congress.
An Egyptian intelligence report describes a meeting in Turkey between military intelligence officials from Turkey and Qatar and Syrian rebels. One of the participants states, “there will be a game changing event on August 21st” that will “bring the U.S. into a bombing campaign” against the Syrian regime.
The chemical weapons strike on Moudhamiya, an area under rebel control, took place on August 21. “Egyptian military intelligence insists it was a combined Turkish/Qatar/rebel false flag operation,” said a source familiar with the report.
The White House has gone to great lengths to shut down any independent investigation of the facts.
A UN inspection team was on the ground in Damascus on August 21 when the Moudhamiya attack occurred, where they were awaiting authorization from the Syrian government to visit sites of earlier alleged chemical weapons attacks.
Once word of Moudhamiya broke and the inspectors announced they planned to refocus their investigation on the fresh attack rather than the earlier ones, the White House was telling the UN to back off from gathering the facts.
According to Monday’s Wall Street Journal, a senior administration official called UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon before the inspectors ever left Damascus, “telling him the inspection mission was pointless and no longer safe.”
The inspectors attempted to visit Mouadhamiya on Monday to examine victims, but were turned back by sniper fire in the no man’s land between government and rebel positions on the outskirts of Damascus. After replacing their bullet-ridden armored car, they inspectors drove into Mouadhamiya for a hurried inspection of victims presented to them by rebel forces.
But even that inspection turned out to be inconclusive, which may be why the Obama White House didn’t want it to proceed.
The UN Special Envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, was circumspect in speaking to reporters yesterday on what the inspectors had actually found on the ground.
“With what has happened on the 21st of August last week, it does seem that some kind of substance was used that killed a lot of people: hundreds, definitely more than a hundred, some people say 300, some people say 600, maybe 1,000, maybe more than 1,000 people,” Brahimi said.
But he would not say that the substance was the deadly nerve agent Sarin, or describe how it was delivered.
But he would not say that the substance was the deadly nerve agent Sarin, or describe how it was delivered.
Earlier inspections by the United Nations were also inconclusive. In May, a member of the United Nations commission investigating chemical weapons in Syria said there was “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof” that sarin gas had been used in Syria against civilians.
“What appeared from our investigation was that it was used by the opponents, by the rebels,” said Carla DelPonte, a former Swiss Attorney General and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
“I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got … they were about the use of nerve gas by the opposition,” she added.
Agents provacateurs are as old as warfare itself. What better than a false flag attack, staged by al Qaeda and its al Nusra front allies in Syria, to drag the United States into a war?
The brutality of the Syrian regime’s assault on its own people is indefensible. But given the inevitable backlash from Iran and the possibility of spillover into Israel, we should gather the facts before unleashing the dogs of war.
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Rep. Alan Grayson: Syria Intelligence Manipulated
September 5, 2013 RSS Feed Print
President Barack Obama walks after the first day of the G20 Summit on September 5, 2013 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who is aggressively lobbying against a military strike on Syria, says the Obama administration has manipulated intelligence to push its case for U.S. involvement in the country's two-year civil war.
Grayson made the accusation in an interview published Wednesday by The Atlantic and offered more detail in a Thursday discussion with U.S. News. He says members of Congress are being given intelligence briefings without any evidence to support administration claims that Syrian leader Bashar Assad ordered the use of chemical weapons.
Grayson said he cannot discuss the classified briefings, but noted details in the administration's public, non-classified report are being contested.
The White House released its four-page public report Aug. 30, arguing that Assad's government killed 1,429 people on Aug. 21 with a planned chemical weapon attack. Evidence cited in that report included "intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used."
Grayson, however, says "the claim has been made that that information was completely mischaracterized."
He points to an article published by The Daily Caller that alleges the communications actually showed Syrian officers were surprised by the alleged chemical weapon attack. The communications, according to unnamed sources paraphrased in article, were intercepted by Israeli intelligence and "doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion."
"What they say in The Daily Caller is that [intercepted communications] would lead one to the opposite conclusion," Grayson said. "I don't know if it's right or wrong, [but] there's a very simple way to find out, that's for the administration to show me and other members of Congress" translated transcripts of the intercepts, he said.
Members of Congress are "not being given any of the underlying elements of the intelligence reports," according to Grayson. He's not sure if the information will come before the votes on a proposed strike next week.
The anti-war Democrat said there are other examples of intelligence he believes has been manipulated to favor war.
"Well yes," Grayson said, "but I'm very constrained about talking about it. ... This has become a fundamental problem with our system: The information we do get is limited, but beyond that we are very constrained in discussing it."
Lawmakers are unable to discuss among themselves classified intelligence about Syria unless they are inside an approved reading room beneath the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center and questioning the official account of events, he said, is "actively discouraged."
The four-page White House report on the alleged attack is no more than "a briefing paper with arguments in favor of attacking Syria" that "doesn't present both sides of the issue," Grayson said.
"The administration wants to flood the zone by excluding other information or points of view," he alleged. "I think that it is interesting that the administration consistently refers to Assad doing this and Assad doing that and Assad doing the other thing without giving the public any evidence to support the proposition that Assad has done anything."
White House spokesperson Caitlin Hayden, who fields questions for the National Security Council, chose not to engage Grayson's accusation and directed questions about the veracity of intelligence to federal spy agencies.
The congressman needled administration representatives for more information during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel responded that the Syrian military communications are "probably classified," but that he's unaware of any intentional deception.
The likely outcome for the vote on military action is uncertain in each chamber. Opponents of military action cite intelligence failures before the Iraq War and the fact that many Syrian rebels are al-Qaida-associated religious fanatics who also commit atrocities. A defeat in Congress would embarrass Obama, who stated his intention to strike Syria before caving to pressure and announcing he would seek congressional approval.
"We can't go to war to spare anyone embarrassment," Grayson told U.S. News. "That would be utterly immoral, we're talking about shedding American blood. ... The president has already made that argument and it's falling on deaf ears."
Watch: Grayson grills Hagel:
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Exclusive: Top Chemical Weapons Expert Highly Skeptical of U.S. Case Against Syrian Government
Cross-posted from Washingtons Blog.
Jean Pascal Zanders is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s top chemical weapons experts, having been quoted in the last two weeks about Syrian chemical weapons byMcClatchy, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Post-Gazette, Huffington Post, Der Spiegel, Agence France-Presse, Global Post, the Telegraph, and many other publications.
We interviewed Zanders by phone.
Q: You were quoted in the Huffington Post on August 30th as saying that the Youtube videos cited by the American government were not conclusive, as you couldn’t tell where or when the videos were taken … or even whether they were from the same incident or different incidents.
Do you still hold that view, or have you seen other videos that change your mind?
Zanders: No, I have not changed my mind. The general observation still stands, and it willstand until we have the actual report from the U.N. investigation.
I do not deny that a chemical with toxic chemicals has taken place. But I am just as concerned about how people are interpreting things in terms of a particular goal … which in this case is military intervention.
Living in a democracy we have the rule of of law, and we collect and analyze a variety of evidence collected at certain scenes before passing any kind of final judgment.
One of the concerns I have is if we look over the periods starting in March 19th with the major allegation of chemcial weapons use near Aleppo, Syria, everything is being reinterpretedas sarin.
When I look at video images that have been going around, what I see is a large number of people suffering from aspyhixia, but only aminority (if the photos are representative of the total picture) display symptoms that would correspond to exposures to neurotoxicants.
John Kerry used the term “signatures of sarin”. But signatures of sarin are things one can have from other organophosphorus compounds.
Q: You’re talking about the fact that pesticides or other nerve agents can give “false positives” for sarin? [Background]
Zanders: Yes, but not just that.
Somebody could have been – and this is purely hypothetical – exposed to an organophosphorus compound neurotoxicant which is produced in large volumes in industry. For example, for agricultural purposes.
On the low end of the spectrum, we have insecticide sprays which we can buy in the supermarkets. On the middle of the spectrum, we have organophosphorus compounds which are intermediaries of other products, or that are used in agriculture for pest and rodent control. I know specifically that the use of such compounds for pest and rodent control is common in the Middle East.
So, if someone were exposed to that in the right volume, there would be clear signatures of neurotoxicant exposure.
So it’s not just a question of false signatures in the sense of chemical tests giving a false positive, but also physiological symptoms that someone might show due to exposure to these commonly-used chemicals.
[The area where the chemical incident occurred was in a heavily-contested battle zone and had been heavily bombed. So that could have released industrial or agricultural chemicals.]
Q: Do you have any knowledge about whether the chain of custody of alleged U.S. tests which Kerry talked about are proper?
Zanders: No, and that’s part of my criticism that Western governments have overstated their case.
We do not know where the samples come from. And we do not know how representative they are for a certain area.
Certain samples could have been selectivelygiven to Western sources for analysis. Assume that you do not know where a sample comes from … your whole chain of custody is compromised.
That’s why UN inspectors can only use samples they have collected themselves.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago saying that Prince Bandar got one alleged victim of chemical warfare out of the country, sent him to the UK, and that person is the basis of which the British made their claims about Syrian chemical weapons use. [Article.]
That goes to a single person. This is quite remarkable, if true.
Q: What other indications weaken the American, British and French argument that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack?
Zanders: The extreme focus on sarin – as ifonly government forces would be able to have sarin – doesn’t make sense. If the UN team were to come up with evidence that toxic chemicals other than sarin were used, does that prove that it was not the Syrian government which is responsible?
I personally don’t think that we have all the facts in right now to be absolutely certain. And I think this is reflected in the U.S. document with the terminology “high confidence” and David Cameron saying it’s his “judgment” or the government’s “judgment”, which reflects aninterpretation of the facts.
In the U.S. document, there is not a single reference to physiological samples.
Postscript: Zanders says we must wait for the results from the U.N. weapons inspection before reaching any conclusions about who is responsible for the August 21st tragedy. [Background.]
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