Saudis break away and lead GCC on their own path regarding aiding Al Qaeda Rebels in Syria..... Interestingly , the Washington Post Woodward article gives credence to the Debka piece from earlier this week that a deal with Iran in the ongoing nuclear talks is well on the way , if not already " quietly " agreed upon between the US and Iran ...... Isn't it almost funny ( considering how War in Syria seems almost like some misty have formed dream / nightmare of sorts ) , that we still are waiting for the final UN report on Syria and so called chemical weapon usage by either / or Syria rebels or Government forces ......

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/syrian-conflict-persian-gulf-officials-tired-of-waiting-for-us-move-to-boost-aid-to-rebels/2013/11/02/af0c8554-4324-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_print.html

( GCC going their own way on Syria... )

Syrian conflict: Persian Gulf officials, tired of waiting for U.S., move to boost aid to rebels

By Karen DeYoung and Bob Woodward, Updated: Saturday, November 2, 5:57 PM

Persian Gulf countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are moving to strengthen their military support for Syrian rebels and develop policy options independent from the United States in the wake of what they see as a failure of U.S. leadership following President Obama’s decision not to launch airstrikes against Syria, according to senior gulf officials.

Although the Saudis and others in the region have been supplying weapons to the rebels since the fighting in Syria began more than two years ago and have cooperated with a slow-starting CIA operation to train and arm the opposition, officials said they have largely given up on the United States as the leader and coordinator of their efforts.

Instead, the Saudis plan to expand training facilities they operate in Jordan and increase the firepower of arms sent to rebel groups that are fighting extremist elements among them even as they battle the Syrian government, according to gulf officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve comity with the United States.

What officials described as a parallel operation independent of U.S. efforts is being discussed by the Saudis with other countries in the region, according to officials from several governments that have been involved in the talks.

Unhappiness over Syria is only one element of what officials said are varying degrees of disenchantment in the region with much of the administration’s Middle East policy, including its nuclear negotiations with Iran and criticism of Egypt’s new government.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry arrives in Saudi Arabia on Sunday on a hastily arranged visit — to include his first-ever meeting with King Abdullah on Monday — that is designed to smooth increasingly frayed U.S. relations with the kingdom.

Kerry will also stop in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Israel, all of which have expressed concerned at what they see as a weakened U.S. posture in the region. The 11-day trip also includes visits to the West Bank, Poland, Algeria and Morocco.

Egyptian state media reported Friday that Kerry will begin his trip with a brief stop Sunday in Egypt, his first visit there since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi this summer. The State Department declined to confirm the visit.

Officials in several countries that had pledged to support a U.S. strike on Syrian targets after confirmation that President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons described their stunned reaction to Obama’s abrupt decision in late August to cancel the operation just days before its planned launch so he could ask for congressional agreement.

“We agreed to everything that we were asked . . . as part of what was going to take place,” said a senior Saudi official reached by telephone in the kingdom. Instead of the 10-to-12-hour warning before launch that the Americans had promised, the official said that Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan “did not know about [the cancellation]. . . . We found out about it from CNN.”
Although the current policy differences are unlikely to be resolved soon, if at all, the Saudis derive part of their standing as a regional leader from their close ties to Washington. Kerry’s visit, in large part, is designed to publicly stroke that aspect of the Saudi image.

Gulf officials emphasized that the U.S.-Saudi relationship, spanning eight decades since the kingdom’s founding, is based on a range of issues, including energy, counterterrorism, military ties, trade and investment, that remain important to both.

Any major attempt at outside intervention in Syria on behalf of the opposition would be limited without the participation of U.S. equipment, personnel, and command and control. Although France, for example, shares some of the Saudi concerns and the French defense minister met with King Abdullah and discussed major new defense contracts in Riyadh early this month, the United States’ partners in Europe have long expressed reluctance to intervene in Syria without a mandate from the United Nations or NATO.

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s support for the U.S. strike option being prepared this summer was abandoned when Parliament voted against any participation.

Turkey, a NATO partner that has long protested what it sees as Obama’s tepid Syria policy, has branched off on its own in terms of support for the rebels. Although the administration has long described Iranian support for Assad as crucial to the Syrian president’s survival, foreign ministers from Turkey and Iran met in Ankara last week to voice their shared concerns about the increasingly sectarian nature of the war.

Sunni Saudi Arabia has no interest in reaching out to Shiite Iran, which it sees as its primary rival for influence in the region. The Saudis are convinced that the United States is so eager to make a deal with Iran that it has already signed on to an arrangement that its allies in the region — including Israel — are sure to disapprove of.

“Absolutely,” the senior Saudi official said.

Saudi distress over the Obama administration’s engagement with the new leadership in Iran may be even more fundamental to the current strain in relations than differences over Syria and also Egypt.
The Saudis, who see Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as a threat, believe the administration is hypocritical in its concern that the military rulers who overthrew Morsi are using too heavy a hand in cracking down on Morsi’s Brotherhood organization. The United States, said one gulf official, expressed little concern over similar abuses under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whom the United States supported before he was overthrown in early 2011.

With new U.S. arms shipments to Egypt suspended, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait have given the new Egyptian government $12 billion to defray expenses, and officials said they plan to contribute at least another $3 billion in the coming days.

While the United States and its gulf allies share the same objectives in the region — a stable Egypt, a non-nuclear Iran and a peaceful Syria without Assad — one official said those allies have concluded that none of those objectives will be reached with Obama’s current policy.

Israel, which shares their concerns, has been relatively reticent in expressing its worries in public, as have the UAE, Jordan and others. But the Saudis have been unusually public in voicing their dissatisfaction.

In a speech in Washington this month, former intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal described Obama’s Syria policies as “lamentable.” Last month, the Saudis canceled their annual speech at the U.N. General Assembly and later turned down their first election to a Security Council seat in what they made clear was a protest against inaction in Syria and outreach to Iran.

“When you commit to something and then you don’t deliver on it, that’s when you have a problem,” the Saudi official said. “It is an accumulation of these type of cases, incidents, and on and on.”



http://www.debka.com/article/23399/Braced-for-imminent-nuclear-accord-with-Iran-US-pulls-away-from-military-option-IDF-stays-on-the-ready

Israel’s high command, working on the assumption that an American-Iranian nuclear accord is near its final stage, plans to keep in place advanced preparations for a unilateral military strike on Iran’s nuclear program into 2014 – hence the IDF’s request for a supplemental NIS3.5bn (app. $1bn) defense budget this week.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report exclusively that the main body of the accord is essentially complete. All the same, President Barack Obama plans to announce before Christmas that only partial agreement has been achieved and negotiations will continue.

He will be cagey in public – partly because not all parts of the accord have been finalized, although the pace of US-Iranian negotiations have been accelerated, and partly to avoid coming clean on the full scope of the deal with Tehran.

 The US-Iranian talks are being held at three levels:

1. American and Iranian diplomats and nuclear experts are discussing the technical aspects of the accord in Vienna. Some of these meetings - but not all - take place at International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in the city.

The talks in Vienna between IAEA chief Yukiya Amano and Iranian deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi on Oct. 29-30 in Vienna were held to review items already approved between the American and Iranian delegations. It remained for the two officials to consider how to integrate those understandings in the future IAEA inspections routine.

Araqchi reported he had brought new proposals to the talks, saying they were productive. Amano said more cautiously: “I am very hopeful that we can come out with a good result.”

2. Secretary of State John Kerry and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, who is the senior US negotiator, are handling the second level of direct negotiations opposite Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif and his deputy Abbas Araqchi.

Because of his direct involvement, Kerry sounded unusually impatient Monday October 28, when he said, “Some have suggested that somehow there’s something wrong with giving diplomacy a chance. We will not succumb to those fear tactics and forces that suggest otherwise.”

He did not name Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, but clearly lashed out against what he regards as the prime minister’s “fear tactics.” Neither did he admit how much progress had been made in the direct US line with Tehran.

3. The third level deals with sanctions. It is run by officials of the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees the sanctions regime, and senior staff from President Hassan Rouhani’s bureau.

They are working to determine which sanctions will be lifted and at which stage of the negotiations.
This process aims at lifting decision-making on sanctions out of the hands of Congress and transferring it to this secret negotiating mechanism. By this means, President Obama hopes not only to thwart Congressional calls for tighter sanctions against Iran, but also to forestall Netanyahu’s efforts to this end.

On Tuesday October 29, a group of Jewish leaders was invited to the White House to meet with members of the National Security Council for an update on the Iran negotiations and a bid to defuse tensions with them and Israel. But none of the above information about the accelerated progress of a US-Iranian accord was released to them.

http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/index.php/2013/11/6805/iran-fm-says-if-nuclear-deal-agreed-believes-both-sides-can-sell-at-home/

( A problem for Iran hawks in the US and abroad is that the new Iranian President and his  Foreign Minister are articulating rationale arguments and behaving as a rationale actor in the nuclear debate... ) 

Iran FM Zarif outlines ideas to exit nuclear dispute

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Laura Rozen

Share

Istanbul __ Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Friday he believes Iran and six world powers should accept each other’s chief objectives as their own in order to resolve concerns about Iran’s nuclear program.

“On the nuclear issue, I believe the problem we have faced in the last ten years is we have both seen the nuclear issue as a zero sum game; we have articulated two seemingly opposing objectives, and each tried to make gains for one objective seemingly at the expense of the others,” Zarif told an audience of Middle East nonproliferation specialists convened in Istanbul Friday by the Pugwash conference on nuclear disarmament.

“The result has been that ten years ago, Iran had less than 160 centrifuges spinning, now it has over 18,000,” Zarif, speaking in English, said. While ten years ago, “Iran’s economy was prospering, now sanctions are hurting the wrong segment of the population. I hope we have come to understand that approach was wrong.”

Zarif said he proposed, at meetings with the P5+1 in New York and Geneva the past two months, a new approach: that Iran accepts the West’s objective that Iran never have a nuclear weapon, and that the West accept Iran’s objective that it have a peaceful nuclear energy program that includes domestic enrichment, with mechanisms to verify it not be used for military purposes.

Iran’s nuclear know-how and technology are now “homegrown,” Zarif said, to explain why he thinks it in the West’s interest to accept Iranian enrichment. You “cannot kill all our scientists and kill our program. …You cannot destroy the technology. How to ensure [the program] is peaceful: allow it operate in a transparent fashion; you cannot push it under the rug.”

Asked whether he believes President Obama would be able to sell Congress on an Iran nuclear deal that includes sanctions relief, Zarif said he would leave American domestic politics to the Americans to sort out: “I do not interfere in American domestic politics.” Both sides have public opinion on their side to pursue a negotiated settlement, he said he believes, but formidable hardline constituencies to contend with at home as well.

“I believe leaders need to show leadership,” Zarif said. “I think experience shows, once there is a good deal, the US president will be able to sell it, and I think we will be able to sell it too.”

Zarif spoke here, at a presidential palace overlooking the Bosporous on the Asian side of the city, on a panel with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, on his first official visit to Turkey since assuming the post of foreign minister in the Hassan Rouhani administration in August. While Zarif and Davutoglu had warm words for each other, the two nations’ differences on Syria were apparent. However, they agreed that the US-Russian agreement that led to Syria’s decision to give up its chemical weapons stockpiles and join the chemical weapons ban was a positive development, and urged that it be a first step towards a broader agreement towards ridding the entire Middle East of weapons of mass destruction.

“I agree with my good friend and brother, Javad-bey,” Davutoglu said. “Something good happens with the Syria chemical weapons ban, at least the process has started.”

Zarif, whose back seemed much improved from when he appeared at a press conference in Geneva last month in a wheel chair, was due to travel on to Ankara Friday for meetings with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Davutoglu. He is slated to travel to Paris next week, ahead of leading the Iranian delegation to the next round of negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran, in Geneva on November 7-8th.

http://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2013/10/31/un-report-on-chemical-weapon-use-in-syria-delayed-until-early-december/

( Syria chemical weapon use report from UN - now delayed under early December ! Hopefully this is a sign a credible report will be produced.  ) 

UN report on chemical weapon use in Syria – delayed until early December

October 31, 2013 — 3 Comments

In a surprise announcement, following this writer’s prompting of a question from the invaluableInner City Press, the spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General has confirmed that the publication of the final UN report on chemical weapons use in Syria, which was to include the alleged attacks in Damascus as well as possible attacks by the rebels in Khan al-Assal and other places, has been delayed until early December.

In a briefing on 30 September, the spokesperson Martin Nesirky had said that the team of chemical weapons investigators led by Professor Åke Sellström was hoping to complete its report by late October.

The delay comes as the team’s initial report has come under intense scrutiny from the blogosphere, with the most favourable opinion being perhaps that it represented an executive summary with poorly set out evidence. A flavour of the strength of feelings of those who have waded through the report and tried to analyse the evidence set out therein can be gleaned from the title of the most comprehensive critique of the initial report to date – “Pigeon Poop on the Pump Handle.”

Whilst mainstream journalists and those perhaps best described as “US militarists in humanitarian clothing” such as Ken Roth’s “Human Rights Watch,” rushed to misinterpret the report as providing proof the Assad regime was responsible for chemical attacks on East and West Ghouta, more careful analysts, bloggers, chemical weapons experts and human rights investigators have been examining each aspect of this hugely complex who-done-it.

A number of blogs have been contributing to the understanding of the issues involved and a comprehensive website dedicated to the controversy has been set up called Who Attacked Ghouta with the pages on The Closer Look at Syria wiki providing another rich source of information.

For those who have not been following the debate, and perhaps rely on the mass media for their information, there is little consensus on whether the attack on Ghouta was a rocket attack, little consensus on who fired the rockets (if they were fired), a belief that the crime scenes investigated by the UN may have been tampered with (as the UN indicated in their report) or even faked and so there is no credibility in the widely distributed map of the alleged rocket trajectories. Perhaps most importantly, there is no consensus over the number of victims or even how they died.

Those who believe that the Assad regime was guilty, as an article of faith, have failed to prove their case – and still face the significant hurdle of trying to explain why Syrian government forces would launch a chemical attack, just after a UN team had arrived in country to investigate an alleged attack by the rebel side, in the one move likely to bring US missiles down on their heads.

The most significant evidence against the Assad regime appears to be the fact that the two rockets examined by the UN in East Ghouta belong to a family of similarly designed rockets which government forces have used in the past, as has been adequately demonstrated on Eliot Higgins’blog. This is weak evidence however, as many weapons systems used by the Syrian army have been captured and used by the opposition and of course, if the incident represents a false flag attack, it would make sense for whoever planned it to use weapons associated with the Syrian government. Moreover, video has been uploaded to the Facebook channel of Aknaf Bait al Maqdis, of an unexploded High Explosive version of the kind of weapon allegedly used in the East Ghouta region, apparently in the hands of an Al-Qaeda affiliate which operates in East Ghouta. Videos have also appeared on YouTube, which purport to show members of another jihadist rebel brigade, Liwa al-Islam, actually firing one of this family of rockets, although it is impossible to tell if this is a video produced by the brigade in question (who deny it), by a pro-government faction, or by a third force, never mind what the motives for this release may have been.

Analysis and modelling of the rockets found in East Ghouta is increasingly suggesting that they may not have had the range to have been fired from the government-held territory, let alone the base posited by Human Rights Watch.

There has been a hostile response, based on character assassination, from mass-media journalists, some organisations and certain bloggers to the report presented by the inter-denominational International Support Team for the Mussalalah in Syria led by Mother Agnes Mariam.

Human Rights Watch have attacked Mother Agnes as “not a professional video forensic analyst,” but the report of her team shows that some of the children alleged to have died in Ghouta on 21 August were moved and filmed in up to four different locations. Mother Agnes also asks questions about the demographics of the alleged victims, who they were and absence of normal families and proper burial rituals. These are particularly pertinent questions given the inexplicable failure of the UN team to ascertain the numbers or identities of the victims or perform autopsies, on the ludicrous basis, according to team leader Angela Kane, that “dead bodies don’t tell you anything.“

The hostility to Mother Agnes has spilled over into physical threats, which perhaps isn’t surprising as she is bravely dedicated to reconciliation and peace, something quite a few people, inside and especially outside of Syria, don’t want to see.

Generally speaking, key actors in the blogosphere’s investigation have shown civility and there has been a remarkable cross-fertilisation of knowledge from experts, such as chemical weapons expert Dan Kaszeta, who has asserted that the alleged casualty toll indicates about 70 rockets are missing,
pharmacologist and ex-forward observer Denis O’Brien, who concludes that the initial UN Report effectively proves nothing and the victims do not show the most indicative signs of Sarin poisoning (vomiting, diarrhoea, urinary and fecal incontinence), and legal scholar Gleb Bazov who has provided a very illuminating draft excerpt from an upcoming study on Ghouta
which explains the cautionary tale of the “Yellow Rain affair,” where the US falsely alleged Laotian and Vietnamese forces had used a “killer pollen” as a CBW delivery mechanism.

Bazov applies the lessons of this episode and says that, based on the rules expounded by OPCW, in its Appendices, the directives of its Technical and Scientific Directorates, and other methodological discussions that exist in literature, we are entitled to conclude that with regard to Syria, “No evidence currently at play, whether supplied by the UN, NGOs, or national governments meets the legal requirements of reliability.”

Bazov points out that the failure of the authors to include the data the investigators found and discuss the analytical methodologies they used points to the conclusion that they themselves are unable to judge the reliability of their (contradictory) chemical analytical reports.

The lack of a credible explanation of what happened on August 21st and the lack of reliable evidence provide by the UN is a serious issue, particularly as this vacuum has been filled by the dodgy theories presented as fact by the likes of Ken Roth’s “Human Rights Watch” and the New York Times.

Hopefully, Professor Sellström and his fellow experts are continuing to review the evidence, gather further evidence from the State parties who have claimed to have evidence pertinent to the facts, looking wider and clarifying everything in the final report so that it can not be misunderstood.

The head of the OPCW investigators on the ground in Syria, has said that the team were amazed by the scrutiny they had come under from social media, but had stuck through it and come out of it united and stronger “like a diamond.” In the additional weeks the experts have given themselves, the team members determined to produce a report which is scientifically sound, accurate and true to the facts of the situation and which would stand up in a court of law, must not allow political pressures to weaken their resolve. We would expect the report authors to act in a transparent fashion and release all the evidence and data which has been gathered (at no small personal risk), having the intellectual honesty to step back from their original conclusions, where necessary.

To be sure, the final report, when it comes, will be a defining moment in relationships between the United Nations, its experts, the media, the scientific community and the public. For faith in international institutions, it is essential the UN, OPCW and WHO experts approach the gathering, analysis and presentation of evidence without fear or favour, as they might for a high-profile criminal case in their own country, and not deliver third-rate, politically tainted justice for the victims, for the survivors, for the relatives and those who are missing family members.