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The global public has yet to see solid proof of Assad chemical use
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The US government insists it has the intelligence to prove it, but the American public has yet to see a single piece of concrete evidence - no satellite imagery, no transcripts of Syrian military communications - connecting the government of President Bashar Assad to the alleged chemical weapons attack last month.
In the absence of such evidence, Syria and Russia have pushed another scenario: rebels carried out the August 21 chemical attack. Neither has produced evidence for that case, either.
That has left more questions than answers as the US threatens a possible military strike.
The early morning assault in a rebel-held Damascus suburb known as Ghouta was said to be the deadliest chemical weapons attack in Syria’s civil war. Survivors’ accounts, photographs of many of the dead wrapped peacefully in white sheets and dozens of videos showing victims in spasms and gasping for breath shocked the world.
Yet one week after US Secretary of State John Kerry outlined the case against Assad, Americans — at least those without access to classified reports — haven’t seen a shred of his proof.
The Obama administration, searching for support from a divided Congress and skeptical world leaders, says its own assessment is based mainly on satellite and signal intelligence. But requests to view that satellite imagery have been denied.
The Obama administration maintains it intercepted communications from a senior Syrian official on the use of chemical weapons, but requests to see that transcript have been denied. Also denied is a request by AP to see a transcript of communications allegedly ordering Syrian military personnel to prepare for a chemical weapons attack by readying gas masks.
The US administration says its evidence is classified and is only sharing details in closed-door briefings with members of Congress and key allies.
Experts confounded
The assessment, also based on accounts by Syrian activists and hundreds of YouTube videos of the attack’s aftermath, has confounded many experts who cannot fathom what might have motivated Assad to unleash weapons of mass destruction on his own people — especially while UN experts were nearby and at a time when his troops had the upper hand on the ground.
“We can’t get our heads around this — why would any commander agree to rocketing a suburb of Damascus with chemical weapons for only a very short-term tactical gain for what is a long-term disaster,” said Charles Heyman, a former British military officer who edits The Armed Forces of the UK, an authoritative bi-annual review of British forces.
Inconsistencies over the death toll and other details related to the attack also have fueled doubts among skeptics.
The Obama administration says 1,429 people died in 12 locations mostly east of the capital, an estimate close to the one put out by the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition.
Regime ‘framed’
When asked for victims’ names, however, the group provided a list of 395. On that list, some of the victims were identified by a first name only or said to be members of a certain family. There was no explanation for the hundreds of missing names.
Some have suggested the possibility, at least in theory, that the attack may have been ordered by a “rogue commander” in Assad’s military or fighters seeking to frame the regime.
Syria says some of its own soldiers were badly contaminated in Jobar, on the edge of Damascus, as they went into tunnels cleared by the rebels. UN experts, who had been collecting tissue and other samples from victims in Ghouta, also visited the Mazzeh military hospital in Damascus, taking samples from injured soldiers there.
Two days after the Ghouta attack, state television broadcast images of plastic jugs, gas masks, medicine vials, explosives and other items that it said were seized from rebel hideouts. One barrel had “made in Saudi Arabia” stamped on it.
In the US, the case for military action has evoked comparisons to false data used by the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Multiple US officials have told AP that the intelligence pictures on the August 21 attack was “not a slam dunk” — a reference to then-CIA Director George Tenet’s insistence in 2002 that US intelligence showed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — intelligence that turned out to be wrong.
They cite the lack of a direct link between Assad and the chemical assault — a question the administration discounts by arguing Assad’s responsibility as Syria’s commander in chief.
A second issue is that US intelligence has lost track of some chemical weaponry, leaving a slim possibility that rebels acquired some of the deadly substances.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said if there is evidence that chemical weapons have been used, specifically by the regular army, it should be submitted to the UN Security Council.
“And it ought to be convincing. It shouldn’t be based on some rumors and information obtained by intelligence agencies through some kind of eavesdropping, some conversations and things like that,” he told The Associated Press in an interview late last Tuesday.
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