Turkish prosecutor indicts six jihadists for alleged attempts to acquire chemicals with intent to produce sarin
Does the truth really set you free? Do I care?
The Turkish Republican Prosecutor in Adana has issued a 132-page indictment, alleging that six members of the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front and Ahrar ash-Sham – one Syrian and five Turks – tried to acquire chemicals with the intent to produce the chemical weapon sarin.
The Turkish newspaper Radikal reports that the suspects were under surveillance by Turkish police after they received information that the al-Nusra members tried to acquire two government-regulated military-grade chemical substances.
11 people were arrested in their safe house in the city of Adana in southeastern Turkey on May 23, 2013, after they had acquired some of the chemicals.
My friend Bill Polk, a well-known historian with extensive experience in the Middle East and Central Asia and author of many books on these areas, has written a backgrounder on how to make sense out of the Syrian chemical weapons issue. He has given me permission to distribute it. Herewith is his most interesting primer on the Syrian chemical weapons issue.
Chuck Spinney
Reflections on the Syrian Chemical Weapons Issue and Beyond
William R. Polk
September 15, 2013
1.The Variety of Weapons and Their characteristics
2 A Short History of Chemical Weapons
3 The Russian Intervention
4 Why the Syrians Have Accepted the Russian Proposal
5. The Prospects for Ridding The Area of Weapons of Mass Destruction
6 The Possibility of Ending the Civil War
7 Who Are the Insurgents and What do they Want?
8 Predictable Results of a Collapse of the Syrian State
Syria: Syrian ambassador to the UN Jaafari said, “Legally speaking Syria has become, starting today, a full member of the (chemical weapons) convention.” He made the statement after submitting relevant documents to the United Nations.
He said President Bashar al-Asad signed a legislative decree on Thursday that “declared the Syrian Arab Republic approval to accede to the convention” and that Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mu'allim had written to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to notify it of Syria's decision to join the convention.
Existing disaster plans may include provisions for mass fatalities but should be reviewed and tested regularly to determine if these plans are appropriate for the relatively long period of increased demand which is characteristic of a pandemic, as compared to the shorter response period required for most disaster plans. There are currently no national plans to recommend mass graves or mass cremations. This would only be considered under the most extreme circumstances. The use of the term mass grave infers that the remains will never be re-interred or identified. Therefore, the term mass grave should never be used when describing temporary interment. – Pandemic Influenza Mass Fatality Response Plan, 2007
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A month before 9/11, scientists from Livermore and its sister Los Alamos laboratory conducted a test using live microbes in a sealed chamber at the West Desert Test Center of Dugway Proving Ground, eighty-five miles from metropolitan Salt Lake City. Dugway is a huge, remote high-desert military installation surrounded on two sides by mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert to the north, acoustically and electronically quiet and free of light pollution, about as remote as one can get in the continental United States. Since 1942, through ups and downs, the post has hosted development and testing of and countermeasures to biological and chemical weapons. Until the United States renounced its own biological weapons in 1972 and destroyed its inventory, ten different biological agents were tested at Dugway.
Since the Nixon years Dugway base has served as the off-the-books black hole of the weapons of mass destruction national mission forces, the commando, SWAT, and technical arm of the Program. Dugway is where secret lethality tests are performed to gauge foreign and terrorist capabilities but also American equipment, protective clothing, detectors, and destroyers. If not literally the birthplace of the guinea pig, then it is certainly the place where the executive agents can play out their darkest fears and fantasies with humans and animals alike; it is the only U.S. facility equipped to test with aerosolized Bio-Safety Level 3 agents, the most deadly.
Syria: Update. Opposition sources say government forces attacked the hills around Ma'aloula village early on Monday under the cover of heavy shelling. The Christian village is reported to be almost empty after most of its residents fled following the arrival of the foreign-backed militants last week. According to a resident, who left the area in the past days, only around 50 people remain there.
Militants from the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front and the Qalamun Liberation Front are reported to be in control of some parts of the historic village, which is located about 70 kilometers northeast of Damascus.
Comment: Since 1999 this village has been on UNESCO's Tentative List of World Heritage sites.
Politics. The Syrian government has accepted a Russian proposal to put its chemical weapons under international control to avoid a possible U.S. military strike, Interfax news agency quoted Syria's foreign minister as saying on Tuesday.
Syrian Foreign Minister Mu'allim said, “We held a very fruitful round of talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday, and he proposed an initiative relating to chemical weapons. And in the evening we agreed to the Russian initiative.” He said Syria had agreed because this would “remove the grounds for American aggression.”
Before leaving Moscow, the Foreign Minister made several astounding announcements reported by Russian media. He said,
“There are very dark storm clouds gathering around the country and North America as a whole. Things are about to get dark, very dark in just a few short weeks. In just over two months, on November 13-14, 2013, the lights are about to go out. Will the lights come back on? It depends on who you ask. Given the past behavior of those in power, it would behoove all of us to prepare for the fact that we could be living for an extended time with no electricity…The working scenario that has emerged is that World War III is on the horizon. Syria was to be the flash point. However, with American and international sentiment running so high against American involvement in the Syrian conflict, Obama needs a Plan B in order to get America into war, because it does not appear that Congress is going to give him the authorization that he needs to force our way in Syria culminating in a military stand off between the Russians and the Chinese and the United States. Subsequently, if Obama fails to obtain Congressional support to attack Syria, he could very well turn his attention to the take down of the power grid and he could still achieve his goals in under two months.
Kerry Was Wrong
