A hacker gained access to U.S. Army Col. Anthony J. MacDonald’s email account by first gaining access to his LinkedIn account. Within the enormous haul of emails collected, the hacker noticed a communication between MacDonald and one of his colleagues, Eugene Furst. Furst congratulates the Col. for his recent successes and gives him a link to the Washington Post article about the chemical attacks in Syria on August 21st.
Next, a friend of MacDonald’s wife Jennifer wrote that she was shocked to see all of the children killed in the chemical attack. Jennifer replies that she saw the story but, “Tony comforted me. He said the kids weren’t hurt, it was done for the cameras.”
The authenticity of the emails has not been confirmed, but there are several other facts that seem to bolster the findings.
Back in June, a group of Syrian rebels were arrested on the Turkish-Syrian border carrying 2kg of sarin nerve gas. On August 26th, Yara Saleh, a Correspondent for the Al-Ihbariya Syrian information channel, reported that a rebel chemical weapons stockpile and assembly facility had been located by the Syrian army in a suburb of Damascus.
On August 27th, Foreign Policy magazine reported that, “in the hours following the chemical attack in Syria, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people.”
The Obama administration is using this intercepted phone call as proof that the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical attack. But this intelligence certainly begs the question, why would a senior official call the chemical weapons unit asking what happened if the Assad administration ordered the attack? A Syrian envoy claims that rebels were behind the gas attacks.
In recent months, the Syrian army has made gains against the rebels. Assad does not need to use chemical weapons, and knows that if he did, the US would likely launch an attack. The rebels, on the other hand, also know this, and so have every reason to use chemical weapons and to blame those attacks on the Assad regime.
To me, it seems there are only two rational explanations; either some low level Syrian officer took matters into his own hands, or the rebels are the ones responsible for the attack. It should be noted that back in May, U.N. rights investigator Carla del Ponte stated, “We still have to deepen our investigation, verify and confirm (the findings) through new witness testimony, but according to what we have established so far, it is at the moment opponents of the regime who are using sarin gas.”
An independent investigation carried out by reporter Jerome Corsi found substantial evidence to support del Ponte’s assertion. Video evidence has emerged on YouTube and elsewhere that shows rebel troops transporting, loading and firing nerve agents into civilian population centers. The munition in the image below is homemade delivery device, not a standard gas shell that Assad would have at his disposal. The image comes from a video that shows rebels firing the device into a Syrian suburb.
Corsi also points out that on Aug. 23, LiveLeak.com hosted an audio recording of a phone call broadcast on Syrian TV between the rebel civilian militia “Shuhada al-Bayada Battalion” in Homs, Syria, and a Saudi Arabian boss, identified as “Abulbasit.” The phone call indicates rebels in Syria launched the chemical weapons attack in Deir Ballba, not the Assad government.
The U.S. government is taking the American public headlong into yet another war based on a phone call that actually discounts the very thing they are trying to prove, while ignoring the mountains of evidence that suggest it is the rebel troops who are most likely responsible for the gas attacks.
Further, it is now a well established fact that many of the Syrian rebels have pledged loyalty to al Qaeda. In June, USA Today reported that, “The pledge of allegiance by Syrian Jabhat al Nusra Front chief Abou Mohamad al-Joulani to al-Qaeda leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri was coupled with an announcement by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, that it would work with al Nusra as well.”
This fact was highlighed by Former congressman Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio), who recently told theHill that striking Syria would effectively turn the United States military into “al-Qaeda’s air force.”
It’s also interesting to note that the rebels have reacted violently to U.N. peacekeepers. The BBC reported that a U.N. convoy carrying weapons inspectors was fired upon by a sniper, causing them to turn back before they could make an assessment of the most recent gas attacks. The Assad regime is adamant that the sniper fire came from rebels. Back in March, rebel forces took 21 U.N. peacekeepers hostage. If the rebels are supposedly the good guys, why are they firing on weapons inspectors and taking U.N. peacekeepers as hostages?
On August 29th, Dale Gavlak, a Middle East reporter for the Associated Press, along with Yahya Ababneh, published an article on the recent gas attacks in Syria. The reporters questioned local residents and rebels about the attacks. According to the rebels themselves, they were responsible for launching the chemical attacks.
According to a rebel named ‘K’, “They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them. We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.”
The rebels blame the Saudis for providing the weapons. The rebel states, “When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them.”
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