Earlier this week, Sy Hersh questioned whether Assad actually launched the Syrian chemical weapons attack. Eliot Higgins pushes back:
Hersh … discusses the possibility that the sarin was produced by Jabhat al-Nusra, the al Qaeda-affiliated group that’s fighting Assad. I asked chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta for his opinion on that. He compared the possibility of Jabhat al-Nusra using chemical weapons to another terrorist attack involving sarin: the 1996 gassing of the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
“The 1994 to 1996 Japanese experience tells us that even a very large and sophisticated effort comprising many millions of dollars, a dedicated large facility, and a lot of skilled labor results only in liters of sarin, not tons,” Kaszeta said. “Even if the Aug. 21 attack is limited to the eight Volcano rockets that we seem to be talking about, we’re looking at an industrial effort two orders of magnitude larger than the Aum Shinrikyo effort. This is a nontrivial and very costly undertaking, and I highly doubt whether any of the possible nonstate actors involved here have the factory to have produced it. Where is this factory? Where is the waste stream? Where are the dozens of skilled people — not just one al Qaeda member — needed to produce this amount of material?”
Joanna Paraszczuk and Scott Lucas pile on:
Hersh also does not examine how insurgents could fire multiple chemical warheads on opposition-controlled towns like the West Ghouta Moadamiyyat ash-Sham. That town, one of the first places that started to demonstrate against the Assad regime over two years ago, has been under a tight regime siege for over a year and is literally surrounded by key regime military strongholds. It is right next to the Mezzeh Military Airport, the site of fierce fighting between regime and insurgent fighters, and just south of the 4th Armored Division base, Sumarieh residences, and key police housing. So while it is easy to see how regime forces could fire on Moadamiyyat ash-Sham from outside the town — indeed, the regime is firing conventional weapons at the town on a daily basis — it would be practically and logistically impossible for insurgents to fire at short-to-medium range from outside the town.
Nor does Hersh bother to examine motive. Why would insurgents fire multiple chemical weapons at Moadamiyyat ash-Sham, a strategically-important opposition-controlled town that had resisted a siege for almost a year at the time of the August 21 attacks? Who would want to weaken the town by causing mass casualties and mass panic?
