Allies’ Intelligence on Syria All Points to Assad Forces

The British say there have been 14 Syrian chemical attacks since 2012 and the last, the most horrific, killed “at least 350” civilians. The Americans count fewer attacks, but put a stunningly higher, quite precise number on the casualties from the attack two weeks ago: 1,429. The French argue that only President Bashar al-Assad and the closest members of his clan can order chemical attacks; the Americans say that, at least when it comes to the Aug. 21 attack that has triggered the Congressional debate over an American armed strike, it is unclear where the orders came from. In short, the differences in intelligence estimates among the United States and its closest allies are considerable but, in the end, perhaps not that meaningful. All come to the same basic conclusions: the attacks involved sarin gas, only the Assad government had control over the chemical agents, and whether it was premeditated or the result of “sloppiness,” as one senior American official put it, the results were devastating. Members of Congress, emerging from unclassified and classified briefings, say they have little doubt that Mr. Assad’s government was responsible for the attacks; even those who cite the example of the huge intelligence errors made about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq concede this case is different. Iraq was about assessing whether weapons existed; Syria is all about who used them, and whether a strike would prevent — or encourage — their use again. But the very public way that the Americans, French, British and Israelis have published their evidence underscores the huge sensitivities around the intelligence itself, as well as the questions it prompts. The issues are made more difficult by the fact that chemical weapons can be delivered in many ways, from small rockets to helicopters (the intelligence reports argue both have been used at different times), and the effects are sometimes hard to detect. There was no mistaking the effects, though, in the Aug. 21 attack, in which there were so many dead, and so much forensic evidence, that there is little credible argument that sarin gas was not used. The question is whether the Obama administration reacted too slowly to earlier attacks, and whether Congress will decide that, no matter how horrendous the effects, it is not a problem for America to solve. A look at the intelligence judgments made public by France, Britain and the United States is generally consistent, if still laden with caveats about how and how surely the governments came to their conclusions. On Aug. 29, the British government released a declassified assessment from the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Jon Day, addressed to Prime Minister David Cameron, saying that it was “highly likely” that the Syrian government carried out the chemical warfare attacks of Aug. 21. The letter noted that Britain had previously judged that the Syrian government had “used lethal C.W. on 14 occasions from 2012,” adding that “this judgment was made with the highest possible level of certainty following an exhaustive review.” “A clear pattern of regime use has therefore been established.” As for the attack on Aug. 21, Mr. Day wrote, there was a lot of “open source reporting of C.W. use,” including videos, photographs and testimonials. “As a result, there is little serious dispute that chemical attacks causing mass casualties on a larger scale than hitherto (including, we judge, at least 350 fatalities), took place.” For Washington, the total was considerably higher, saying that “a preliminary U.S. government assessment determined that 1,429 people were killed in the chemical weapons attack, including at least 426 children.” The British judged that “there is no credible intelligence or other evidence” to substantiate claims that the Syrian opposition either used chemical weapons or even has them.

Ver Mas en: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/world/middleeast/allies-intelligence-on-syria-all-points-to-assad-forces.html?ref=global-home&_r=0

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