Rebels Charge That Assad Continues to Use Chemical Weapons

[DonViejo]

by Eli Lake Apr 25, 2013 5:55 PM EDT

The Obama administration says Syria’s government may have attacked its citizens with sarin last month. Rebel groups allege those attacks are continuing.

As the White House waits for more evidence to determine whether or not Syrian president Bashar al-Assad crossed what President Obama has called his “red line” and last month used chemical weapons in his campaign against his country’s rebels, Syrian fighters from the ground are reporting a new chemical weapons attack in south Damascus.

On Thursday, the Syrian Support Group (SSG), a U.S.-based advocacy organization that has pressed Obama to provide the Syrian opposition with advanced weapons, issued a report that said two chemical weapons attacks were conducted on April 25 in the southern part of Daraya, a suburb of Damascus. One doctor working from the Daraya medical center said 75 victims were treated for symptoms including “muscle spasms, bronchial spasms, headaches, dizziness, vomiting, and miosis” following a 1 a.m. rocket strike. Another 25 victims were sent to the medical center complaining of similar symptoms when a second attack hit the area at 7 a.m. local time, according to the SSG and a statement from the local coordinating council of Dariya, a media group affiliated with the Syrian opposition.
The Daily Beast was unable to confirm the report. But the allegation comes after the White House acknowledged today that the U.S. intelligence community had “varying degrees of confidence” that sarin gas was used on a small scale in attacks in Syria. U.S. defense and intelligence officials say the alleged attacks included attacks on March 19 in Damascus and Aleppo.

The SSG, one of the first to report on the March 19 attacks, said victims of Thursday’s chemical strike exhibited symptoms similar to those from the March 19 attacks, in which rebel groups claimed the regime used weapons armed with echothiophate—an organophosphate similar to sarin.

If the rebel report is true, it is a nightmare scenario for the Obama administration. Democrats and Republicans on Thursday warned that the administration’s cautious approach to confirming evidence of a chemical attack may end up emboldening Assad. In the past year, Assad has used SCUD missiles and fixed-wing aircraft to attack civilian areas, an escalation from his initial response to the Syrian uprising in 2011.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/25/rebels-charge-that-assad-continues-to-use-chemical-weapons.html

[Purveyor]

1. This Eli Lake? The darling of National Review? Eli Lake Gets the Scoop

As the administration’s Libya narrative unraveled, Lake was on the job.

By Eliana Johnson

If you’ve been following the story of the terror attacks in Benghazi and their scandalous fallout here at home, there’s a good chance you’ve been reading Eli Lake’s coverage at The Daily Beast. Lake, the Beast’s 40-year-old senior national-security correspondent, has been the indispensable reporter on the case.

Lake was the first to report on the unraveling of the administration’s narrative, which centered on a “spontaneous” eruption of violence elicited by a YouTube video, when intelligence sources suggested extremists had monitored the compound before the attack.

He was also the first to tell us that, within 24 hours, American officials knew the attack was carried out by al-Qaeda affiliates, and the first to trace the origins of Susan Rice’s claim about a protest “undertaken in response to a very offensive video” to a series of flawed talking points generated by the CIA. Then came his report that a former regional security officer in Libya, Eric Nordstrom, was preparing to tell Congress that the State Department reduced security in Libya despite his objections. Nordstrom delivered his astonishing testimony to the House Oversight Committee on October 10, the day after Lake’s story appeared.

To those who know him, Lake’s dominance on the Benghazi beat comes as no surprise. Lake, a former colleague of mine at the New York Sun, earned a reputation early on for his ability to get the scoop. “We sensed that Lake could be a scoop-getter, which turned out to be an understatement,” says Seth Lipsky, who hired Lake at The Forward in 1999 and again at the Sun in 2004. Lake’s 2007 Sun exclusive highlighting the consensus judgment in the latest National Intelligence Estimate that an al-Qaeda leadership council met regularly in eastern Iran so rattled Bush-administration officials that the Sun published an editorial on “The Lake Effect.” Thanks to Lake, the Sun was also a leading source of news on the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji and on Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. “He’s just a serious, widely sourced newspaperman,” Lipsky says.

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http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331778/eli-lake-gets-scoop-eliana-johnson