Slashdot Mirror
Syrian Rebels Claim Hundreds Killed By Poison-Gas Attack
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Haroon Siddique reports for The Guardian that opposition activists have accused forces loyal to the Assad regime of using chemical weapons in towns in the eastern Ghouta. Accounts of the death toll vary wildly. The British based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights put the number killed at 'dozens.' Others put the figure much higher. The Local Coordination Committees said 'hundreds' were killed, the majority of them civilians. Graphic videos purporting to show the victims of the attack have been posted online (WARNING: graphic) showing chaotic scenes of people, including children, having seizures, being treated, and dead bodies lined up. 'Symptoms of the patients include nausea, hallucinations, suffocation, hard coughing, high blood pressure, seizures etc,' says the Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC). 'There is still no clue of the chemical weapon/toxic gas that was used by the regime's forces to target the innocent civilians.' Ake Sellstrom, the Swedish scientist who heads the U.N. inspection team in Syria, told the Swedish media that he had seen only the television images of the alleged attacks. 'But the high number of wounded and dead they are speaking about sounds suspicious,' Sellström told Swedish news agency TT, via telephone from Damascus. 'It sounds like something one should take a look at.'. The official Syrian news agency called the reports 'untrue' and designed to derail a United Nations inquiry into charges of chemical weapons in the conflict."
The timing and location of the reported chemical weapons use - just three days after the team of U.N. chemical experts checked in to a Damascus hotel a few km (miles) to the east at the start of their mission - was surprising.
"It would be very peculiar if it was the government to do this at the exact moment the international inspectors come into the country," said Rolf Ekeus, a retired Swedish diplomat who headed a team of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq in the 1990s.
"At the least, it wouldn't be very clever."
The side that's winning decides to piss off everyone by using poison gas on civilians/rebels. I guess now all the bleeding hearts will be chanting for Chairman Obama to "liberate" and "freedomize" the nation of Syria from their secular ruler so we can gain a level headed theocracy in it's place.
...video linked supplied, there's no chaos, and despite the insinuation of more than one person, including children, having seizures - I saw one guy whose legs were trembling. I've seen shock victims trembling worse.
I'm not saying this didn't happen, I am just saying that the video basically shows nothing (and maybe there's something wrong with me, but I didn't think it was 'graphic' in the slightest.)
Maybe they linked the wrong video.
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US meddling in mid-east affairs is a guaranteed disaster for the US.
Help one tribe, and the opposing tribe will hate you forever. Then the tribe you help will soon hate you also. Bottom line: Muslims must hate infidels, it is a key part of their religion.
No matter who the US helps, the US involvement will be called an "invasion." The US will be accused of using the US military to steal mid-east oil. It happens every time.
Sadam, Osama, and the Muslim Brotherhood, were all the good guys, and our buddies, at one point. Now, even Kuwait hates us.
There is no way to win in a mid-east conflict. The only winning move is not to play.
Other than buying oil, the US has no business in the mid-east. Let the crazies kill each other, if that is what they want to do. It is part of their culture, I guess.
But why is this on Slashdot? This isn't a discussion on the engineering of the gas or the dispursement methods used, just a news article.
If you'd looked at goatse.cx as much as he had, nothing would seem graphic to you either :)
Massacres in Kosovo are well established fact. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Kosovo_War Although I don't know where you've got the exagerated numbers from.
"I have drawn a red line. Cross it and I shall draw another!"
Have gnu, will travel.
This isn't a discussion on the engineering of the gas or the dispursement methods used, just a news article.
Because nerds aren't all clinical sociopaths more interested in the method of killing than the fact of it.
Plus, being a nerd is all about caring about some important, intellectual topic that the mainstream doesn't see the point in compared to who the latest pop star is sleeping with. Few things are nerdier than international policy, even though most of it is carried about by non-nerds. (Kind of like baseball.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
1. Not a single old person. It's either children (poor babies! think of the children!) or young men of combat age. With the occasional young woman thrown in. I guess there are no elderly at all in Syrian "civilian areas"? There are real dead people mixed in with living people, that much I'll grant you. However this chemical agent is "curiously selective" of its victims, and the cause of death is unknown and debatable until someone does an autopsy.
2. No evidence of fasciculations. I see plenty of people having tonic clonic seizures that somehow permit them to still be aware of their environment and look at the camera-man (doesn't happen in a real seizure), or point their index finger in a religious sign to their God. Fasciculations however are involuntary. You can't fake them. They're a sign of lower motor neuron damage/blockade, the sort you'd expect with chemical weapons (especially organophospates and nerve agents like Sarin/Tabun and family). But since they can't be faked you won't see any.
3. The timing, as has been pointed out elsewhere, is highly suspicious.
That's my $0.02 worth. But most people will believe whatever they are fed. I mean there's video, so it has to be real, right? No one has ever faked a massacre before for the cameras, right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
because you do realize there are other options for the middle east than theocracy and autocracy
like democracy
you think that's funny? then you're part of the problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it