BEIRUT — A leading member of a United Nations investigatory commission says there are “strong concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof” that Syrian rebels have used the nerve agent sarin.
Carla del Ponte, a former prosecutor for U.N. tribunals investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, made the comment in an interview Sunday with a Swiss television channel, the BBC reported.
The U.N. panel, known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, emphasized in a statement Monday that it had reached no conclusions about the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria's civil war.
“I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got ... about the use of nerve gas by the opposition,” Del Ponte told Swiss Italian broadcaster RSI.
She said the evidence emerged from interviews conducted by investigators with victims, physicians and others in neighboring countries.
Del Ponte did not rule out the possibility that President Bashar Assad's government may also have used chemical agents on the battlefield.
Nonetheless, the comments were a blow to opposition activists who have alleged that the government has deployed chemical weapons on various occasions against rebel forces in Syria......
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who I already considered to be a buffoon, was left trying to explain how the Obama administration did not believe the results of the UN investigation. Needless to say, Jay Carney knows nothing about chemical weapons, and if the UN investigation had shown strong evidence (or even a scintilla of evidence) that Asad used such weapons, the US would have likely already sent a squadron of F-18s to Syria to put the country in the hands of our allies, al-Qa'ida.
The most obvious comparison with which to make between our current situation in Syria, is with our Afghanistan policy in the 190s. You remember, when we funded Islamic jihadists to overthrow the Russians. How did that turn out for us?
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