"Sellstrom explained to Winfield that the investigating team had sought the help of the opposition in the area where the attack took place to identify as many as 80 survivors of the Sarin attack. “We thought that if they can gather 80 people who were affected but still surviving, that it [would be] clearly indicative that a major event had taken place,” he said. Sellstrom revealed in the interview that the team had chosen 40 people from the original 80 identified as survivors by the opposition. Those 36 people described themselves as having had very serious exposure to Sarin. Thirty of the 36 reported rocket strikes either on or near their homes. The remaining six said they had gone to a point of impact to help those suffering from the attack.
The U.N. report provided detailed statistics on the symptoms reported by the 36 individuals and concluded the data were “consistent with organophosphate intoxication”. But chemical weapons specialists have identified serious contradictions in the data that appear to indicate the contrary. Twenty-eight of the 36 victims – nearly four-fifths of the sample – said they had experienced loss of consciousness, according to the Sep. 16 U.N. report. The second most frequent symptom was difficulty breathing, which was reported by 22 of the 36, followed by blurred vision, which was suffered by 15 of them. But only five of the 36 reported miosis, or constricted pupils. That fact is an indication that the exposure to Sarin was actually minimal or nonexistent for 31 of the 36, or 86 percent of the sample. Miosis is the most basic and reliable indicator of nerve gas poisoning, according to chemical weapons literature and specialists who analysed the report. As little as four mg of Sarin per cubic metre for just two minutes would have triggered that physiological response, according to an Apr. 17 email from UK-based American chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta in April. A 2002 article in the journal Critical Care Medicine put the minimum exposure necessary to cause miosis at one mg of Sarin per cubic metre for three minutes. Yet miosis was the least prevalent symptom among those people claiming to have been very seriously exposed to Sarin in Syria. Dr. Abbas Faroutan, an Iranian physician who treated Iranian victims of Iraqi nerve gas attacks, noted that the data were “not logical”. Seven of the 36 people identified as victims told investigators they had lost a combined total of 39 members of their immediate families who were killed in buildings they said were either points of impact of the rockets or only 20 metres (64 feet) away. However, only one of the seven exhibited the constriction of pupils and only one reported nausea and vomiting. Despite the paucity of the most fundamental indicator of exposure to Sarin, 31 of the 36 were found to have a trace of Sarin in their blood samples. That seeming contradiction is explained by the fact that even exposure to an amount of Sarin too small to cause any symptoms would be detected in the blood using an extremely sensitive method called fluoride reactivation, according to Kaszeta. The U.N. team found that six of the people who claimed serious exposure to Sarin had no trace of Sarin in their blood at all, indicating that they had in fact experienced no exposure to Sarin at all." Gareth Porter
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Well, As Hersh and I have said, this whole thing was just propaganda BS. The most likely thing is that some rebel group cooked this batch of kitchen grade sarin in Turkey and decided to stage a "provocation" that would help to "sell" American involvement in much the same way that the dastard Wolfowitz said that the Bush Administration chose the non-existent Iraqi nuclear weapons threat for the same reason.
Unfortunately, the vendu US media will never publish or show this on TV.
Fortuntately, the American public have decided that they will not fight for a lot of jihadi scum. pl
http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/05/u-n-probe-chief-doubtful-syria-sarin-exposure-claims/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_Syria
For the amount of money being wasted on the "Free" Syrian Army one would at least expect to get a better quality of liars.
Posted by: Fred | 07 May 2014 at 03:46 PM
"Miosis is the most basic and reliable indicator of nerve gas poisoning, according to chemical weapons literature and specialists who analysed the report."
The instructor during NBC training had us memorise a line on nerve agents, roughly: "as the pupil narrows, the anus widens" hinting to another symptom to be expected.
Posted by: confusedponderer | 08 May 2014 at 08:31 AM
All
More BHO long ball in the ME ? The Syrian CW transfer out of their country seems to be going apace,& we do not see much more sophisticated weapons going to the liver eaters - Indeed as Col Lang noted Homs is now under the control of Assad forces.
I still wonder if BHO did not go to the Congresscritters for the Syrian AUMF - knowing it would fail . And this was after PM Cameron had is neocon a--ss handing to him by all the MP's . Is it too naive to hope that we are seeing a BHO course correction at least in the ME ? We Shall See...
Posted by: Alba Etie | 08 May 2014 at 03:28 PM
Alba Etie,
Course correct out of Syria to Ukraine? That's making a very bad situation even worse.
Posted by: Fred | 08 May 2014 at 04:47 PM
Fred
Its looks like confrontation with Putin over "Banderstan" may be winding down . Russian leadership has asked for a new Geneva conference to try to reinstate the cease fire between the Ukranian authorities and Russian separatist . We have not seen the Sector sanctions against Russia imposed by BHO after all .Most telling to me is that there are no Russian troops in Ukraine proper - At one point it looked like the Russian military would be driving West to the Polish border. I am trying to be counter intuitive to the SST consensus
that seems to say we are still carrying out the neocon agenda with no push back from the Administration . I hope that I am right , we shall see.
Posted by: Alba Etie | 09 May 2014 at 10:26 AM