Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
Technically, the production of certain agents- Sarin included- is not that difficult, provided you have the money and a little bit of know-how. Several splinter groups over the past few decades have made it and nerve agents like it with varying degrees of success.
The problem has generally been, and will be in the future, with dispersal. It's really hard to reliably disperse anything other than a fuckton of agent over any significant parcel of territory without a lot of specific technology- much more difficult to produce and deploy than the chemical itself.
Which is why, presumably, there was just as much focus put into the missiles and missile fragments found and identified, and potential firing vectors that by and large led back to known Syrian launch areas, as there was focus put into the environmental presence of the agent itself.
As for early warning: "The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21 August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded."
Bullshit. Around the same time last year that the US detected potential Sarin production by the Assad regime (December), there were also very public reports in the news of large chemical stockpiles being transferred and disseminated across the country. Don't have time to link right now, will later. I remember thinking, "there's no way Assad would use these. This is clearly a message to the international community: 'this is what stands to fall into enemy hands if the current regime fails, so you'd better either help us or stay out of our way.'" I was wrong in that regard.
There was a good article in this week's New Yorker about some Syrian sleuth-work that touches on the nerve-missile thing. Can't link because it's locked, but if people have a New Yorker subscription, it's worth the read.
This article feels kind of tinfoil hattish. A lot of what's chronicled in terms of press releases and what the Obama admin made public could easily be attributed to the fact that they were given the onerous deed of building a bulletproof case for military intervention in Syria in the face of an American audience with waning (if any) patience for wartime activity, and a congress that was at this exact same point very publicly looking for a reason to impeach the president on any grounds possible. It's not really necessary to turn it into more of a "there's more evidence pointing towards Al Nusra and less pointing towards Assad" thing. There's no doubt Al Nusra and AQ affiliates the world over could easily produce plenty of scary shit. But they'll disperse it the old fashioned way- a ziploc bag punctured with an umbrella tip. What happened in Syria- both in scope and method- points way more towards the Syrian government.