Al-Qaeda Calls for "Immediate Halt" in Syria To Stop Infighting - Yes, John McCain, Your Rebels Include an Al-Qaeda Faction

The Obama administration and John McCain have insisted that the sarin gas attacks on Syrian civilians came from Bashar Assad's Syrian government, and regime-change is needed. A new MIT report says, in essence, American Intelligence is wrong and needs to fix itself. While thinking about the attacks, we also need to think about Benghazi and a possible gunrunning operation from that city to Syrian rebels. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri is calling for rebels to pull together rather than fighting each other, so if you (hello John McCain!) have doubts that al-Qaeda is fighting among the rebels, get over it. That's the summary for what you'll read below.

Ayman Al-Zawahri

I loathe crediting the United Nations for anything, but in this case, it bears merit. A report released this week issued by a "team of security and arms experts," concludes that the Syrian government had no viable method of delivering the sarin from any distance within Syria exceeding two miles, leaving what has been suspected for some time - Syrian rebels (including al-Qaeda) had to gas their own people in Ghouta, in an effort to get U.S. support in overthrowing Assad.

[Theodore Postol, Prof. of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT] ...a basic analysis of the weapon – some also have described as a looking like a push pop, a fat cylinder filled with sarin atop a thin stick that holds the engine – would have shown that it wasn’t capable of flying the 6 miles from the center of the Syrian government-controlled part of Damascus to the point of impact in the suburbs, or even the 3.6 miles from the edges of government-controlled ground.

He questioned whether U.S. intelligence officials had actually analyzed the improbability of a rocket with such a non-aerodynamic design traveling so far before Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Sept. 3 that “we are certain that none of the opposition has the weapons or capacity to effect a strike of this scale – particularly from the heart of regime territory.”...

[Richard Lloyd, former UN weapons inspector]...Lloyd, who has spent the past half-year studying the weapons and capabilities in the Syrian conflict, disputed the assumption that the rebels are less capable of making rockets than the Syrian military.

“The Syrian rebels most definitely have the ability to make these weapons,” he said. “I think they might have more ability than the Syrian government.” Source: Syria The Truth

On Fox yesterday at 10:26 a.m. CDT, Leland Vittert reported that Syrian rebels are fighting among themselves as much as they are fighting back against the regime. More inn support of that information:

Meanwhile, as infighting among rebels has grown so deadly — nearly 1,400 killed in the past 20 days — Ayman al-Zawahri, the Al-Qaeda head, called for an immediate halt to the internal clashes.

In an audio message posted online Thursday, he said Islamic groups in Syria should set up an Islamic court that would mediate and resolve the factions’ differences.

Islamic fighters should also focus on “bringing down Assad’s secular, sectarian, unjust and criminal regime to set up a just Islamic state.”

The intervention by the Al-Qaeda leader plays directly into Mr. Assad’s argument only his government is preventing Syria’s further descent into chaos. Source: National Post

To think that al-Qaeda would hesitate to gas civilians is extraordinarily naive.

Seymour Hersh quoted in Global Research:

“Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally.  He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly-capable machine shop.’  The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal.”

The MIT report dated January 14, 2014 is titled Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013 and can be found here.

● The Syrian Improvised Chemical Munitions that were used in the August 21, 2013 Nerve Agent attack in Damascus have a range of about 2 kilometers

● The UN Independent Assessment of the Range of the chemical munition is in exact agreement with our findings

● This indicates that these munitions could not possibly have been fired at East Ghouta from the "heart", or from the Eastern Edge, of the Syrian Government controlled area shown in the intelligence map published by the White House on August 30, 2013.

● This mistaken intelligence could have led to an unjustified US military action based on false intelligence

● A proper vetting of the fact that the munition was of such short range would have led to a completely different assessment of the situation from the gathered data

● Whatever the reasons for the egregious errors in the intelligence, the source of these errors needs to be explained

● If the source of these errors is not identified, the procedures that led to this intelligence failure will go uncorrected, and the chances of a future policy disaster will grow with certainty.

● Conspiracies are many, but some are worth considering and must be considered because what Obama and Hillary Clinton are telling us about Benghazi makes no sense, and the support of Syrian rebels makes no sense now that we know that al-Qaeda factions are in the rebel mix. (Source: "Main Policy" issues of the above linked report)

If you prefer to get technical, I encourage you to view the MIT report linked above and take note of the maps of the areas affected and their distance from the grounds held by the Syrian government.

In my opinion, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were likely conspirators in a gunrunning operation from Benghazi to Syria straight into the arms of waiting rebels. Perhaps this explains why Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi and died on September 11, 2012, along with 3 other Americans AND why General Carter Ham did not know about the CIA annex in Benghazi, and why the Pentagon didn't know the Benghazi Special Mission Compound -- the residence where Stevens and others lived and worked when Stevens was in Benghazi -- existed. Unbe-freaking-lievable, as blogger Proof Positive said in comments on my story about General Ham and the Pentagon a few days ago.

Obama is backing the al-Qaeda side of Syria, just as he is backing the Muslim Brotherhood. Every al-Qaeda leader was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Wake up America!

Washington Times, September 12, 2013:

12 years later, we are back to arming radical Muslims, having forgotten, with stunning speed, the lessons of the previous 30 years.

12 years later we have come full circle.

We all understand that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It served as the basis of our Cold War foreign policy stance towards revolutions and civil wars around the globe.

But when the enemy of my enemy, is also my enemy, it would seem as though choices for options range between “absolutely not” and “this is a terrible idea.”

Posted by Maggie @ Maggie's Notebook