While domestic security must be upheld, it is equally important to protect open public debate. ● We know that you will agree that one of the hallmarks of free and open democracies is a vivid public debate addressing all fundamental aspects of society, including the balance and possible conflict between the legitimate security concerns of governments and the protection of privacy and the free press. We all understand both the imperative to uphold domestic security and the equally important imperative to protect our open public debate about the limits to and legal implications of these efforts. The debate is not a sign of weakness of our democracies. It is the basis of our strength. ● Against this backdrop, events in Great Britain over the past week give rise to deep concern. We may differ on where to draw the line and strike the right balance, but we should not differ in our determination to protect an open debate about these essential questions. Also, we should stand united to protect individuals engaging in such debates within the parameters of democracy and the rule of law.

A Department of Defense training manual obtained by a conservative watchdog group pointed to the original American colonists as examples of an extremist movement, comments that have sparked fear of a broader crackdown on dissent in America. The training manual provides information that describes, among other things, “common themes in extremist ideologies." Now, if the Department of Defense has its way, historical figures who risked their lives to free America from British colonial rule – names like Paul Revere, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams – will be rebranded as dangerous extremists, alongside the likes of skinheads and neo-Nazis. The first paragraph of the section entitled ‘Extremist Ideologies’ opens with a statement that has drawn heated criticism: “In US history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

Iranian Armed Forces’ Deputy Chief of Staff Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri has warned the United States of the “severe consequences” of crossing the red line on Syria. ● “The US knows where the red line of the Syria front is laid; and crossing Syria’s red line in any form will have severe consequences for the White House,” Brigadier General Jazayeri said on Sunday. The Iranian commander said that the ongoing terrorist war in Syria is masterminded by the US and the reactionary forces in the region against the resistance front, adding that despite the enemy plots, the Syrian government and nation have gained considerable victories thanks to their resistance against this massive aggression.

SANA: Russian FM: any military intervention in Syria will leave severe repercussions in the Middle East and north Africa
Sydney Morning Herald: Iran warns US against action on Syria - Video
Zero Hedge: "Military Intervention In Syria", US Training "Rebels" Since 2011
And The Complete Grand Plan - The March 2012 Leak
PressTV/Kevin Barrett: US military intervention in Syria can lead to WWIII: Analyst

● Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention in Syria's civil war [it's not a civil war] and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict [the US and Israel are behind the "conflict"] even if reports that Syria's government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed, a Reuters/Ipsos poll says. ● About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria's civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act. ● More Americans would back intervention if it is established that chemical weapons have been used, but even that support has dipped in recent days - just as Syria's civil war has escalated and the images of hundreds of civilians allegedly killed by chemicals appeared on television screens and the Internet.

Médecins sans Frontières says symptoms indicate mass exposure to neurotoxic agent, as Syrian state TV claims chemical weapons found in rebel tunnels. ● Médecins sans Frontières has said hospitals it supports in Damascus treated thousands of patients for neurotoxicity, the first independent indication of the use of poison gas in a deadly incident on Wednesday in the Syrian capital. The medical charity said the hospitals received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on Wednesday morning, of which 355 reportedly died. Dr Bart Janssens, director of operations at the charity, said: "Medical staff working in these facilities provided detailed information to MSF doctors regarding large numbers of patients arriving with symptoms including convulsions, excess saliva, pinpoint pupils, blurred vision and respiratory distress." He said he could not confirm the cause of symptoms or the culprits.

Syrian soldiers have found chemical agents in tunnels dug by the militants in the Damascus suburb of Jobar, with some of the soldiers having been affected by the chemicals, Syria's TV says.

Reuters: Russia: Syrian rebels preventing probe into alleged chemical attack ● Russia's Foreign Ministry said on Friday Syria's opposition was preventing an objective investigation into allegations the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack. "Much needed signals from the opposition, including its readiness to guarantee the safety and effective work of U.N. experts on territory controlled by militants, unfortunately are not forthcoming," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "It is directly preventing an objective investigation into the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria."

Russia Today/LiveLeak: Syria: Army 'finds US made chemical weapons effects' in opposition stronghold ● Syrian government forces says they found materials including chemical weapons protection masks made in the US, and toxic chemical agent containers made in Saudi Arabia, when it raided a tunnel in the opposition stronghold of Jobar near Damascus on Saturday. A Syrian army officer told reporters that soldiers participating in the raid showed symptoms such as suffocation and dilated pupils in addition to vomiting and general fatigue. According to the army, symptoms appeared minutes after opposition militants detonated two explosive devices. The officer said chemical agents are still being analysed. The claims follow condemnation from countries such as the UK, France and the US of the Assad government after an alleged chemical weapons attack earlier in the week. Russia, has suggested that opposition militants could have been responsible for the attack.

Russia Today: Syrian rebels use toxic chemicals against govt troops near Damascus - state media ● Syrian rebels have used chemical weapons against regime forces in the Damascus suburb of Jobar, where soldiers discovered stockpiles of toxic poisoning antidotes, state media reports. According to SANA citing “an official source” suffocation cases among army soldiers have been reported. The source told the agency that army unit pushed into the area, where soldiers were attacked, and seized a warehouse containing material labeled 'Made in KSA' as well as a large number of protective masks. In addition, the army discovered a stockpile of chemical poisoning antidotes with 'The Qatari-German Company for Pharmaceutical Industries' label on them.

Syrian Radio & TV: BREAKING: Syrian soldiers have found chemical agents in tunnels dug by the terrorists in the Damascus suburb of Jobar, with some of the soldiers having been affected by the Chemicals.

LiveLeak: FSA trial sarin/nerve gas on rabbits 3-4 months prior to the chemical attacks in Ghouta - VIDEO

Global Research: Deleted Daily Mail Online Article: “US Backed Plan for Chemical Weapon Attack in Syria to Be Blamed on Assad” ● In January 29, 2013, Britain’s most popular Daily Newspaper, in its online version Dailymail.co.uk published an article titled: U.S. ‘backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria and blame it on Assad’s regime’ A few days later they pulled the article. What the reason was for the deletion remains unclear. The article was published at this URL.

Kevin Barrett: Syria chemical mayhem: Another Israeli false-flag? ■ How could Israel immediately know who was behind the Syrian chemical attack? Israeli leaders have amazing powers of clairvoyance. Whenever a huge, history-steering terror attack happens, the Israelis immediately know who did it. Before the dust settles, they stand up and tell the world exactly what it all means - and provide the script for the way they want the world to react. Christopher Bollyn reminds us: “Within minutes of the airplane crashes on 9/11, Ehud Barak (the founder and master of the Israeli military's covert operation force, the Sayeret Matkal) was in the London studio of the BBC World ready to provide a plausible (and political) explanation to the world. Barak, the real mastermind of 9/11, was the first person to call for a 'War on Terror' - and US intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East.” Like Ehud Barak minutes after 9/11, Moshe Yaalon stood up just hours after the Syrian chemical weapons tragedy and provided an apparently pre-scripted narrative.

● A defense official, cited by Reuters, said on Friday the US Navy was expanding its Mediterranean presence with a fourth cruise-missile ship, the USS Mahan. Though the source stressed to Reuters the Navy did not have orders to prepare for military operations against Syria. ● The ship was due to head back to the United States, but the commander of the US Sixth Fleet decided to maintain the ship in the region. All four ships are capable of launching long-range, subsonic cruise missiles to reach land targets. ● President Barack Obama is "under renewed pressure" [from Israel] to take action following the emergence of footage of what appears to be the aftermath of a toxic agent attack in a Damascus suburb on Wednesday.

CBS News: U.S. preps for possible cruise missile attack on Syrian gov't forces
PressTV: Hagel: US positioning forces for possible military action on Syria

[Jun 20, 2013] Press TV has conducted an interview Saeb Shaath, author and Middle East expert in Belfast, about the issue of US president Obama’s declaration to escalate the war in Syria by arming militant elements and the confirmation statement by Shimon Peres saying the US has no other choice. The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: No surprise in what the Israeli president has said about the US arming insurgents, but what was surprising is Shimon Peres saying that that was the last option that the US has. Is that the last option that the US has, is the Israeli president correct there?

Shaath: They are trying to bluff their way around this. The president of Israel, he knows more than what he tries to tell. Israeli had a role from the beginning and its role was to create a series of such destruction in Syria. Let me say historically in 1948 the doctrine was declared by Ben Gurion, then the leader of the Zionist movement who founded Israel when the British installed it for them, said they have to be able to fight all the Arabic countries together - that’s how Israel can succeed and that’s become their doctrine, which was used to implement devious tactics in creating hot spots and flash points in every Arabic country such as sectarian, religious tensions and they created their undercover groups to act as political movements or religious movements within the Arabic world. That is a British and US tactic and they taught the Israelis very well how to use it.

Stephen Lendman: Drumbeat for War on Syria ● Whenever America goes to war or plans one, media scoundrels march in lockstep. Truth is the first casualty. Managed news misinformation substitutes. It happens every time. It's standard practice. It's no different this time. Facts on the ground don't matter. They're systematically ignored. Nations Washington opposes are vilified. Harsh media scoundrel rhetoric targets them. It repeats with disturbing frequency. It's escalating now.

Judges ask government to provide detailed evidence about why it wants right to trawl data seized using terror laws. ● The high court has given the government until Tuesday night to provide detailed evidence about why it wants the right to trawl and share data seized using terror laws from the partner of a Guardian journalist. Lord Justice Beatson and Judge Kenneth Parker said in a judgment outlining their decision to allow the police to continue accessing material taken from David Miranda that the ruling was made because while they could not judge the strength of the government's claims about the national security risks the material would pose if disclosed, they did have "serious assertions by responsible persons". Miranda's partner, Glenn Greenwald, has exposed mass digital surveillance by US and UK spy agencies based on material leaked by Edward Snowden, the former US intelligence contractor. Miranda was travelling from Berlin back to his home in Rio de Janeiro when he was detained at Heathrow last Sunday.

● Israel has been forced to issue a formal apology to Japan over offensive comments posted on Facebook by its head of online public diplomacy. ● The apology followed a complaint by the Japanese ambassador to Israel, Hideo Sato, after senior government official Daniel Seaman disparaged commemorations for the victims of the 1945 atomic bombs, causing a wave of protests in Japan. ● "I am sick of the Japanese, 'Human Rights' and 'Peace' groups the world over holding their annual self-righteous commemorations for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims," Seaman wrote on his Facebook page. "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the consequence of Japanese aggression. You reap what you sow."

Digital infrastructure exceeding limits of human control, industry experts warn. ● A series of system crashes affecting Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft in the past fortnight has brought warnings that governments, banks and big business are over-reliant on computer networks that have become too complex. ● The alarm was sounded by industry experts in the aftermath of a three-hour network shutdown that paralysed the operation of the Nasdaq stock market in New York on Thursday, on what should have been a quiet day of routine share trading on the exchange. ● Jaron Lanier, the author and inventor of the concept of virtual reality, warned that digital infrastructure was moving beyond human control. He said: "When you try to achieve great scale with automation and the automation exceeds the boundaries of human oversight there is going to be failure. That goes for governments, for consumer companies, for Google, or a big insurance company.

■ Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst convicted of making public thousands of secret documents, was sentenced Wednesday to 35 years in prison. But the files Manning sent to the website WikiLeaks remain on the Internet for anyone to read, and their impact on the world may be debated for as long as he remains in prison.
■ "Manning was under the impression that his leaked information was going to really change how the world views the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and future wars actually," Navy Capt. David Moulton, a forensic psychiatrist testifying in Manning's defense, told the military court on July 14. "It was his opinion that if through crowd sourcing that enough analysis was done on these documents, which he felt to be very important, that it would lead to greater good, that society as a whole would come to the conclusion that the wars weren't worth it, that really no wars are worth it."

Politico: Ron Paul: Manning ‘should be released’
David Walsh: In letter to Obama, Bradley Manning defends exposure of war crimes

Jeff Jarvis ● What are you thinking, Mr President? Is this really the legacy you want for yourself: the chief executive who trampled rights, destroyed privacy, heightened secrecy, ruined trust, and worst of all, did not defend but instead detoured around so many of the fundamental principles on which this country is founded? And I voted for you. I'll confess you were a second choice. I supported Hillary Clinton first. I said at the time that your rhetoric about change was empty and that I feared you would be another Jimmy Carter: aggressively ineffectual. Never did I imagine that you would instead become another Richard Nixon: imperial, secretive, vindictive, untrustworthy, inexplicable.

■ The Obama administration has given up more of its surveillance secrets, acknowledging that it was ordered to stop scooping up thousands of Internet communications from Americans with no connection to terrorism — a practice it says was an unintended consequence when it gathered bundles of Internet traffic connected to terror suspects.
■ One of the documents that intelligence officials released Wednesday came because a court ordered the National Security Agency to do so. But it's also part of the administration's response to the leaks by analyst-turned-fugitive Edward Snowden, who revealed that the NSA's spying programs went further and gathered millions more U.S. communications than most Americans realized.

Stephen Lendman: Lawless NSA Spying Exposed

The latest documents leaked by the US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed that the UK is running a secret spying center in the Middle East. ● Britain runs the secret snooping station in the Middle East to intercept huge numbers of emails, telephone calls and web traffic for the United States and other Western intelligence agencies, The Independent reported. The newspaper, however, has not disclosed the exact location of the station. ● According to the leaked documents, the information extracted from the underwater fibre-optic cables, is passed to Britain's eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and then shared with the US NSA. ● British government claimed the Middle East installation, is a key element in the West’s so-called “war on terror” and provides a vital “early warning” system when it comes to possible attacks. The UK’s secret surveillance base in the Middle East is part of a larger $1.5 billion clandestine electronic operation, codenamed “Tempora,” which includes recordings of telephone calls, the content of email messages, Facebook entries and the personal internet history of users around the world.

Glenn Greenwald/The Guardian: Snowden: UK government now leaking documents about itself ● The NSA whistleblower says: 'I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent.' ● The Independent this morning published an article - which it repeatedly claims comes from "documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" - disclosing that "Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies." This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it's the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided. That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure?

Boing Boing: Snowden denies being source of The Independent's "NSA leak" story exposing UK base

Lawyers for David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, appeared in the High Court in London on Thursday, seeking an injunction to stop access to the material seized from him by British police. ● After hearing submissions from Miranda’s legal representative and those representing the Metropolitan Police (Met) and the UK’s Home Office, judges Lord Justice Beatson and Justice Kenneth Parker granted a limited injunction supposedly preventing the government and police from “inspecting, copying or sharing” the data seized. This, however, was effectively ruled null and void by their judgement that police could examine the data for “national security purposes.” A full hearing on the issue is to take place on August 30.

Glenn Greenwald: State-loyal journalists seem to believe in a duty to politely submit to bullying tactics from political officials. ● The US and the UK governments go around the world threatening people all the time. It's their modus operandi. They imprison whistleblowers. They try to criminalize journalism. ● They threatened the Guardian with prior restraint and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement. They detained my partner under a terrorism law, repeatedly threatened to arrest him, and forced him to give them his passwords to all sorts of invasive personal information - behavior that even one of the authors of that terrorism law says is illegal, which the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said yesterday is just "the latest example in a disturbing record of official harassment of the Guardian over its coverage of the Snowden leaks", and which Human Rights Watch says was "intended to intimidate Greenwald and other journalists who report on surveillance abuses." And that's just their recent behavior with regard to press freedoms: it's to say nothing of all the invasions, bombings, renderings, torture and secrecy abuses for which that bullying, vengeful duo is responsible over the last decade. ● But the minute anyone refuses to meekly submit to that, or stands up to it, hordes of authoritarians - led by state-loyal journalists - immediately start objecting: how dare you raise your voice to the empire? [...] The US and UK governments are apparently entitled to run around and try to bully and intimidate anyone, including journalists - "to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian", as Reuters put it - but nobody is allowed to send a message back to them. That's a double standard that nobody should accept.

TechDirt: Orders To Destroy Guardian Hard Drives Came Directly From PM David Cameron

The Israeli minister for military affairs, “Moshe Yaalon's clumsy attempt to steer the world's reaction to the Syrian chemical weapons massacre suggests that the attack was yet another Israeli false-flag operation,” Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, wrote in an article published on Press TV’s website on Thursday.

Yaalon [...] described the Syria crisis as a bottomless struggle between a ruling Alawite minority and a disparate Sunni opposition including Muslim Brotherhood members and al-Qaeda affiliates, which would result in the "implosion" of Syria into Sunni-, Shia- and Kurdish-dominated parts. Barrett, however, said the remarks did not offer an analysis of the situation in Syria but were...

...“a program of action.” “In fact, they will do whatever it takes to keep the fighting going, including launching false-flag attacks like the recent chemical weapons massacre. Israel's goal, as Yaalon admits, is the destruction of Syria,” the expert stated. “The Israelis and their American proxies have already smashed Iraq, Libya, and Sudan into pieces,” he explained, as part of Tel Aviv’s plan to break up neighboring Middle Eastern countries into "tiny ethnic and sectarian Bantustans." “Now they are targeting Syria and Egypt -- two countries whose land they plan to steal to create a ‘Greater Israel’ stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.”

The analyst said the recent release of Egypt’s criminal ex-dictator, Hosni Mubarak, from jail was also a calculated Zionist project to outrage the Egyptian masses, and thus accelerate the ongoing massacre of Egyptians by the army.

SANA: Lavrov and Kerry call for objective investigation into possible chemical weapons use in Damascus Countryside ● Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his U.S. counterpart John Kerry stressed the importance of conducting an objective investigation into reports on possible use of chemical weapons in Damascus Countryside in Syria two days ago. A statement issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry said Lavrov made phone calls with Kerry, highlighting the need that the armed opposition's groups ensure a safe entry for the UN investigators to the region where reports said the possible chemical attack took place. The statement pointed out that Russia has called upon Syria to cooperate with the UN experts. It added that Moscow expects the "Syrian opposition" to make constructive steps towards getting the international conference on Syria held so as to find a solution to the crisis as soon as possible. Earlier, the US announced that it is unable to confirm reports that spoke of an alleged gas attack in Damascus Countryside last Wednesday.

PressTV: British MP: Israel provides terrorists in Syria with chemical weapons
Jason Ditz: Doubts Surround Yesterday’s Allegations of Syria Chemical Weapons Strike
AWIP: Syria: Chemical Attack in Ghouta 'an Accident Caused by Free Syrian Army'

The Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) has denounced the United States for planning to supply 1,300 cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia. ■ “We are disappointed with the US decision to export cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia as both countries acknowledge the negative humanitarian impact of these weapons on civilians,” CMC Director Sarah Blakemore said on Thursday. “Cluster munitions have been banned by more than half the world’s nations so any transfer goes against the international rejection of these weapons,” she added. The US Defense Department announced on Tuesday that Textron Defense Systems won a contract valued at $641 million to build the bombs for the Persian Gulf state. The contract, expected to be completed by 2015, formalizes the sale of CBU-105 cluster bombers. Congress was first notified about the deal in December 2010.

Israeli warplanes raided Friday at dawn the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine military site in Naameh, south of Beirut, according to the National news Agency. ● For his part, the Front's chief in Lebanon, Ramez Moustafa, confirmed the news and clarified that the Zionist warplanes fired one rocket onto Naameh valley and that no losses or damages were recorded. "We will not respond to this assault in the way that serves the Zionist plan to lure us, yet in the proper place and at the proper time," Moustafa pointed out. The spokesman of the Israeli army asserted that the assault responds to the rockets that were fired Thursday from the Lebanese territories into Nahariya and Akka, north of occupied Palestine.

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has been airlifted by helicopter out of Cairo’s Tora Prison and flown to the army's International Medical Center, where he will remain under guard. The 85-year-old still faces multiple criminal charges. The transfer came after a court ruled that prosecutors can no longer prolong Mubarak’s time in jail with appeals or new charges, a tactic that helped to keep him behind bars for the past 17 months. Prosecutors have decided not to challenge the decision.

Michael Angel Ruiz had a history of drug addiction. On July 28, for reasons unknown, he climbed onto the roof of his apartment. Witnesses called the police to protect his safety. This turned out to have been a fatal decision. First they tased him several times on the roof. He finally complied and hopped down. Cops immediately swarmed him and put him in a choke-hold. Witness Gary Carthen said that Ruiz was "getting choked out and tased at the same time." He remained in a choke-hold for at least three minutes. The most disturbing moments were to come.

Michael Ruiz, now fully restrained, was dragged down the concrete stairs on his face. As deputies held his arms behind his back, they allowed his head to dangle and thump against every stair. At this point Ruiz may have already lost consciousness, and was making no attempt to lift his head. Video shows him lifelessly suffering head trauma on the descent down the stair case. "I just felt sick to my stomach," said Richard Erickson, a retired police detective. "I'd never seen anything like this before, even when I was with the police department."

Radley Balko ■ One of the central themes of my book is that that too many cops today have been conditioned to see the people they serve not as citizens with rights, but as an enemy. My argument is that this battlefield mindset is the product of a generation of politicians telling police that they're at war with things -- drugs, terrorism, crime, etc. -- and have then equipped them with the uniforms, tactics, weapons, and other accoutrements of war. ● Over the last several days, the popular online police magazine PoliceOne site has been rolling out a series of opinion pieces in response to my book. As you might expect, most of them are critical, although a couple have been thoughtful. ● One essay by Sgt. Glenn French was particularly disturbing. French serves as commander of a SWAT team in Sterling Heights, Michigan. French doesn't criticize me for arguing that too many police officers have adopted this battlefield mindset. Rather, he embraces the combat mentality, and encourages other cops to do the same.

● The NSA surveillance of millions of emails and phone calls. The dogged pursuit of whistleblower Edward Snowden across the globe, regardless of the diplomatic fallout. And the sentencing of Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison for giving a cache of government files to the website WikiLeaks. Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg sees these events as signs that the United States is becoming a police state.
● "We have not only the capability of a police state, but certain beginnings of it right now," Ellsberg told HuffPost Live Wednesday. "And I absolutely agree with Edward Snowden. It's worth a person's life, prospect of assassination, or life in prison or life in exile -- it's worth that to try to restore our liberties and make this a democratic country."
● Ellsberg was a military analyst with the RAND Corporation in 1969 when he secretly copied thousands of classified documents about U.S. decision-making during the Vietnam War. In 1971, he leaked the files (known as the Pentagon Papers) to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers.

Syria: Chemical Attack in Ghouta 'an Accident Caused by Free Syrian Army' - The attack that killed over 200 people in the Damascus suburbs could be an accident caused by a riot control agent, and those responsible may be a faction of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and not the Assad regime, according to a chemical weapons specialist. Gwyn Winfield, editorial director at CBRNe World, a magazine specialising in chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive weapons, told IBTimes UK [that]

● We can say there is some form of chemical used. But until we take blood samples, samples of the soil and the water in the area we can't say that a chemical agent has been used," he said. "It can be a riot control agent, like in the recent Egyptian case of the tear gas used in the back of a van that killed 36 prisoners. We have the same symptoms in the children and casualties.

● Winfield said he finds it "suspicious" that in the week UN inspectors enter the country with the acquiescence of Assad, the Government welcomes them with a chemical weapons missile barrage. "It is not impossible that some faction in the Free Syrian Army did it to get attention or maybe it was an accident by an inexperienced operator who may have not realised what he was doing." The security expert said there are numerous cases of riot agent used in a lethal way, for example in confined spaces and not to disperse a crowd.

Gwyn Winfield: Reflections on Ghouta [22 August 2013]
RIA Novosti: Syrian Chemical Weapons Reports May Be ‘Provocation’ – Moscow
AWIP: Reports of massive chemical attack near Damascus as UN observers arrive in Syria