Scientists and local communities are expressing serious concern about the ongoing destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal on board a vessel in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea.

“Neutralisation” of the chemicals, including mustard gas and the raw materials for sarin nerve gas, began earlier this week under Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) guidelines, on board the specially modified U.S. maritime vessel Cape Ray.

The operation, which is expected to be completed within 60 days, uses Deployable Hydrolysis Systems (FDHS), but the technique is being criticised.

According to Thodoris Tsimpidis, director of the Archipelagos Institute, a Greek non-profit organisation specialising in marine conservation, hydrolysis is not a safe method for neutralising chemicals on board.

“We were invited for a tour of the Cape Ray before the operation but we did not go because whenever we asked something important they replied that it was confidential. We do not understand why scientists are not allowed on board during the operation,” he told IPS.Syria agreed to surrender it chemical weapons to international control after a chemical attack with sarin gas on August 21 last year against rebels in disputed areas of the Markaz Rif Dimashq district around Damascus.

“The Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not responded to our concerns. Why is Greece sending a submarine to escort the operation and not its specialised maritime vessel that could monitor any sea contamination if this happens?”

Syria agreed to surrender it chemical weapons to international control after a chemical attack with sarin gas on August 21 last year against rebels in disputed areas of the Markaz Rif Dimashq district around Damascus. It is estimated that 281 died in the attack, with some reports raising numbers up to 1,729.

France accused the Assad regime, saying it had proof that it was the perpetrator of the attack but the Syrian regime blamed militants who had taken control of elements of its chemical weaponry.

France, the United Kingdom and the United States threatened the regime with military action but, after Russia’s intervention, Syria asked in September 2013 to join the OPCW and surrender its chemical arsenal for destruction.

Initially Belgium and Norway refused to host the neutralisation process on their territories, while Albania initially accepted, only to retract after public opposition rapidly invalidated plans.

U.S. authorities leading the operation then decided to attempt the destruction of chemicals on board, a process in which over 30 countries and the European Union have been actively involved.

The last consignment of chemicals left Syria on June 23 and was loaded aboard the Danish ship Ark Futura with destination the port of Gioia Tauro in southern Italy. There it was trans-loaded to the Cape Ray, which then sailed to the Mediterranean where the operation is now under way.

The operation has been cloaked in secrecy for fears of terrorist threats but others believe this is due to the precariousness of the operation itself.

On Thursday, members of political organisations and activists met in Chania, Crete, to coordinate protests against the operation. In an effort to break what they said was the “concealment” and “silence” of the big national media they plan to block a U.S. military base on the island for three days and attempt a symbolic sail against Cape Ray.

In an announcement on Wednesday, they said: “We warned them long before they started, by participating, together with thousands of people who reacted once they found out about their plans, in demonstrations and events throughout Greece. They decided, using concealment and silence by the mass media, to move on; we decided to meet them at sea. We are coming!”

Although the exact location of the neutralisation operation is unknown, it is thought to be taking place 100 km west of the island of Crete.

Secrecy about the process has disturbed the local community. “Monitoring by international observers and environmental organisations from the European Union and scientists of the countries directly concerned is necessary,” says professor Evaggelos Gidarakos, head of Laboratory of Toxic and Hazardous Waste Management at the University of Chania in Crete.

“None of those stakeholders have been given access in this case which has become an issue of the American military navy alone. The scientific community has been marginalised, so that even if something goes wrong we will never know.”

The presence of OCPW inspectors on board Cape Ray throughout the operation has not appeased critics. Tsimpidis said that OPCW “is not going to be held accountable” if anything goes wrong.

OCPW, a United Nations body, has continually repeated that all possible safety precautions have been taken for the operation, but it has also clarified that it “bears no responsibility” for any chemical accident and that is the U.S. Navy which will “assume all liabilities”.

IPS approached the OCPW for comments but only received an email answer directing it to the organisation’s FAQ page.

After the neutralization operation has been completed, the Cape Ray will sail to Germany and Finland to deliver the by-products of the operation for further processing

Meanwhile, the Ark Futura will continue on to the United Kingdom and then Finland to deliver chemicals to be destroyed at commercial facilities.

A second cargo ship, the Norwegian vessel Taiko, has already delivered a quantity of chemicals to Finland. The ship is now sailing to Port Arthur, Texas, in the United States, where the last cargo of chemicals will be destroyed at a commercial facility.

Ǻke Sellström (right), head of the UN technical mission to investigate the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria, briefs journalists on the work of the mission on Dec. 13, 2013. At his side is investigation team leader Maurizio Barbeschi from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Credit: UN Photo/Amanda Voisard

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, May 6 2014 (IPS)

The head of the U.N. team that investigated the Aug. 21, 2013 Sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, Ake Sellstrom, is doubtful about the number of victims of the attack reported immediately after the event.

Sellstrom has suggested that many people who claimed to have been seriously affected by Sarin merely imagined that they had suffered significant exposure to the chemical. 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.

Underlying Sellstrom’s doubts are data on symptoms from a sample of people who said they were severely affected by the Sarin attack. The data, published in the September report, appear to belie the claims of Sarin intoxication by those in the sample, according to experts who have analysed them.

Sellstrom expressed his doubts in an interview with Gwyn Winfield, the editor of the CBRNe World Magazine, that was published in the February issue.

“If you take the figures from Tokyo, you can compare how many died versus those that were intoxicated,” said Sellstrom. But in the case of Syrian attack, he said, “[W]hile we could conclude that it was big, we couldn’t do the same for how many died or were affected.”

He expressed doubt that many of the alleged survivors of the attack had been exposed to Sarin. “You can get many symptoms from other items in a war,” Sellstrom said, “[P]hosphorous smoke, tear gas, many of those devices on the battlefield will affect the lungs, eyes and give you respiratory problems.”

Then Sellstrom added, “Also in any theater of war, people will claim they are intoxicated. We saw it in Palestine, Afghanistan and everywhere else.”

Now a project manager at the European CBRNE Centre in Umea, Sellstrom did not respond to e-mail requests from IPS for comment on this article by deadline.

However, his remarks to CBRNe were evidently influenced strongly by the team’s experience in gathering data on several dozen alleged victims who claimed to have been among the most heavily exposed to Sarin on Aug. 21.

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 36 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.

Kaszeta said he had concluded that the people interviewed and evaluated by the UN “didn’t have serious exposure” to nerve gas.

The indication that the overwhelming majority in the sample had very little or no exposure to Sarin was particularly significant, because those in the sample had been chosen by local opposition authorities as being among the most serious affected survivors. The data suggest that the Syrian opposition and its external supporters had vastly exaggerated the scope and severity of the attack.

In an apparent reference to the questionable data on symptoms collected on the 36 alleged survivors, Sellstrom told Winfield the investigators “need to be better at differential diagnostics on the intoxication, better medical markers.”

Selstrom also expressed doubt about the numbers of victims said to have been treated at local hospitals. The U.N. investigators visited two of the three hospitals in the Damascus suburbs that had treated victims of the attack and had provided figures for the numbers of victims they had treated.

“[T]he figures they provided of people who passed through them was just not possible,” said Sellstrom. “It is impossible that they could have turned over the amount of people they claim they did.”

Sellstrom did not refer to the total number of victims claimed by hospital administrators, but Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) issued a statement Aug. 24 that three hospitals near the area of the attack had reported to MSF that they “received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013”. MSF said 355 had died.

Sellstrom repeated his doubts about the total number of victims of Sarin intoxication and the numbers of patients said to have been treated in hospitals in a Mar. 11 interview with the website “Syria in Crisis” affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The head of the Syria investigation had also investigated the use of chemical weapons by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war for the U.N.  He had been Chief Inspector for UNSCOM, the U.N. Commission on Iraq’s compliance with the ban on weapons of mass destruction, and head of its successor, UNMOVIC.

He has apparently questioned the larger narrative of Syrian government culpability for the attack as well. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after the release of the December U.N. investigation report, Sellstrom said he believes both sides in the Syrian conflict had the “opportunity” and the “capability” to “carry out chemical weapons attacks.”

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.

Secretary of State John Kerry (shown as a senator in 2009) has called the use of chemical weapons in Syria a "moral obscenity". Credit: Ralph Alswang, Center for American Progress Action Fund/CC by 2.0

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

After initially insisting that Syria give United Nations investigators unimpeded access to the site of an alleged nerve gas attack, the administration of President Barack Obama reversed its position on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get the U.N. to call off its investigation.

The administration’s reversal, which came within hours of the deal reached between Syria and the U.N., was reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday and effectively confirmed by a State Department spokesperson later that day.

In his press appearance Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who intervened with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to call off the investigation, dismissed the U.N. investigation as coming too late to obtain valid evidence on the attack that Syrian opposition sources claimed killed as many 1,300 people.

The sudden reversal and overt hostility toward the U.N. investigation, which coincides with indications that the administration is planning a major military strike against Syria in the coming days, suggests that the administration sees the U.N. as hindering its plans for an attack.

Kerry asserted Monday that he had warned Syrian Foreign Minister Moallem last Thursday that Syria had to give the U.N. team immediate access to the site and stop the shelling there, which he said was “systematically destroying evidence”. He called the Syria-U.N. deal to allow investigators unrestricted access “too late to be credible”.

After the deal was announced on Sunday, however, Kerry pushed Ban in a phone call to call off the investigation completely.

The Wall Street Journal reported the pressure on Ban without mentioning Kerry by name. It said unnamed “U.S. officials” had told the secretary-general that it was “no longer safe for the inspectors to remain in Syria and that their mission was pointless.”

But Ban, who has generally been regarded as a pliable instrument of U.S. policy, refused to withdraw the U.N. team and instead “stood firm on principle”, the Journal reported. He was said to have ordered the U.N. inspectors to “continue their work”.

The Journal said “U.S. officials” also told the secretary-general that the United States “didn’t think the inspectors would be able to collect viable evidence due to the passage of time and damage from subsequent shelling.”

The State Department spokesperson, Marie Harf, confirmed to reporters that Kerry had spoken with Ban over the weekend. She also confirmed the gist of the U.S. position on the investigation. “We believe that it’s been too long and there’s been too much destruction of the area for the investigation to be credible,” she said.

That claim echoed a statement by an unnamed “senior official” to the Washington Post Sunday that the evidence had been “significantly corrupted” by the regime’s shelling of the area.

“[W]e don’t at this point have confidence that the U.N. can conduct a credible inquiry into what happened,” said Harf, “We are concerned that the Syrian regime will use this as a delay tactic to continue shelling and destroying evidence in the area.”

Harf did not explain, however, how the Syrian agreement to a ceasefire and unimpeded access to the area of the alleged chemical weapons attack could represent a continuation in “shelling and destroying evidence”.

Despite the U.S. effort to portray the Syrian government policy as one of “delay”, the formal request from the United Nations for access to the site did not go to the Syrian government until Angela Kane, U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, arrived in Damascus on Saturday, as Ban’s spokesman, Farhan Haq, conceded in a briefing in New York Tuesday.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said in a press conference Tuesday that Syria had not been asked by the United Nations for access to the East Ghouta area until Kane presented it on Saturday. Syria agreed to provide access and to a ceasefire the following day.

Haq sharply disagreed with the argument made by Kerry and the State Department that it was too late to obtain evidence of the nature of the Aug. 21 incident.

“Sarin can be detected for up to months after its use,” he said.

Specialists on chemical weapons also suggested in interviews with IPS that the U.N. investigating team, under a highly regarded Swedish specialist Ake Sellstom and including several experts borrowed from the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, should be able to either confirm or disprove the charge of an attack with nerve or another chemical weapon within a matter of days.

Ralph Trapp, a consultant on proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, said he was “reasonably confident” that the U.N. team could clarify what had happened.

“They can definitely answer the question [of] whether there was a chemical attack, and they can tell which chemical was used,” he said, by collecting samples from blood, urine and hair of victims. There was even “some chance” of finding chemical residue from ammunition pieces or craters where they landed.

Trapp said it would take “several days” to complete an analysis.

Steve Johnson, who runs a programme in chemical, biological and radiological weapons forensics at Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, said that by the end of the week the U.N. might be able to answer whether “people died of a nerve agent.”

Johnson said the team, if pushed, could produce “some kind of view” on that issue within 24 to 48 hours.

Dan Kastesza, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and a former adviser to the White House on chemical and biological weapons proliferation, told IPS the team will not be looking for traces of the nerve gas sarin in blood samples but rather chemicals produced when sarin degrades.

But Kastesza said that once samples arrive at laboratories, specialists could make a determination “in a day or two” about whether a nerve agent or other chemical weapons had been used.

The real reason for the Obama administration’s hostility toward the U.N. investigation appears to be the fear that the Syrian government’s decision to allow the team access to the area indicates that it knows that U.N. investigators will not find evidence of a nerve gas attack.

The administration’s effort to discredit the investigation recalls the George W. Bush administration’s rejection of the position of U.N. inspectors in 2002 and 2003 after they found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the administration’s refusal to give inspectors more time to fully rule out the existence of an active Iraqi WMD programme.

In both cases, the administration had made up its mind to go to war and wanted no information that could contradict that policy to arise.