'We know he has WMD, we have the receipts', part deux

[deminks]

With the World Watching, Syria Amassed Nerve Gas

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/world/middleeast/with-the-world-watching-syria-amassed-nerve-gas.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

Syria’s top leaders amassed one of the world’s largest stockpiles of chemical weapons with help from the Soviet Union and Iran, as well as Western European suppliers and even a handful of American companies, according to American diplomatic cables and declassified intelligence records.

While an expanding group of nations banded together in the 1980s to try to block the Syrian effort, prohibiting the sale of goods that would bolster the growing chemical weapons stockpile, the archives show that Syria’s governing Assad family exploited large loopholes, lax enforcement and a far greater international emphasis on limiting the spread of nuclear arms.

(snip)

One of the best-known cases in the United States involved a Waterville, Me., company once known as Maine Biological Laboratories. The company and several top executives were found guilty of allowing a series of shipments to Syria in 2001, including restricted biological agents.

That was one of several instances that involved deals with American firms, the cables show. In another case, an unidentified American company sold potassium cyanide to a Syrian pediatric hospital in 2006, but made no effort to check whether it was used for treating patients, as the Syrians had insisted was done, or instead was diverted for making chemical weapons.

(end snip)

And, how do we know about US involvement, you ask? Wikileaks leaked cables.

This still does not prove that the weapons used were used by Assad. One would think that because of the prolific unimpeded sale of WMD to the region, that both sides could be heavily armed. Nobody was making the stuff, everybody was buying RTU (ready to use).

[Laughing Mirror]

1. Thank you, Chelsea Manning, for leaking the diplomatic cables

on which this New York Times exposé is based.