Clean up on aisle "false flag"
There's a cynical double-game played on the authorship of the 8/21 Damascus area artillery barrages that included Sarin gas shells, involving using any weakness of one claim as an argument for all other claims, conflating Assad and Assad Regime and generally producing heat rather than light.
Let us take in in order.
1) Was there a huge Sarin Attack?
Yes. Nobody disputes this today, though many or most of the current deniers did ring the "no attack" bell early on. The administration's death toll of 1,429 was bogus, insofar as they surely knew that no such specific number was reliable and thus that number was not likely to be the actual number, but they used it anyway. Also, I have never seen a break down of how many people were killed by conventional artillery shells in the huge mixed barrages of 8/21, so who knows what even constitutes Sarin deaths speciffically... but almost everyone agrees this was big—the largest and deadliest chemical weapons attack since the gassing of Kurds in Iraq many years ago.
2) Were the Sarin shells fired by Syrian regime forces?
Yes. For pete's sake... the alternative is that the rebels have a massive capability to fire Sarin artillery from their current positions into the heart of Assad territory and just haven't bothered to do so, preferring to infiltrate Assad strongholds to fire the weapons back at themselves. It is irrelevant whether some rebels have some Sarin (they do) or whether they have fucked around with Sarin before (they have) unless rebel forces could have done THIS attack.
This was a large attack on more than one area with rocket artillery, launched from closer into the heart of Damascus out toward rebel stronghold neighborhoods. The rebels could not have done that. They eat people. They rape women, murder children, and are certainly morally capable of a false flag operation to encourage the USA to bomb Assad forces, but absent the practical ability to do so their motives mean nothing.
3) Did Assad order the attack?
We do not know. It is distinctly possible that he did not. But it is certain that someone within Assad's regime forces hierarchy did. For some reason this "unknown" gets boot-strapped into intellectual anarchy, as if any unknown element opens the door to any and every theory. And some arguers have artfully exploited the short-hand mutual identity of "Assad" and "regime forces" to muddy the water by using "Assad may not have done it personally" as somehow supporting of "the rebels did it."
This is like a theory that Curtis LeMay orchestrated the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima over Truman's objections being used to argue that the Japanese dropped an A-bomb on themselves.
= new reply since forum marked as read
K & R 
(I know. It wouldn't be very "secret" if we all got to see it. 
)
If Grayson, Sanders and Warren are convinced by the evidence they have access to, that counts for a lot with me.
