Washington’s Blog
September 6, 2013
Jean Pascal Zanders is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s top chemical weapons experts, having been quoted in the last two weeks about Syrian chemical weapons by McClatchy, Time, theLos Angeles Times, Post-Gazette, Huffington Post, Der Spiegel, Agence France-Presse, Global Post, theTelegraph, and many other publications.
We interviewed Zanders by phone.
Q: You were quoted in the Huffington Post on August 30th as saying
that the Youtube videos cited by the American government were not
conclusive, as you couldn’t tell where or when the videos were taken …
or even whether they were from the same incident or different incidents.
Do you still hold that view, or have you seen other videos that change your mind?
Zanders: No, I have not changed my mind. The general observation still stands, and it will stand until we have the actual report from the U.N. investigation.
I do not deny that a chemical with toxic chemicals has taken place.
But I am just as concerned about how people are interpreting things in
terms of a particular goal … which in this case is military
intervention.
Living in a democracy we have the rule of of law, and we collect and
analyze a variety of evidence collected at certain scenes before passing
any kind of final judgment.
One of the concerns I have is if we look over the periods starting in
March 19th with the major allegation of chemcial weapons use near
Aleppo, Syria, everything is being reinterpreted as sarin.
When I look at video images that have been going around, what I see
is a large number of people suffering from aspyhixia, but only a minority (if the photos are representative of the total picture) display symptoms that would correspond to exposures to neurotoxicants.
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