Mass Hysteria or Mass Deception?

It’s not going to be the lead story on the BBC news or the headline on the front page of the Guardian but 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.

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, “Phosphorous 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.”

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.
“The 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.”

 UK-based American chemical weapons specialist Dan 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.

This of course in addition to the information from Seymour Hersh that the source of sarin was from Libya and the attack facilitated by Turkey.

From here and the original interview here