Rebels Admit Responsibility For Chemical Weapons Attack --- Chemical Weapons Supplied By Saudi Arabia, Not Syria! Forwarded By Erasmus Of America - August 31, 2013 - 9:05 Am

Militants tell AP reporter they mishandled
Saudi-supplied chemical weapons, causing accident

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
August 30, 2013

Syrian rebels in the Damascus suburb of
Ghouta have admitted to Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak that
they were responsible for last week’s chemical weapons incident which
western powers have blamed on Bashar Al-Assad’s forces, revealing that the
casualties were the result of an accident caused by rebels mishandling
chemical weapons provided to them by Saudi Arabia.

Image: YouTube

“From numerous interviews with doctors,
Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families….many believe that
certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief,
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the
(deadly) gas attack,” writes
Gavlak. (back up version here).

Rebels told Gavlak that they were not
properly trained on how to handle the chemical weapons or even told what
they were. It appears as though the weapons were initially supposed to be
given to the Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra.

“We were very curious about these arms. And
unfortunately, some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set
off the explosions,” one militant named ‘J’ told Gavlak.

His claims are echoed by another female
fighter named ‘K’, who told Gavlak, “They didn’t tell us what these arms
were or how to use them. We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We
never imagined they were chemical weapons.”

Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of an opposition
rebel, also told Gavlak, “My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I
thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry,” describing them
as having a “tube-like structure” while others were like a “huge gas
bottle.” The father names the Saudi militant who provided the weapons as
Abu Ayesha.

According to Abdel-Moneim, the weapons exploded
inside a tunnel, killing 12 rebels.

“More than a dozen rebels interviewed
reported that their salaries came from the Saudi government,” writes
Gavlak.

If accurate, this story could completely
derail the United States’ rush to attack Syria which has been founded on
the “undeniable” justification that Assad was behind the chemical weapons
attack. Dale Gavlak’s credibility is very impressive. He has been a Middle
East correspondent for the
Associated Press for two decades and has also worked for National
Public Radio (NPR) and written articles for BBC News.

The website on which the story originally
appeared – Mint Press (which is currently down as a result of huge
traffic it is attracting to the article) is a legitimate media organization
based in Minnesota. The Minnesota
Post did a profile on them last year.

Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in providing
rebels, whom they have vehemently backed at every turn, with chemical
weapons, is no surprise given the revelations earlier this week that the
Saudis threatened Russia with terror attacks at next year’s Winter Olympics
in Sochi unless they abandoned support for the Syrian President.

“I can give you a guarantee to protect the
Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of
the games are controlled by us,” Prince Bandar allegedly told Vladimir
Putin, the
Telegraph reports.

The Obama administration is set to present
its intelligence findings today in an effort prove that Assad’s forces were
behind last week’s attack, despite American officials admitting
to the New York Times that there is no “smoking gun” that directly
links President Assad to the attack.

US intelligence officials also told
the Associated Press that the intelligence proving Assad’s culpability
is “no slam dunk.”

As
we reported earlier this week, intercepted intelligence revealed that
the Syrian Defense Ministry was making “panicked” phone calls to Syria’s
chemical weapons department demanding answers in the hours after the
attack, suggesting that it was not ordered by Assad’s forces.

UPDATE: Associated Press contacted us to confirm that Dave
Gavlak is an AP correspondent, but that her story was not published under
the banner of the Associated Press. We didn’t claim this was the case, we
merely pointed to Gavlak’s credentials to stress that she is a credible
source, being not only an AP correspondent, but also having written for
PBS, BBC and Salon.com.