What if that is the case. Makes more sense than gassing a bunch of civilians.
Who used gas in the two previous attacks in March and August of 2013? Assad denied those too. It has been reported that the gas used in those two attacks had the same hallmarks, and likely came from stockpiles of the Syrian military. Obama and Rice claimed that all gas was removed from Syria, but we can take what they say with a grain of salt. Since Obama and Rice are liars, why isn’t Assad a liar too? If Assad was responsible for those two other attacks, he didn’t face any consequences, so why wouldn’t he take the chance to use it again? I’m giving the President, and the intelligence claims that they tracked the plane that dropped it, the benefit of the doubt...not some muzzie tyrant.
Experts on chemical weapons believe that the nerve agents used in both the 2013 attack and the attack this past week were “binary” in nature. That means that the chemical precursors were mixed shortly before detonation in precise quantities. This is often done by a two-chamber shell or bomb, and is used to prolong shelf life (Sarin otherwise only has a shelf life of 5 years). It’s a very sophisticated effort to make a binary agent, and is likely not one that the Syrian rebels could pull off. The Japanese terrorists that made Sarin in the mid-1990s spent millions of dollars, and had a 3 story chemistry lab staffed with dozens of people and an enormous amount of sophisticated equipment, and they still only managed to make a couple gallons of the stuff. The Syrian rebels simply don’t have the sophistication to make that happen.
Then Assad is short a runway.
A bomb hitting sarin will destroy it rather than disperse it. This is the seventh gas attack in Syria to hit Assad’s enemies since 2013. And not the first time that Assad has claimed that it is the result of his planes hitting a rebel gas cache.