Sellstrom’s report on Syria
for the UN and his prior inspections record in Iraq are dubious, to say
the least. In the eyes of laymen, his seeming objectivity and
non-partisanship is based on the myth of Sweden’s neutrality. The public
assumes – wrongly- that Sweden never takes sides in wars or
geopolitical conflicts.

Fraud of Neutrality

This cosmetic veneer of Swedish
neutrality has been deftly exploited by Israel and NATO to perpetrate
falsehoods throughout Sellstrom’s work for the UN, including denial of
the chemical-and-biological causes for “Gulf War Syndrome” and the
shipments of U.S. chemical weapons to the Saddam Hussein regime.

Sellstrom also never made any
attempt to probe the U.S.-produced 20-foot-long cannisters of VX nerve
gas discovered at Balad Air Base by American National Guardsmen. His
mission was not to prove Iraqi guilt but to get Washington off the hook
for supplying tons of nerve gas to Baghdad. Saving U.S. officials like
Donald Rumsfeld from disgrace and treason charges is far more important
to imperial power that disclosing any facts in a theater of war.

The salient critique of the UN
inspections in Iraq was made by American inspector Scott Ritter who
accused the team of spying for Washington and NATO. The same question
hangs over Sellstrom’s report on Syria. Is Sellstrom acting on behalf of
Washington and Tel Aviv?

What is publicly known about Sellstrom is that the biochemist heads the European CBRNE
Center [Center for advanced Studies of Societal Security and
Vulnerability, in particular major incidents with (C)hemical,
(B)iological, (R)adiological, (N)uclear and (E)xplosive substances], at
Umea University in northern Sweden, which is sponsored by the Swedish
Defense Ministry (FOI). Though not a NATO member, the Swedish military
and police have a leading role in European security affairs as drafters
of the repressive 2009 EU action plan based on the Stockholm
Counterterrorism Programme.

Major funding for the CBRNE
multidisciplinary research projects at Umea comes from the EU budget for
the war on terrorism. These projects include: defense strategy for
large-scale terrorist attacks (notice the term “relatively large scale”
in his just-released Syria report); recommendations for EU medical
emergency responses; and specialized training at Umea for experts,
including military officers attached to NATO.

Sweden’s military-industrial
complex, which includes Saab and Bofors, is anything but peace-loving
and neutral. The kingdom’s cloak of neutrality is most useful for
Israeli interests, which have exploited Scandinavia’s clean image to
skew international policy against the Palestinians and Arab states, as
demonstrated in the half-baked Oslo Accords.

Umea University is deeply
involved in joint research with Technion (Israel Institute of
Technology), the Haifa-based university that provides state-of-art
technology to the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and its intelligence
agencies. Several departments, which are involved in joint Israeli
research, participate in multidisciplinary studies at Sellstrom’s CBRNE
center. These include: the computer department, which has cooperated
with Technion on control systems since 2004; the medical faculty; and
chemistry, his own field of studies.

The Israeli-Swedish research
cooperation is fostered by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which
provides scholarships and awards to bind together the industries and
universities of the two countries. This year the State of Israeli is
sponsoring the Start Tel Aviv program for expanded cultural ties, in its
relentless campaign to subvert Scandinavia. The political agenda and
military links behind the bilateral cooperation has prompted an
anti-Israel boycott by conscientious Swedish academics.

No Credibility on Syria

The term “relatively large scale”
chemical-weapons attack used in the introduction to the UN report on
Syria is hyperbole, since any major attack with sarin would have
resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities, especially if dispersed by
military rockets. The first videos from Ghouta showed residents pouring
out of their homes onto the street, gasping for fresh air. If indeed
highly efficient rockets had been used, every one of them would have
been killed instantaneous. The gassing, therefore, must have been an
accidental release indoors, probably from a hidden rebel arsenal.

Chemical residues from the
alleged rockets would have been oxidized by the heat of impact and
certainly no intact organophosphate traces would be detectable, since
sarin is designed to decompose after 20 minutes. Rockets are designed to
use a binary system by which two chemical precursors are mixed during
mid-air dispersal. Thus, there is no need for stabilizers or
dispersants, meaning an absence of any identifying chemicals. The UN
inspectors arrived long after the expiration period for sample testing.
There is a possiblity also that the site and rocket parts may have been
tampered with falsified evidence by the rebels and their foreign
military advisers.

The casualty figures are
unverifiable, and certainly not any of the videos showed more than a
dozen corpses at a time. The scenes of swaddled infants is typical of
war propaganda, certainly not believable when only a few faces were
visible. The sum effect of these images is closer to theater than
credible reporting.

Hidden Agenda

American ambassador to the UN
Samantha Power made emphatically clear that the “nerve gas used in Syria
was more concentrated than the nerve gas in Iraqi.” Her statement
should be rephrased as: “Saddam may have trans-shipped U.S.-supplied
nerve gas into Syria, but it wasn’t our nerve gas used against Syrian
civilians.”

That is the essential point of
the Sellstrom report: To take Washington off the hook for being the
major supplier of nerve gas precursors, formulations, delivery
technology and storage systems to the Middle East, incluing Israel,
Egypt, Libya, Iraq and very possibly Syria (during the Clinton era of
good will).

The UN report of chemical weapons
on Syria lacks basic credibility due to the duplicitous record of its
chief inspector, Ake Sellstrom, who is politically and financially
compromised at every level. An impartial fact-finding mission of
credible international experts is required, but it would have no chance
of conducting a fair investigation so long as Washington provides
weapons and political support to the insurgency, including its Al Qaeda
faction.

The geopolitical objective
underlying the White House orchestrated hystrionics over Syria is to
strip Damascus of its limited deterrence capability against Israel’s
nuclear forces. Nerve gas may not be much of a counter-strike response
compared with atomic warheads, but it seems Israel’s goal is absolute
strategic supremacy against the Arab states and Iran. With the new UN
report on Syria, Tel Aviv is a giant step closer to the dream of
rendering all its neighbors defenseless and divided.

*Yoichi Shimatsu,
a science journalist based in Hong Kong, led a team of investigative
reporters for the Japan Times Weekly and served as consultant to
Takarajima 30 magazine during the Tokyo subway gassing in 1995.

GLOBAL RESEARCH