The latter. This is a non-story by the Daily Fail.
You can make chemical weapons out of almost anything (we’re talking about fluoride, aka the main ingredient of toothpaste!), given the right expertise and delivery methods (which undoubtedly Syrian forces have had all along, and likely rebels too). Which is why, as soon as embargoes kick in, brokers and manufacturers of chemical substances start having huge headaches and eventually give up and just stop selling anything to the embargoed… at least not directly – unscrupulous companies need just a little roundtrip through some weird but fairly peaceful country, greasing the right hands to make stuff “disappear” while sitting in a warehouse somewhere, only to reappear as part of some other unsuspicious cargo. Occasionally our fine secret services stumble on one of these unscrupulous individuals and throw him in jail with great fanfare, but like with all things illegal, for one they catch there are probably a dozen still happily trading.
Going on about whether we US/UK/Euro citizens can take the moral high ground on chemical weapons is just pointless anyway: we (and Soviets) sold them the technology long ago, and once you do that, the cat is out of the bag. Unlike nuclear weapons, which are very difficult to produce and deliver, chemical ones are usually just slightly-repurposed conventional munitions. We invented them more than 100 years ago, without computers or high-precision tools, so they can’t be that hard to make.
