Syria poison gas story unravels

SUBHEAD: The Trump Administration narrative continues to come apart revealing the lust for war.

By Michael Krieger on 18 April 2017 for Libertty Blitzkrieg -
(https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/04/18/the-trump-administrations-syria-gas-attack-narrative-continues-to-unravel)


Image above: American UN Ambassador Nikki Haley reprises UN Ambassador Colin Powell false demonstration of weapons of mass destruction - this time with photos of "victims" of Syrian war crimes. Photo by Drew Angerer. From (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/syria-chemical-attack-al-qaeda-played-donald-trump_us_58ea226fe4b058f0a02fca4d).

Pretty much every official statement emanating from the U.S. government these days is a deception, fabrication, or outright lie. I understand that this is a hard thing for a U.S. citizen to admit, but as James Baldwin so accurately stated:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

So let’s go ahead and face the facts. Governments lie. Governments have always lied. Extremely corrupt, imperial governments overseeing societies in deep economic and cultural decline lie even more. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s what obviously happens when you combine tremendous power with human nature.

Although I’ve been questioning the Trump administration’s fairytale narrative about the recent Syria gas attack from day one, I don’t have the expertise to sufficiently examine the evidence and put some meat on the bones.

In contrast, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT, Theodore A. Postol does, and he’s published a series of reports over the past week calling out what he believes is a deliberate deception by members of the Trump team.

IB Publisher's note: A section of this report has been omitted as it duplicates our reporting, on 14 April 2017, of Professor Postol's analysis. You can see that material, if you have not read it here Ea O Ka Aina: Source of Sarin gas attack faked? Michael Krieger goes on to say:

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Take a look at the “Summary and Conclusions” section from his third report courtesy of Naked Capitalism:

Summary and Conclusions
It is now clear from video evidence that the WHR (White House Intelligence Report) was fabricated without input from the professional intelligence community.

The press reported on April 4 that a nerve agent attack had occurred in Khan Shaykhun, Syria during the early morning hours locally on that day. On April 7, The United States carried out a cruise missile attack on Syria ordered by President Trump. It now appears that the president ordered this cruise missile attack without any valid intelligence to support it.

In order to cover up the lack of intelligence to supporting the president’s action, the National Security Council produced a fraudulent intelligence report on April 11 four days later. The individual responsible for this report was Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor.

The McMaster report is completely undermined by a significant body of video evidence taken after the alleged sarin attack and before the US cruise missile attack that unambiguously shows the claims in the WHR could not possibly be true. This cannot be explained as a simple error.

The National Security Council Intelligence Report clearly refers to evidence that it claims was obtained from commercial and open sources shortly after the alleged nerve agent attack (on April 5 and April 6). If such a collection of commercial evidence was done, it would have surely found the videos contained herein.

This unambiguously indicates a dedicated attempt to manufacture a false claim that intelligence actually supported the president’s decision to attack Syria, and of far more importance, to accuse Russia of being either complicit or a participant in an alleged atrocity.

The attack on the Syrian government threatened to undermine the relationship between Russia and the United States. Cooperation between Russia and the United States is critical to the defeat of the Islamic State. In addition, the false accusation that Russia knowingly engaged in an atrocity raises the most serious questions about a willful attempt to do damage relations with Russia for domestic political purposes.
We repeat here a quote from the WHR:

An open source video also shows where we believe the chemical munition landed—not on a facility filled with weapons, but in the middle of a street in the northern section of Khan Shaykhun. Commercial satellite imagery of that site from April 6, after the allegation, shows a crater in the road that corresponds to the open source video.

The data provided in these videos make it clear that the WHR made no good-faith attempt to collect data that could have supported its “confident assessment.” that the Syrian government executed a sarin attack as indicated by the location and characteristics of the crater.

This very disturbing event is not a unique situation. President George W. Bush argued that he was misinformed about unambiguous evidence that Iraq was hiding a substantial store of weapons of mass destruction. This false intelligence led to a US attack on Iraq that started a process that ultimately led to the political disintegration in the Middle East, which through a series of unpredicted events then led to the rise of the Islamic State.

On August 30, 2013, the White House produced a similarly false report about the nerve agent attack on August 21, 2013 in Damascus.

This report also contained numerous intelligence claims that could not be true. An interview with President Obama published in The Atlantic in April 2016 indicates that Obama was initially told that there was solid intelligence that the Syrian government was responsible for the nerve agent attack of August 21, 2013 in Ghouta, Syria. Obama reported that he was later told that the intelligence was not solid by the then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.

Equally serious questions are raised about the abuse of intelligence findings by the incident in 2013. Questions that have not been answered about that incident is how the White House produced a false intelligence report with false claims that could obviously be identified by experts outside the White House and without access to classified information.

There also needs to be an explanation of why this 2013 false report was not corrected. Secretary of State John Kerry emphatically testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeating information in this so-called un-equivocating report.
On August 30, 2013 Secretary of State Kerry made the following statement from the Treaty Room in the State Department:

Our intelligence community has carefully reviewed and re-reviewed information regarding this attack[Emphasis added], and I will tell you it has done so more than mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment. Accordingly, we have taken unprecedented steps to declassify and make facts available to people who can judge for themselves.

It is now obvious that this incident produced by the WHR, while just as serious in terms of the dangers it created for US security, was a clumsy and outright fabrication of a report that was certainly not supported by the intelligence community.


In this case, the president, supported by his staff, made a decision to launch 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base. This action was accompanied by serious risks of creating a confrontation with Russia, and also undermining cooperative efforts to win the war against the Islamic State.

I therefore conclude that there needs to be a comprehensive investigation of these events that have either misled people in the White House, or worse yet, been perpetrated by people to protect themselves from domestic political criticisms for uninformed and ill-considered actions.

Sincerely yours, Theodore A. Postol
Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy Massachusetts Institute of Technology Email: postol@mit.edu

The U.S. government is completely rogue and determined to drive the U.S. into an unwinable war based on false pretenses, which doesn’t serve the national interest. These lunatics must be stopped.


Image above: American UN Ambassador Colin Powell holding up a vial with powder that could be used to hold anthrax, in his presentation to the UN in February 2003, ahead of the Iraq invasion. Did he really think we'd believe he brought a vial of anthrax into the United Nations General Assembly hall. A lying sack of shit. Photograph by Timothy A Clary  From (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/02/28/how-bush-administration-sold-war-and-we-bought-it)

See also:
U.S. Propaganda is Embarrassingly Bad (and Why it Matters)
Disturbed Intelligence Analysts Express Concern Over Trump’s ‘Wag the Dog’ Syria Moment
Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire
Goldman Sachs and the Deep State Have Taken Over the Trump Administration

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