New
Revelations Belie Trump Claims on Syria Chemical
Attack
By Gareth
Porter
April
15, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "TruthOut
"-
Two
unnamed senior Trump administration officials
briefing journalists Tuesday asserted that a
Syrian regime airstrike in the city of Khan
Sheikhoun on April 4 had deliberately killed
dozens of civilians with sarin gas.
The
Trump administration officials dismissed the
Russian claim that the Syrian airstrike had
targeted a munitions warehouse controlled by
Islamic extremists as an afterthought to cover
up the Syrian government's culpability for the
chemical attack. Moreover, the Trump officials
claimed that US intelligence had located the
site where the Syrian regime had dropped the
chemical weapon.
However, two new revelations contradict the
Trump administration's line on the April 4
attack. A former US official knowledgeable about
the episode told Truthout that the Russians had
actually informed their US counterparts in Syria
of the Syrian military's plan to strike the
warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun 24 hours before the
strike. And a leading analyst on military
technology, Dr. Theodore Postol of MIT, has
concluded that the alleged device for a sarin
attack could not have been delivered from the
air but only from the ground, meaning that the
chemical attack may not have been the result of
the Syrian airstrike.
The
Trump administration is pushing the accusation
that the Assad regime was the force that carried
out the highly lethal chemical attack on April 4
very hard, perhaps not so much to justify the
already politically popular US strike against
the Shayrat airbase on April 6, but rather to
buttress a new hardline policy against the
Syrian regime.
The two
unnamed senior Trump officials who briefed
journalists Tuesday sought to discredit the
Russian claim that the Syrian airstrike had hit
a warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun that was believed
to hold weapons including toxic chemicals. One
of the two unnamed officials said that a Syrian
military source had "told Russian state media on
April 4 that regime forces had not carried out
any strike in Khan Sheikhoun, which contradicted
Russia's claim directly."
This
Trump administration official appeared to be
suggesting that there was no evidence that a
weapons storage site had been hit by a Syrian
airstrike. But an internal administration paper
on the issue now circulating in Washington, a
copy of which Truthout obtained, clearly refers
to "a regime airstrike on a terrorist ammunition
dump in the eastern suburbs of Khan Sheikhoun."
More
importantly, the US military allegedly knew in
advance that the strike was coming: Russian
military officers informed their American
counterparts of the Syrian military's plan to
strike the warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun city 24
hours before the planned airstrike, according to
the former US official who spoke with Truthout.
The official is in direct contact with a US
military intelligence officer with access to
information about the US-Russian communications.
The military intelligence officer reported to
his associate that the Russians provided the
information about the strike to the Americans
through the normal US-Russian Syria
deconfliction telephone line, which was
established after the Russian intervention in
2015 to prevent any accidental clash between the
two powers. The officer said that Russia
communicated to the US the fact that the Syrians
believed that the warehouse held toxic
chemicals.
That
information was considered so politically
sensitive that after its initial dissemination,
it was available only to a few officials, the US
military intelligence officer told his
associate.
Despite the US denial of the Russian account of
a Syrian strike on a warehouse in the city, an
eyewitness account appears to confirm it. A
14-year-old resident told
The New York Times she
was walking only a few dozen yards away from a
one-story building when she saw a plane drop a
bomb on it. The eyewitness reported the
explosion created a "mushroom cloud" that stung
her eyes.
She
added that she then hurried back home and
watched as people began to arrive to help others
in the neighborhood and were stricken by the
toxic chemical in the air.
The airstrike she saw appears to be the one that
was the objective of the Syrian operation in
Khan Sheikhoun. The mushroom cloud she saw seems
to be the widest of the three mushroom
clouds shown in
a video taken sometime after the explosion.
Two other strikes were apparently carried out
after the initial strike on the building for
which there is an eyewitness account. One was at
a hospital in or near the city and the other was
at a center of the White Helmets organization,
built into a rock formation. The hospital strike
was reported in an Associated
Press story on Tuesday, which
reported that a Russian drone was said to be
hovering over a hospital as victims of the
earlier attack were being brought in for
treatment. The story said the hospital was later
attacked.
The hospital attack was cited by
an anonymous AP source as
evidence that the Russians knew in advance that
a chemical weapons attack was going to be
carried out. In fact it indicates that the
hospital strike may well have been linked to the
earlier airstrike on the one-story building.
When
asked about the bombing at the hospital during
the press briefing on Tuesday, one of the
unnamed senior US officials would not confirm
that the Syrians had carried out the attack or
discuss the issue further, saying, "We don't
have any comment right now on who may have been
involved in bombing that hospital and why and
how."
The
senior US officials briefing the press insisted
that a Syrian air strike delivering sarin was
the only credible explanation for the dozens of
deaths in Khan Sheikhoun. One of the officials
cited a video showing a crater in the middle of
a main road, which the Trump administration's
key officials have determined was the site of
the chemical weapon that reportedly killed 50 to
100 people. He implied that this was evidence
that a Syrian airstrike had released what was
believed to be sarin.
But Dr.
Theodore Postol of MIT, who debunked the
original official claims of the location of
rockets that hit Syria's Ghouta area with what
appeared to be sarin on August 21, 2013, has
come to a different conclusion. Postol says that
the carcass of the delivery vehicle -- shown in
last week's video and in still photos of the
small crater -- indicates that the chemical
attack was not delivered via airstrike but from
the spot on the road where it was found.
In an assessment
completed on Tuesday,
Postol called the collapsed metal tube shown in
the crater, which he estimates to be about two
and a half feet long, "an improvised dispersal
device." He analyzes the device as having been
assembled from a section of pipe from a 122 mm
rocket with caps at both ends that was filled
with sarin and with some kind of explosive
placed on top of it. The explosive on top
smashed in the pipe holding the sarin, and
pushed the sarin out of its tube, according to
Postol, "like toothpaste from a toothpaste
tube."
Postol
estimates that the device might have held eight
to 10 liters of sarin. Was it actually used to
emit the toxic chemical that killed dozens of
residents? Postol doesn't claim to know, but he
states that it did not resemble an air-delivered
chemical weapon. "The administration attempted
to use evidence that contradicted their own
claim," Postol told Truthout.
One of
the unnamed US officials briefing the press
declared, "We are confident that terrorists or
non-state actors did not commit this particular
attack," and explained that non-state actors
don't have the sarin required. But whether that
assumption is well-founded or not, the universal
assumption that the deaths could only have been
caused by exposure to sarin is mistaken.
Exposure to smoke munitions that create
phosphine gas when in contact with moisture can
cause neurological symptoms that mimic those of
sarin, because they both damage the body's
ability to produce the enzyme cholinesterase.
Both the Syrian Army and the Al-Nusra Front
fighters in the Aleppo area, moreover, had
abundant stocks of phosphine-producing smoke
munitions in 2013, as was documented
by German journalist Alfred Hackensberger of Die
Welt.
Furthermore, both ISIS (also
known as Daesh) and al-Qaeda
in Aleppo have
been reported to have access to phosphine-based
weapons.
These phosphine-producing munitions can be
lethal if humans are exposed in confined space,
and they have the smell of garlic or rotting
food. That is precisely the smell that was reported
by eyewitnesses in
Khan Seikhoun. Sarin, on the other hand, is
normally odorless.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative
journalist and historian writing on US national
security policy. His latest book,
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the
Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in
February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter:
@GarethPorter.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
See
also
Declassified U.S. Report
Accusing “Assad Regime” of Using Chemical
Weapons
“ No proof
whatsoever!
A
Government of
Morons
By Paul Craig
Roberts |
 |
Western
Civilization, if
civilization it
is, is the
greatest
committer of war
crimes in human
history. -
Continue |
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