Trump's Missile Attack on Syria Justified With
Fake Intelligence, Experts Say
Echoes of George W. Bush's disastrous invasion
of Iraq.
By Steven Rosenfeld
April
20, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Alternet"
-
On April 7, President Trump committed his
first “act of war,” attacking Syria with
missiles in response to what he said was a
poison gas attack by the Syrian government that
killed dozens. But the White House’s subsequent
intelligence report offering its proof of
Syria’s role was “false” and “fraudulent,”
suggesting a “coverup” by a president acting
without any intelligence and intentionally lying
to the public.
These are the characterizations of two
longtime experts in war studies and missile
systems, which—along with coordinated comments
by Vice President Mike Pence in
South Korea and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in
Russia that America’s “strategic patience” is
ending—suggest Trump may be seeking a war of
choice, even if it involves fabricated
intelligence.
President George W. Bush’s White House fabricated intelligence
concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass
destruction before his April 2003 invasion of
Iraq. What seems to be unfolding at the top
ranks of the Trump administration is similar to
Bush’s pronouncements and evidence following the
9/11 terrorist attack.
This latest outburst of militarism began
April 4, when it appears that poison gas,
possibly the nerve agent sarin, killed dozens of
Syrian civilians in the town of Khan Shaykhun.
These deaths, among them women and children, are
uncontested and documented on videos. Which
poison gas was used, how it was delivered and
who was behind the incident remain unanswered
questions, said Phyllis Bennis, director of
the New Internationalism Project at the
Institute for Policy Studies, though United
Nations scientists and Turkish doctors who did
autopsies have pointed to sarin.
“The Syrian government may well be
responsible for the attack, or others may have
been involved,” she said. “But without an
independent, international investigation, we
simply don’t know. That means the Organization
for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
[an international body with 192 member
countries] must be given a full and complete and
open mandate to follow all leads and report
fully.”
“Similarly, we have reports from Turkey that
autopsies on some of the bodies indicated the
gas was sarin; reportedly OPCW and/or U.N.
scientists were present,” Bennis continued. “But
the reports come only from the official Turkish
medical/forensic authorities. Again, without a
full and thorough independent investigation, all
of the unknowns remain just that.”
What’s not unknown, however, is three days
after the attack, on April 7, Trump ordered a
cruise missile attack on a Syrian military
airfield.
“This was an act of war,” Bennis said. “Even
if we already knew, even if there was a credible
source finding the Syrian government was
responsible, that would not give the White House
and the Pentagon the right to unilaterally
attack Syria without U.N. authorization, when
the U.S. was not attacked, without consultations
with or authorization from Congress, in
violation of the War Powers Act.”
On April 11, under mounting criticism, the
White House issued a four-page report squarely
blaming the Syrian regime for the gas attack,
saying it was delivered by a plane from the
airport that was hit by U.S. missiles and
accusing Russia of lying by claiming that the
poison gas was in the hands of guerrilla armies
fighting the regime.
“The United States is confident that the
Syrian regime conducted a chemical weapons
attack, using the nerve agent sarin, against its
own people in the town of Khan Shaykhun in
southern Idlib Province on April 4, 2017,” the report began.
“Our information indicates that the chemical
agent was delivered by regime Su-22 fixed-wing
aircraft… Our information indicates personnel
historically associated with Syria’s chemical
weapons program were at Shayrat Airfield in late
March making preparations for an upcoming attack
in Northern Syria, and they were present at the
airfield on the day of the attack.”
The report continued, “We have confidence in
our assessment because we have signals
intelligence and geospatial intelligence,
laboratory analysis of physiological samples
collected from multiple victims, as well as a
significant body of credible open source
reporting, that tells a clear and consistent
story.”
But these assertions are not clear,
consistent or convincing, said Theodore Postol,
a professor of Science, Technology, and
International Security at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Postol, who has
received numerous awards for his work on missile
systems and has worked for the Office of the
Chief of Naval Operations, looked at the same
information sources cited by the White House and
concluded in a 14-page analysis that,
first of all, whatever happened in Khan Shaykhun
was not the result of an air attack.
“It’s important to be clear about what I’m
saying,” he told AlterNet. “I’m saying that a
so-called White House intelligence report issued
on April 11 is totally inconsistent with the
claims it’s making. I’m not so much saying that
I know what happened, because actually I don’t.
What I do know is that this report was, to be
blunt, fabricated without the intelligence
methodologies that it claims to have used.
Because I have data that I have been poring
over… for example, there’s video data of this
crater that they allege was the source of an air
attack, an air munitions. It was not an air
munition. You could see that very easily.”
“So the issue is that the White House issued
a false intelligence report and the reasons
[why] I don’t know,” Postol said. “But one
possibility is they are trying to cover up their
tracks because they didn’t know what was going
on and they attacked a foreign power. And that
is not good.”
Bennis agreed that the White House
intelligence report doesn’t prove what it
claims.
“The four-page white paper released by the
White House, purporting to prove that the Syrian
government was responsible for the chemical
weapons attack, does not provide any of the
actual evidence they claim to rely on,” she
said, commenting by email. “It makes a set of
assertions, describes the kind of information
they have, and essentially then says ‘trust
us.’ It appears to be a White House (that is,
political) document, not the official position
of intelligence agencies themselves. It does not
provide anything close to proof, or even
evidence, of the who, the what or the how of
the chemical attack.”
|
No
Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is
Independent Media
|
Postol’s analysis is
not the first time he has examined White House
claims about poison gas use in Syria or weapons
of war in Iraq. What he suspects may be
happening in the Trump White House is alarming
on its own terms and is different than what
happened when President Obama was considering
attacking the Syrian regime for a purported
poison gas attack in 2013. In the case of Obama,
Postol said the president was initially given
bad intelligence blaming the Syrian regime and
called off the attack because there was
insufficient proof.
“The Obama administration had another
incident like this in August of 2013,” he said.
“It’s somewhat different. The president was
incorrectly told that Syria was the perpetrator
of the attack in Ghouta on August 21, 2013, and
he was preparing to attack Syria when he was
finally told, as he proceeded, that the
intelligence did not solidly support that
conclusion. That’s when he backed down. He
didn’t back down because he didn’t have the
courage to take the action.”
In contrast, it appears that President Trump
is ordering military action without any
intelligence confirmation beforehand, Postol
said.
“The indication I now have, on April 11 the
National Security Council put out a
fraudulent—to be very clear—a fraudulent
intelligence report, a report that could not
possibly be what it claims to be,” he said.
“That tells my bureaucrat’s nose that somebody
in the White House wants to cover up something.
And I think probably—again I don’t know—probably
what I think they’re trying to cover up is that
they took all these risks to the nation’s
security without any intelligence to support
it.”
That prospect is as alarming as it is well
informed, and has serious ramifications.
“There’s something going on with our
intelligence apparatus and the politics of
operating it. And it’s not acceptable as far as
I’m concerned,” Postol said. He added, “what
needs to happen is not going to happen. What
needs to happen is there has to be a full
investigation of how this fraudulent report was
produced. Who was involved? And who ordered it…
It’s pretty clear to me at this point that an
important decision was made, a decision that had
potentially grave consequences for our national
security without any intelligence at all. It was
done, probably, for political purposes.”
The biggest risk in impulsively ordering a
missile attack in Syria, he said, is “there was
a risk that he [Trump] would inadvertently come
into a military confrontation with Russia. He
certainly caused a deep problematic reaction
with Russia. And he has probably undermined our
ability to defeat the Islamic State because we
need Russia to defeat this entity. So it was a
pretty important decision.”
Postol’s observations and reflections on a
White House that is ordering military attacks
without intelligence input, or issuing orders
without a systematic check on its battle plans
and targets (and subsequently “fabricating”
intelligence reports for propagandistic media
and public consumption), is eerily reminiscent
of George W. Bush’s presidency. Some members of
Bush’s intelligence team fabricated a case to
invade Iraq based on Saddam Hussein’s purported
weapons of mass destruction. Bush later said
publicly that he had been misinformed about
evidence that Iraq had a substantial weapons
store. Journalists like James Fallows of the
Atlantic have documented how
Bush’s decision to launch a war of choice in
Iraq came rapidly on the heels of the Sept. 11,
2001 terrorist attacks.
What Trump and his top aides are doing now
echoes Bush’s pre-war rhetoric and moves. Since
the Syrian missile attack, Secretary of State
Tillerson has repeatedly said,
“our policy of strategic patience has ended.”
Vice President Pence, speaking in South Korea on
Monday, not only repeated those words, he
suggested that the U.S. missile attack in Syrian
was a sign of an America willing to use its
military arms.
“Strategic patience has been the approach of
the last American administration and beyond,”
Pence said at a joint press conference with
South Korean Acting President Hwang Kyo-Ahn,
referring to North Korea’s nuclear weapons
program. “Just in the past two weeks, the world
witnessed the strength and resolve of our new
president in actions taken in Syria and
Afghanistan. North Korea would do well not to
test his resolve or the strength of the Armed
Forces of the United States in this region.”
Less than 100 days into Trump’s presidency,
the White House has failed to pass a single
major piece of legislation. Instead, beyond
placing a right-wing justice on the Supreme
Court with the GOP-majority U.S. Senate’s help,
Trump has already committed an act of war: an
unauthorized attack on a foreign power. And his
administration has fabricated the evidence for
that attack, an intelligence report that doesn’t
prove what it purports.
As Postol said, something is going on with
the nation’s intelligence apparatus and the
politics surrounding it, and it’s not making the
world a safer place.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
