From Dr. Theodore Postol of MIT
I have reviewed the document carefully, and I believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria at roughly 6 to 7 a.m. on April 4, 2017.
Obama was right to question attribution of 2013 attack:
I have worked with the intelligence community in the past, and I have grave concerns about the politicization of intelligence that seems to be occurring with more frequency in recent times – but I know that the intelligence community has highly capable analysts in it. And if those analysts were properly consulted about the claims in the White House document they would have not approved the document going forward.
I am available to expand on these comments substantially. I have only had a few hours to quickly review the alleged White House intelligence report. But a quick perusal shows without a lot of analysis that this report cannot be correct, and it also appears that this report was not properly vetted by the intelligence community.
This is a very serious matter.
President Obama was initially misinformed about supposed intelligence evidence that Syria was the perpetrator of the August 21, 2013 nerve agent attack in Damascus. This is a matter of public record.
President Obama stated that his initially false understanding was that the intelligence clearly showed that Syria was the source of the nerve agent attack. This false information was corrected when the then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, interrupted the President while he was in an intelligence briefing. According to President Obama, Mr. Clapper told the President that the intelligence that Syria was the perpetrator of the attack was “not a slamdunk.”
The question that needs to be answered by our nation is how was the president initially misled about such a profoundly important intelligence finding?
Obama got pushback from the Republican Congress in 2013 which did not want him to go to war (possibly just to deny him credit. However they claimed it was pushback from the voters in their home districts.) I have always wondered if Hillary Clinton was involved in the fabrication to get Obama to go to war in Syria.
Trump has been turned into a made man by this gang-style initiation, kill some foreigners and you show that you are one of us. However the election of Trump has shattered the story that opposing war is a guarantee that the candidate will lose the centrist Republican voter.
Democrats made a big deal of Trump’s supposed flip-flop but it was always irrelevant to me. The country flip-flopped! Trump was right with the country.
