by Hadding Scott

THEODORE A. POSTOL, a professor of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a devastating critique of the Trump Administration’s intelligence-report (dated 11 April 2017) on the recent gassing-incident in Syria (4 April 2017) for which Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, is being blamed. Postol notes discrepancies in the report that exclude the possibility that Assad’s government did it.

The accusation is that a military aircraft belonging to Assad’s government dropped sarin-gas near Khan Sheikhoun, killing civilians. Part of the evidence for this is supposed to be a spent sarin-container lying in a bomb-crater.

Professor Postol notes that the container — assuming that this really was the source of the gas, as claimed in the report — is “a section of 122mm pipe like that used in the manufacture of artillery rockets” that was rigged as an improvised chemical munition. The way the tube is contorted indicates that it was ruptured with an explosive device placed over one end of it, so that it was “crushed by a powerful downward explosive force.”

Postol concludes that this “points to an attack that was executed by individuals on the ground, not from an aircraft.” Since the area is controlled by al-Nusra Front, a faction hostile to President Assad, the fact that the sarin-container was not dropped from an aircraft means that al-Nusra Front was involved in the commission of this crime. Al-Nusra Front, incidentally, receives assistance from the State of Israel, according to UN observers. The idea of staging a false-flag atrocity at this time could have come from the State of Israel. The Israeli intelligence-agency, Mossad, is notorious for false-flag incidents, such as the Lavon Affair and the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, and others. As the cause of the misinformation fed to President Trump, Postol blames what he calls the “politicization” of U.S. intelligence: 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. By politicization, in this instance, Postol obviously means Zionist infiltration of American intelligence-services. This is not the first time that misinformation from an American intelligence-agency was used to provoke violence against an enemy of the State of Israel. About the gassing-incident at Ghouta in 2013, which is now cited as a precedent and a proof that Assad does indeed gas his own citizens, Postol tells us:

At that time (August 30, 2013) the Obama White House also issued an intelligence report containing obvious inaccuracies. For example, that report stated without equivocation that the sarin carrying artillery rocket used in Damascus had been fired from Syrian government controlled areas. As it turned out, the particular munition used in that attack could not go further than roughly 2 km, very far short of any boundary controlled by the Syrian government at that time. The White House report at that time also contained other critical and important errors that might properly be described as amateurish. For example, the report claimed that the locations of the launch and impact of points of the artillery rockets were observed by US satellites. This claim was absolutely false and any competent intelligence analyst would have known that. The rockets could be seen from the Space-Based Infrared Satellite (SBIRS) but the satellite could absolutely not see the impact locations because the impact locations were not accompanied by explosions. These errors were clear indicators that the White House intelligence report had in part been fabricated and had not been vetted by competent intelligence experts. […] 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? A second equally important question is how did the White House produce an intelligence report that was obviously flawed and amateurish that was then released to the public and never corrected? The same false information in the intelligence report issued by the White House on August 30, 2013 was emphatically provided by Secretary of State John Kerry in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee!

Misinformation from intelligence-agencies also contributed to the warmongering against Saddam Hussein. Here is a particular example of it that I described for the American Dissident Voices broadcast of 26 April 2003. I refer to the accusation that Saddam Hussein attempted to bomb-assassinate former president George Herbert Walker Bush, an accusation often repeated in the period before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

During a visit by former president George H. W. Bush to Kuwait in April 1993, an undetonated explosive device was discovered. It was viewed as part of an attempt to assassinate the former president.

The explosive substance from the device was submitted to the FBI’s crime-lab to determine its origin. Specifically, the question was whether the substance resembled the plastique known to be possessed by the Iraqi government.