Syraq SITREP 20: #Trump WH/UN Amb @NikkiHaley Accuses #Syria of Plotting Chemical Attack

Posted by James the Russian Analyst

The Israeli Air Force has bombed Syrian government forces near the Golan Heights three times in the last several days, while the U.S. is threatening to attack Syria over a chemical weapons strike Bashir al-Assad is supposedly planning.

After a US Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet shot down a Syrian Air Force SU-22 bomber earlier this month, Russia warned the U.S. that American and other Coalition aircraft flying west of the Euphrates River in Syria would be treated as potentially hostile and tracked on radar.
The Trump White House’s New ‘Assad is Plotting to Use Chemical Weapons’ Announcement Reportedly Catches DoD/CENTCOM by Surprise

However, it seems not everyone at the Department of Defense or other parts of the government is buying these ‘warnings’ based on unspecified ‘reports’ of chemical weapons being prepped somewhere inside Syria, awaiting Assad’s order to attack. In particular, the ‘Assad just wants to gas kids because he’s an evil dictator’ line coming out of the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York and White House-issued statement received some apparently unexpected push back from the same legacy media outlets which supported Trump’s April 6 cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base.

Some Pentagon officials allegedly told NBC News’ Ken Dilanian and other reporters they were blindsided by the White House accusation that Syria is preparing a major chemical attack against civilians. Another reason, besides DoD’s quickly ‘corrected’ reticence, for reporters showing some long overdue skepticism towards White House Syria claims is timing: the Trump Administration is issuing the allegations just one day after legendary (My Lai massacre and Abu Gharib torture revealing) investigative journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the April 4 Khan Sheikhoun ‘sarin gas’ attack used to rationalize Tomahawk missile strikes as a pack of lies.

Seymour Hersh Exposes the Lies Behind the Khan Sheikhoun Chemical Incident:
Welt Article Says Trump Knew Intel Was Weak or Bogus, Ordered Tomahawk Missile Strike Anyway

Predictably, the response to Hersh’s article from online shills for the globalists’ Syria Narrative, especially UK-based open source shyster Eliot Higgins (who speaks neither Russian nor Arabic and has never been to Syria or eastern Ukraine), has been furious. But even if Hersh’s sources got some details wrong or the dialogue presented in the German news magazine Die Welt attributed to a U.S. intelligence source and a serviceman at CENTCOM fretting about possible Russian retaliation seems odd, Hersh has presented them to the publisher who claims to have verified his sources identities. Contrast this with The Washington Post and The New York Times love of intel sources pushing the #TrumpRussia story who it isn’t clear are named — even within a tiny circle of editors.

After the initial pushback against the Trump White House’s ‘Syria is prepping a chemical attack claims’, in which AP journalists actually stated that the Administration was offering no fresh evidence to support its accusations against Damascus, it appears National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’s staff went to work on selling the narrative to the now overwhelmingly pro-war ‘liberals’ at The New York Times:

"On Tuesday, White House officials said only that Mr. Trump’s [87 word] statement [posted above in this article — JWS] spoke for itself.

That silence added to the uncertainty about whether a new military confrontation with Syria was looming just two months after Mr. Trump fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian base, Al Shayrat airfield, after a chemical weapons attack that killed dozens.

Mr. Assad’s government vigorously denied the accusation of preparations for an attack, calling Mr. Trump’s statement a provocation. And in Russia, a close ally of Syria’s, a senior lawmaker accused the United States of using the declaration about chemical weapons to plan an attack on Syria.

As if to punctuate his contempt for the Trump administration’s warning, Mr. Assad visited a Russian air base near Latakia in the western part of the country on Tuesday, accompanied by Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the Russian military’s chief of staff. The Syrian news media, which reported the visit, distributed a video clip of Mr. Assad climbing into the cockpit of a Russian Sukhoi Su-35 parked at the base, where Russia has conducted many of its bombing operations to support the government’s side in the six-year civil war."

The Pentagon’s Highly Implausible (Read: Bullshit) Narrative: Assad Would REALLY Not Only Plan to Use Chemical Weapons, But Use Them from the Same Base the U.S. Military Already Partially Destroyed with Cruise Missiles?

The NYT story went on to repeat Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis’ statement that U.S. military intelligence assets had seen preparations for chemical weapons use at the Al-Shayrat air base east of Homs. That is, the same air base the U.S. said it struck with over 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles on April 6, but which RogueMoney readers know was ‘only’ hit by barely half that number, the fate of the other BGM-109s being unknown. Since there’s no testimony or audio/visual evidence (eg photographs of SAMs streaking in skies over populated Latakia, video recordings of sonic booms at night) any of Russia’s Pantsir or S300/400 SAMs were fired at the ground skimming targets, some have suggested their inertial and GPS guidance systems were damaged by powerful Russian Krasukha jammers along the Mediterranean coast. The Russian Analyst tends to agree with this scenario, in that the Russians would not pass up an opportunity given via the deconfliction hotline warning of a few hours notice to evacuate their personnel from Al-Shayrat, for live fire electronic warfare training against the USA’s frontline sea-launched cruise missile.

Nonetheless, even if the Tomahawk strike was as some said an expensive fireworks show, to demonstrate Trump’s ‘toughness’ in contrast with Obama’s indecision and also show The Donald could defy his supposed #TrumpRussia masters, many of the missiles clearly found their targets. Multiple hardened aircraft shelters were destroyed, and the extent of the destruction was documented by both commercially available and DoD released satellite photography, as well as by Russian journalists visiting the base the morning after the strike. This raises the question as to where exactly Capt. Davis is claiming the Syrian air force personnel are mixing binary chemical agents or loading CW bombs, without any protection whatsoever, if not on the tarmac in the open.

The Khan Sheikhoun Chemical Hoax:
Whatever Happened There, the Syrian Air Force Definitely Did NOT Drop a Sarin Bomb on the Town

Given these inconvenient and indisputable facts, the plausibility of the Pentagon’s Tuesday evening June 27 claim is unlikely to be accepted by the Russians Foreign or Defense Ministry spokespersons today, particularly since no evidence has been produced to demonstrate that chemical weapons were stored at the base prior to the ‘sarin gas attack’ at Khan Sheikhoun. Nor have international inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) visited Al-Shayrat, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin inviting them to do so to verify if any traces of sarin were at the site. But such avoidance of any evidence that could contravene the U.S., UK, Turkish and Franco-German governments’ positions is not surprising, considering the OPCW’s Turkish bureaucrat in the region accepted supposed sarin samples from Khan Sheikhoun victims without a chain of custody and never sent inspectors to Khan Sheikhoun itself — a fact pointed out by the German Welt magazine’s brave report by Sy Hersh.

A retired military contributor to Col. Patrick Lang’s Turcopolier blog, who knows a thing or two about chemical weapons from training to put on protective gear and survive CW attack at Fort McClellan during the last Cold War, explains the absurdity of the U.S. case that Syria launched sarin gas bombing sorties from Al-Shayrat here. The pseudo-nymed contributor ‘Publius Tacitus’ also points to the bizarre spectacle of White Helmets ‘first responders’ crouching next to the crater supposedly left by a Syrian air force sarin bomb wearing only flip flops and surgical masks for ‘protection’, a posture which despite Leicester, England-based couch potato Eliot Higgins’ ‘expert analyses’, would almost certainly result in convulsions and death had sarin actually been used there:

There is no evidence, not one shred of intelligence, to show that the Syrian Air Force or Army activated their chemical weapons unit anytime prior to the alleged sarin attack at Khan Sheikyoun. If the Syrians were going to launch a chemical weapons attack they would have to go through the process of alerting that unit and issuing it orders to prepare such weapons. That also means that the chemicals (the Syrian sarin was a binary system, which means that two separate chemicals had to be mixed together in order to create an active, viable chemical capable of killing) had to be taken from storage, transported in a secure fashion with men wearing MOPP gear (an acronym for “Mission Oriented Protective Posture“). Think of a space suit. The people handling live agents, such as sarin, do so in order to ensure they do not contaminate themselves and end up dead.

It is common knowledge within the intelligence and military community that both the United States and Israel put a priority on monitoring and collecting intel on the movements of Syrians Chemical Weapons units. Why? To ensure that Israel would be forewarned and protected against a surprise attack. The nature of military grade sarin is that it requires advance preparation, planning and logistics. One does not simply pick up a hand grenade, pull the pin and launch a chemical attack. That’s only in Hollywood and the X-Box of Eliot Higgins.

Then we have the so-called evidence from Khan Shiekyoun of the sarin. Ted Postol has provided an extensive and comprehensive analysis of why the conventional wisdom that this was a sarin attack is wrong (one of his articles is at this link). Those who insist that there was sarin are relying entirely on second hand evidence collected by individuals with direct ties to radical Islamic groups. Not one single independent outside observer was allowed to the scene to collect forensic evidence or examine victims. The only “victims” examined took place a couple of days later in Turkey.

But we now have video evidence that it was not sarin. Watch as the White Helmets collects samples that they boldly declare as SARIN without having performed a single scientific field test. They collect samples declaring the water, etc as SARIN!! Talk about magic.

This is all about propaganda and media manipulation. You will spot two individuals dressed up in some form of bizarre MOPP gear (they are fully covered). But that is not the case for everyone else running around, especially the knuckle heads carrying the supposed samples of deadly sarin. A simple surgical mask provides absolutely no protection whatsoever against SARIN. This is absurdity worthy of Monty Python:

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