16 January 2014 — Moon of Alabama

We called the chemical weapon attack near Damascus on August 21st a false flag operations and unlikely to have been committed by the Syrian government. Disregarding the large motive the insurgents had for such an attack as well as other facts the Obama administration accused the Syrian government and prepared to go to war over the issue.

Threatened with a possible impeachment procedure should he go to war over unverified WMD claims Obama was forced to go to Congress to ask for support. But the people of the United States were against another war in the Middle East and Congress, despite heavy lobbying from the Zionists, declined to act. Offered a deal over Syria’s chemical weapons by the Russians Obama stopped his war plans and accepted the Syrian disarmament offer. That the Russians had deployed a quite capable and well sized fleet to the Syrian coast also played a decisive, though still under-reported, role.

Obama had little factual base for his claim that the Syrian government had committed the chemical attack. The claims the Obama administration put out were not signed off by the U.S. intelligence community but solely by the White House. Obama was deliberately going to war over largely fake WMD claims. Only the pressure form the people, and Russian intervention, eventually held him back.

Ignoring several significant issues the anti-Syrian propaganda corps pushed the “Assad has done it” claim. Human Rights Watch and the New York Times’ CJ Chivers pushed claims that the flight path of the chemical rockets pointed to Syrian government origins. This was, as we pointed out, another false claim.

Seymour Hersh later reported that Obama’s case for war had deliberately left out facts that pointed to the insurgent’s culpability in the chemical weapon use. Hersh mentioned an analysis by the MIT missile expert Theodore Postol which trashed the Obama administration’s assertions as well has the HRW and NYT claims of the missiles origin. McClatchy reports on the now public analysis:

A series of revelations about the rocket believed to have delivered poison sarin gas to a Damascus suburb last summer are challenging American intelligence assumptions about that attack and suggest that the case U.S. officials initially made for retaliatory military action was flawed.

A team of security and arms experts, meeting this week in Washington to discuss the matter, has concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered sarin in the largest attack that night was too short for the device to have been fired from the Syrian government positions where the Obama administration insists they originated.

The report is even harsher than the McClatchy story about it lets one assume. The first page of its presentation (pdf, emphasis added) reads:

• The Syrian Improvised Chemical Munitions that Were Used in the August 21, Nerve Agent Attack in Damascus Have a Range of About 2 Kilometers
• The UN Independent Assessment of the Range of the Chemical Munition Is in Exact Agreement with Our Findings
• This Indicates That These Munitions Could Not Possibly Have Been Fired at East Ghouta from the “Heart”, or from the Eastern Edge, of the Syrian Government Controlled Area Shown in the Intelligence Map Published by the White House on August 30, 2013.
• This mistaken Intelligence Could Have Led to an Unjustified US Military Action Based on False Intelligence.
• A Proper Vetting of the Fact That the Munition Was of Such Short Range Would Have Led to a Completely Different Assessment of the Situation from the Gathered Data
• Whatever the Reasons for the Egregious Errors in the Intelligence, the Source of These Errors Needs to Be Explained.
• If the Source of These Errors Is Not Identified, the Procedures that Led to this Intelligence Failure Will Go Uncorrected, and the Chances of a Future Policy Disaster Will Grow With Certainty.

The short version of this whole story is this: The scientific facts are clear and the White House version of the WMD story is definitely false. These facts are not new but where known when the White House claims were made. Obama (and Kerry) deliberately lied about the WMD attack in Syria to wage an open war against the Syrian government and people. Threatened with a possible conflict with the Russian fleet and a possible impeachment Obama caved in. But he has not yet given up on his aim of regime change and of destroying Syria and its people.

It is time for Congress to investigate who prepared, on who’s order, the false claims about chemical weapon use in Syria and to draw consequences.