April 12, 2017
By
Robert Parry
After making the
provocative and dangerous charge that Russia is covering up Syria’s use of
chemical weapons, the Trump administration withheld key evidence to support its
core charge that a Syrian warplane dropped sarin on a northern Syrian town on
April 4.
A four-page white
paper, prepared by President Trump’s National Security Council staff and
released by the White House on Tuesday, claimed that U.S. intelligence has
proof that the plane carrying the sarin gas left from the Syrian military
airfield that Trump ordered hit by Tomahawk missiles on April 6.
The paper asserted
that “we have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence,” but then added
that “we cannot publicly release all available intelligence on this attack due
to the need to protect sources and methods.”
I’m told that the
key evidence was satellite surveillance of the area, a body of material that
U.S. intelligence analysts were reviewing late last week even after the
Trump-ordered bombardment of 59 Tomahawk missiles that, according to Syrian
media reports, killed seven or eight Syrian soldiers and nine civilians,
including four children.
Yet, it is unclear
why releasing these overhead videos would be so detrimental to “sources and
methods” since everyone knows the U.S. has this capability and the issue at
hand – if it gets further out of hand – could lead to a nuclear confrontation
with Russia.
In similarly tense
situations in the past, U.S. Presidents have released sensitive intelligence to
buttress U.S. government assertions, including John F. Kennedy’s disclosure of
U-2 spy flights in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and Ronald Reagan revealing
electronic intercepts after the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Airlines Flight 007
in 1983.
Yet, in this current
case, as U.S.-Russian relations spiral downward into what is potentially an
extermination event for the human species, Trump’s White House insists that the
world must trust it despite its record of consistently misstating facts.
In the case of the
April 4 chemical-weapons incident in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which
reportedly killed scores of people including young children, I was told that
initially the U.S. analysts couldn’t see any warplanes over the area in Idlib
province at the suspected time of the poison gas attack but later they detected
a drone that they thought might have delivered the bomb.
A Drone Mystery
According to a
source, the analysts struggled to identify whose drone it was and where it
originated. Despite some technical difficulties in tracing its flight path,
analysts eventually came to believe that the flight was launched in Jordan from
a Saudi-Israeli special operations base for supporting Syrian rebels, the
source said, adding that the suspected reason for the poison gas was to create
an incident that would reverse the Trump administration’s announcement in late
March that it was no longer seeking the removal of President Bashar al-Assad.
If indeed that was
the motive — and if the source’s information is correct — the operation would
have been successful, since the Trump administration has now reversed itself
and is pressing Russia to join in ousting Assad who is getting blamed for the
latest chemical-weapons incident.
Presumably, however,
the “geospatial intelligence” cited in the four-page dossier could disprove
this and other contentions if the Trump administration would only make its
evidence publicly available.
The dossier stated,
“Our information indicates that the chemical agent was delivered by regime
Su-22 fixed-wing aircraft that took off from the regime-controlled Shayrat
Airfield. These aircraft were in the vicinity of Khan Shaykhun approximately 20
minutes before reports of the chemical attack began and vacated the area
shortly after the attack.”
So, that would mean
– assuming that the dossier is correct – that U.S. intelligence analysts were
able to trace the delivery of the poison gas to Assad’s aircraft and to the
airfield that Trump ordered attacked on April 6.
Still, it remains a
mystery why this intelligence assessment is not coming directly from President
Trump’s intelligence chiefs as is normally the case, either with an official
Intelligence Estimate or a report issued by the Director of National
Intelligence.
The White House
photo released late last week showing the President and a dozen senior advisers
monitoring the April 6 missile strike from a room at his Mar-a-Lago estate in
Florida was noteworthy in that neither CIA Director Mike Pompeo nor Director of
National Intelligence Dan Coats was in the frame.
Now, it is the White
House that has released the four-page dossier supposedly summing up the
assessment of the “intelligence community.”
An Argumentative
Dossier
The dossier also
seems argumentative in that it assumes that Russian officials – and presumably
others – who have suggested different possible explanations for the incident at
Khan Sheikdoun did so in a willful cover-up, when any normal investigation seeks
to evaluate different scenarios before settling on one.
It is common amid
the “fog of war” for people outside the line of command – and even sometimes
inside the line of command – to not understand what happened and to struggle
for an explanation.
On April 6, before
Trump’s missile strike, I and others received word from U.S. military
intelligence officials in the Middle East that they, too, shared the belief
that the poison gas may have resulted from a conventional bombing raid that
ruptured containers stored by the rebels, who – in Idlib province – are
dominated by Al Qaeda’s affiliate and its allies.
Those reports were
cited by former U.S. intelligence officials, including more than two dozen who
produced a memo to President Trump urging him to undertake a careful
investigation of the incident before letting this crisis exacerbate U.S.-Russia
relations.
The memo said “our
U.S. Army contacts in the area” were disputing the official story of a chemical
weapons attack. “Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria
ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong
wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently
died,” the memo said.
In other words, to
suggest possible alternative scenarios is not evidence of a “cover-up,” even if
the theories are later shown to be erroneous. It is the normal process of
sorting through often conflicting initial reports.
Even in the
four-page dossier, Trump’s NSC officials contradicted what other U.S.
government sources have told The New York Times and other mainstream news
outlets about the Syrian government’s supposed motive for launching the
chemical-weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun.
According to the
earlier accounts, the Syrian government either was trying to terrorize the
population in a remote rebel-controlled area or was celebrating its impunity
after the Trump administration had announced that it was no longer seeking
Assad’s removal.
But the dossier
said, “We assess that Damascus launched this chemical attack in response to an
opposition offensive in northern Hamah Province that threatened key
infrastructure.” Although Khan Sheikhoun was not near the fighting, the dossier
presented the town as an area of support for the offensive.
Assuming this assessment
is correct, does that mean that the earlier explanations were part of a
cover-up or a propaganda operation? The reality is that in such complex
situations, the analyses should continue to be refined as more information
becomes available. It should not be assumed that every false lead or discarded
theory is proof of a “cover-up,” yet that is what we see here.
“The Syrian regime
and its primary backer, Russia, have sought to confuse the world community
about who is responsible for using chemical weapons against the Syrian people
in this and earlier attacks,” the dossier declared.
But the larger point
is that – given President Trump’s spotty record for getting facts straight – he
and his administration should go the extra mile in presenting irrefutable
evidence to support its assessments, not simply insisting that the world must
“trust us.”
[In a separate
analysis of the four-page dossier, Theodore Postol, a national security
specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded that the
White House claims were clearly bogus, writing:
“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.
“In fact, a main
piece of evidence that is cited in the document points to an attack that was
executed by individuals on the ground, not from an aircraft, on the
morning of April 4. This conclusion is based on an assumption made by the
White House when it cited the source of the sarin release and the photographs
of that source. My own assessment, is that the source was very
likely tampered with or staged, so no serious conclusion could be made
from the photographs cited by the White House.”]
