As always, text in this font is mine. Text in this post in this font is from excerpts from previous blog posts on this subject. Search this blog for 'sarin' to access those posts.
Some points to begin with:
I despise Assad and think he has to be held accountable for many, many atrocities!
American and British Intelligence, and probably French also, almost always support American and/or NATO policy. Truth is not their business! Consequently, it should always be taken with considerable skepticism.
Days before the gas attack at Khan Sheikun, President Trump came to the logical realization that Assad, as horrible a monster as he is, must be part of the resolution to the war in Syria, otherwise there will never be a resolution to the war. This must have been the best news Assad had heard in years. But just a few days later, Khan Sheikoun was attacked.
Who would benefit from such an attack? Certainly not Assad! Is Assad so stupid as to not see that? Of course not; Assad may be many things but stupid is not one of them.
Who gains from the attack? The rebels, of course, and those who support them. That would be the USA, UK, Saudi Arabia and possibly NATO.
Who else would benefit? Arms manufacturers and merchants all over the world.
I contend that some people in places of power wanted to turn Trump away from talking to Assad and ensure that the war would continue. Remember what happened to JFK when he attempted to end the war in Viet Nam!
This was a false flag operation that demonstrated that even if Trump can't be controlled, he can be manipulated. This attack had far more to do with 'deep state' than with Assad.
All chemical weapons were removed from Syrian control...
In 2013, Assad was accused of using chemical weapons and everyone jumped on the band-wagon from the White House to MSM. It was soon proven that it could not have been Assad's regime but was, in fact, from a rebel group, a rebel group sponsored by the USA and Saudi Arabia.
In 2014, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported on opposition forces' ability to use chemical weapons. In an article for the "London Review of Books," Hersh obtained documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon's own spy organization. They suggested that the Nusra Front, a Syrian offshoot of al Qaeda, had access to the sarin nerve agent. A chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013, which was blamed on Assad, was carried out by rebels, according to Hersh's article. They wanted Washington to presume Assad had crossed Obama's "red line" and draw the US into a war.
There are doubts over whether the suspected chemical weapons strike in Ghouta came from Assad's forces.
The attack took place while UN weapons inspectors were in the country, on Assad's invitation, said Meyer. Assad had asked them to investigate a chemical weapons attack from March 2013 outside Aleppo, which killed Syrian soldiers.
"It makes no sense that the regime would carry out an attack with inspectors in the country," he said.
But some were under rebel control
Former weapons inspector Richard Lloyd and MIT professor Theodore Postol cast further doubt on Assad's role in the Ghouta attack. They reported in 2014 that the chemical weapons could have only been fired from rebel-held territory, with a range of up to 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles).
UN Report on Syria Sarin Attack 'Unprofessional': Russia
Russia on Thursday dismissed a report by a UN-led panel that blamed the Syrian regime for a sarin gas attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun as "superficial and unprofessional".
"We believe that the report turned out to be superficial, unprofessional and amateurish," said the foreign ministry's security and disarmament department head, Mikhail Ulyanov.
Research was all 3rd party and biased
"The mission did their research from a distance, that in itself is a scandal."
The report offered by the White House, however, cited “a wide body of open-source material” and “social media accounts” from the rebel-held area, including footage provided by the White Helmets rescue group documented to have ties with jihadist rebels, Western and Gulf Arab governments.
The White Helmets are not what they appear to be on MSM. It is clear they are agenda-driven and anti-Assad. Check out
this report by a Canadian journalist.
Syria called out the OPCW investigators for not caring enough to visit the actual site of the incident in Khan Sheikhoun despite the Syrian authorities’ reassurances that they are ready to cooperate in full to make the venture possible.
According to the ministry, the findings were rooted in the claims provided by “terrorists”, who were taken to Turkey from Khan Sheikhoun and bribed to testify.
At the same time, the ministry noted that the mission (OPCW) turned down the proposal by Damascus to fly them on a private plane to Shayrat airbase, considered by the West as a place from which the attack originated.
It further argued that the OPCW’s way of handling the probe suggests that the organization’s initial goal was not to establish the truth but to conceal the facts that did not fit in the western narrative. The report serves “to raise the collapsing morale of terrorist groups following the achievements made by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies on the Syrian ground,” the statement read.
So the OPCW never went to Khan Sheikoun or to Shayrat airbase. Their investigation was taken from the testimony of people and groups who are not the least impartial.
Sarin canister crushed from above not exploded from within
“Any competent analyst would have had questions about whether the debris in the crater was staged or real,” he wrote. “No competent analyst would miss the fact that the alleged sarin canister was forcefully crushed from above, rather than exploded by a munition within it.”
Chemical analysis 'proves' Syrian origin
Chemical analysis indicates the nerve gas used in the April 4 attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun was identical to that used previously by the Syrian military.
This was the 'proof' that it was Syria who was responsible. However...
Rudskoy noted that, under the 2013 agreement to give up its chemical weapons, the Syrian government destroyed its stockpiles at 10 sites that were under its control. This was verified by the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). However, the remaining two facilities were in territory controlled by the rebels, he said, and it remains unclear what happened to the chemicals stored there.
So, obviously, rebels, including those backed by the USA, had access to Syrian-made sarin gas, but the Syrians didn't. How you can use that to conclude that Syria did it is beyond common sense. It's a red herring! If anything, it proves that the gas came from rebels.
The event
At least 87 people died on April 4 this year when sarin gas projectiles were fired into Khan Sheikhun, a town in the Idlib province of northwestern Syria.
Images of dead and dying victims, including young children, in the aftermath of the attack provoked global outrage and a US cruise missile strike on a regime air base.
A joint panel by the UN and the world's chemical watchdog Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concluded that the Syrian regime was responsible, and that the air force had dropped a bomb on the town, releasing the deadly nerve agent.
Bomb came first, gas later - Ulyanov
Russia and Syria have however presented an alternative theory that an explosive device was set off on the ground. Ulyanov on Thursday suggested the sarin gas was poured inside the crater in the ground left by the bomb.
He spoke as part of a panel of foreign ministry, air force and other Russian officials presenting slides that showed elaborate diagrams of regime war planes' trajectories and satellite images in an effort to cast doubt on the UN report.
The officials also showed video footage of rescue personnel working in the crater wearing "only respirators and cotton gloves."
Ulyanov said the video had been filmed after rebels detonated the bomb and before the sarin gas was poured into the crater.
"If it were an aerial bomb, the bomb's tail would be in the crater, but there are no traces of an aerial bomb," he said.
"The verdict against Damascus that has been issued so confidently turned out to be baseless," he said.
Bomb was not dropped from a plane
Russia made the conclusion that chemical weapons could not have been used on Khan Shaykhun, Syria, from the Su-22 plane used by Syria's Air Force, the Russian news agency Tass reported, quoting an unnamed Defense Ministry spokesman.
"After studying the materials submitted, I see several aspects that do not allow making a conclusion that chemical weapons in the form of an air bomb were used from a Su-22 aircraft of the Syrian Air Force," he said.
Russia claims, after studying a report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations, that the chemical bomb that exploded in Khan Shaykhun left a rectangular-shaped crater on the ground, while an airdrop bomb would leave an elliptical or round hole.
The evidence, the spokesman noted, is "convincing enough to conclude that at the moment of the explosion the bomb was static and lying on the asphalt surface."
The report “contains absolutely no evidence that this attack was the result of a munition being dropped from an aircraft,” wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Theodore Postol, who reviewed it and put together a 14-page assessment.
“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,” wrote Postol.
Bomber & bomb don't line up
On Thursday, with the aid of maps, satellite footage and charts, Moscow set out why it believed the Syrian government had been unfairly maligned.
A Russian Defence Ministry official told a media briefing that the Syrian Su-22 jet accused of dropping the chemical bomb was not physically close enough to the attack site to have been involved.
Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control, told the same briefing that US accusations that Russia had encouraged the use of chemical weapons in Syria were ungrounded, RIA reported.
"It was hysteria and a completely open attempt to discredit Russia with rather primitive dirty means," Ulyanov was quoted as saying.
The White House on Wednesday admonished Russia after it vetoed a United Nations plan to continue its ongoing investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Syria agreed to destroy its chemical weapons in 2013 under a deal brokered by Russia and the United States.
The Syrian government has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons during the country's more than six-year civil war.
