White House Lays Out Evidence That Syria Was Behind Deadly Chemical Attack

[HAPPY2BME]

A senior administration official laid out evidence that the Syrian regime was behind the chemical attack in the country that killed at least 80 people last week.

The official said intelligence gathered from social media accounts, open source videos, reporting, imagery, and geospatial intelligence showed that the chemical attack was a regime attack.

The official said evidence showed that the attack came from aircraft from the Sharyat Airbase — which the U.S. struck with missiles Thursday night — and that information suggested personnel associated with the country’s chemical warfare program were at that airfield at the time of the attack.

“The Russian and Syrian narratives are false, and there is depth of information that supports this,” the official said. “We don’t think it’s remotely possible for Syrians or Russians to fabricate this much information so quickly.”

“Moscow said chemicals were caused by a regime airstrike on a terrorist ammunition depot in the eastern suburbs of Khan Shaykhun. However, a Syrian military source told Russian state media on April 4 that regime forces had not carried out any airstrike in Khan Shaykhun, contradicting Russia’s claim. An open source video also shows where we believe the chemical munition landed — not on a military base filled with weapons, but in the middle of a street in the northern section of Khan Shaykhun.”

“It’s clear Russians are trying to cover up what happened there,” the official said, with regard to Syrian regime culpability.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/11/white-house-lays-out-evidence-that-syria-was-behind-deadly-chemical-attack/#ixzz4e2OJebhm

[BlueStateSaint]

Here's something else . . .

Are Syria's Chemical Weapons Iraq's Missing WMD? Obama's Director of Intelligence Thought So.

Who was the bigger liar on WMD? Bush or Obama?
11:45 AM, Apr 10, 2017 |  By Mark Hemingway

During the Bush administration, the popular protest refrain was “Bush lied, people died." It's true that a major justification for the Iraq war was eliminating Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of so-called weapons of mass destruction, a catch-all phrase for biological and chemical weapons, as well as ridding Iraq of attempts to start a nuclear program. Saddam Hussein previously used chemical weapons on the Kurds, so we know he had these weapons at some point. But they were nowhere to be found when we invaded.

One popular theory for what happened to them is that they were smuggled into Syria. In 2003, none other than James Clapper—who went on to be Obama's director of national intelligence—said this is what happened to Iraq's WMD:

The official, James Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the U.S. invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material "unquestionably" had been moved out of Iraq.

"I think people below the Saddam-Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," Clapper, who leads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said at a breakfast with reporters.

He said he was providing a personal assessment. But he said "the obvious conclusion one draws" was that there "may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material."

Clapper wasn't alone. Other credible reports from international officials and a well-regarded Syrian journalist and many other sources said that Iraqi WMD ended up in Syria as well. In 2005, the CIA's final report on the absence of WMD in Iraq called the transfer of chemical weapons to Syria "unlikely," but couldn't rule out the possibility that this is what happened.

However, given what we know now about Syria's chemical weapons use, it might be time to reassess whether the intelligence that Iraq had WMD was as faulty as we thought. And it's not just that WMD ended up in Syria, either. Though it was largely downplayed by the media, American troops in Iraq also stumbled across caches of chemical weapons—a handful of soldiers were even exposed to chemical weapons in Iraq with serious consequences. Further, there are chemical weapons stores in Iraq unaccounted for in areas now controlled by ISIS. The New York Times reported all of this in 2014, long after "Bush lied" was the settled line on WMD.

I added the last two paragraphs, plus all of the coloring above, to make a point to any DUmmies that might read this.

President Bush was correct about Iraq's WMD.  Now, we are seeing the results of that slander ("Bush lied, people died") come to fruition.

The article is here:  http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/are-syrias-chemical-weapons-iraqs-missing-wmd-obamas-director-of-intelligence-thought-so./article/2007610

[wasp69]

Here's something else . . .

I would not be one bit surprised if this whole debacle ended up proving this scenario to indeed be exactly what happened.

I personally believe it to be almost completely true, but it needs to be proven.