Preface: We spoke for quite
a while with Dr. Postol by phone, and
find him to be an ethical, honest, patriotic American man. He's made some
interesting discoveries debunking the Syrian chemical weapons propaganda, and
so we're helping to spread his findings.
By Theodore A. Postol,
professor emeritus of science, technology, and national security policy at
MIT. Postol’s main expertise is in ballistic missiles. He has a
substantial background in air dispersal, including how toxic plumes move in the
air. Postol has taught courses on weapons of mass destruction – including chemical
and biological threats – at MIT. Before joining MIT, Postol worked as an
analyst at the Office of Technology Assessment, as a science and policy adviser
to the chief of naval operations, and as a researcher at Argonne National
Laboratory. He also helped build a program at Stanford University to
train mid-career scientists to study weapons technology in relation to defense
and arms control policy. Postol is a highly-decorated scientist, receiving the
Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society, the Hilliard Roderick
Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the
Richard L. Garwin Award from the Federation of American Scientists.
This is my third report
assessing the White House intelligence Report of April 11, 2017. My first
report was titled A Quick Turnaround Assessment of the White House Intelligence Report
Issued on April 11, 2017 about the Nerve Agent Attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria and my second report was an Addendum to the first report.
This report provides unambiguous evidence that the White House
Intelligence Report (WHR) of April 11, 2017 contains false and misleading claims
that could not possibly have been accepted in any professional review by
impartial intelligence experts. The WHR was produced by the National
Security Council under the oversight of the National Security Advisor,
Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Postol-1.jpg
This image was extracted from a
video of a worker during midday (note shadows) on April 5, 2017 next to the
crater where sarin was allegedly released according to the White House
Intelligence Report (WHR) issued of April 11, 2017.
The WHR asserts that it reviewed commercial video evidence and
concluded that sarin came from the crater next to a man. Other video frames
show unprotected workers in the crater showing no evidence of sarin poisoning
at the same time the dead birds are being packaged. The URLs to this and
a related video are contained in this report.
The evidence presented herein is from two selected videos which
are part of a larger cache of videos that are available on YouTube. These
videos were uploaded to YouTube in the time period between April 5, 2017 and
April 7, 2017. Analysis of the videos shows that all of the scenes taken
at the site where the WHR claims was the location of a sarin release indicate
significant tampering with the site. Since these videos were available
roughly one week before the White House report was issued on April 11, this
indicates that the office of the WHR made no attempt to utilize the
professional intelligence community to obtain accurate data in support of the
findings in the report.
The video evidence shows
workers at the site roughly 30 hours after the alleged attack that were wearing
clothing with the logo “Idlib Health Directorate.” These individuals were
photographed putting dead birds from a birdcage into plastic bags. The
implication of these actions was that the birds had died after being placed in
the alleged sarin crater. However, the video also shows the same workers
inside and around the same crater with no protection of any kind against sarin
poisoning.
These individuals were wearing honeycomb face masks and medical
exam gloves. They were otherwise dressed in normal streetwear and had no
protective clothing of any kind.
The honeycomb face masks would provide absolutely no protection
against either sarin vapors or sarin aerosols. The masks are only
designed to filter small particles from the air. If there were sarin
vapor, it would be inhaled without attenuation by these individuals. If
the sarin were in an aerosol form, the aerosol would have condensed into the
pours in the masks, and would have evaporated into a highly lethal gas as the
individuals inhaled through the mask. It is difficult to believe that
such health workers, if they were health workers, would be so ignorant of these
basic facts.
In addition, other people dressed as health workers were standing
around the crater without any protection at all.
As noted in my earlier reports,
the assumption in WHR that the site of the alleged sarin release had not been tampered with was totally unjustified
and no competent intelligence analyst would have agreed that this assumption
was valid. The implication of this observation is clear – the WHR was not
reviewed and released by any competent intelligence experts unless they were
motivated by factors other than concerns about the accuracy of the report.
The WHR also makes claims about “communications intercepts” which
supposedly provide high confidence that the Syrian government was the source of
the attack. There is no reason to believe that the veracity of this claim
is any different from the now verified false claim that there was unambiguous
evidence of a sarin release at the cited crater.
The relevant quotes from the WHR are collected below for purposes
of reference:
The United States is confident that
the Syrian regime conducted a chemical weapons attack, using the nerve agent
sarin, against its own people in the town of Khan Shaykhun in southern Idlib
Province on April 4, 2017.
We have
confidence in our assessment because we have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence,
laboratory analysis of physiological samples collected from multiple victims,
as well as a significant body of credible open source reporting
We cannot
publicly release all available intelligence on this attack due to the need to
protect sources and methods, but the following includes an
unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s analysis of this
attack.
By 12:15 PM
[April4, 2017] local time, broadcasted local videos included images of dead children of
varying ages.
… at 1:10 PM [April4, 2017] local …
follow-on videos showing the bombing of a nearby hospital …
Commercial
satellite imagery from April 6 showed
impact craters around
the hospital that are consistent with open source reports of a conventional
attack on the hospital after the chemical attack.
Moscow has since claimed that the
release of chemicals was caused by a regime airstrike on a terrorist ammunition
depot in the eastern suburbs of Khan Shaykhun.
An open source video also shows
where we believe the chemical munition landed [Emphasis Added]—not on a facility filled with
weapons, but in the middle of a street in the northern section of Khan
Shaykhun. Commercial satellite imagery of that site from April
6, [Emphasis Added] after the allegation, shows a crater in the
road that corresponds to the open source video.
Observed munition remnants at the
crater and staining around the impact point are consistent with a munition that
functioned, but structures nearest to the impact crater did not sustain damage
that would be expected from a conventional high-explosive payload. Instead, the
damage is more consistent with a chemical munition.
Russia’s allegations fit with a
pattern of deflecting blame from the regime and attempting to undermine the
credibility of its opponents.
Summary and Conclusions
It is now clear from video
evidence that the WHR report was fabricated without input from the professional
intelligence community.
The press reported on April 4 that a nerve agent attack had
occurred in Khan Shaykhun, Syria during the early morning hours locally on that
day. On April 7, The United States carried out a cruise missile attack on
Syria ordered by President Trump. It now appears that the president
ordered this cruise missile attack without any valid intelligence to support
it.
In order to cover up the lack of intelligence to supporting the
president’s action, the National Security Council produced a fraudulent
intelligence report on April 11 four days later. The individual
responsible for this report was Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the National
Security Advisor. The McMaster report is completely undermined by a
significant body of video evidence taken after the alleged sarin attack and
before the US cruise missile attack that unambiguously shows the claims in the
WHR could not possibly be true. This cannot be explained as a simple
error.
The National Security Council Intelligence Report clearly refers
to evidence that it claims was obtained from commercial and open sources
shortly after the alleged nerve agent attack (on April 5 and April 6). If
such a collection of commercial evidence was done, it would have surely found
the videos contained herein.
This unambiguously
indicates a dedicated attempt to manufacture a false claim that intelligence
actually supported the president’s decision to attack Syria, and of far more
importance, to accuse Russia of being either complicit or a participant in an
alleged atrocity.
The attack on the Syrian
government threatened to undermine the relationship between Russia and the
United States. Cooperation between Russia and the United States is
critical to the defeat of the Islamic State. In addition, the false
accusation that Russia knowingly engaged in an atrocity raises the most serious
questions about a willful attempt to do damage relations with Russia for
domestic political purposes.
(Read the rest
of this lengthy report at link below)
