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Trumps missile attack on Syria was justified with fake intelligence: experts
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/trumps-missile-attack-on-syria-was-justified-with-fake-intelligence-experts/Trump’s missile attack on Syria was justified with fake intelligence: experts
Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
18 Apr 2017 at 23:23 ET
snip//
But these assertions are not clear, consistent or convincing, said Theodore Postol, a professor of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Postol, who has received numerous awards for his work on missile systems and has worked for the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, looked at the same information sources cited by the White House and concluded in a 14-page analysis that, first of all, whatever happened in Khan Shaykhun was not the result of an air attack.
“It’s important to be clear about what I’m saying,” he told AlterNet. “I’m saying that a so-called White House intelligence report issued on April 11 is totally inconsistent with the claims it’s making. I’m not so much saying that I know what happened, because actually I don’t. What I do know is that this report was, to be blunt, fabricated without the intelligence methodologies that it claims to have used. Because I have data that I have been poring over… for example, there’s video data of this crater that they allege was the source of an air attack, an air munitions. It was not an air munition. You could see that very easily.”
“So the issue is that the White House issued a false intelligence report and the reasons {why} I don’t know,” Postol said. “But one possibility is they are trying to cover up their tracks because they didn’t know what was going on and they attacked a foreign power. And that is not good.”
Bennis agreed that the White House intelligence report doesn’t prove what it claims.
“The four-page white paper released by the White House, purporting to prove that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack, does not provide any of the actual evidence they claim to rely on,” she said, commenting by email. “It makes a set of assertions, describes the kind of information they have, and essentially then says ‘trust us.’ It appears to be a White House (that is, political) document, not the official position of intelligence agencies themselves. It does not provide anything close to proof, or even evidence, of the who, the what or the how of the chemical attack.”
snip//
Less than 100 days into Trump’s presidency, the White House has failed to pass a single major piece of legislation. Instead, beyond placing a right-wing justice on the Supreme Court with the GOP-majority U.S. Senate’s help, Trump has already committed an act of war: an unauthorized attack on a foreign power. And his administration has fabricated the evidence for that attack, an intelligence report that doesn’t prove what it purports.
As Postol said, something is going on with the nation’s intelligence apparatus and the politics surrounding it, and it’s not making the world a safer place.
23 replies
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... who's more likely to have lied?
The Trump administration or the Putin flunkies?
Or are they pretty much the same thing?
