FROM EIR DAILY ALERTMattis Admitted in February, Pentagon Had No Evidence That Assad Used Chemical WeaponsApril 8, 2018 (EIRNS)—A Feb. 8, 2018 Newsweek article by Ian Wilkie reports what should have been a stunning revelation by Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis on that date, but instead was much underplayed: There was no evidence that Syrian President Assad had used poison gas on his own people. On April 10, 2017, after the U.S. cruise missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat airfield on April 7 in retaliation for Syria’s assault earlier that week on terrorist forces in Khan Sheikhoun, which the U.S. alleged was a chemical weapons attack on civilians, Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon, “The Syrian government would be ill-advised ever again to use chemical weapons.” But 10 months later, Feb. 2, 2018 at the Pentagon, Mattis said,
Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. He emphasized, “We do not have evidence of it.” Wilkie wrote,
referring to both the Khan Sheikhoun attack last year and the 2013 Ghouta attack.
he says. The technical aspects of the two attacks (as of February) are not consistent with the use of nation-state quality sarin munitions. The 2013 Ghouta event employed home-made rockets of the sort the insurgents use, Wilkie asserts. Further, the White House Memorandum on Khan Sheikhoun seemed to rely heavily on testimony from the Syrian White Helmets, who were filmed at the scene having contact with supposed sarin-tainted casualties and not suffering any ill effects. The same actors, Wilkie writes, were filmed wearing chemical weapons training suits around the supposed “point of impact” in Khan Sheikhoun—a sign of fakery, because a training suit offers no protection at all, and they would be dead if military-grade sarin were used, he says. And, the fact that UN investigators were in Syria when the chemical weapons event occurred in April 2017 makes it very doubtful that Assad would have ordered the use sarin then, since it was a banned weapon he had agreed to never employ. Wilkie ended,
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