Uh Oh! General Mattis Admits No Evidence of Assad Using Poison Gas on His Own People

by Tim Brown, Freedom Outpost:

As Rep. Thomas Massie said when it all went down, “The first casualty in war is the truth.”

I do have to say, I’m shocked that this would actually be acknowledged, but not at all surprised by the truth since we have been those pointing out that both the Obama administration and the Trump administration were lying to us about Assad using Sarin gas on his own people in Syria.

Newsweek has the story:

Lost in the hyper-politicized hullabaloo surrounding the Nunes Memorandum and the Steele Dossier was the striking statement by Secretary of Defense James Mattis that the U.S. has “no evidence” that the Syrian government used the banned nerve agent Sarin against its own people.

This assertion flies in the face of the White House (NSC) Memorandum which was rapidly produced and declassified to justify an American Tomahawk missile strike against the Shayrat airbase in Syria.

Mattis offered no temporal qualifications, which means that both the 2017 event in Khan Sheikhoun and the 2013 tragedy in Ghouta are unsolved cases in the eyes of the Defense Department and Defense Intelligence Agency.

Mattis went on to acknowledge that “aid groups and others” had provided evidence and reports but stopped short of naming President Assad as the culprit.

There were casualties from organophosphate poisoning in both cases; that much is certain. But America has accused Assad of direct responsibility for Sarin attacks and even blamed Russia for culpability in the Khan Sheikhoun tragedy.

Now its own military boss has said on the record that we have no evidence to support this conclusion. In so doing, Mattis tacitly impugned the interventionists who were responsible for pushing the “Assad is guilty” narrative twice without sufficient supporting evidence, at least in the eyes of the Pentagon.

This dissonance between the White House and the Department of Defense is especially troubling when viewed against the chorus of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) experts who have been questioning the (Obama and Trump) White House narratives concerning chemical weapons in Syria since practically the moment these “Assad-ordered events” occurred.

OK, so let’s just chalk it all up to the military industrial complex and the mainstream media feeding us the bull that we needed to be involved in Syria in the first place.  It’s sort of like that line that came out of the Bush administration about “WMD’s in Iraq,” right?

In any case, Zero Hedge points out that the attacks could only have three originators.

• The Syrian government
•  
• The fighters of whichever group, like Al-Nusra or ISIS who elected to use this to frame the Syrian government, and;
•  
• The US, in an attempt to frame the Assad regime.

Tyler Durden writes:

The Americans were not invited to help Assad, so their presence in Syria is an inconvenient truth – Syria cannot expel them, but they were never wanted, and even by the American people, involvement in yet another Middle Eastern nation is not high on the “things I want my country to do” list for most Americans.

The loser in this situation is the United States, because of the mishandling of this conflict.  While most of the conflict and the American action in it took place during the Obama era, it is probably the case that if the USA simply gathered all its troops and equipment and retreated to Israel or the Mediterranean Sea, or just plain left, the result might be a great deal worse for the Russian and Syrian national forces already there.

The problem here is that there may well be a serious intelligence breach or failure that created or allowed the decision to launch that Tomahawk strike. Russia Today also ran the Mattis piece, because to do so suits the Russian narrative that there is no way Bashar Assad would use gas on his own people. Indeed, it does not make rational sense to a Westerner how a dictator retains power when his country is already a war zone and watched by world powers.  To do a mass killing of one’s own citizens under such a watchful eye seems a highly absurd course for any leader to take.

The further problem is the reality of conditions on the ground.  As this report points out, the Americans may be in a situation where foolish decisions by previous administrations and maybe even this one, have created a situation where they cannot leave.

 Well, I”m not convinced of that.  We got involved by training, funding and arming Islamic jihadis under the Obama administration.  We continually tried to stick our nose into Syria where it didn’t belong.

Then, President Donald Trump, unconstitutionally attacked Syria with a plethora of missiles due to a lie his own Defense Department couldn’t not even prove to support the claims.

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