Former CIA Officer: "The Intelligence Confirms The Russian Account On Syria" | Zero Hedge
President Trump earned neocon applause for his hasty decision to attack Syria and kill about a dozen Syrians, but his rash act has all the earmarks of a “wag the dog” moment.
Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.
Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.
There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.
But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.
One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.
The source said the Trump national security team split between the President’s close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a protégé of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus.
White House Infighting
In this telling, the earlier ouster of retired Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser and this week’s removal of Bannon from the National Security Council were key steps in the reassertion of neocon influence inside the Trump presidency. The strange personalities and ideological extremism of Flynn and Bannon made their ousters easier, but they were obstacles that the neocons wanted removed.
Though Bannon and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said, they shared the belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria, revealing the Obama administration’s CIA analysis that
a fatal sarin gas attack in 2013 was a “false-flag” operation intended to sucker President Obama into fully joining the Syrian war on the side of the rebels — and the intelligence analysts’ similar beliefs about Tuesday’s incident.
Instead, Trump went along with the idea of embracing
the initial rush to judgment blaming Assad for the Idlib poison-gas event. The source added that Trump saw Thursday night’s missile assault as a way to change the conversation in Washington, where his administration has been under fierce attack from Democrats claiming that his election resulted from
a Russian covert operation.
Russia, Iran Warn U.S. They Will "Respond With Force" If Syria "Red Lines" Crossed Again | Zero Hedge
A statement issued on Sunday by a joint command centre consisting of forces of Russian, Iran and allied militia alliance supporting Syrian President Bashar al Assad said that Friday's US strike on the Syrian air base
crossed “red lines” and it would "respond with force" to any new aggression while increasing their level of support to their ally.
In the statement
published by the group on media outlet Ilam al Harbi, the pro-Assad alliances says that
“what America waged in an aggression on Syria is a crossing of red lines. From now on we will respond with force to any aggressor or any breach of red lines from whoever it is and America knows our ability to respond well."
Earlier on Sunday the UK's Defence Secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, demanded Russia rein in Mr Assad (by which he really meant be willing to accept a new Syrian regime with a pro-western puppet leader, and one who is willing to allow the Qatar gas pipeline to cross the country on its way to Europe.
Fallon also claimed that Moscow is "responsible for every civilian death" in the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhun and said Putin was responsible for the brutal killings “by proxy”, because it was the Syrian president’s “principal backer." The defense minister said the attack had happened "on their watch"
and that Vladimir Putin must now live up to previous promises that Mr Assad’s chemical weapons had been destroyed. His comments came after Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson pulled out of a Moscow visit hours before he was due to fly.
* * *
Finally, for those who are unclear about the core geopolitical tensions that are at the base of the long-running Syrian proxy war, the answer is - as so often tends to be - commodities and specifically natural gas, as we first explained in 2013, and as summarized in the following October 2016 article courtesy of Eric Zuesse (see also "Competing Gas Pipelines Are Fueling The Syrian War & Migrant Crisis")
The Oil-Gas War Over Syria (In 4 Maps)
It would seem the tomahawks that are missing all hit 'the Donal' in the foot.
https://www.darkmoon.me/2017/americ...rters-desert-him-in-droves-over-syria-attack/
‘SHOCKED AND ANGRY . . . NO ONE VOTED FOR THIS!’
I never knew it would come to this: that a newly elected President of the United States, like a snake oil salesman, should con millions of trusting Americans into giving him a leg-up into the White House, all in the belief that he was their man, only to jump into bed later on with the Jews and give them all the finger.
Today is Palm Sunday, the day Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey to the sound of hosannahs, and palms were scattered before his feet. Let the donkey celebrate the hour:
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
Who would have thought that, two thousand years later, an alien race from Khazaria would have ensconced themselves in the land where Jesus lived and pass themselves of as the rightful owners of that land? And who would have imagined for a moment that a con artist of an American president should enable them to expand their ill-gotten territories, with the help of his Jewish son-in-law in the White House, and that this should all be done under the trusting noses of the American people — possibly the most ill-informed and brutalized bunch of civilized morons the world has ever seen?
This is what I read on my own website by former Trump supporters, “
Dump Trump!” And this: “Trump has crossed my red line. It’s all over, baby. Unlike some who still continue to make countless excuses for Trump, others are awakening from the Trump dream. I had hoped Trump was the real deal, I voted for him in the primary and the general election. I stuck with him as long as I could. I was played, and I fell for it, but it’s all over now.”
Another respected writer on my site throws his cards on the table, revealing himself in the process as an extreme anti-Semite:
“The one thing that will get you and ‘L’ to drink a toast to each other, and make the rest of us bring out the champagne bottles, is to turn on the news one day and find the towers of Tel Aviv have come toppling down.
I do believe the day will come when the world sees Israel go up in smoke.
Armageddon approaches. The land where Jesus walked will become an uninhabitable wasteland for centuries.
Bryan MacDonaldVerified account @27khv
