“The Assad regime is down to as few as 18,000 soldiers, according to some estimates. U.S. officials said the chemical weapons attack, launched against civilians in an area that has supported the rebels, was intended to help make up for those manpower deficiencies.”
> Senior officials said that U.S. signals and aerial intelligence, combined with local reporting and samples taken from victims of the attack, showed that a Russian-made, Syrian-piloted SU-22 aircraft dropped at least one munition carrying the nerve gas sarin on the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun.
>
> The officials said that nothing from an array of intelligence and publicly available material provided any credence to the alternative account put forward by Syria and Russia, which claimed that routine bombing inadvertently struck an opposition chemical weapons depot.
>
> “We are very confident that terrorists or nonstate actors did not commit this attack,” said one senior official who, like others, spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence findings.
Nothing new reported.
Has the establishment already turned Trump’s head away from the four big domestic issues that won him the presidency?
I hope he can resist the Uniparty’s agenda of war mongering, regime change and nation building.
It sucked George ‘Dubya’ Bush in and destroyed his presidency.
Russia pulls out, Assad loses, isis/al queda wins or one of their benefactors, Turkey moves in.
How can we ask the Russians to join with us in getting gas weapons out? We tried that before and achieved “100% success”. It might even have been true at that moment. But the knowledge of how to make nerve gas is the crucial thing, and there is no way to get rid of that knowledge. They can make their own, and there’s basically nothing we or the Russians can do about it, beyond trying to strictly monitor all the equipment and any precursor chemicals that the Syrians can’t make themselves.
We can condemn it, we can sanction it, but we can’t stop Assad from using it if that’s what he wants to do.