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Washington (AFP) - White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer got himself in hot water Tuesday when he appeared to -- at least momentarily -- forget the Holocaust, suggesting Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons on his own people. Speaking about a chemical attack in Syria which the US blames on Bashar al-Assad, Donald Trump's high-profile spokesman said: "You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons." His comments, on the first day of the Jewish festival of Passover, brought looks of astonishment from the assembled White House press corps, who offered Spicer a...

On Aug. 21, 2013, I woke up in the dark around 4:45 a.m., struggling to breathe. My eyes were burning, my head was throbbing, and my throat was blocked. I was suffocating. I tried to inhale but all I heard was a horrible rasping sound as my throat closed up. An unbearable pain drummed in my head. The world began to blur. I pounded my chest but couldn’t breathe. My heart seemed about to explode. Suddenly, my windpipe opened. A gust of air pierced my lungs. Needles seemed to stab my eyes. A searing pain clawed at my stomach. I...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weighed in on the United States' airstrikes in Syria Friday, saying it was hypocritical to lament the loss of innocent Syrian children in chemical attacks while simultaneously forbidding those those children from entering the United States. Clinton criticized President Donald Trump's attempts to ban Syrian refugees from the U.S. She also emphasized the attacks need to be accompanied by a plan to end Syria's civil war, which the country has been embroiled in since 2011, when she was Secretary of State....

The chemical weapon attack by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad on the rebel-held town Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province on April 4 once again underscores what a foreign policy failure President Obama was and what a serial liar Susan Rice is. On January 16, 2017, Rice, who served as U.N. Ambassador during Obama’s first term and was rewarded for her Benghazi lies with the post of National Security Advisor, where she could be compelled to testify before Congress, Gave what amounted to an exit interview with NPR. During the interview she crowed about the Obama administration’s success in eliminating...

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says there's no "hard evidence" of Russian involvement in Syria's chemical bomb attack, but charges Moscow's been "incompetent" and "out-maneuvered" by Bashar al-Assad. In an interview with ABC News' "This Week" aired Sunday, Tillerson said in his visit to Russia this week, he'll call upon Moscow "to fulfill the obligation it made to the international community when it agreed to be the guarantor of the elimination of the chemical weapons." "Why Russia has not been able to achieve that is unclear to me," he said. "I don't draw conclusions of complicity at all. But clearly,...

<p>Back in July 2014, then-Secretary of State John Kerry announced that his department “got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out” of Syria.</p> <p>Following Tuesday's horrific chemical attack on the Syrian city of Khan Sheikhoun — which reportedly left over 80 people, including scores of children, dead — those claims have come under close national scrutiny.</p>

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster delivered remarks in Florida today to give some background on the strikes against Syria Thursday. He made one curious comment that raises a lot of troubling questions: And the one thing that I will tell you though, there was an effort to minimize—to minimize risk to third-country nationals at that airport—I think you read Russians from that—but that—and we took great pains to try to avoid that. Of course, in any kind of military operation, there are no guarantees. And then there were also measures put in place to avoid hitting what we believe is...

What do we know about the modern Middle East, particularly the “hot zones” like Syria, the Gaza Strip, and Iraq? We know that people die before their time. Old people, young people, children, even babies. Innocent or guilty, they’re all targets of the Islamic jihadists’ war for the control of their regions, and ultimately, the world. In Syria, for example, where we have been horrified at the murders of little children by an apparent chemical weapon attack allegedly committed at the order of Bashir al-Assad, we must remember how other children were killed the very same week, even the very...

Back in January in an in interview with NPR, Obama national security adviser Susan Rice was still touting the Obama administration's success at removing chemical weapons in Syria: "We were able to find a solution that didn't necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished." Between her dubious public statements on Benghazi, the Bowe Bergdahl desertion, her recent denial that she knew anything about unmasking Trump officials' identities in intelligence reports, and now this—it would seem Rice has a real...

Reports of the first mass use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime began four years ago amid the country’s ongoing conflict. In March 2013, both sides in the Syrian Civil War traded accusations over a gas attack that killed dozens of people, including government soldiers, in Khan al-Assal, a district of Aleppo city in northern Syria. An investigation by the United Nations later concluded that sarin nerve gas was used in the attack, but the international body did not identify a culprit. ...In August 2013, Syrian government forces were accused of using chemical weapons against rebel-held suburbs...

The Pentagon released a map Thursday that reportedly shows the flight pattern of a Syrian aircraft that dropped chemical weapons on civilians Tuesday. The map was released hours after President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to fire 59 Tomahawk missiles at a northern Syrian airbase, in retaliation for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s attack.

Shortened title. Full title: Syria's government was supposed to have gotten rid of its chemical weapons in 2014. So what happened? There’s a mystery at the heart of an apparent chemical weapons attack in Syria this week: Syria’s government, suspected of carrying out the attack, was supposed to have gotten rid of all its chemical weapons in 2014. A year earlier, President Obama said Syria had crossed a “red line” by allegedly using sarin gas near Damascus and Aleppo, killing at least 100 to 150 people. But rather than take military action, Obama agreed to a Russian deal to dismantle...

Syria: President Trump sent a loud message to Syria's Bashar al-Assad for his use of deadly Sarin gas against his own people: Your days of terrorizing your own people with chemical weapons are about to end. But many others are getting Trump's message, too. "Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the air base in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched," Trump said, speaking from Mar-a-Lago in Florida. "It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons." Two U.S. ships in the...

WASHINGTON, April 6, 2017 — The United States fired Tomahawk missiles into Syria today in retaliation for the regime of Bashar Assad using nerve agents to attack his own people. President Donald J. Trump ordered the attack on Al-Shayrat Air Base, the base from which the chemical attack on Syria’s Idlib province was launched. The missiles were launched from U.S. Navy ships in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross fires a tomahawk land attack missile while conducting naval operations in the Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017. Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Robert S....

It seems the former national security adviser has a credibility problem. According to a recent headline from Reuters, "U.S. intelligence agencies suspect Assad did not turn over all chemical weapons stockpile." The evidence of the recent chemical attack in Syria makes that declaration little more than stating the obvious. However, back in January in an in interview with NPR, Obama national security adviser Susan Rice was still touting the Obama administration's success at removing chemical weapons in Syria: ... Between her dubious public statements on Benghazi, the Bowe Bergdahl desertion, her recent denial that she knew anything about unmasking Trump...

The United States launched dozens of cruise missiles Thursday night at a Syrian airfield in response to what it believes was the Syrian government's use of banned chemical weapons blamed for having killed at least 100 people on Tuesday, U.S. military officials told NBC News. The U.S. military fired at least 50 Tomahawk missiles intended for a single target — Ash Sha'irat in Homs province in western Syria, the officials said.

Syria produced a “ridiculously huge amount” of deadly sarin gas, says an internal Defense Department memo written amid the Obama administration’s effort to remove and destroy all the country’s chemical weapons. That stockpile, which Obama aides declared was reduced to zero by summer 2014, is back in the news. President Trump on Wednesday accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of once again committing mass murder against his own people by unleashing sarin gas on a town in Idlib province, killing dozens of innocents. His words raise the question, where did the sarin come from? An intelligence official said, that at this...

Chemical weapons experts have thrown doubt on Russian claims the attack that killed more than 80 civilians in rebel-held Syria could have been caused by an air strike on a "warehouse" containing toxic agents. The Syrian regime's ally Russia has sought to deflect an international outcry aimed at Damascus by claiming that Syrian air strikes had hit a warehouse where "toxic substances" were stored and that they were released by the explosion. Olivier Lepick, a French expert with decades of experience of chemical weapons, told AFP on Thursday that the theory advanced by the Russians was "completely fanciful".

United States secretary of state John Kerry has mocked the notion that Syrian rebels were responsible for last month's chemical weapons attack near Damascus. He has called on all United Nations member nations to "stand up and speak out" on Syria's chemical weapons at the upcoming General Assembly. "The world can decide whether it was used by the regime which has used chemical weapons before, or whether the opposition secretly went unnoticed into territory they don't control, to fire rockets that they don't have, containing Sarin that they don't possess, to kill their own people," he said. "I would say...

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books («Whose Sarin?» and «The Red Line and the Rat Line») has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set...