{"id":303675,"date":"2017-04-14T03:42:31","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T02:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/new-revelations-belie-trump-claims-on-syria-chemical-attack\/"},"modified":"2017-04-14T03:42:31","modified_gmt":"2017-04-14T02:42:31","slug":"new-revelations-belie-trump-claims-on-syria-chemical-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/new-revelations-belie-trump-claims-on-syria-chemical-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"New Revelations Belie Trump Claims on Syria Chemical Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><span class=\"wf_caption\" style=\"display: block; max-width: 640px; width: 100%;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/images\/images_2017_04\/2017_0413por_.jpg\" alt=\"President Donald Trump leaves after making a statement about the American attack on an air base in Syria, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., April 6, 2017. (Photo: Doug Mills \/ The New York Times)\" width=\"640\" style=\"width: 100%; margin: auto;\"\/><span style=\"text-align: left; margin-top: 3px; display: block;\">President Donald Trump leaves after making a statement about the American attack on an air base in Syria, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, April 6, 2017. (Photo: Doug Mills \/ The New York Times)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Two unnamed senior Trump administration officials briefing journalists Tuesday asserted that a Syrian regime airstrike in the city of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 had deliberately killed dozens of civilians with sarin gas.<\/p>\n<p>The Trump administration officials dismissed the Russian claim that the Syrian airstrike had targeted a munitions warehouse controlled by Islamic extremists as an afterthought to cover up the Syrian government&#8217;s culpability for the chemical attack. Moreover, the Trump officials claimed that US intelligence had located the site where the Syrian regime had dropped the chemical weapon.<\/p>\n<p>However, two new revelations contradict the Trump administration&#8217;s line on the April 4 attack. A former US official knowledgeable about the episode told Truthout that the Russians had actually informed their US counterparts in Syria of the Syrian military&#8217;s plan to strike the warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun 24 hours before the strike. And a leading analyst on military technology,\u00a0Dr. Theodore Postol\u00a0of MIT, has concluded that the alleged device for a sarin attack could not have been delivered from the air but only from the ground, meaning that the chemical attack may not have been the result of the Syrian airstrike.<\/p>\n<p>The Trump administration is pushing the accusation that the Assad regime was the force that carried out the highly lethal chemical attack on April 4 very hard, perhaps not so much to justify the already politically popular US strike against the Shayrat airbase on April 6, but rather to buttress a new hardline policy against the Syrian regime.<\/p>\n<p>The two unnamed senior Trump officials who briefed journalists Tuesday sought to discredit the Russian claim that the Syrian airstrike had hit a warehouse in Khan Sheikhoun that was believed to hold weapons including toxic&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/40222-new-revelations-belie-trump-claims-on-syria-chemical-attack\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Donald Trump leaves after making a statement about the American attack on an air base in Syria, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, April 6, 2017. (Photo: Doug Mills \/ The New York Times) Two unnamed senior Trump administration officials briefing journalists Tuesday asserted that a Syrian regime airstrike in the city [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":303676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-303675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}