How many times have we been lied to by the Obama regime? Remember the promise that you can keep your doctor? Or the regime’s insistence that the Benghazi terror attack was the result of an obscure video? Now comes word that the regime may have known that it failed to completely eliminate Syria’s stock of chemical weapons, including the extremely deadly sarin gas used in the latest attack.
On Saturday, the Daily Caller reported:
In the wake of the recent chemical weapons that killed innocent civilians, including women and children, observers immediately recalled former President Barack Obama’s 2013 deal, which allowed the president to back down from his red line on chemical weapons, and the administration’s comments in the aftermath.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry stated in 2014 that the Obama administration “got 100 percent of the declared chemical weapons out of Syria.” Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice commented in January that the president and his team were “able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”
At the time, fact-checking site Poltifact reported that the administration’s comments were “mostly true;” however, the site has since re-evaluated its assessment. “Either Syria never fulling complied with its 2013 promise to reveal all of its chemical weapons; or it did, but then converted otherwise non-lethal chemicals to military uses.”
Writing at the American Interest, Sean Keely noted:
Now, a stray remark from National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is raising uncomfortable new questions. From the transcript:
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. […] And then there were also measures put in place to avoid hitting what we believe is a storage of sarin gas, so that that would not be ignited and cause a hazard to civilians or anyone else.
If this strike was arranged to avoid hitting sarin storage facilities, the question arises: did the Obama Administration know that such depots still existed after its “historic” deal that supposedly removed all Syria’s chemical weapons?
It sure looks like it. Keely added:
The signs point to yes. In Congressional testimony last February, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged “gaps and inconsistencies in Syria’s declaration,” validating reports that Syria was still hiding banned chemicals at undisclosed locations. And on its way out the door in January of this year, the Obama Treasury quietly introduced new sanctions against Syrian officials involved in chemical warfare. Buried in the language sanctioning a particular official was a telling admission: “As of 2016, Abbas has continued operating at locations in Syria associated with chemical warfare-related missions.”
Whether or not the Obama Administration knew of this particular sarin facility, then, they clearly knew that Syrians were still clinging to their stockpiles at several locations. They knew what Adam Garfinkle has been saying all along: that Obama’s deal to remove chemical weapons was not a historic diplomatic triumph but an unenforcable sham that the Syrians and Russians never intended to comply with.
Translation: The Obama regime lied.
There’s more, as Jeff Dunetz notes here, citing the Business Insider’s coverage of Clapper’s Senate testimony last year:
“We assess that Syria has not declared all the elements of its chemical-weapons program to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)…Despite the creation of a specialized team and months of work by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to address gaps and inconsistencies in Syria’s declaration, numerous issues remain unresolved.”
Syria has carried out chemical weapons attacks even after the implementation of the September 2013 agreement, he said.
“We continue to judge that the Syrian regime has used chemicals as a means of warfare since accession to the CWC in 2013,” Clapper said.
He noted OPCW investigators’ conclusion that “chlorine had been used on Syrian opposition forces in multiple incidents in 2014 and 2015.” The regime was still dropping chlorine bombs from the air. “Helicopters — which only the Syrian regime possesses — were used in several of these attacks,” Clapper stated.
The report further adds:
Chlorine attacks have been documented in Syria throughout 2014 and 2015, while one group of Syrian doctors discovered at least 31 chlorine attacks in the country during a single 10-week span in 2015.
And it’s long been clear that at least some of Syria’s chemical-weapons infrastructure remained in place past mid-2014. According to a July 2015 Wall Street Journal report, US intelligence agencies “concluded that the regime didn’t give up all of the chemical weapons it was supposed to,” while Assad “continu[ed] to operate weapons-research facilities.”
So, how could these attacks have happened if Syria got rid of all of their chemical weapons?
Moreover, what, if anything will be done?
Related:
- Five reasons bombing Syria is a good thing
- Syrian survivor praises Trump, slams CNN: Where were you when civilians were gassed?
- MSNBC propagandist suggests Putin masterminded gas attack in Syria to help Trump
- Poll: Do you support Donald Trump’s missile strike against Syria?
- MSNBC’s Matthews, Corn go bananas, claim action against Syria a distraction from Russia
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