As Rawstory has reported the White House has full and complete confidence that Assad was the source of this sarin attack and said so quite explicitly in their own 4 page assessment.
The United States is confident that the Syrian regime conducted a chemical weapons attack, using the nerve agent sarin, against its own people in the town of Khan Shaykhun in southern Idlib Province on April 4, 2017. According to observers at the scene, the attack resulted in at least 50 and up to 100 fatalities (including many children), with hundreds of additional injuries.
We have confidence in our assessment because we have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence, laboratory analysis of physiological samples collected from multiple victims, as well as a significant body of credible open source reporting, that tells a clear and consistent story. We cannot publicly release all available intelligence on this attack due tothe need to protect sources and methods, but the following includes an unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community's analysis of this attack.
...
The Syrian regime maintains the capability and intent to use chemical weapons against the opposition to prevent the loss of territory deemed critical to its survival. We assess that Damascus launched this chemical attack in response to an opposition offensive in northern Hamah Province that threatened key infrastructure. Senior regime military leaders were probably involved in planning the attack.
...
Our information indicates that the chemical agent was delivered by regime Su-22 fixed-wing aircraft that took off from the regime-controlled Shayrat Airfield. These aircraft were in the vicinity of Khan Shaykhun approximately 20 minutes before reports of the chemical attack began and vacated the area shortly after the attack. Additionally, our information indicates personnel historically associated with Syria's chemical weapons program were at Shayrat Airfield in late March making preparations for an upcoming attack in Northern Syria, and they were present at the airfield on the day of the attack.
Personnel connected with the previous use of sarin were at the Airfield where the Su-22’s are based, the bombers had attacked that morning just before the sarin was released so therefore the bombers dropped the sarin right? Dots connected. Case closed.
Well, perhaps. Or possibly not.
Professor Postol argues that that isn’t possible based on the the photo of the impact crater.
In the center of the crater is a pipe which appears to have been crush by a downward explosion, Postol notes that this is entirely inconsistent with a munition dropped from the air and far more consistent with a ground based IED device detonated on top of a pipe filled with sarin, as he diagrams below.
The tube is not consistent with the weapons container of the type of artillery rocket that Syria used in their 2013 sarin attack which killed over 1,300 people.
This canister is the wrong length and thickness to have been part of one of a normal Syrian rocket from the type we had previously seen in 2013. Via BBC.
Using witness statements, GPS information and satellite imagery, Human Rights Watch confirmed four sites in Zamalka where at least eight rockets struck - al-Mahariq Street, Naher al-Tahoun Street in the Bostan area, near the Hamza mosque, and near the Tawfiq mosque in the al-Mazraat area.
In Muadhamiya, a town about 20km (12 miles) to the west of Zamalka, was struck by rockets at about 05:00 local time. One opposition activist said he counted seven projectiles falling in two areas - four next to the Rawda Mosque, and the other three about 500m (1,640ft) away in the area between Qahwa and Zeitouna Streets.
...
It has been difficult to establish a precise death toll from the attack, owing to the chaos resulting from the large number of casualties and the lack of any large hospitals in the affected areas.
While activists initially said about 300 people had been killed, by the end of 21 August the main opposition alliance had put the death toll at more than 1,300.
Impact craters from the 2013 attack included the entire rocket structure which was markedly different in shape as shown via NinjaPundit.
If as we saw in 2013 the Syrian arsenal of sarin was installed on rockets, and the rocket remained largely intact after deployment, why would they then attempt to drop a single sarin canister from an Su-22 — rather than a volley of six or seven rockets as they had previously done — which would, and did, have a significantly higher death count that time by a factor of 20 to 1?
The rockets from 2013 apparently were not equipped with high explosives which would have caused the crushed and cracked appearance we seen in the more recent container which likes an emptied tube of toothpaste. It doesn’t even appear that this was part of the known Syrian arsenal.
Also what would be the point of this micro-chemical attack? Why take such a huge risk with so small an amount of sarin?
I wondered if it was possible that this was still, as the White House claims, a device that was dropped from the air in some type of modified deployment vehicle, so I asked Prof. Postol.
Postol: I don’t why you’d build something like this [for air dispersal] — it would require drag parachute or something. This is clearly a primitive munition. it’s thick walled, it should be thin walled and it’s crushed from the outside. The issue isn’t what it is, I don’t know what it is. I know what it looks like.
The White House issued report that they knew what it was. The giant issue is that the White House cited physical evidence that is not supported by the facts, which suggest that this white house report is fabricated. No intelligence person would have looked at this seriously. My assessment isn’t aimed at proving [it wasn’t an attack by Assad] — it’s aimed at the [false] citations made in the White House report.
I then asked if there was any way to show this was from part of the Syria’s allegedly destroyed arsenal of chemical weapons which was supposedly guaranteed by the Russians?
Postol: It could be Turkish sarin if you accept what Symor Hersh is reporting. There are reports that there are a lot of players in game, and it could be any one of them.
[The point is that] it’s clear that the President took an action on April 7, that is not supported by the intelligence.
And indeed Seymour Hersh has written exactly that in the past in reference to the 2013 attack.
According to Hersh, the administration’s war plans were disrupted by U.S. and British intelligence analysts who uncovered evidence that the Sarin was likely not released by the Assad government and indications that Turkey’s intelligence services may have collaborated with radical rebels to deploy the Sarin as a false-flag operation.
Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan sided with the Syrian opposition early in the civil conflict and provided a vital supply line to the al-Nusra Front, a violent group of Sunni extremists with ties to al-Qaeda and increasingly the dominant rebel fighting force. By 2012, however, internecine conflicts among rebel factions had contributed to Assad’s forces gaining the upper hand.
This doesn’t disprove that Assad was not linked to the attack, nor does it prove that Erdogan and al-Nusra are the culprits. It’s even possible in the chaos of the Syrian war zone that this particular container of sarin had been abandoned — just as about 5,000 rounds of discarded and abandoned chemical ordinance were discovered by our Troops in Iraq — and was only accidental damaged by bombs dropped from Assad’s Su-22 attack.
It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.
Two technicians assigned to dispose of munitions stepped into the hole. Lake water seeped in. One of them, Specialist Andrew T. Goldman, noticed a pungent odor, something, he said, he had never smelled before.
He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling.
The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.
Is this what happened? We don’t really know.
What this report does indicate is that a full and thorough investigation of all factors involved here by neutral parties — such as the UN, as was verbally requested by Russian Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, even if Russia did Veto exactly such an investigation just minutes after his statement — is needed and should have been performed before a retaliatory airstrike was called for by Trump, or anyone.
That airstrike was premature and reckless. If sarin was being stored at the Shayrat Airfield the cruise missile attack could have released it into the air and killed dozens at the base.
The Trump administration already has piles of credibility problems from not knowing where and when the U.S.S. Carl Vincent is headed to claiming Assad is worse than Hitler even with the “Holocaust Centers.” Half the time these errors appears to be simply carelessness and recklessness, what’s mostly disturbing is how hard the fight to justify an obvious mistake or a minor lie, but then sometimes it grows into obvious malice like when they charged the intel community to prove Trump false tweets about Wiretaps.
The intelligence community was allegedly directed to provide cover for President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that Trump Tower was wiretapped by his predecessor, the New Yorker reported Tuesday.
An anonymous intelligence source told the magazine’s Ryan Lizza that “the White House said, ‘We are going to mobilize to find something to justify the President’s tweet that he was being surveilled.’”
Asking for an “all-points bulletin,” or a request to look through intelligence reports, White House officials said, “We need to find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower,” according to Lizza’s source.
If the White House was willing to ask the intel community to do that over a set of tweets, what would they be willing to ask them to do to justify a unwarranted military attack on a sovereign nation?
And If you bomb a country that didn’t attack you for committing a war crime based on falsified evidence which hasn’t yet been confirmed — is that also a war crime?