Eric Zuesse

The Trump Administration is demanding Russian President Vladimir Putin to abandon support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has blocked at the United Nations an investigation-team's being sent to the alleged site of the alleged sarin-gas attack that the Trump Administration alleges was perpetrated by the forces of Assad. Instead of allowing an international team to investigate, President Trump’s team, on Monday April 24th, headlined that it "Sanctions 271 Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center Staff in Response to Sarin Attack on Khan Sheikhoun”, so as to "target the scientific support center for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s horrific chemical weapons attack on innocent civilian men, women, and children.”

Russian Television reported U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, on April 6th, two days after the alleged sarin attack, as essentially demanding Putin’s capitulation, regarding the Syrian war:

“'It is very important that the Russian government consider carefully their support for Bashar al-Assad.’ Tillerson added. Asked if the US will lead a regime change effort in Syria, Tillerson said that 'those steps are underway.'”

In other words, the Trump Administration is continuing what had originally been the Obama Administration’s objective, prior to Russia’s entry into the war on Assad’s side on 30 September 2015: regime-change in Syria. The Trump Administration is apparently willing to go to war against Russia in order to remove Assad and replace him with a leader who is supported by the U.S., Sauds, and America’s other allies in the war to replace Syria’s existing government.

Tillerson’s Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, was quoted by Russian Television on April 21st, as saying:

“I believe that it’s a very serious situation, because now it’s obvious that false information about the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government is being used to move away from implementing Resolution 2254 [the UN’s plan for a negotiated settlement of the Syrian crisis, that was reached between Lavrov and his then-counterpart John Kerry, near the end of Obama’s Presidency], which stipulates a political settlement with the participation of all the Syrian parties, and aims to switch to the long-cherished idea of regime change."

MIT’s Dr. Theodore Postol, America’s most highly honored expert on intelligence-analysis, has been trying unsuccessfully to obtain U.S. press-coverage of flaws in the official White House document, “White House Intelligence Report” concerning the alleged sarin event on April 4th; and, in apparent frustration at the total lack of mainstream coverage of this in the United States, Dr. Postol closed his latest analysis of the source-evidence that the document had relied upon, by saying:

"The mainstream media is the engine of democracy. … The critical function of the mainstream media in the current situation should be to report the facts that clearly and unambiguously contradict government claims. This has so far not occurred. … The President and his staff took decisions without any intelligence, or far more likely ignored intelligence from the professional community that they were given, to execute an attack in the Middle East that had the danger of creating an inadvertent military confrontation with Russia."

The present news-report is being submitted to all U.S. news media, for publication without charge, in the hope that Dr. Postol’s analysis, and other critical analyses of the White House Intelligence Report, will be made public by the U.S. news media, given that the Trump Administration is blocking any third-party independent scientific investigation into this important matter, and a war between the United States and Russia could result.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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