“I got a call from the President one afternoon back in April [2017]. He wanted to talk about some disturbing images that were coming in from Syria. I’m sure you saw many of them yourselves — scenes of innocent civilians writhing in agony, the apparent victims of a chemical weapons attack.”

CIA Director Mike Pompeo

“This perversion of principles – twisting information to fit a desired conclusion – became the modus vivendi of American politics and journalism. And those of us who insisted on defending the journalistic principles of skepticism and evenhandedness were increasingly shunned by our colleagues, a hostility that first emerged on the Right and among neoconservatives but eventually sucked in the progressive world as well. Everything became “information warfare.”

Robert Parry — Consortium News

CIA Director Mike Pompeo joined Face the Nation host John Dickerson to discuss the Trump administration’s policies towards North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY

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On January 7 2018, CIA Director Mike Pompeo joined “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson to discuss the Trump administration’s policies towards North Korea, Iran and Pakistan. His answers about some questions are dubious at best.

When asked to provide one example to show that President Trump understands the US IC work, Pompeo recalled the ‘Khan Shaykhoun’ attack…

About Khan Shaykhoun 

CIA Director Mike Pompeo recalled the events that followed the ‘alleged’ use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in the town of Khan Shaykhoun on April 4 2017.

Pompeo provided a dramatic account of the events that led up to the US missile attack on the Syrian regime’s Shayrat air base on April 7 2017.

I got a call from the President one afternoon back in April. He wanted to talk about some disturbing images that were coming in from Syria. I’m sure you saw many of them yourselves — scenes of innocent civilians writhing in agony, the apparent victims of a chemical weapons attack.

The President had a very direct message for me: Find out what happened. So we immediately assembled a crack team of Agency experts. They began piecing together the evidence, working closely with some outstanding partners from across the Intelligence Community.

The CIA assembled “a crack team of 200,” and by the next day’s Cabinet meeting, had concluded that the Syrian government had indeed used chemical weapons.

I told him that the [intelligence community] had concluded that a chemical weapon had indeed been used in the attack, and that it had been launched by the Syrian regime.

Pompeo, are you sure? I’ll admit that the question took my breath away. But I knew how solid the evidence was, and I was able to look him in the eye and say, Mr. President, we have high confidence in our assessment.

Based on the Intelligence Community’s judgment, he made one of the most consequential decisions of his young administration, launching a strike against the very airfield where the attack originated.

COMMENT

This account of the event is truly odd. According to Seymour Hersh’s investigation:

“Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.”

“The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives.”

“Details of the attack,  including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.”

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INTEL TODAY covered this event and it is abundantly clear that the official US/CIA story does not make any sense, neither from a scientific nor from a political point of view.

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There are some reasons to believe that the newly elected  French President has come to the same conclusion recently — as I will explain soon.

After being briefed by the DGSE, Macron has made a U-turn on his political agenda for Syria and no longer asks for the departure of President al-Assad, arguing that he has no legitimate successor.

Ironically, this was the view defended by his opponent during the Presidential campaign.

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An analysis by Robert Parry

“That is why many of us who exposed major government wrongdoing in the past have ended up late in our careers as outcasts and pariahs.

Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who helped expose major crimes of state from the My Lai massacre to the CIA’s abuses against American citizens, including illegal spying and LSD testing on unsuspecting subjects, has literally had to take his investigative journalism abroad because he uncovered inconvenient evidence that implicated Western-backed jihadists in staging chemical weapons attacks in Syria so the atrocities would be blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The anti-Assad group think is so intense in the West that even strong evidence of staged events, such as the first patients arriving at hospitals before government planes could have delivered the sarin, was brushed aside or ignored.

The Western media and the bulk of international agencies and NGOs were committed to gin up another case for “regime change” and any skeptics were decried as “Assad apologists” or “conspiracy theorists,” the actual facts be damned.

So Hersh and weapons experts such as MIT’s Theodore Postol were shoved into the gutter in favor of hip new NATO-friendly groups like Bellingcat, whose conclusions always fit neatly with the propaganda needs of the Western powers.” [ An Apology and Explanation — December 31, 2017 ]

CIA Director on North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan

REFERENCES

January 7, 2018, 11:19 AM| CIA Director Mike Pompeo joins “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson to discuss the Trump administration’s policies towards North Korea, Iran and Pakistan.

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CIA Director on North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan