#ChemicalWeapons #Use #Syria #Disinformation #TulsiGabbard 
How a contrarian MIT professor fueled Tulsi Gabbard’s doubt about Syrian gas attacks[...]

The Gabbard aide wanted to discuss events in Khan Sheikhoun, a rebel-held village in northern Syria and a flash point in the country’s long-running civil war. Days earlier, a United Nations investigative panel had concluded that the Syrian government was responsible for deploying chemical weapons against its own population there, echoing the findings of U.S. and French intelligence agencies about the April 2017 attack that killed an estimated 90 people, including dozens of children.

But Gabbard, then a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, was interested in an alternative explanation. So her aide sought the perspective of an iconoclastic MIT professor, Theodore A. Postol, who in the months after the attack had released preliminary research suggesting that the use of chemical weapons in Syria had been staged by opposition forces.

The 2017 outreach, recorded in emails that Postol shared with The Washington Post, marked the beginning of his years-long engagement with Gabbard. The interactions, which included in-person and virtual briefings, help explain her contrarian views of atrocities in Syria, including past statements expressing doubt about the regime’s responsibility for the use of poison gas.

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#ChemicalWeapons #Use #Syria #Disinformation #TulsiGabbard