The Washington Post coverage of the nomination hearing of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence included a report on her consultation with MIT weapons expert Dr. Ted Postol regarding the accusation that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its civilian population. Gabbard wrote to Dr. Postol in 2017 regarding the accusation that President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on the town of Khan Sheikhoun. Postol, the Post notes, “months after the attack had released preliminary research suggesting that the use of chemical weapons in Syria had been staged by opposition forces.”
Postol, one of the world’s leading experts on nuclear weapons, has testified at several meetings organized by the Schiller Institute on the extreme danger of nuclear weapons. He provided his exchanges with Gabbard to the Post, which added: “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.”
But Postol himself is the Post’s central target, whom they denounce as a “conspiracy theorist.” They write: “Postol, who became emeritus at MIT in 2014, is an unusual interlocutor for a would-be director of national intelligence. A physicist with training in nuclear engineering, he worked for the Pentagon in the early 1980s before gaining prominence as an outspoken critic of its defense technologies. He has uncovered flaws in anti-missile plans and errors in analysis conducted by esteemed scientific bodies. His own research, however, has drawn fervent criticism for what some see as significant mistakes in studies of topics ranging from Israel’s Iron Dome to North Korean missiles to nerve agents in Syria.”
