• France among others as possible suspects behind Ghouta chemical attack
• Witness of 2013 Ghouta gas attack in Syria reveals who was responsible for the tragedy
• French General: Syrian government unlikely to be behind 2013 Ghouta chemical weapon attack

Amidst Obama's convoluted explanations for his decision to cancel his planned attack on Syria, buried deep inside the article, we find this quite remarkable paragraph, which in all the vast literature there has been about the Ghouta sarin attack has gone almost completely unnoticed.

"Obama was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who interrupted the President's Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each morning from Clapper's analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syria's use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a "slam dunk." He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a "slam dunk" in Iraq."

(Bold italics added)

In other words there is no need to speculate that the planned US attack on Syria was called off because of doubts about Syrian government responsibility for the sarin gas attack within the Western intelligence community. The President of the United States no less has told us as much and has confirmed that those doubts existed, and that they formed an important part of the reason for his decision not to attack Syria in the days following the sarin attack.

In fact the doubts were so great that they caused no less a person than James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, to come to the White House and interrupt the President's daily intelligence briefing to warn him personally about them.

Until now Washington has been advising and assisting Kurdish forces to capture Manbij from ISIS and effectively expel Syrian forces from Hasakah, and has urged the Kurds to mount a campaign to take Raqqa from ISIS. After Manbij, Washington had its sights on assisting the Kurds take Jarablus, a vital target in both further isolating ISIS in Raqqa and allowing the Kurds to join the Afrin and Kobane enclaves, with little then to stop them self-declaring independence. Washington thus faced a dilemma: continue to back the Kurds on their way to Jarablus, or reining them in and ceding the town to its — for now — NATO ally Turkey. With Biden (and Barzani) in Ankara the day of the operation, they've made their choice. The US agreed to move the SDF back to the east of the Euphrates, and reports say they're already on their way.

Make no mistake about it though: the US is saying one thing, and doing quite another. It says it is with Turkey in its mission to contain the YPG to northeast Syria... all the while US Special Forces and military jets are physically assisting the YPG to advance towards (and link up with?) Kurdish forces all along the Syria-Turkey border to the Mediterranean.

Turkey intervenes in Syria with US support: The end for Kurdish autonomy or independence?

• Turkey, the Kurds and the insanity of U.S. policy in Syria
• Turkey intervenes in Syria with US support: The end for Kurdish autonomy or independence?