Back in August 2013, with the Syrian civil war raging, President Obama was determined to launch airstrikes against Syria’s regime. But after the Parliament of the United Kingdom refused to back its government’s involvement, he was feeling enough pressure that he did something he hadn’t done when he took us to war in Libya: He decided to go to Congress for permission.
Congress debated and discussed the measure, whose passage was very much in doubt. And once it became clear that Congress wasn’t going to cooperate, Obama subsequently made the mistake of trusting the Russians to broker a deal by which all of Syrian dicator Bashar al Assad’s chemical weapons would supposedly be removed.
The following July, Secretary of State John Kerry went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to defend what had been viewed as a controversial deal brokered by an untrustworthy party. At the time he was speaking, Russian forces had just downed a commercial airliner over Ukraine. “With respect to Syria, we struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out,” he said.
At the time, PolitiFact did a fact check on Kerry’s statement, and guess what? They decided it was “mostly true.”
Kerry said all of Syria’s chemical weapons had been removed. The UN body in charge said that the last of Syria’s declared chemical weapons left the country in late June. There remain, however, some discrepancies in the details of the weapons the Syrians had acknowledged possessing, and some additional work is needed.
With that qualification, we rate the claim Mostly True.
Last night around 9 p.m., the fact-checking website retracted this piece, in light of the chemical weapons attack in Idlib, widely believed to be the responsibility of the Syrian government. “One way or another, subsequent events have proved Kerry wrong.”
They did archive this erroneous fact check for posterity, though, as a reminder that it doesn’t always pay to simply deem conventional wisdom as “truth” on the mere say-so of someone with an official title.
