Hello, friends, James Corbett here, corbettreport.com.

It's April 10, 2017, aka 72 hours into the post-Syria Strikes world and the dust is beginning to settle on the crazy events of last week. I hope you've been following all the latest information in the comments section of The Corbett Report's own open source investigation as The Corbett Report community has been doing yeoman's work in assembling and collating all the data streaming forth from the newsfeeds. But in case you haven't been following the developments this weekend let's just go over what we know, what we don't yet know, and what we can read in the tea leaves about what is to come.

Firstly, I won't spend too much time on the chemical weapons incident that spurred all of this in the first place other than to direct you to a very important interview that Scott Horton just conducted with ex-CIA officer Philip Giraldi where he insists that the intelligence community and military personnel know that the intel shows that this was not an Assad attack. This is further bolstered by an interview that ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern gave to RT that Fox News subsequently tried to censor off the web. McGovern says that his military sources indicate that the Syrian government's strike on Idlib hit a chemical manufacturing plant and it was the toxic fallout from that that killed the citizens of Khan Sheikoun.

But as to the strike itself. There have been people throwing around the idea that the US tipped the Russians and/or Syrians off to the strike before it happened as if this was some kind of conspiracy or covert collusion, but there's nothing hidden or conspiratorial about it. Shortly after the Tomahawks were launched, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis confirmed that "Russian forces were notified in advance of the strike using the established deconfliction line. U.S. military planners took precautions to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield."

The "established deconfliction line" that he's talking about there refers to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that was signed back in October 2015. Again reading directly from Defense.gov: "the MOU includes specific safety protocols for aircrews to follow, including maintaining professional airmanship at all times, the use of specific communication frequencies and the establishment of a communication line on the ground." That MOU did not call for sharing specific information on what was being targeted, but obviously as per Captain Davis' statement that was shared this time via the communication line.

Now we know that Russia, Syria, Iran and Iraq set up the so-called "RSII coalition" in September 2015 to share intelligence and establish a joint information center in their joint bid to destroy ISIS, so let's connect the dots. We know that the Pentagon informed Russia about the strike ahead of time. We know that Russia shares information with Syria, Iran and Iraq. Now Bloomberg dutifully reports that a Pentagon official "said the Pentagon had no intelligence indicating that the Russians tipped off Syria to the looming attack," but we don't need any SigInt or James Bond spy shenanigans to put two and two together. They have a joint information center on the ground, for crying out loud. The Russians absolutely let the Syrians know what was coming.