09/04/13 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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Boy, I was twittering like a madman yesterday.
Well, I was a madman at the time, so that was part of why.
Anyway, our next guest is my favorite reporter in the whole wide world.
His name is Gareth Porter, and he writes primarily for InterPress Service.
That's IPSnews.net, IPSnews.net.
He also writes for truthout.org.
You might remember that last year he won the Gellhorn Prize, the Martha Gellhorn Award, I believe it's called, over in England for his great work that he did for Truthout about the surge in Afghanistan and the night raids and the murder of civilians by Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus and their special forces men during that bogus surge.
Anyway, he also wrote a book about Vietnam called The Perils of Dominance, and his speciality is debunking everything the War Party says, which is all lies, which makes it really easy for him.
You know, he figured out that niche to do this for a living.
Oh, these guys will talk, and then I'll just dismantle it.
That'll be simple.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
As always, thanks for your enthusiastic support.
You're the best.
What can I say?
How intelligence was twisted to support an attack on Syria, and, well, geez, sorry to the state, but you just completely destroyed them here, the CIA, and I guess, can you tell us what exactly is the relationship of this document, this Syria dossier, compared to a national intelligence estimate?
Because they're saying it does have...
I'm glad you began with that question, Scott, because there really is a very serious question about what the status of this document is.
Really?
Okay, now, so the CIA, they put out an estimate about this and that, the other thing, but then there's a national intelligence estimate, which is kind of a special different category of things where the heads of all the different 16 or 17, or however many it is, intelligence agencies meet together, and when they all agree on what the thing should say, then that's the national intelligence estimate.
That's kind of a bigger deal than just the CIA morning briefing or something.
This clearly is not a national intelligence estimate.
It's not that.
But it does have the input of, they claim, all the other intelligence agencies, right?
Yeah, the language that they use is interesting.
The language is that it was vetted by intelligence agencies.
That doesn't really tell us very much, and I'll tell you the truth, I mean, I think that this is a document that, I mean, the summary document itself was clearly written by the White House, either largely or entirely, and it may have been checked with Clapper, the director of national intelligence, but it's not a product of the intelligence community, for sure.
For sure.
The CIA didn't even write this thing, you're saying.
I'm saying that they certainly did not write the summary.
The summary is something that, and by the way, another piece of evidence here that's quite relevant about the curious status of this document is that it does not appear anywhere on the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Now that's significant because all of the major products of the intelligence community, any national intelligence estimate where there has been a published version or something published from it, like key judgments, they're all there on the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but this one does not show up.
I have called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to ask for clarification.
I sent an email this morning.
They have not responded, but I am going to follow up and try to get some clarification from them about what does this all mean.
All right, now, so much of your article here is based on the kind of slippery language that they use, and now it's at least kind of pseudo-CIA language, right?
We judge this with high confidence or we don't judge that with high confidence, but you're telling me that what happened here was some White House staffers or whoever at the White House, they had gone through whatever the CIA had given them, and they kind of plagiarized as much of it as they can and cherry-pick out from that to write up this summary, but it's not the CIA saying we judge with high confidence.
Well, I mean, I think that there's a relationship here between the language that they use specifically when they talk about assessment and the language of whatever the intelligence people put before them, and by the way, I mean, we also don't know what the process was by which the so-called intelligence community product was arrived at.
In other words, since it wasn't a national intelligence estimate, just to repeat, I mean, there was some consultation here, but it's probably something more like everybody was assembled around a table and they had a discussion, and Clapper and his aides drafted something up and there was some discussion, but there was never an official process of approval.
Speak now or forever hold your peace kind of thing.
Whoever dares contradict me, go ahead.
All right, that's what I thought.
In actual estimates, there is the possibility of having dissenting views.
It's clear that there is no opportunity for anything like that here, but that there was a dissent.
I mean, I absolutely guarantee you that there were people in the intelligence community who were dissenting from some of the views that are expressed here.
Hey, I guarantee that too.
Philip Giraldi was on the show yesterday and I kind of nailed him down on it, and he basically said, yes, I can report to you that many current and former CIA people at least don't believe the case was proved with this thing.
Yeah, and actually, if you read it carefully, this is one of the points that I make in my piece.
They do say we assess with high confidence that a chemical weapons attack took place, but then when you get to a nerve gas attack or nerve agent, then it's we assess.
Well, I mean, that doesn't mean anything.
I mean, that means that there's no real level of confidence attached to it.
And it's like saying, well, we're not really sure.
Right.
And by the way, one thing I did not state in my article and I realized in retrospect that I missed is that there's another place in the document where they say we assess, and that is with regard to the total number of 1429 deaths that the summary says we assess according to a preliminary government assessment, you know, is the total number of deaths.
Well, that clearly was not something that the intelligence community embraced by any means in any way, shape or form.
So that is, that is, it actually it's called a preliminary government assessment.
And that means that basically I think it came from the White House.
By the way, why do you think that they chose such specific numbers for their body count there instead of just saying politically more potent, clearly, in other words, that was a political estimate and it wasn't given by the intelligence community.
I think that's the bottom line.
Yeah.
But I mean, with a two nine at the end.
Yeah, it's not.
You know, in other words, they took somebody's word for it, who's, you know, a source who was clearly self-interested.
I mean, that's that's the explanation for that.
Gotcha.
All right.
So now the phone intercept.
Well, I want to talk about Winpac, but first of all, the phone intercept.
They try to the Americans claim credit for the intercept.
And yet you debunk that.
You say, no, it's just Steve Clemens and Benjamin Netanyahu's intercept.
The same one we're talking about here.
Absolutely.
The this is this is an absolutely central point to understanding the deception involved in this document that they are they're claiming we which which everyone reading it is going to automatically assume means the U.S. intelligence community intercepted some communications.
But Craig Murray, the retired British ambassador who's been a whistleblower and a truth teller, actually happens to be an expert on this whole question of electronic intelligence, because he was well briefed on that when he was in the diplomatic service.
And the fact is that virtually all communications, whether radio, microwave or or other communications, go through or are monitored by the the secret facility in Cyprus.
That's something called Trudeau's T.R.O.O.D.O.S.
And as Murray points out in a blog that he did very last few days, the United States and the U.K. share the output that they both use that facility.
And all of the monitoring that takes place is shared between the United States and the U.K.
Well, the fact is that the U.K. intelligence was never informed that there was such an intercept.
And that means that the U.S. intelligence did not pick up that those intercepted conversations.
And that means that it did come allegedly purportedly from the Israelis.
Now, there have been a number of stories about this.
It was leaked to a German publication and then picked up in the Israeli press by a former Israeli intelligence official that the Israelis were the ones who got this intercept.
Now, that means that it is totally unreliable.
We don't even know whether it was a genuine intercept or not.
The Israelis do not turn over the actual electronic intercept to U.S. intelligence.
That's never done.
The fact is that all they do is give the United States a report.
So we simply cannot rely on it.
That's the first point.
And then even what was turned over has been leaked to the news media previously to the release of this document and gave it a different characterization, which is quite, you know, it gives the lie to the way it was characterized in the summary document.
All right.
Now, was Craig Murray saying here that, well, that the British and the Americans would have gotten it?
And how is it that the Israelis came upon this intercept that we were unable to get?
Or is he at least open to the possibility they could have gotten something that the Americans missed?
Just don't believe the Americans when they claim that it's their intercept.
He asserts that it's very unlikely that the Israelis got this because of the nature of – that the Israelis picked up a set of communications that were not transmitted through means that were picked up by the Trudeau's listening station, the secret listening post in Cyprus.
And so he regards that as extremely suspicious.
And then you're saying there's another interpretation of the same probably bogus Israeli intercept that's already floating around out there.
Exactly.
Even assuming that this is an actual intercept and that the Israelis reported it accurately to very uncertain assumptions, the characterization of it that was given to the cable, if I remember correctly, I believe that's the source.
That's what it says in your piece here, yes.
Yes.
That was essentially a storyline that had a panicky, quote unquote, senior Syrian defense ministry official talking to somebody in the chemical weapons unit and saying, hey, what's going on here?
Did we do this?
Are we the ones who did this?
And unfortunately, we're not told what the answer was.
What did the chemical – the alleged purported chemical weapons officer say in response to this allegedly panicky senior Syrian official?
And, of course, I think that that suggests that, you know, if there was indeed such a transcript that the answer was not – did not conform with the argument, the assertion in the summary document that there was confirmation that the Syrian regime carried out a chemical weapons attack.
That's funny, you know.
John Kerry just says, well, look, we have proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I'm not about to show any of it to you, but I swear that we do.
Beyond a reasonable doubt, I say.
Well, you know, what's interesting, and I did not publish this because I didn't see it until after my piece went out, but there was a Republican member of Congress who was quoted, I believe by Reuters, saying that he had seen the classified version of this document, and his comment was – and bear in mind, this is a Republican member of the House of Representatives, not known for sophistication as a lot – he said it was pretty thin.
So I take that as a pretty good indicator that there was not a lot of substance there in the document itself that went – that is in the classified version of this document that went beyond the extreme thinness and suspicious character of this document.
Yeah.
In fact, the administration – not to give them advice for lying better or whatever, but I think the more often that they say kind of in protest that, well, but it couldn't have been anybody but Assad who did it, that just really makes it so plain and clear how little evidence they have.
First of all, Your Honor, just look at him.
He must be the guy that we're talking about here, like idiocracy or something.
By the way, there is a third – there's another point that I did not write about in my piece, which is extremely important for your listeners to know, and that is that there is another place where we assess was used.
And this was where the – it said in the summary document, we assess that the opposition did not use chemical weapons.
Now what does that mean?
That goes back to the use of we assess for the idea that there was a nerve gas attack, that nerve gas was used in the attack, which, as I pointed out in the piece, actually means – and I was told this by a former senior U.S. intelligence official – that they don't know.
I mean because there's no level of confidence expressed.
Right.
In other words, it's a huge omission, the fact that the phrase, we judge with high confidence, is not there.
Precisely so, precisely so.
And that's even the White House spinning the CIA report, and they're still only willing to go that far.
Exactly, except that they don't expect people to notice this, and they're quite right.
Right.
So now one of the things I'm looking at here in the article is how you talk about the fact that the U.N. weapons inspectors were just arriving in Damascus at the invitation of the government of Syria because they wanted the U.N. inspectors to help them prove that it had been the rebels using chemical weapons in the past.
It certainly doesn't make much sense that they would go ahead and do an attack right as the inspectors are arriving in their country.
It seems like a tactical mistake somebody else could have made on the rebel side, perhaps.
Then they were perfectly willing, as you report, to go ahead and, yeah, go ahead and check for the gas and inspect away.
We have nothing to hide.
Is that more or less correct or not, or what?
Well, that's precisely correct, and the point is that this goes to the question of motive.
Why would the Syrian regime allow the inspectors to go in after they had committed a major chemical weapons attack and open themselves up to the U.N. officially finding, coming up with the concrete physical evidence showing that they were guilty of a chemical weapons attack?
I mean, you know, it certainly raises a serious question about, you know, what they could have possibly, why they possibly would have wanted to do that.
And I quote, this is, I think, an extremely important point in the piece.
I quote the British intelligence assessment making the statement that there was no obvious trigger, political or military trigger, for Syria to use chemical weapons at that point.
That is a specific refutation of John Kerry's tendentious presentation saying that, you know, the Syrian government had every reason to want to use chemical weapons.
And this, of course, is one of the major themes that we've been hearing from the Obama administration, that they wanted to clear out all these people.
Well, you know, if you really stop and think about it, there was practically no military utility to whatever happened.
I mean, you know, the results had absolutely no visible, no discernible impact on the course of the conflict.
I mean, it didn't help them at all.
Well, in a vacuum, never even mind the idea of accidentally getting the Americans to intervene or flirting with that danger of having the Americans intervene further on the side of the rebels, something like that.
It's absolutely contrary to counterinsurgency, to go gassing neighborhoods instead of, you know, killing insurgents in the most individual-type fashion that you can, like McChrystal would do.
Well, I mean, yeah, I don't want to rely on counterinsurgency theory here.
I think that it's much more persuasive and much more significant that, you know, even in just straight, you know, military terms, forget about insurgency, just think about two sworn enemies who are trying to, you know, defeat one another on the field of battle.
This use, this alleged use of chemical warfare just didn't add up.
I mean, you know, if it was in fact a nerve gas attack that was aimed at killing thousands of people as what, you know, precisely what happened in the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam used chemical weapons and killed thousands of people in Halabja, yeah, then, you know, there was some kind of military utility involved in using the chemicals.
And in this case, it simply doesn't appear to apply.
And one other point about that, Scott, which I did not put in my piece, but I will reveal to your listening audience, I understand that from a source who is in touch with the opposition forces in Syria, that the Saudis outfitted all of the fighters, the opposition fighters, the rebel fighters, in that area with 20,000 anti-chemical war suits and gas masks.
Now, you know, I can't tell you that the regime was aware of the fact that the rebels have been fully outfitted with anti-chemical weapon suits, but it does, again, provide an additional detail here which makes it much less credible that the Syrian military would believe that there was anything to be gained by this kind of chemical weapons attack.
All right.
Now, you also talk about in your article that you cast a lot of doubt on whether sarin or what kind of gas was even used here.
Can I ask you where do you think this came from?
There's the report in the Mint Press that's going around, of course, about how the Saudis have provided some chemical weapons to the rebels and they accidentally broke open some canisters and poisoned themselves or something.
I don't really credit the idea of an accidental incident, and I didn't use the story that has been published because I just didn't think the sourcing on it was strong enough.
But I think that the question, the possibility that the opposition forces did, in fact, do something certainly cannot be ruled out.
It remains to be seen.
They certainly had the motive.
They are the ones who had the motive for this to happen because, of course, it plays into their interests very clearly.
But at this point, we still don't have any confirming evidence.
It's just not clear.
You asked me what really happened.
The answer is I don't know.
I think, first of all, we have to wait until the U.N. investigators make their report to see if they did, in fact, find nerve gas in the blood of victims.
If they did, then we have to reevaluate and try to figure out what that means.
I mean, if they do not, then we also have to recalculate.
Then we have to try to go from there to figure out what happened.
But the point that you've made, that you've just alluded to, which is central to my analysis, is that the chemical weapons specialists are very clear that the symptoms shown on the videos themselves, these videos which are so emotional, which evoke so much emotion, and are so easily manipulated politically, they find that they don't show a chemical weapons attack.
They're not consistent with any known chemical weapon.
All right, we've got to stop right there.
Thanks, Gareth.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, everybody, that is the great Gareth Porter, how intelligence was twisted to support an attack on Syria.
It's at truthout.org.
And read those doubts of those experts about how sarin works and what's seen in those videos.
Very important point to end there.
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