Rick Sterling, an investigative journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, discusses the three competing narratives about the Syrian gas attack; and why the one favored by mainstream US media – that the Syrian government is absolutely guilty – has more facts working against it than for it.
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Okay, introducing Rick Sterling.
He's an investigative journalist and has been writing lately for consortiumnews.com where you can find lots of great things about all issues, Russia, Ukraine, and Syria especially.
How are you doing, Rick?
Welcome back to the show.
All right.
Good to be with you, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
All right, so we've got a big complicated mess here, and I think you do a real good job of going through and trying to parse here about between what we know and what we don't know and what seems like it may or may not be reasonable about this gas attack.
So go ahead, sir.
The floor is yours.
Well, there's three or four narratives here.
The Western narrative is that Assad did it.
He's guilty.
He dropped chemical weapons, which proves that he didn't get rid of, or when I say he, we're talking about the Syrian government.
They didn't dispose of all their chemical weapons as was agreed in 2014 and that he's responsible and we have to punish him.
He's crossed the red line and that's that.
The policeman of the world needs to step in and prove that this cannot be tolerated.
We have a moral obligation to do it, as I've heard some politicians say.
Another narrative, so that's the Western narrative.
That's the one that Trump is using and the media is using very widely.
PBS NewsHour now says that the Syrian regime did it.
There's no, it's not an allegation.
It's just a fact, according to them.
Another narrative is that the Syrian government attacked terrorists in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which is a stronghold of Nusra and other militant factions, and that they dropped a regular bomb, but it hit a chemical weapons storage depot and it was a windy day and the cloud of chemicals that went up following the attack, that wafted over a residential area and those are the, some of the victims or those are the victims.
A third narrative is that it was a staged event and some villagers who had been kidnapped two weeks prior in the town of Qatab, which is in Northern Hama, not very far from Khan Sheikhoun, but two weeks ago there was a major thrust pushed by the militant faction.
They took over that town and some other towns and they kidnapped some of the villagers.
There are different reports over how many, some say 250, but the third theory is that many of the victims were actually, and the dead ones in particular, were basically executed and possibly and very likely they were executed with sarin, which had been provided to them by likely Turkey, and that the videos that came out were basically put out in conjunction with an actual attack.
So basically they timed an event, they staged an event with some killings and basically put that together.
They had the social media already primed to go and they flooded the media with that narrative.
Which of these stories is true?
You know, that would take a serious investigation.
There are timing discrepancies.
The Syrian Air Force and the Russians who work with them in their air coalition, they say their attacks happened at 11.30 and at 12 o'clock noon, whereas some of the social media reports indicate the deaths showed up at 7.30 in the morning or just at 7 in the morning, 7, 7.30 in the morning.
So there's timing discrepancies and one would have to examine all of the sites where bombs fell, basically, and then look for the hard evidence.
Now do you want me to just carry on, Scott?
I'm happy to carry on.
I can say- I think you're doing fine.
Okay.
I mean, I'm jotting down a couple of things to add some follow-ups later, but this is fine.
Okay, good.
One thing, some listeners might have seen interesting stories that appeared in the London Guardian and their reporter claimed to be the first Western reporter to arrive on the scene one or two days later, and so they provided what they considered their evidence, and in fact one of their stories is that firm evidence of the chemical attack mounts, and they published the story, the dead were wherever you looked, inside the Syrian town after the gas attack, and their first story was Syria chemical weapons attack, what we know about the deadly air raid.
They've got some photographs and they've got the results of their reporter who arrived on the scene there named Karim Shaheen, who was coming from Beirut, presumably.
Now this is terrorist-controlled territory, and we know what's happened to many Western journalists who have gone into terrorist-controlled territory in the past, so I'm not sure how this person's safety was guaranteed, but they did have a- they had some kind of a guarantee, presumably.
The significant thing about his report is it's extremely flimsy.
He refers to four airstrikes, but then he only shows one example, and basically the example is a hole in a roadway where a- some kind of missile landed and hit.
Now supposedly that was the missile, that was a missile that contained chemical weapons and the- and it was released after impact with the- with the roadway, and that that's what killed all the nearby people.
Well, one obvious question is, well, where is the mortar casing?
Where's the missile casing?
I personally have been in Damascus, Syria, when mortars fired from terrorists on the outskirts of Damascus hit right in the street outside the hotel.
I was astounded at how much the hotel shook from the- from the sound.
We went down, and myself and another person were actually the first people on the- on the scene, or not the first, but almost the first, and we saw the- the mortar round that had hit and exploded and killed several people, actually.
So the obvious question is, well, where is the mortar casing or the- the- the bomb casing from- that- that hit the roadway?
Another obvious question is, well, this is one example that would need investigation, obviously.
Where are the other- where are the examples of the other three strikes that hit?
And so those are- those are a few questions that, you know, are fairly obvious that one would need to examine.
You wouldn't have to look at- Let me go ahead and jump in here.
So- Sure.
So here's the thing about that.
That was like a week ago or something almost, right, that this Guardian report came out.
So and- and now let's get back to the thing in the road in a minute, because that's a different area of discussion that could lead to a whole other tangent here.
But one of the main things about that report in the Guardian is, okay, the Russians and the Syrian military claim that they bombed a warehouse.
Well, here's the warehouse, and yeah, it has a hole in the ceiling, but obviously it wasn't bombed recently, and obviously it didn't have a bunch of chemicals being stored or- or- or mortar, you know, chemical mortar shells being manufactured in there or anything.
Place is abandoned.
Nobody's been in there in forever.
We can tell just by looking at it.
But then so it seems like- maybe that's right, but I just want one more reporter to say, yes, I mean, if- if there are- or the Russians or the Syrians or someone to agree of what is the building that they claim they bombed, and can we please see some pictures of that?
If the Russians and Syrians agree that this is the building they say they bombed, well, then I think Guardian reporter man has a very good point.
It doesn't look to me like anything's been moved out of there recently.
It's just an abandoned old building.
But if they want to dispute the Guardian report and say, no, dum-dum, that's not the building we bombed.
We bombed this other building way over here and let's see some pictures of that.
Well, then now we're getting somewhere.
But otherwise, I feel like I'm just sitting here spinning my tires in the mud waiting for a new answer.
We're getting snowed here.
It's very clear for them to say this is firm evidence is- it's very dubious.
That is not credible.
You can't- he shows a photograph of an abandoned building.
Well, who knows what building that was?
I mean, the author says there were four bombings, but he only shows one example.
So where were the other- where are the other three?
And on the shell in the street, if it hit, if it's a rocket or a mortar or a missile full of chemicals, whatever it was, it landed in the street right there.
Okay, I don't know everything about Sarin, but from the looks of it, they're kind of way out, not even in a neighborhood.
They're like in an industrial kind of agricultural business park, sort of a part of town where it's not like there's a bunch of houses or downtown, you know, district full of people.
It's not densely populated.
Yeah, so what, were they all throwing a barbecue right there next to the road or what, you know?
Right, yeah.
Now, the photographs that I'm looking at from the second, or actually the first Guardian report shows a guy with a mask on, with gloves on, taking some soil samples.
Now here's another contradiction that, in fact, Karim Shaheen says that it was clearly Sarin.
He says, he indicates that with some certainty, that it was a nerve agent.
But then there are photographs from the event that show White Helmet Rescue, the infamous White Helmet people.
They didn't even have gloves on and they were touching victims of the attack.
And Sarin is, basically Sarin can kill a person just by skin contact.
So there are a lot of inconsistencies.
But the main thing that needs to be stressed is you have to have a serious investigation to determine the facts of this.
Looking at some social media, Hillary Clinton in her book, Hard Choices, you know, made the point, and she was very proud of the fact that the U.S. trained over 1,000 activists and independent journalists, as she called them.
Well, they weren't independent and they're activists for what?
They're basically agents for the U.S.
And that was, you know, so she talks about training over 1,000 when she was Secretary of State.
So Lord knows how many have been trained since then.
Another thing that we can mention, Scott, whenever you want me to get into it, is yesterday the White House released a four-page report.
Yeah, go ahead about that, please.
On this incident.
And they call it the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons on April 4, 2017.
This is another piece of garbage.
I mean, I'm sorry, anybody, any critical eye looking at this can pick holes in it very, very rapidly.
If a person's following the events there, it might be, they might be able to snow somebody who is, who, you know, is not able to follow the events there, but somebody who is can easily pick holes in this.
They basically rely to an astounding extent on social media reports and video accounts.
Open source accounts is one of their major, their major pieces of evidence.
And we've seen where that can lead.
I'll remind listeners, you know, one of the best pieces of evidence.
Well, let me just say right there, hold that thought, please don't forget it.
But you know, I'm looking at this right now, and it seems like a pretty big straw man argument, pretty obvious straw man argument for them to say, well, we are certain that the opposition could not have fabricated all of the videos and other reporting of chemical attacks.
In other words, well, geez, they got killed by something.
Somebody poisoned them with something.
But so it's sort of a pretended argument.
I don't think anybody said all the dead here are just actors pretending to be dead, that the whole thing is nothing but some kind of Hollywood put on.
The criticism is that, well, maybe somebody else did it to frame up the government, right?
So for them to have to stoop so low as to just refute kind of a silly straw man that, oh, they couldn't have fabricated every bit of this, to me is kind of a tell, not to read too much into it, but come on.
No, no, that's a great point.
There's another thing that's significant here is they basically say that the Syrian government has – it's well-known that they were – they've used sarin gas in the past and the only people who dispute that, that this report refers to, they say Syria and – the Syrian ally Russia dispute that and then they – one-third of this report is dedicated to what they call refuting the false narratives and the false narratives are supposedly the disagreements that have been expressed by Russia and Syria.
And I'd like to point out to the listeners that in fact it wasn't Russian or Syrian investigators that pointed this out, but it was Seymour Hersh and Robert Perry and a couple of professors from MIT who all independently did investigations and came up with the same conclusion which was that it either was or very, very likely was the opposition, the armed opposition in Syria responsible for the sarin gas attack in August of 2013.
And they all took different approaches.
Seymour Hersh interviewed his contacts and in the intelligence community and working in the government and he basically learned that from Libya, weapons were coming out and being shipped through Turkey into Syria and that it was the Turks who basically engineered the transfer of sarin gas into Syria that was used in the Damascus attacks in August of 2013.
It was Turkey with the armed opposition with the obvious goal of crossing Obama's red line and forcing Obama to directly intervene in Syria.
So that's just one thing that, number one, a falsehood here is that the evidence points to the Syrian government from the past.
That's false.
The credible investigations have all pointed to the opposition, including the United Nations weapons inspector Carla Del Ponte because in a gas chemical weapons attack in the spring of 2013, a United Nations inspection team investigated and Carla Del Ponte said the evidence pointed to the opposition.
So these are just a few things that are never mentioned on PBS NewsHour or on Democracy Now for that matter.
The fact that the evidence from 2013 all points to the armed opposition who had the motive to do it and who the evidence suggests did it.
And the exact same thing happens, the exact same thing is true now.
The opposition has all of the motive to do this.
The Syrian government has no motive.
It's completely against their interests for this to happen.
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Well, and the thing is too that for the especially skeptical, critical listeners, which you should be, all of you, you can even refer to Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Barack Obama, his exit interview from one year ago, where the article begins, and I know I'm repeating myself, but it's important.
The article begins with, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody knows Assad did it.
But when you get into about two thirds of the way through the article somewhere, it turns out that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, interrupted Barack Obama's morning CIA briefing, pulling his highest rank in the intelligence community to say, Mr. President, this whole thing about the evidence about Assad's government doing the sarin attack, the evidence is not a slam dunk, which is a direct reference to George Tenet's phrase about the WMD evidence in Iraq.
And it was Clapper saying to the president, I refuse to stand by this intelligence.
And really, he might as well have said, and if you do it anyway, and they asked me, that's what I'm going to tell them.
So that was one of the reasons that Obama didn't do it, is Clapper basically was saying, I'll throw you right under the bus.
And the same thing happened with Dempsey too, by the way.
Dempsey said, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not on the intelligence, but he said, well, I don't know why we have to do this right now.
And so that was both of them telling Obama, really, the way I read it, you better not do this based on these laws.
Yeah, well, the last time around when a CIA director said it was a slam dunk, well, of course, was 2002, when George Tenet told George W.
Bush it was a slam dunk that Syria, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
And of course, that was found out to be false.
So they didn't, he didn't even, he didn't really, that was a clear warning, just like you're, just like you're saying.
But that is completely left out of this four page, laughable report from the White House.
It's laughable in one sense that it is so pathetic.
Well, it's laughable that it came from the White House, just like in 2013.
Why am I reading a government assessment, which is a made up thing?
Why am I reading a White House white paper instead of something with the CIA officer's signature on the damn thing?
Right, exactly.
And now, and now that you mentioned that, there's, and that wasn't...
Not that I believe them, but I'd like to see them at least stand by it, right?
Even if they're going to lie, I don't want to have to hear it just from the White House.
Give me somebody from Langley at least pretending.
Well, they don't, and they start off by saying the United States is confident that the Syrian regime conducted a chemical weapons attack.
Well, in their terminology, there's moderate confidence, there's confidence, there's high confidence.
Well, they don't even achieve the level of high confidence.
So in a way, it's very clear that they do not have evidence.
And if you look at the, if one reads the report, and I recommend to listeners to read the original material here, read what they're exactly saying.
You can read the New York Times version of it, but you're going to come away knowing less than when you go in, to be honest, because the New York Times is distorting like hell on this issue.
In fact, they've made, I didn't, I kind of wonder if they've issued a correction because in the last article I wrote for Consortium News, one of my examples of falsehoods is their claim from 2013, they say that the intelligence agencies ascertained that it was the Syrian government, and that is false.
The intelligence agencies did not do that in 2013, just like you're referring to, Scott.
It was the White House assessment that came in with their half-baked claim.
And we know from what Giraldi reported back then in the American Conservative Magazine, that there was at least a handful of CIA analysts who were prepared to resign over this.
They were going to be damned if they were going to be made to put their names on a report like this.
Not again.
Exactly.
After the fiasco of 2002-2003 with the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But Michael Gordon, the same guy who spun all of the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, this guy is still writing, he's still a prominent foreign affairs writer at the New York Times.
He's got this thing which is a flat-out, it's just a falsehood.
Right.
And yeah, he's the same guy who had the aluminum tube story with Judith Miller in the New York Times in 2002.
He's the same guy who all through 2007 pushed the lie that Iran was behind every roadside bomb that went off in Iraq that almost led to a war then as well.
Exactly.
I mean, the situation is very dangerous now, and I've got to just say, like I've heard Dennis Kucinich say recently, like Norman Solomon said in an excellent editorial that was published the other day, we have to wake up.
This is dangerous.
It looks like in the span of one week, Rex Tillerson went from saying it's up to the Syrian people who decide their government to saying Assad has to go.
And then just yesterday, he was kind of subtly threatening Russia, saying they need to break their relations with Iran and Syria.
Well, and nonsensically, because their relationship with Syria is weakening their position in the Middle East.
Huh?
Really?
You mean Syria, where they have their only port in the Mediterranean Sea?
Yeah, they should give that up.
That'll strengthen their position.
And I bet if he just tells them that, they'll hear it from, they'll believe him instead of thinking for themselves.
The big danger now is that there's a media stampede.
I think Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting just reported that 47 out of 48 or 48 out of 49 major newspaper editorials came out doing like a high five for the Trump attack on Syria.
Talk about crossing a red line.
When you start explicitly attacking and killing people in a foreign country, that's a major line you're crossing.
So the fact that the media came out, and we've got Robert Kagan's editorial in the Washington Post last weekend, and John McCain's statement from last Friday saying this is just the start.
We need to reassert United States dominance in the region is what it comes down to.
So it's very, I think it's very dangerous.
Iran is not going to back down.
And I don't think, I mean, they want to, Russia is, Russia may not be as opportunistic as Washington is.
All right, now, I want to get back to a couple of points about this gas attack for a minute, because you're right.
Bottom line is we need an investigation.
You and I aren't solving this here.
But it is important, I think, to at least show the context and cast some doubt where it's relevant on what we're being told here.
And something I thought was a major point was that, and I don't know a lot about this.
I just read that this was the case.
I think you probably must know more about this than me.
But that this doctor who was the source of so many of the original reports about the gas attack, that he was the guy who had kidnapped or helped to kidnap this British, I don't know who he was, Cantil or Cantilly, this guy who people, and this ought to connect dots for people in your mind, you may have seen this guy.
He's this very articulate, he seems like he's a BBC newscaster on scene or whatever doing propaganda for ISIS.
And he was especially, you know, we saw these videos of him, especially a couple of years ago, where he sounds like boy, he loves it.
But you can also kind of tell that boy, does he have a gun at his head, as he's sitting here telling us all about the glories of the Islamic State and everything.
And then apparently, the reason I know this is because I saw a clip of one of those old propaganda videos, where this guy is clearly the slave of the Islamic State doing one of his English language propaganda videos.
And guess who's walking around all over the background with their black Al-Qaeda flags and ISIS flags and whatever it was, I guess this was from 13 when they hadn't split yet.
And maybe 12 or 13 before the big split between ISIS and Nusra.
But there's a bunch of white helmets all running around with a bunch of Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists who clearly have enslaved this poor Brit.
And this guy, he was charged with their kidnapping in England.
But since they were still enslaved in Syria, there is another of these guys, I guess, too.
They couldn't testify against him.
So he got off and went back to Syria, where here he is feeding us propaganda about a goddamn gas attack.
Right, right.
Do I understand that right?
Really, Rick?
Is that right?
Shahul Islam.
I need to follow up on the story with John Cantley, who was the British reporter who was kidnapped around the same time as James Foley, actually.
But this guy, Shahul Islam, who is the medical doctor who does the video on this chemical weapons event from April 4th, he basically became a doctor.
He got his license in 2012.
He lost his license later in the year when it came out that he had been involved in the kidnapping of this John Cantley, who was a British reporter.
And so he's been implicated in that.
And he had his medical license suspended in the UK because of that.
And he is the major voice that's, or he is one of the major voices that's documenting this attack, which they claim was from a Syrian chemical weapons attack.
But it's all very dubious.
And the one, the first thing that, you know, an investigator looks at when you go to the scene of a crime or when you start to investigate it to find out what happened, of course, is, well, who benefits from this?
Because there are obviously ones that you need to give special attention to if they're going to be benefiting from it.
And from the beginning in this conflict, the so-called rebels, the so-called moderate rebels have been very attuned to influencing the West.
And one of the clearest examples of that is the kidnapping of Richard Engel, which was a staged event.
They basically, the so-called rebels kidnapped Richard, the NBC reporter, Richard Engel, and he was held captive and he was supposedly kidnapped by supporters of Bashar al-Assad.
This was the so-called Shabiha militia.
And they had all sorts of crude sayings and slogans and sectarian, sectarian attitude.
And then supposedly Richard Engel and his film crew were liberated after a gunfight by the Free Syrian Army.
Well, the whole thing was staged.
The kidnapping was staged.
It was all staged by the so-called moderate rebels to influence Richard Engel and to provide this nice story that demonizes the Assad government and that and romanticizes the Free Syrian Army, the so-called Free Syrian Army.
Now, was he in on that hoax, do you think?
Or is it clear whether he was in on it or just the dumbest?
No, my impression is he was not in on it.
No, he wasn't in on it.
But I am 99.9 percent certain that he learned of it later on.
Apparently he speaks some Arabic.
I'm not sure how fluent he is, but I think somebody who was very fluent would pick up on the fact that this looks a little bit dubious.
The acting here isn't quite cutting it.
But if he didn't learn of it, then he certainly learned of it when he came back because there were negotiations, there were financial negotiations going on, supposedly.
And his bosses in New York, they knew the real story.
So he would have learned about it.
But he kept quiet until one or one and a half years later, it was going to be published in the newspaper in The New York Times.
It was going to be run as a story.
So at that time he fessed up.
But no, he was going to keep it secret.
I think almost certainly he I'm sure he learned of it when he came back.
It's it's I cannot believe they didn't tell him when he came back.
The whole thing was a setup.
Well, it's amazing that he would go along with that.
Somebody kidnaps you.
And then I guess Stockholm syndrome where he's still on their side anyway.
These guys, it's you know, I'm just going to throw this in here because it seems relevant that it was John McCain's friends in the Northern Storm Brigade.
There's that famous picture of him standing on the porch with some jihadis.
And people oftentimes say that's Baghdadi there.
And that's incorrect.
But it doesn't matter because it's the Northern Storm Brigade, the same guys who sold Stephen Sotloff to Baghdadi to cut his head off.
So it sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
It's amazing.
Now, tell me about again about this Caesar report, because this was a big one, too, and the timing and everything.
Yes.
And this is another example just showing the manipulation and the media manipulation and the marketing, the social management of going on in this conflict.
In the February of 2014, there were going to be Geneva negotiations going on between the Syrian government and representatives of the armed opposition.
There's always been a problem.
Those negotiations have never been very successful because the militants on the ground, the fighters on the ground, the most effective ones are the al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, which spun off from ISIS.
But those are the most effective fighters.
There's other ones that are directly controlled by Qatar.
Other ones are directly controlled by Saudi Arabia.
Other ones are directly controlled from Turkey.
And other ones, again, who are strongly influenced or semi-controlled by the U.S. and the U.K.
But in any event, in February of 2014, there were supposed to be negotiations.
Well, the day before the negotiations were to begin a worldwide release in Paris, on CNN, on major media around the world of the so-called Caesar report, which was supposed to be the photographs revealed by a defecting Syrian military photographer who claimed to have 55,000 photographs documenting the torture and death of 11,000 Syrian civilians, innocent civilians tortured and killed by the Assad regime.
And these photos had supposedly been corroborated by a legal team from the U.K. and the U.S., which had flown to Qatar and interviewed the defecting photographer who they said had to remain anonymous.
So they gave him the code name Caesar.
Well, of course, this coming right on the cusp of these negotiations, it poisoned the atmosphere and it demonized the Assad government, of course.
And that was part of the justification for the so-called rebels walking away from the negotiating table and refusing to negotiate.
And that's what's happened consistently.
There's always been some kind of spectacular event that happens just prior to negotiations or some kind of big international event.
So and incidentally, this chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun happened the day before a Brussels conference on Syria.
But it turns out that I did a report, I did an investigation into the into the Caesar report that was revealed.
Now, nobody can have access or very few people, only the FBI and then Human Rights Watch was given access to all the photographs at one point.
But they're the only ones we've seen a small number of photographs, 20 or 50 or a few hundred have been made available.
And there's some hundred more on the on the Internet.
But the it turns out Human Rights Watch in any event was given access to a large percentage of the fifty five thousand.
And they discovered that nearly half of the photographs show the opposite of what was claimed.
Instead of showing civilians who had been tortured and killed by the regime, they actually show dead Syrian soldiers and civilians who had been killed in car bombs, which are only done by the armed opposition.
So this obviously under completely undercuts the report.
Then when I looked at it closely, there were all sorts of inconsistencies and contradictions in the photographs, like some of the people are bloating.
They've been dead for one week or two weeks and they're bloating.
Other other people have show sign of medical.
It's like they they've got they've got wristbands on which indicated they were they were on an IV drip machine.
So they they weren't being tortured.
They were actually being medically treated.
So there's various contradictions.
People can look it up in in my report if you're interested.
See, just do Rick Sterling and Caesar report if you if you search on that.
So there's all these contradictions.
And and this is just this is another example of the of the disinformation that's gone on around the war.
These attorneys who went from the UK and the US to Qatar were are basically legal prostitutes.
They went there, they admitted they didn't have much time, they admitted they were in a rush.
Well, why were they in a rush?
They were in a rush because they had to get this report out before the Geneva negotiations started.
There's so much fraud and misinformation on this conflict.
And Stephen Kinzer calls it one of the most shameful episodes in American media history ever.
And I think he's exactly right.
Yeah, well, things sure could get worse.
Did you see the news conference right before we went on today?
Greg, I saw some the one in Moscow.
Yes.
Lavrov and Tillerson meeting.
And I started to watch it, but I didn't have I didn't have time.
So the overall tone was, hey, listen, everybody knows we got to get along.
Come on.
They got nukes.
We got nukes.
Tillerson said that these are the two premier world nuclear powers, he says.
There's no room for screwing around with this.
OK, you know what?
I really wanted to hear the Secretary of State say that.
OK, I don't know if he really meant it.
Maybe it's bad that he said it because it means the opposite.
But did he come out explicitly and say that?
Yeah, yeah.
He said exactly that.
OK, well, that was that was a very close paraphrase, close to a direct quote, as I could say about the two premier nuclear powers and everything.
We cannot have this current mood, this current trajectory of our relationship continue.
On the other hand, well, accusations are flying, but there's no proof anywhere because the Americans are lying.
And so there sure is a pretty big monkey wrench in the works with this new detente, assuming that Trump and Tillerson have had a meeting of the minds that says that, look, here, sooner or later, we're working toward a new detente.
OK, assuming that which is a big assumption.
But this whole Syria thing, it sure is easy, I guess, I think for for those who would thwart peace to make this the issue that that is the the the point that the high is the new detente.
The jackals of war are barking louder than ever.
John McCain last Friday, Robert Kagan in The Washington Post on the weekend.
They they see this as their opportunity.
So, I mean, is there going to be is there going to be some sanity to resist that?
Because they basically want war.
There's there's no doubt about it.
Kagan says it in so many words.
The US has to assert itself militarily.
And I think it'll be very interesting what whether Tillerson comes under attack.
And if he leaves his position, I think he's a voice of he's horrible on on climate change.
We know where he comes from.
But I think he's relatively to some of the some of the warmongers out there.
He's he's got some some sanity, whereas some of these other voices, they they are just they are truly warmongers.
They learned nothing from the invasion of Iraq.
They left Libya a mess and they don't care.
They want to leave Syria a mess rather than have the Syrian army defeat the terrorists.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is, certainly having the CEO of Exxon be the secretary of state.
I mean, there's good and bad.
I mean, that means that, boy, go ahead and bomb Yemen all you want, Saudi.
And that goes without saying, right?
Forget it.
He might as well be an agent of influence of Saudi Arabia.
On the other hand, maybe he's got a little bit of that kind of Rockefeller history behind him there at Standard Oil of New Jersey.
And, you know, maybe they do enough international business there.
And maybe just his point of view coming from Houston instead of D.C., instead of being, you know, a think tank wonk whose only job is trying to get into war or whatever.
At least he's got a different perspective than that, a very internationalist one, but a very business based one rather than a very militarist one.
You know, I'm I'm looking for silver linings here.
We're scraping bottoms of barrels and saying these are the best Republicans we could hope to have in power as long as we got them kind of a thing.
So, you know, do I prefer James Baker to Richard Perle?
Sure, I do.
You know, so in this case, you know, maybe maybe things can can be, you know, something short of H-bomb exchange.
Victoria Nuland was being suggested to be secretary of state if Clinton had won.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and and and Flournoy for secretary of defense.
And, you know, Mattis still wanted to bring Flournoy on anyway, although she refused to serve under Trump.
Right, right.
I think, yeah, Masterson and and Mattis, it'll be interesting to see what who's got who's going to who's going to drive the the foreign policy, because we've got, you know, the old school Republicans and and we've got the the project for a new American century, the super, you know, US supremacists and just the services themselves.
I mean, the Marine Corps is its own interest for sure.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Guys, you know, dangerous, dangerous times here.
All right.
Listen, thanks so much.
Come back on the show, Rick.
I sure appreciate your analysis and all this stuff.
OK.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
Yep.
You, too.
All right.
So that is Rick Sterling.
You can find him at Consortium News dot com where he does investigative journalism.
This one's really important.
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How media bias fuels Syrian escalation by Rick Sterling.
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