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We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Rick Sterling.
He's a great investigative reporter.
And recently he's been writing for consortiumnews.com and especially on the conflict in Syria over the last few years.
Welcome back to the show, Rick.
How are you?
Great.
Nice to be here.
Very happy to have you here.
And listen, this is a really important article.
The trumped up Syria sarin case.
And I guess I'm not sure now that I think about off the top of my head if there's any or much original in here, but I don't care because this is basically the comprehensive revisionist take.
Although, you know, on this show, we got it right from the day of the attack.
We had Phil Giraldi on here debunking the story.
But anyway, you've really got the comprehensive review of what we know about the supposed, at least, sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun in Syria in April, on April the 4th.
Right.
Right.
Well, just to set the set the scene for for listeners very concisely, in August of 2013 in the town of Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus, there was a sarin.
There was a gas attack that was later determined to be sarin.
There were huge outcries.
It crossed the red line that Obama had set the year before.
Huge demand for the U.S. to attack.
Subsequently, later on, over the next six months, it came out.
Seymour Hersh did study and the U.N. did an investigation that was very, very iffy.
And then Aki Selstrom from the U.N. finally acknowledged that the missile carrying the attack could only have come from opposition held areas.
In other words, all of the accusations that it had to be the Syrian government was was either flat out wrong or was very dubious.
Seymour Hersh's study pointed to the the chemical attack being conducted by the insurgents with support through Turkey.
Then Syria agreed to to to destroy all of its sarin, all of its chemical weapons stockpiles.
They did that under the supervision of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons over the next year.
All of it was destroyed aboard a U.S. vessel.
And then they were without chemical weapons of any sort.
And then we started hearing reports about chlorine gas.
Well, the Syrian government not having any sarin now was supposedly, according to the opposition and their supporters, using chlorine gas, which had been used effectively in World War One when troops were in trenches because chlorine is a heavy gas.
And so it would sink into the trenches and kill people.
But it's a very limited effectiveness.
But nevertheless, the opposition was claiming that the Syrian government in all its abhorrence was using chlorine, which is not prohibited because chlorine is a very well-known and widely used agent that's used for treating water.
It's used for cleaning and so forth.
But the opposition claimed that Syria was using chlorine gas.
They tried to get something going on that at the U.N. and elsewhere.
That is the opposition.
They didn't really get much traction.
So then we started hearing reports that the Syrian government hadn't actually destroyed all of their chemical weapons and sarin, as had been actually verified by the OPCW, which received a Nobel Peace Prize for their role in the operation.
So the opposition was claiming that the Syrian government hadn't actually done it, that they had retained a bunch.
And then last April 4, in the spring of 2017, we had this incident at Khan Sheikhoun, the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which has been controlled mostly by the al-Qaeda's version in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra.
And now it's gone through a few name changes, but it's basically still Nusra.
And then this report came out on October 26, a report from what they call the Joint Investigative Mechanism, put together for the OPCW and the U.N.
And the report came out on October 26.
It was released to governments at the U.N. and it was released to select media.
So the New York Times lead story was that the report basically confirms that the Syrian government was responsible for the gas attack.
Well, it took about a day and a half, 36 hours later, the report was leaked over the Internet, and other people could look at the whole report, not just that one sentence, that they're confident the Syrian government is responsible and find all sorts of contradictions and discrepancies in the report.
So that's what I've, in this story that I've done, I've gone through and I've highlighted some of the big contradictions and inconsistencies in the report.
And whenever you like, I can review some of those.
Yes, please do.
Because, of course, look, the narrative is everything.
And the narrative in the news is, oh, my goodness, see, it's the U.N. and everybody knows that that's objective.
And, hey, I like to cite the U.N. when they report on body counts in Afghanistan, when their numbers are bigger than America's, this kind of thing.
And so, jeez, you're saying that beyond reproach is not beyond reproach.
Then make your case, sir.
Well, so the first point is that they do not confirm this.
The wording that they use is important.
You know, you get into legalese here.
What they say is they're confident the Syrian government is responsible.
But then within the report, you find all sorts of of of indications that there there there is no confirmation.
In fact, in fact, they actually confirm that they don't have evidence that the Syrian that there was a Syrian plane over the town at the at the at the time of the incident.
They have not confirmed that.
So that's one basic thing.
There's all sorts of other questions that one can go into.
The first one, of course, is motive in any criminal investigation.
You need the means.
You need the opportunity and you need a motive.
The Syrian government has no motive.
It's completely illogical that they would be using chemical weapons when they're advancing on the front and they are dropping bombs.
They make no secret of that.
They're fighting.
They're fighting terrorist forces that, you know, have been basically organized, supported, weaponized by some of the richest and most powerful countries on Earth.
There are tens of thousands of terrorists in Syria that have come from all parts of the world, promoted by in addition to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, also by the US and by France and the UK, sadly.
So they have no motive to do something like this, whereas the opposition has a huge motive to try to drag the US and NATO into the conflict.
So that should be the first thing that one should actually ask.
Well, why would why would the Syrian government do this?
You know, you mentioned the 2013 attack there in Ghouta.
And we have the same problem there when this attack happened right as some inspectors were there to look at another attack as soon as they arrive in town.
We're going to go ahead and do a sarin attack right then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Perfect timing.
You know, just as the UN inspectors arrive in Damascus, why not launch a why not why wouldn't the Syrian government launch another chemical attack?
It's completely illogical.
And at that time, the the UN inspectors were coming to Damascus to to continue their investigation of a of a chemical weapon that had happened in the spring in in Syria.
The UN had investigated and there was actually discrepancy in the UN investigation team with one of their leading members, Carla Del Ponte, saying that, well, the evidence actually points to the opposition being responsible.
But so so in this when I've when I've gone through and I've I've carefully read the report of this of this team, the report that's just come out.
And there's all sorts of other various strange things.
For example, how do you have victims of an attack showing up at a hospital before the attack happened?
That should raise some red flags.
Well, how do you know that's true?
We're talking about timestamps on pictures.
Or do you have better than that?
Well, I'm I'm talking about the data from the from from the report.
How do we know that?
They do know that because they looked at the logbooks at the hospitals that victims went to and they compare that with when the attack supposedly happened.
Now, see, that's what I followed up on that.
Right.
Because anybody's camera can have whatever timestamp.
That was I'm just saying that's where my imagination goes to easiest explanation for discrepancy there.
But that doesn't account for hospital logs, does it?
No.
And we're talking about not just one source here with questionable data or with pointing to that discrepancy.
We're talking to multiple hospitals because victims were transported for unknown reasons.
Victims were taken to clinics, to hospitals, many, many hospitals, 125 kilometers away.
Victims from Khan Sheikhoun were taken there and they were delivered to the hospital.
They were logged into the hospital 15 minutes after the event.
Well, how do you travel 125 kilometers and go into a hospital 15 minutes after the event?
According to the report, 57 victims were were delivered to hospitals before the event happened at 646 in the morning.
So and then they continue by saying they didn't the investigation didn't look into that further.
Well, why not?
Wouldn't that be a huge, glaring discrepancy that you would have to look into?
Another big problem with the report is that they never went to the scene of the crime.
Well, I mean, that's a basic of any investigation.
You've got to go to the scene of the crime and do your own soil sample testing.
Do your own interviews on site there.
You know, observe the circumstances.
Even though the Syrian and Russian governments guaranteed the safety of the investigation team, they declined to go there.
Well, why?
If it's a serious, important investigation, as it should be, you have to go to the scene of the of the crime.
So and I mean, we can look back and we can compare and contrast it with what happened in August 2013.
The UN actually did send a team to Ghouta and they were given a very short time by the by the armed opposition groups to be there.
They were under a very rushed circumstance, but they were allowed to go there and they did gather important data.
Why haven't they done this in the case of Khan Sheikhoun?
That's a that's a big question.
Now, one of the the the opposition and the the the people who say that this is overwhelming evidence, they point to the the material evidence that came out, which is bodies of victims were taken to Turkey and soil samples were taken to Turkey and analyzed.
And they claim that, well, the the the victims, the samples from the victims show sarin and the soil samples show sarin.
And moreover, they show sarin, which matches up and which is identical to the type of sarin that was produced in Syria and that was destroyed in 2013 aboard the US aboard the US ship at sea.
That's where the the sarin that was removed from Syria was destroyed.
Well, I mean, as soon as I heard that victims and and material evidence was being taken by the insurgents to Turkey, that automatically raised a big suspicion.
Because if you were if you were setting this up to implicate the Syrian government, that's precisely the kind of thing they would they would do.
They would have you know, they would have some kind of faked up evidence to present.
And to those to say and and if you talk about matching up the sarin that was discovered, you know, now we're looking at April of 2017 in Turkey with the with the with the sarin that was produced in Syria over over previous decades.
Well, you know, the US has very sophisticated chemical means.
And and I think it's reasonable to suspect that the CIA would have retained samples and would might easily be able to replicate or might be able to replicate with sophisticated chemists the markers that were in the Syrian sarin.
So it's all you know, it's all very questionable.
One needs to look at it much more critically and objectively than has been done so far.
All right, hang on just one second.
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So, I mean, look, that's all well and good and everything, but, geez, the poor guys, they just couldn't go there because the place is crawling with terrorists.
So maybe the burden is on you to come up with an alternative theory of what happened there, or maybe more than one possibility.
What do you think?
Well, number one, they never asked the insurgents that control.
Basically, the town, Khan Sheikhoun, has been dominated by Jabhat al-Nusra, by the al-Qaeda for years now.
They never asked them, can we go there?
Of course, the opposition in Syria is desperate to drag the U.S. and NATO into the conflict.
They're losing steadily on the ground.
Right now, they're kind of constricted to an area, Idlib province in the north of Syria, and this town is in Idlib province, to the south.
But if the terrorist groups don't have anything to hide, if the evidence is very strong, why wouldn't they welcome an investigation?
Right, well, they're a bunch of bin Laden-loving terrorists.
I don't know, they're so crazy, all they can do is set off suicide bombs all the time, and if the U.N. goes there, well, then, yeah.
It raises a lot of questions, and that's their excuse, I know.
Well, this is where we got all our evidence from, is these people who cut little kids' heads off and stuff, but, you know, and it's too dangerous for us to go there and verify anything that they told us.
But we trust them, though.
Yeah, we trust them, yeah, why wouldn't you?
And that, I mean, you're kind of putting your finger on it, on the whole thing is very kind of dubious.
So, and the report that came out, and, you know, it's featured, they picked one sentence, that they're confident.
Well, what does confidence mean?
As we know from the U.S. intelligence services, you've got different levels of confidence, right?
You've got moderate confidence, you've got high confidence.
Well, you know, how high is the confidence of this committee?
Is it moderate confidence, which just means, well, it's possible, or is it high confidence?
We know from the report itself, there's all sorts of inconsistencies and contradictions which they acknowledge.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, this is just a small anecdote, but I actually met a guy who is a legit rocket scientist, and, you know, I've interviewed Theodore Postal on the show about this and all this stuff, but I was, you know, actually hanging out, spending time with a guy who worked on Star Wars and all of this stuff, you know, shooting missiles with missiles and all these things.
And I showed him a picture of the bomb crater from the middle of the road here.
Right.
Yeah, this is where they say the chemical bomb attack, you know, I pulled it up on my phone, I handed it to him.
He just took one look at it and handed it back and laughed.
Like, you know, he didn't even study, he's just like, pfft, yeah, anyway, it's a pothole, son.
Right.
So, I mean, I can't, I'm not going to name the guy on the air or whatever, it's just a guy I met, but he was a legit rocket scientist who knew a bit about things like this.
Well, exactly.
And Theodore Postal himself has done, you know, tremendous work kind of examining that and saying how this is not credible.
You know, that hole was, that pothole was, you know, is not the source of sarin that you're talking about.
Yeah.
And by the way, audience, I was not at Area 51, I was on the Contra Cruise with Tom Woods and there was a rocket scientist there.
In case anybody's wondering, where's Scott Horton?
Somebody accused me of being part of the counterinsurgency doctrine one time because I took a week off for a broken piece of equipment, you know.
Right.
Got to make sure and cover those angles.
What was Scott doing hanging around with a Star Wars guy?
Not the movie, but the missile defense program.
Right, right.
Well, that, I mean, the pothole, well, they've since, they've rushed to fill in the pothole.
So the pothole is not there anymore.
But in any case, in any case, the area surrounding it is still there.
And in any case, you can, you know, you can remove whatever was filled into the pothole and still extract useful evidence or useful information.
You know, the chemical analysis these days is so incredibly strong.
So even, you know, months after an event, taking a soil sample or a sample from that area, of course.
And they could remove the cement or the blacktop that was used to fill in that area that they claim was the scene of the crime.
And you could take samples down below.
And that's what they have not done.
Furthermore, when they went to now, the story was that it's a one-time deal.
And they even say in this, in the official report here, they say that it was a one-time effort from the Syrian air base to load this chemical weapon on board a Syrian jet fighter, SU-22, and launch it.
When the Syrian government kept saying, well, you know, you're claiming that we loaded chemical weapons from the al-Sharat air base.
Why don't you come to al-Sharat and do all the inspection and take any samples?
If we're handling chemical weapons here, you know, there can be evidence of that retaining in various ways.
But they declined to, when they went there, they refused to do any sampling.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so I want to change the subject a little bit here back to when this happened.
I interviewed Phil Giraldi that day.
And on April the 4th, people can check the archives.
It's right there.
CIA and military say that it wasn't a chemical attack at all.
That the Russians had been observing the place.
There was supposed to be a meeting of some jihadi kooks.
And they had had a drone surveilling it.
They had been in communication with the Americans over the deconfliction line where they, you know, coordinate.
Here's who we're going to bomb and when and all of that.
And that this was one of those.
And then something went awry and they basically stayed.
So it wasn't a false flag like 2013.
It was.
And I guess this is Gareth Porter's theory that he, you know, added later was it was chemicals being stored in the basement of the building that was bombed that ended up leaking out and poisoning some people.
And then he shows and with expert testimony and, you know, expert citations talks about how the symptoms would be very much along the same lines as what you would see and whatever.
So it makes sense that the that the white helmets and the Al Qaeda guys would seize on people dying of a gas attack in order to, you know, trump it up to make it look like a sarin attack.
But I don't know exactly how well that fits with what you're saying about people were already showing up dead at the hospitals before the bombing.
But I don't know whose timeline.
And this is not this is not me speculating.
This is in the report.
And they identify they say, you know, it's curious.
That's confusing to me then because I can I can see them taking advantage of a situation.
But how, you know, how do they know which building the Russians are going to bomb to put some chemicals in it?
You know what I mean?
These things are well, that's I mean, that's.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting.
It's amazing that you had Phil on.
I didn't realize he would feel had had had basically come to that conclusion or he had that insight.
I mean, he said he had military and intelligence sources who said that.
And I talked to him two days later when they I hope I have this timeline.
Right.
It was two days later when I talked to him.
He had actually I think it's OK to say now he had told me earlier in the day, yeah, they're going to do a cruise missile strike.
But don't say that part, because we're afraid that if if that's really clear, then the Russians might try to preempt that.
And we don't want that.
But there's going to be a cruise missile strike tonight.
And then so that's what happened a couple of a couple of that's a couple hours.
Right.
Well, and that's what Seymour Hirsch discovered and revealed in his report, which came out months later.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's really basically just if you go back and listen to those are all the interviews and then.
Right.
You know what?
In the back of my mind, something's telling me it was really just the one interview.
Maybe it was two days later.
It wasn't the day of.
It was just the one two days later.
Anyway, you guys, I have to check the archives last April, but it's in there.
But it's in there.
And then if you read Seymour Hirsch, you go, wow, looks like Giraldi had this right on.
Exactly.
And Hirsch's report came out a couple of months later.
And just as a little sign of how we're losing our freedom of of speech here.
Seymour Hirsch, one of the most famous, well-known investigative journalists, had to go to Germany to get his report published.
Yeah.
Well, and every time he publishes anything, they try to spin it as some kind of conspiracy thing.
And yet I interview the guy virtually every time he comes out with a story over the last decade.
And it always holds up everything he's written.
JSOC running around in Iran or the redirection support in the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria as early as 2006 or on and on and on.
Israeli support for the Kurds breaking away.
He wrote that like 2004.
Plan B. You know what I mean?
Come on.
This is Seymour freaking Hirsch we're talking about here.
They got nothing on him.
They go, oh, yeah, well, he's going crazy now.
Well, he might always been a bit cranky, but in his in his personal demeanor.
But show me where he blew his facts.
No one can.
Yeah.
Well, there are several.
What actually happened at Khan Sheikhoun was there, you know, was the chemical weapons depot that they had there hit in the missile cruise strike?
And was it the basically that explosion that resulted in the deaths?
Were there people who were already were basically kidnapped villagers from a neighboring town, which had happened five days before?
Were those were those villagers murdered by the terrorists?
And, you know, you know, did did they use chemical weapons to murder them and then deliver those bodies to Turkey?
There's all sorts of questions that need to be looked into here into that, that that's why the report what we've got so far is is very inconsistent.
There needs to be a lot more investigation.
They need to go to the actual site.
There needs to be a lot more scrutiny on this material evidence that was delivered by the by the by the insurgent groups.
That's a big violation of the chain of custody that's required for evidence to be considered credible or verifiable.
All sorts of contradictions in what's come out right now.
Yeah.
So the the the mainstream media claim that this is this has been confirmed is flat out false.
In fact, a basic fact of the story in the report, they say they cannot confirm Syrian airplanes were over the area at the appropriate time.
All right.
Listen, man, I'm sorry.
I have to go.
I'm late.
Got to interview Walter Jones about his attempt for now.
Somewhat thwarted, I guess.
But he's trying to stop the war in Yemen.
Some help from some other good progressive caucus, Democrats and Liberty Republicans there.
Yeah, well, that's important.
That's important.
Hey, listen, you do great work.
I really appreciate your time again on the show, man.
Yeah.
Hey, glad to be here, Scott.
Take care.
You too.
All right, you guys.
That is Rick Sterling.
He is an investigative journalist.
He's writing now for Consortium News.com.
This one is called the trumped up Syria sarin case.
Huge one.
And that's again at Consortium News.com.
I'm Scott Horton.org.
Libertarian Institute.org.
Fool's errand dot US.
Buy my book and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
