Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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, introducing investigative journalist Rick Sterling.
He's written this great new piece we're running at antiwar.com.
Well, by the time you guys hear this, it'll be up there.
It's called Taking the World to the Brink of Annihilation.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Yeah.
Hi, Scott.
All right, so, you know, omnicide aside, that's Daniel Ellsberg has now coined that phrase for nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, the end of the species.
But short of that anyway, and we can get to that at the end if you want to talk about the real implication of the conflict between America and Russia here.
But boy, you did a great job breaking down all kinds of different questions that I and my audience might have about the situation in Syria here.
So, first of all, can you talk about the supposed, alleged, I guess, I don't want to prejudice it, the alleged chemical weapons attack that took place Saturday in a town called, is it Douma in Syria?
Right.
Well, the bigger picture is that starting about seven or eight weeks ago, the Syrian government began a campaign to expel the armed factions which have controlled the district called East Ghouta, which is on the outskirts of Damascus.
And East Ghouta is an area of farms and towns that's been controlled by these armed factions since 2012.
And almost on a daily basis, various militants have launched mortars and held cannon missiles into Damascus.
I saw, I personally witnessed two mortar attacks in the spring of 2014 when I was there.
One of the attacks killed several people.
So, I've seen this with my own eyes and the Syrian government has had its hands full up until now, but beginning about seven or eight weeks ago in early to mid February, they began a campaign to finally get rid of the armed factions which have controlled this area.
It went very quickly, actually, and over the course of about five weeks, they regained control of 90% of East Ghouta.
And when they did that, they basically did some air attacks and then they sent in their crack military team, the so-called Tiger Forces, and the rebels decided to negotiate.
And so, with the support of the Russian reconciliation team, they negotiated the peaceful withdrawal, the evacuation of the militants from this 90% of the area, and the militants were taken by buses, you know, several, many thousands to the north of Syria, and the big majority of civilians rushed into the government-controlled areas and where they had set up recovery stations and they had food and medical support and everything else.
The last zone, the last town is Douma, which has been controlled for many years by a Saudi-funded group called the Army of Islam, Jaysh al-Fattah, and they kind of refused to negotiate and then they kind of stalled on the negotiation and the Syrian army said, if you don't come to a reconciliation here, we are going to attack.
And then on Saturday, it came out on video from the White Helmets and a couple of medical groups, Western-funded medical groups that have some members and have basically agents there in Douma.
The story that there was a chemical attack.
On Sunday, last Sunday, this was all over the major Western media and then at the same time Trump issued his tweet, either late in the night Saturday or early Sunday, he issued his infamous tweet accusing Russia and Iran for being responsible for supporting the quote animal Assad and big price to pay.
So things have gone on from there, but that's kind of the basic context.
You have a video report, video claims.
It looked like there were dead children, but where the video was taken, when it was taken, all of those details have not been confirmed and we've got the president of the United States threatening to attack Syria and an ally of Russia, obviously.
So the situation is very dangerous.
All right.
Now, so, I mean, and this has been remarked all over the place from everybody who doesn't have a TV news show, which is that this doesn't make any sense at all.
Because you're saying this is the last little group here in this town.
There's still, you know, al-Qaeda up in the Idlib province, as you talked about, which, and I think you say in the essay, there's part of the reason that this group, Jaysh al-Islam, didn't want to negotiate is because they didn't want to go to Idlib because they're enemies of al-Qaeda too.
And so they're kind of, you know, desperate holdouts here, whatever.
But the point being Assad is on the verge of near total victory here.
You know, the Kurdish situation notwithstanding, but in terms of defeating ISIS and al-Qaeda and the jihadist so-called revolution.
So why in the world would he do this in a way, which when everyone knows that the chemical weapons are now the red line for the responsibility to protect doctrine or however this, you know, Trump team calls it, to intervene in this war that, you know, we know they've been intervening in all along, but in a more overt way against the government there.
And yet, on the other hand, you know, the Syrian government is a government.
So they do stupid, horrible things all the time, right?
So why wouldn't they do this?
I don't know.
Do you completely dismiss it?
I think it's extremely unlikely that the Syrian government would do this.
In fact, I don't think they've done.
In fact, all of the previous incidents where there have been accusations, the subsequent Syrian investigation, serious investigations point to the attacks being done by the armed militants as a provocation, trying to pressure the US and NATO to intervene directly.
So, I mean, if we think about going back to August of 2013, when the most famous and the biggest chemical weapons incident happened in the same area of eastern Ghouta, it was immediately, the Syrian government was immediately accused of being responsible.
But the subsequent investigations, the serious investigations, all pointed to it being done by the opposition with support from a foreign government.
Seymour Hersh did a detailed report called the Red Line and the Rat Line, which talked about Turkey supplying the sarin to the militants to carry out the act and with the explicit goal of provoking the US to attack Syria and get involved and overthrow the Syrian government, which Turkey was wanting to do, Erdogan, the Erdogan government was wanting to do.
So Seymour Hersh, Robert Perry, MIT professor Theodor Postol, all of these people.
There's a website called whoghouta.com.
All of these investigations provide very convincing evidence that the attack in 2013 was not by the Syrian government.
It was by the militants with the goal of, you know, pressuring the West to attack the Syrian government just as they did in Libya in 2011.
Hey, don't forget Jeffrey Goldberg, the great journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who he quotes Obama.
This is how he knows is the president himself told Jeffrey Goldberg, I guess making his excuse, but it must be true.
He wouldn't claim this, that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, came to him in, I don't know if it was August or September then, 2013, and told him this is not a slam dunk.
Which is a reference to George Tenet, of course, telling President George W. Bush, I'll stand behind you and say that I'm telling you that this stuff is true for Iraq War II.
Yeah, exactly.
The thing that's been missing from the Goldberg piece and the subsequent commentary about that, and Obama failed himself to make this important point.
So he was very proud that he resisted what he called the Washington playbook, and that he did not attack Syria at the end of August 2013, early September 2013.
But what was alluded to in that quote you give was that the Syrian government was not responsible.
That was the key thing, because if you look at the media now, they all are based on the assumption that Assad's been doing this for years and years, and nothing has happened, and Obama failed to enforce the red line, and now Trump's going to enforce the red line.
All of that is premised on the assumption that the Assad government is guilty when the serious investigations say, no, that's not true.
It's been done by the armed militants with the specific goal of pressing the U.S. to get directly involved.
Yeah, and then even the DNI himself refused to stand behind the accusations.
And we know from the time from Phil Giraldi's reporting back then that there was a very good reason, a very simple reason, why the White House released a government assessment blaming Assad at the time, and that was because they couldn't get the CIA to put one out saying that this is what they thought.
The analysts and Giraldi said they were threatening to resign, that there's no way you're going to make us say that we know that Assad did this.
For that to be happening at CIA headquarters in Langley, can you imagine for them to just fold their arms in front of their chest and say forget you to Obama on that?
I mean, that's pretty amazing.
Well, they were hung out to dry after the invasion of Iraq, and I think that was one of the lessons learned.
And Ray McGovern, a former CIA official and actually a presidential briefer, he's one of the co-founders of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He's made that point that's been published at Consortium News especially.
But we really need those people to step up now.
It was great that they were pouring cold water on it and they were refusing to go along with it in 2013.
Same thing a year ago too.
I mean, in fact, Giraldi came on the show April the 4th, the day of the attack last year, and said he has military and intelligence sources that say that this is not true, that the Russians bombed this building, that they had a drone surveilling it for at least two weeks beforehand, that they were on the phone with the Americans on the deconfliction line and let them know, hey, we're launching this attack against this building today where these guys are meeting, and that military and intelligence sources in the field or nearby anyway in the region were saying that, no, this is not true.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, in my article...
And that was the day of too.
Yeah, yeah.
It's amazing.
And we need the honest and the good people in the CIA to step up and bring some real factual information to the table right now actually.
Going back to that incident that you're talking about, which is almost exactly a year ago, it was April of 2017.
Again, Seymour Hersh did an investigation of that, and he also confirmed that the incident was not carried out by the Syrians and that the U.S. intelligence knew it.
He couldn't get that published in the U.S.
He couldn't get it published in the U.K.
He had to go to Germany to get his investigation published.
This is an indication of the sorry state of Western media, which went along with and promoted the lies leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and have basically failed to investigate all of the claims of the government and the U.S. and Western claims around Syria.
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Thanks.
So back to this one, I'm sorry, because I was going to ask you more about Conchicoon, but we should focus here on Douma.
So now tell me about, you know, other than the fake accusations of sarin use by the Assad government, what about the numerous, I think, undisputed claims about ISIS and al-Qaeda and these groups using chlorine in their attacks over the last years?
Right.
Well, you know, chlorine is not even on the prohibited list of chemicals because it's, you know, it's used for treating water.
It's used for all sorts of cleaning purposes, and that's not a prohibited chemical.
So you can get access to chlorine pretty readily.
And so it is possible to create some incidents.
However, a lot of these, the claims about chlorine really began after the Syrian government eliminated its sarin, which was confirmed at the time in 2014.
It was confirmed by the OPCW, which was awarded a Nobel Prize, largely on account of its involvement in that effort.
The Syrian government worked with them and removed all of the, you know, the stockpiles and all of the factories that could make chemical weapons.
But after that it was, and the OPCW certified in 2014 that Syria had complied with that agreement and had followed through on that.
Well, it was after that that the stories about chlorine began, the claims by the quote-unquote rebels that they were under attack by chemical weapons and they were chlorine.
Now, just one important side note here.
How was the existing stockpile of the Syrian government, the chemical weapons, eliminated?
They were eliminated by the U.S. on a U.S. vessel called the Marva Ray or something like that.
It's a U.S. vessel that has the capability of destroying chemicals.
Anyway, you can imagine that there were CIA and intelligence officers on there and they could easily have set aside some of those Syrian chemicals and analyzed them and so all of these claims that markers are found from the Syrian chemicals, those have to be, those are not very persuasive because the U.S. has had its hands on all of that material.
So, you know, that's one important thing that just because a chemical is found to have a marker that matches with past Syrian chemicals doesn't really prove anything because those chemicals were all turned over to the U.S.
Yeah.
All right, now, so here's a problem.
And, yeah, no, that's an important point.
Of course, this is part of why the neocons hate Vladimir Putin so much because he keeps cooperating with George W. Bush and Barack Obama and doing things to help them, like when the entire American population did not want to have a war with Syria over these lies in 2013, Putin stepped in, went around John Kerry, and said to Obama, Look, let's do this deal.
We'll get rid of these chemicals.
We'll have your people verify it.
It'll be good enough.
And it was.
And everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
And then, you know, Robert Perry, you mentioned him.
You've done a lot of great writing for ConsortiumNews.com.
His whole theory, or not his whole theory, but he said he thought a big part of the coup in Ukraine was revenge for Putin cooperating with the president in Syria, that this has got to be stopped, you know, all this getting along and making agreements and stuff.
And so let's overthrow the government of Ukraine twice in 10 years.
So to make sure to nip that in the bud and not let that get in.
Of course, it was the Kagan family involved in all this stuff.
So on the Ukraine part there.
So anyway, side point, but worth bringing up, that this is something that they just can't abide.
And so but this brings us to our real point, which is that by the time anybody hears this, we might already be dead because I don't know exactly.
I don't think Putin used the term red line, but they have said, listen, Syria is an ally of ours.
And we insist you don't attack.
I don't know exactly.
What did they threaten?
Did they say they will fight?
Well, what they said, and I went over this pretty carefully.
And this is the statement of the chief of the general military staff of Russia.
And this was a report from a month ago.
And they said the U.S. plans to accuse Syria's government forces of using chemical weapons.
And they said a provocation with the use of chemical weapons, chemical agents in Syria is being prepared to justify a massive U.S. strike against Damascus government.
You know, I repeat, this story was from a month ago, March 13th.
And the general goes on to say that he goes on to issue a warning.
In case there is a threat to the lives of our military, the Russian armed forces will take retaliatory measures both over the missiles and carriers that will use them.
So they're basically saying that the locations, if it's an aircraft carrier, or if it's a land base of the U.S. that launches these missiles, they will be targets.
So where does that take us?
If the U.S. goes ahead and does this and does attacks, the Damascus government in Damascus and Russians are there, he said this, they're staying there alongside the Syrians, they're killed.
They've said they will attack the source of those missiles.
Where does that take us?
Yeah, man, it's just crazy.
You know, we're stuck in this thing, right?
Where, because of George W. Bush and Iraq War II, they're forever trying to make up for the fact that they empowered Iran in Iraq.
And then all they end up doing is empowering Iran more, while empowering al-Qaeda more at the same time, too.
The Americans never benefit, but the American people's actual enemies, al-Qaeda, and the American empire's enemies, the Iranians, they continue to benefit time and again after all these interventions over there.
But now, I mean, they're in a panic.
If you read what they're writing, I was just reading this thing in the Jerusalem Post today, which is actually a couple months old, saying, you know, my God, the Shiite crescent is so much more powerful than it used to be, for some reason, somehow, history began yesterday, and now we just cannot abide having the IRGC and the Iranian special forces types and Hezbollah empowered on our northern border in Syria now, the way it is.
And never mind how it got that way, but they're like a DEFCON 1 over this.
We're going to have to, you know, as John Bolton says, if we're not overthrowing Assad, we might as well just go ahead and overthrow the government in Tehran.
Then it doesn't matter if Assad is a lie to Tehran or not, because there are puppets from now on kind of attitude.
They have really brought this thing to a head in a way that, even though you and I don't care, you know, about the Shiite crescent, for them, this is absolutely intolerable, even though they're the ones who created the whole thing in the first place.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
They created this.
And to my perspective, the answer is you go back to the outcome of World War II, which was international law, the UN Charter, that it's a violation of both for one state to attack another one, either through its own forces or through a proxy army.
And Israel and Saudi Arabia can, you know, proceed with their governments and they can do whatever they're doing.
They don't have the right in cahoots with the United States to say that they're the sole, you know, governments that dictate the area.
They basically destroyed Iraq.
They destroyed Libya, which is still in chaos today.
The Afghanistan conflict goes on.
The U.S. is increasing the number of troops there.
They have tried to destroy Syria, but Syria has clung on.
It's continued.
It's a secular government.
It's a semi-socialist government.
They feel very strongly that they are not just one ethnicity.
There's many different ethnicities.
There's many different religions in Syria.
They respect them all, and that's what they're fighting for.
And that's what we should be fighting for as well.
Instead, the U.S. government and our tax dollars are going to fund the most reactionary, sectarian, religiously, you know, biased fanatics, really, and mercenaries.
And so this is, you know, are we going to start World War III over this?
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And, you know, we don't have to back the Assad government.
It was wrong when Bill Clinton and George W. Bush contracted with Assad to torture people for the U.S.
You know, we shouldn't do that.
That's part of what, you know, supporting Egypt, supporting Saudi, making deals like this with Assad.
I don't know, you know, it's not like the Assad regime was ever really the puppets of the Americans, but they cooperated with Iraq War One.
And, you know, they've been in power since the Nixon years, the father and then the son.
And we didn't have that big of a problem with them before.
And so, but yeah, we don't have to back them up, but to support the al-Qaeda guys against them, it's just crazy.
And, you know, I mean, I don't have to tell you, but I do have to tell everybody listening, for those who are young and those who maybe were wrong then or weren't paying attention then, that we've known since the very beginning, since 2011, the reports came in, Bandar is sending jihadist terrorists from Saudi to Syria.
That was in 2011.
You know, Phil Giraldi reported about Obama's new finding, authorizing the CIA to step up covert action in Syria.
We had Eric Margolis, and he went to France and talked to special forces and intelligence guys there, said they're already on the ground there in Syria organizing the rebellion.
And we knew from the beginning, and it was in McClatchy newspapers from the very beginning, that their sources at the State Department said that, ah, geez, it's al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They've come across the border, and they're leading this fight.
And this is before the whole thing even freaking really got started, comparatively, you know.
In 2011, at the very beginning, we've known that this thing was led by these very worst of the suicide bombers.
Right.
Yeah, that's the sad thing.
The U.S., actually, the U.S. and the U.K. have used sectarian fanatics, have used a reactionary element of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Going back to the 1940s, there's a good book by Robert Dreyfus called Devil's Game.
How the U.S. Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Yeah, them and the Brits.
Exactly.
And so there's a long history of this, and that's precisely what's happened to Syria.
That's what Syrians are fighting for.
Going back to your point about Assad, whether it's Assad or Maduro in Venezuela or Putin in Russia, I mean, we can have our opinions, but the basic, the core principle is that it's for the people in those countries to determine their leader.
It's also for them to overthrow their leader if they don't like them, to campaign against them or to support them.
And it's not the right of Americans to dictate who should be leading Syria.
It's for the Syrian people.
Right.
Well, and you know, what's insane about this is that because of the consequences of supporting the jihad in Syria this whole time, it ended up in leading to the rise of the Islamic State, which didn't just carve off a piece of eastern Syria.
I mean, guess what?
The group called itself the Islamic State of Iraq back in 2006.
They said what they were about.
And so they conquered all of western Iraq.
So then we had to fight Iraq War III from 2014 through 17 to rouse them back out again.
But that puts us on both sides of the same war where, you know, we hate Assad so much because he's killing these wonderful jihadist heroes.
Well, what about Abadi?
Abadi is just the Assad of Iraq.
The only problem is that it's the USA that put him in there.
So when he kills tens of thousands of people in Mosul with American help, that's perfectly cool.
Even though, never mind the double standard on the civilian casualties, but how about just the double standard on how come we're fighting for Hezbollah's side in Iraq if that's the root of all evil in Syria then?
Why not keep back in the Islamic State?
Why not go ahead and openly declare, yes, us and Saudi and Turkey and Qatar and Israel, we support the caliphate to limit the power of Iran and keep it that way.
Right.
Well, I mean, I guess my core belief is that we need international law.
We need due process.
We need a multilateral world where independence is, where countries can chart their own paths, can determine their own leadership, whether they want to be capitalists, communists, socialists, whatever, libertarian.
I mean, whatever.
It's up to the people of each country to determine.
The big picture here is the conflict in Syria is a focal point of a conflict over the world.
Is the world going to be run by the United States?
Is it going to be a unipolar world with the U.S. as the unquestioned, unchallenged economic, military, political determining force?
That certainly runs against what was established after World War II.
And I think we need to get back to that.
And that's really what's at stake here.
Can China and Russia, can they support other governments around the world, even if the United States doesn't like it?
Does the United States have the right to overthrow the government of Syria?
Does Israel have the right to create mayhem and support mayhem in Syria because they don't like Iran?
These are kind of the core questions.
It's really kind of the core contradiction of the U.N. and all this international law at its core, though, that without the USA as the world army to enforce the world law, then what is it?
That's right.
And sadly, you know, certain departments, certain agencies, certain people at the United States, at the United Nations are not independent.
Sadly, they have become tools of the United States and U.S. policy.
Well, I mean, I'm just saying maybe that's the way it has to be, as long as you have such a thing.
In other words, as you say, the U.N. charter says all these states are sovereign.
But it's America says, yeah, because it's our job to keep them all from fighting.
And then therefore wages all these wars in the name of enforcing that very world order.
Right.
Right.
Well, it's it's sad now.
We've got an ambassador of the United States at the United Nations who just says, you know, flat out, if the if the world's if the Security Council isn't going to act, then we're going to act alone, which is just in flat out violation.
Yeah.
You know, under international law, you're not allowed to attack another country unless you accept in self-defense or or with the authorization of the U.N. Security Council.
Yeah.
So since the United States was never, you know, was never it was never taken to court, it was never shown that their invasion of Iraq was a clear violation of international law.
We you know, that has seen the dissent when when international law can be violated with impunity by one government, in this case, the United States and its main allies.
It undermines the credibility and nobody even thinks about it anymore, sadly.
Right.
Well, and that's the whole thing, right, is, you know, for right wing patriots out there, we shouldn't have to give in to international law as though it's something being enforced on us.
It's the American government that has created this whole thing.
And America being a limited constitutional republic, a commercial republic, is perfectly consistent with leaving the rest of the world to hell alone, which happens to be the international law anyway.
Right.
So, yeah, that's the whole thing of it.
You know, if if if if it's America first, then we don't need the U.N. to tell us to be unilaterally at peace.
That's supposed to be up to us.
And that's exactly what we need to have as our policy.
You know.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
Now, I mean, a lot of people around the world may not like Donald Trump, but it's not for them to to decide.
It's for the American people to exactly elect or remove Donald Trump.
Boy, if you think about if all of America's pretexts for war were turned around and used against us by the rest of the world, we'd be in trouble.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, thanks again for coming on the show.
Great work.
OK.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that is Rick Sterling and he's an investigative journalist.
And he wrote this article.
It's up at Antiwar dot com, taking the world to the brink of annihilation.
And I'm Scott Horton.
Check out all the stuff at Scott Horton dot org.
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