04/30/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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Anyway, yeah.
So this is my show, and really, the most important thing I can do on this show is give you access to the great Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Glad to be back.
I'm fine.
In fact, I've just come from an event in D.C. where Ed Snowden was giving us a personal message.
He got an award from the Nation Institute for truth-telling, for courage, excuse me, not for truth-telling, for courage, for obvious reasons.
And it was quite inspiring to hear Snowden talk about his decision.
Oh, that's great.
I saw a couple of things on Twitter about that was going on.
I didn't realize that that's where you were, so.
Yeah.
That was the outstanding highlight of the event.
Yeah, you got it.
Well, there are such things as American heroes.
So all right, now, the headlines out of Syria, car bombings everywhere.
From the Daily Mail, which I don't know how questionable this may or may not be, but sure does look legit, man.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or whoever they are, these ISIS guys, these al-Qaeda and Iraq guys, have apparently crucified a couple of guys to death in the city of Raqqa.
And of course, there are endless claims of new chemical weapons attacks, including, I guess, based on chlorine, which I guess I'll ask you about at the end of this interview.
But so all that, I mean, when these guys are being crucified and whatever, that hopefully ought to draw their attention back to this horrible crisis going on in Syria now and the truth behind it all and what it all means and who's who and what the hell.
And you've finally, finally written about the August sarin attack, which is so important.
And I'm so thankful that you have.
It's at truthout.org.
New data raise further doubt on official view of August 21st gas attack in Syria.
Take us through it.
Break it down.
Well, this is this is the first of all, you're right that I finally got this out.
And you're referring, of course, to the fact that there was an earlier period in last September when I was working on a piece.
I worked on it for three weeks and finally decided not to go ahead with it because I was unable to put together what what I thought was a coherent or understandable, reasonable picture of what happened.
And since then, of course, a lot a lot of controversy has swirled around the issue.
A lot of positions have been taken on both sides of this.
New information has come out.
And now I took another look at this from a different perspective, which is not so much being able to tell people what happened, but rather to sort out what we know and what we don't know and what what begins to emerge in terms of the parameters of the problem.
And so that that is really what I tried to do in this rather long piece.
And this is undoubtedly one of the more complicated, if not the most complicated pieces that I've ever tried to do.
It has a lot of different moving parts and it's, you know, it involves a whole series of issues.
One, you know, whether the whether the information we have now suggests that, in fact, the the rockets that were discovered, that were fired into the embryons of Damascus on August 21st had to come from the government-controlled areas, as was argued very strongly at the time in the in the weeks that followed or not.
Then a second issue that I get into in the piece is whether the the opposition was really capable of mounting an attack with with the amount of sarin that would be required for the attack.
And that, of course, gets one into the whole question of how much sarin really was used or, you know, might have been used in the attack.
And then, you know, finally, I come down to, you know, not finally, but another another issue is supposedly smoking gun, which was the discovery of traces of hexamine or a form of hexamine.
I won't even try to pronounce it.
It's a very, very long, multi-syllable chemical compound that was found, you know, by the UN investigating team, which has been argued to be a smoking gun for the Syrian government having carried out the attack, because the Syrian government has included in its official declaration of chemical weapons to the OPCW the 80 tons of hexamine.
And one of the people that I discussed in my piece has argued, that is Dan Cozzetta, the chemical weapons expert, has argued that this is a smoking gun, that it has to mean that it was the government that was the source of this of these traces.
So then, you know, at the end of the piece, I come back to the whole question of how lethal was the attack, and look at new evidence, not so much new evidence, but evidence that really hasn't been examined, certainly by the news media, that has to do with the symptoms that were shown by the people that were interviewed by the UN investigating team.
And what you find, what I found in looking at that data, was that it suddenly appears that the people who they were steered to by the opposition, that is, the UN team was steered to by the opposition, weren't really exposed very seriously to sarin, certainly not as seriously as was made to appear at the time.
So all these things are in the mix in this piece.
It has at least four, you know, bigger picture issues that I've covered.
And that's kind of, I mean, where I come down here at the end of it is that it now looks very much like it was a much less lethal attack than it was made out to be, certainly by the news media and by the U.S. government, and that it's much less clear who was responsible for this than it appeared to be the case at the time, that there was a strong case being made that there are various indicators that it must be the Syrian government.
And finally, that, you know, if you go back and look at the question, there are two questions.
One, the question of capability, who was most capable or who was capable of carrying out the attack.
But the other one is the problem of motivation.
And I basically address that at the end of the piece and suggest that, you know, it may still be the case that it would have been much easier for the Syrian government to carry out the attack in terms of capabilities, but it would appear that the primary, that the party that had the primary motive here for carrying out such an attack was indeed the opposition.
So that is sort of a capsule summary of the piece that doesn't really go into any of the details much.
Right.
Well, that's all right.
We'll go through it.
First of all, the last thing there about the motive, I remember Robert Baer, the former CIA officer, saying on TV back in 2011 or 12 maybe that, hey, if it comes down to it, he said, I know these Alawites, the ones in charge in Damascus, and if it comes down to it, they will use chemical weapons.
But his real emphasis, I believe at the time, I think it's fair to characterize it, was if it comes down to it.
And yet they have never even been close this entire war long of losing power in Damascus.
It has not come down to it at all, has it?
Well, yeah.
Let's take a look at that question very quickly, because that is indeed one of the issues surrounding motivation.
You know, it is perhaps the primary motivation that has been attributed to the government has been indeed that it was losing the war, it was afraid that it was very rapidly losing control, particularly in the Damascus area, and that this was a desperate effort to restore the momentum to the government forces' side.
That is indeed the argument that has been made, but there are some serious questions about that, I mean, one of which is that, as I point out in my piece, the British intelligence paper, a two-page paper that was issued by British intelligence, actually more or less openly questions that notion that the government was desperate about, you know, fearing that it was losing in the Damascus area.
It, in fact, saysóI don't have the quote in front of me, but it says, essentially, that there's no apparent reason why the government would take the risk of carrying out a chemical weapons attack under those circumstances, specifically circumstances that included having the UN team ensconced right there in Damascus, within a couple of kilometers, or, you know, two to three kilometers at very most, of the scene of the chemical attacks.
So, one of the major intelligence agencies that's involved in this issue really did not buy that idea that there was aóthat that was a motive for the government to carry out the attack.
All right, we'll have to hold it right here and go out to this break.
We're talking with Gareth Porter.
Here he is at Truthout, where he wins awards for his journalism.
New data raise further doubt on official view of August 21 gas attack in Syria, the one that almost led to an American air campaign, at least, in the last summer.
Back right after this with Gareth Porter.
Stone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, X-Key Score, Boundless Informant.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org is the website.
I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter.
Mostly he's at interpressservice, ipsnews.net, but he also writes for truthout.org, won the Gellhorn Award for his work on Petraeus and McChrystal surge in Afghanistan there at Truthout.
This piece is called New Data Raised Further Doubt on Official View of August 21st Gas Attack in Syria.
You know that big uh there was me spacing out when I was supposed to say he's the author of the most important book of this year and last year and the one before that and probably next year too, and that is Manufactured Crisis, the truth about the Iran nuclear scare, which debunks every bit of what you ever heard about the threat of Iran's nuclear program, and it's good, man, real good, and it should win whatever all prizes they give away for journalistic books like this.
It's absolutely incredible and irrefutable, Manufactured Crisis by Gareth Porter.
Okay, now, so back to the article here, it's New Data Raised Further Doubt on the Official View of the August 21st Gas Attack in Syria, and so he sort of gave us the overview here, we talked about the motive and how there was no motive, but you know what, let me go ahead and ask you this now, even though this isn't in your article, I don't think, unless I did kind of read it fast, I might have missed it, but what about the gas attacks from right around a year ago, there's even a speech that I gave right a year ago where I brought up how the Israelis were saying, aha, a chemical attack, and it was Assad who did it, and how it was Kerry himself who told the Israelis to pipe down about it, and that there was no conclusive evidence that that was the case, and et cetera, et cetera, and I forget why I thought so, but I interpreted it then, it's in the speech that I interpreted it, Kerry's signal to them as to wait, it's not time to exploit this particular narrative yet, that was the way that that played out a year ago, so what was going on there, do you think, that was a rebel attack?
I'm glad you raised the issue because it is very important to understand that whole series of alleged chemical weapons attacks that started, I mean the first one that I remember specifically because I was actually going to write about this, but I didn't have the space to do it in this piece, was December of 2012 in Homs, and then there was another series of, I believe, seven, roughly seven, I could be off by one or two, alleged attacks, and of course, you know, it varies depending on who's listing them, I mean there's some organizations that listed even far more than that, but the point that I would make is that in most of those cases, it seems pretty clear that it was not a chemical weapon, it was not a sarin attack at all, the evidence that I saw was I looked at the details that were available in all but one of those attacks indicated that it was most likely, almost certainly, you know, it was a combination of smoke, a smoke weapon, a smoke grenade of some sort, mixed perhaps with CS gas, and that combination could easily cause the kind of respiratory symptoms that were experienced by many of the people who were the victims that were shown in videos in these attacks.
Now, there was one exception, and that was the attack on Khan al-Assal in March of 2013, and that was the one that, of course, the Syrian government charged was a rebel attack and wanted the UN to go investigate it, and indeed that's what they were doing there, as you indicated before the break.
That's what they were doing in Damascus, but of course the UN wanted to be able to visit other sites where other alleged attacks had taken place.
Which by the way, Gareth, I know a couple of Branch Davidians who could refute that CS is not a chemical weapon, that's some pretty harsh stuff, and when you burn it, it turns into hydrogen cyanide, which is how they kill people in the gas chamber, so it's some pretty nasty stuff, but it's not sarin.
I agree that that's a very dangerous weapon, and it can actually cause people to die.
And I think it's banned by the Geneva Conventions for use in international warfare anyway.
I'm not aware that CS gas is banned in international warfare.
You may be right, I don't recall the best case, but I cede to you if you've checked on that.
I think that, I couldn't prove it to you right now, but I bet I could if I looked.
Anyway, I'm sorry, go ahead.
But in any case, this was clearly not a sarin attack, as was claimed both by the opposition groups, as well as by, ultimately, the United States government and its allies, who used that as part of the argument that it was certain that the August 21st attack was carried out by the Syrian government.
So it is very, very relevant, and I do, in fact, believe that that evidence does not really hold up.
All right, so now, let's get to the location data, if we can break this down and get through your article here.
Originally, the story was that these chemical rockets had come from, what, nine kilometers away or six kilometers away, was it?
And that it had to have been this military base agreed a couple of different investigations right from the beginning, correct?
That's correct.
I mean, the military base was north, of course, of the, of Muammadiyah, which was one of the neighborhoods that was hit.
And if I, you know, if I remember my map in my head correctly, northwest of the other neighborhood, that was the primary, the primary one hit.
So, I mean, this was indeed supposed to be the place that was pinpointed by the New York Times, and originally it was considered by the two researchers who were quoted very widely in the press, Ted Postol and Richard Lloyd, they also agreed that that was, that that was the case.
So now, suddenly, that turns out not to be correct, because the, you know, when, when Lloyd and Postol reviewed the whole question of the mechanism that the rocket that was used to carry out the attack in all but one of those neighborhoods, that is, Muammadiyah, they found that, in fact, it would not go more than about two kilometers or about 1.2 miles.
And so that whole theory about the military base north of there that was, I think, 9.6 kilometers away was suddenly taken off the map, the political map of this issue.
And that has represented a fundamental shift in the whole debate.
And then you get, the next round was our friend Brown Moses, or Elliot Higgins, coming out with a new argument that, yes, okay, it may have been a much shorter trajectory, a much shorter range, but it could have come from a government-controlled area, maybe 2.5 kilometers, 2.2 to 2.5 kilometers away.
And that then became the primary argument for the Syrian government responsibility.
But...
Which, hey, conceivably, anyway, wait a minute, let's win friends and influence people here.
You could concede that that could be possible, that, oh, it wasn't launched from there, it was launched from here.
Well, still, it's still government territory.
So what about that?
Well, Ed, what about that is that it turns out that what Elliot Higgins claims was government-controlled territory was really not government-controlled territory.
In fact, it was an area that, I mean, the point that he is now pinpointing, which was east of what is called the Jobar-Kaboun industrial zone, is it's an area where a bunch of highways come together.
And apparently, according to an expert who has contested the Elliot Higgins argument, Charles Wood, a forensic expert who has been watching videos specifically about that specific area, he says that, in fact, the government troops were under fire, they were being attacked, even on August 21st, that there was, you know, that they were fighting off an attack by the rebels, that that was a very highly contested area, and that this is based on, specifically on visual evidence that he has seen.
So that argument appears to be, at best, extremely contested and not at all strongly documented at this point.
All right.
Now, here's the problem.
We have a conflict between how thorough your work is here and the time on the clock and your busy schedule.
Can I keep you another segment, or do I need to let you go?
Well, normally I would say yes, but I do, in fact, need to leave for an appointment in D.C., which is actually an hour earlier than I thought it was when I first spoke with you.
Okay.
No problem.
Maybe we can try another day this week.
Yeah, let's follow up, because there's still some more questions I'd like to give you a chance to answer and give people more of a chance to find this work.
We've only touched the surface, obviously.
Right.
Okay.
Well, that's all right.
That's how radio works.
Thanks very much for your time, Gareth, as always.
Good talking to you.
Thanks so much for having me again.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, everybody.
So that's the great Gareth Porter.
He writes at IPSnews.net and at Truthout.org.
And this one is at Truthout.
It's called New Data Raised Further Doubt on Official View of August 21 Gas Attack in Syria.
Very important work there at Truthout.org by the author of the book Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear weapons threat.
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