05/01/14 – 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.
Now we rewind to yesterday's notes here, so we welcome the great Gareth Porter back to the show.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks very much.
Glad to be back again, Scott.
That's your heroic theme music there.
It does sound like some sort of Superman film.
I don't know.
It's Spaceballs.
It's what?
Spaceballs.
I don't know that.
I can't see a thing in this helmet.
Anyway.
All right, so listen.
You wrote this thing for the Truthout there, truthout.org.
As you sometimes do, this one is called New Data Raised Further Doubt on Official View of August 21 Gas Attack in Syria.
So this was disputed all along.
We almost got into a war over it.
It was said by John Kerry 35 times in one speech.
We know, for the following 35 reasons, we know, we know, we know that it was Assad that did it.
We almost went to war, but the American people and, helpfully, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, don't do it.
And the president, oh, and also the British people and the British parliament said, absolutely not.
And so that's, gosh, the whole damn thing.
They didn't get to have their war.
And then all we found out since then basically seems to be reason to doubt the cause of spelling that they were attempting to invoke back then.
So very important, very instructive.
And this is also part two, then, of this interview, because we talked about kind of the overall gist of it, as well as the first couple of reasons why now, looking back, you find it so unlikely that the official story was correct.
So I think where we left off yesterday, we had talked about all the location data and who was asserting what and how it was all skewed and how you're pretty firm in your conclusion that the volcano rockets that were used in the attack must have come from rebel held territory, not government held territory, as had been in the accusations.
And then, so I think the next piece that you the next big data point that you focus on in your article, Gareth, is about the amount of sarin involved and the war party's assertions about who and only who could have possibly been able to come up with so much sarin to do what they did.
Well, you know, what's what's interesting about the discourse on this issue over the past several months has been the degree to which, not just the degree, I mean, essentially this entire issue has been turned over to a set of experts outside the US government or any other government which has been involved in the issue.
And so there's been a kind of back and forth among people taking positions on different sides of this issue, as I referred to yesterday, particularly you've got Elliot Higgins, better known by at least some as Brown Moses, the Brown Moses blog, UK based blogger, taking a very strong, increasingly vociferous position on the side that the evidence is clear that in his view that it's that it was the Syrian government that carried out the attack.
And on the other side, and then you have aligned with him, Dan Kazeta, who is this former Army chemical war officer who actually served as an advisor in the White House at one point and who I've quoted in the past because he was taking a very independent position initially.
He was skeptical about some of the evidence, suggesting particularly on the side of the question of the symptoms that were being exhibited in videos and also eventually in the UN report.
So he has started out as a sort of an independent voice, skeptical voice, but has now aligned himself with the Elliot Higgins view that this must have been a government operation, an operation by the Syrian government, because he argues that the rebels could not possibly have produced enough sarin to be used in the attack.
But there are the problems there, and I can't remember if I got into this yesterday, but he has put forward a kind of an initial analysis of how much sarin might have been required in the attack or been used in the attack, which was entirely artificial based completely on sort of using old US Army chemical warfare manual to estimate how much sarin would be used.
It has nothing to do with any of the data about the actual attack, but rather starting with, well, if he was a chemical warfare officer, presumably a US chemical warfare officer, how much would he use in this attack?
So he comes up with the estimate of at least one ton of sarin that would be necessary based on that exercise, and that has been widely used, I'm sorry to say, as a sort of benchmark despite the fact that it's really quite irrelevant to the reality of the specifics of this attack.
So I'm just pointing to the fact that there has been this back and forth between people on that side versus some of the people on the blog who attacked Houthi, including this fellow, Charles Wood, who is a Perth, Australia-based forensic expert, and they've been carrying out a very strong response, have waged a strong response to some of the arguments that have been made and, in my view, have actually produced more convincing evidence in that exchange.
So it's quite interesting that you've got a discourse that is really, the US government has been not involved in at all and has been carried out by these experts on the two sides.
Now, that leaves one issue remaining, which is really not about back and forth between experts but is really about data that comes from the UN report itself, the report of the UN investigation.
And I must tell you that this is the issue that has really caused me, more than anything else, to continue to be doubtful about the official line that this was a Syrian government attack.
And that is the data that were included in the UN report about the symptoms that were shown by the sample, what was originally supposed to be a sample of 80 people but was ultimately only 36 people who were examined and analyzed in detail, the symptoms recorded as data in the report.
And what is so important about this is that these 36 people were fingered by the opposition leadership in the environs of Damascus as the people they wanted the UN to interview or to use as their sample.
So in other words, the UN team very explicitly went to the leadership of the opposition in that area and said, okay, tell us who we should meet as far as serious victims of the attack are concerned.
And so they steered them to, we're not exactly sure how many, but ultimately there's supposed to be 80 of them, and they ultimately only cited 36 cases.
And the significance of this is that the symptoms don't make any sense.
The ones that are recorded in the report don't make any sense.
And Kazeta is the one who pointed this out originally.
But an Iranian doctor who is an expert on this has said the same thing, that the vast majority of them don't show any sign of meiosis, which is when the pupil of the eye contracts.
And that is supposed to be one of the, it is in fact the primary symptom, it's the first symptom that you would find within three minutes of serious exposure to sarin.
You would have that as a symptom.
And yet, only a small minority, as I recall, around 15, 16, 17% of the total of the 36 people showed any sign of meiosis.
There's something wrong with that.
And what that means, and Kazeta is the one who first commented on this, he said this tells him that those people were not seriously exposed to sarin.
In other words, they were not exposed to a serious sarin attack, despite the fact that most of them, not all of them, had some, according to the lab reports, showed some sign of sarin in their blood, nevertheless, their symptomology suggests that they did not, in fact, they were not exposed to a serious sarin attack.
So that raises serious questions about what actually happened, which I think still remained very much unanswered.
Well, I mean, it seems like, you know, as you're saying, if that's the first symptom, even if they were, is it your speculation, or you have other people speculating here that perhaps the stuff was watered down a bit, it seems like it would still cause constriction of the pupils would be, like you said, first off.
That's right.
Even if they were only partially affected.
That's right.
That is my speculation, based on a technical paper published in 2002, which points out that sarin could be mixed with water at a pH, a sort of normal level pH of 7, which is, you know, not too alkaline and not too, not too opposite of alkaline, and that means that it could last for 5, as I recall, 5.4 hours before breaking down, the sarin breaking down.
And that means that, you know, if you needed to fill up the rockets, but you didn't have enough sarin, if you were working, you know, with much lesser amount of sarin, you could fill up the rockets mostly with water, so that they would remain stable.
That's the main reason that the two, Lloyd and Postol, have argued that you'd have to fill them up with sarin, because they would be unstable otherwise.
But you could fill them up with water, and they would still function in the same way.
But that suggests that there's much less sarin in the attack than we've been led to believe.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis, and this one at Truthout about the sarin attack last August in Syria.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
As always, I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter from interpress service, IPSnews.net, truthout.org, and amazon.com.
I actually make that scotthorton.org slash amazon, where you can find Gareth's great new book.
It's so important.
I really mean it, man.
That's the reason I always talk to him is because he's the best.
And now here he is, the best in book form, Manufactured Crisis, debunking every lie about the Iran nuclear program and the supposed threat it poses to Israel and the United States of America and world order or anything else.
The idea that it exists at all.
He absolutely destroys it.
You can hear my 10 part interview series with him on Manufactured Crisis at scothorton.org slash stress.
We've got them all there for you and slash interviews, of course.
But we got them all combined even into one giant file now, all 10 interviews on the subject of that book.
I beseech you to read it.
In fact, you should buy a lot of them and then you should send your extras to the local library so that they can have some on their shelves.
How about that?
Excellent suggestion.
Thank you.
Give them to friends and send them to your buddy who you know, who's in the Air Force Intelligence and whatever you can do, man.
I don't know.
Everybody knows somebody knows somebody, man, and everybody ought to be reading Manufactured Crisis.
And no, Gareth ain't paying me to say that.
I'm not even saying it because I consider him a friend of mine and I want to do him a favor and see him get paid a lot, which of course is also true.
But no, it's because this is the most important freaking thing in the whole world other than our relationship with Russia.
And we really have a chance now of peace agreement, a nuclear deal that could lead to a real end of the Cold War with Iran.
And I think that this book could be such an important part of that as all the last of the so-called reasons to be afraid are whittled away and smashed and tossed aside and people can come to reasonable terms, man.
It's about damn time.
It's overdue and it's important.
And the book is Manufactured Crisis.
OK, thank you.
Now, again, the new article here at Truthout is new data raised further doubt on official view of the August 21st gas attack in Syria.
And so now I'm trying to figure out exactly how this argument goes, Gareth, but it's something to the effect of at first, well, these rockets traveled nine kilometers.
Of course, the rebels don't have anything that fancy.
So it must have been.
And we talked about this a bit yesterday, too.
It must have been government weapons that were this good.
But then on closer examination, the actual rockets that were used in these attacks or this attack were no such thing.
Couldn't go that far at all.
More like two kilometers, 2.2 or whatever.
I think they measured it as we spoke about.
But then the argument is still that this kind of and I'm paraphrasing what I believe is the position of Brown Moses blog, Elliot Higgins here, that still these are government weapons and they didn't come from the rebel stocks and there's no reason to believe that the rebels had them or could have filled them up with any kind of sarin diluted or not or anything else.
And so what about those volcano rockets and how unique they are?
The key point, the key point about the volcano rockets is that the government clearly did start using those rockets in the war for conventional explosives beginning in either late 2012 or early 2013.
I don't remember exactly.
And they used them a number of times.
Clearly the rebels had plenty of examples of the rockets.
They were able to put together the dimensions and the way they operated and so forth.
They had the evidence.
And as Ted Postal of MIT said to me in an interview, look, I've seen videos of, or maybe it was Lloyd, they both said the same thing essentially, that they know that there's plenty of evidence that the rebels have workshops in which they make their own weapons, their own rockets as well as launchers.
There are videos of them, I think it was Lloyd who said this, videos showing that they have an assembly line essentially where certain people are working on the tail fins of rockets.
So the idea that they were not interested in or capable of manufacturing facsimiles of these rockets and adapting them to chemical warfare would simply be unreal, unrealistic.
It's very clear that they have all the capability that they need in order to make those rockets and to adapt them.
All right.
Well, so now what about the supposed exact nature of the replication here though, all the way down to the numbers of bolts and all that?
I believe one of the scientists quoted by Seymour Hersh says, oh no, this is at Mint Press, a follow-up at Mint Press to the Hersh piece, where one of these scientists says, well, what did Elliot Higgins do, count all the bolts?
And I saw Elliot Higgins on Twitter say, yeah, I counted the damn bolts, of course I counted the bolts, what are you saying, that I couldn't count the bolts?
So what about that?
I mean, isn't that pretty exact?
These must have been government weapons, whatever, or maybe they were stolen from government warehouses?
Is there any indication that's possible?
Well, look, these are not nuclear weapons we're talking about here.
We're talking about highly, you know, very rudimentary conventional weaponry.
And so they are well within the capability of ordinary folks to produce.
I mean, that's the bottom line.
I feel like we're talking about Iranian EFPs in Iraq in 2007 right now.
We are, absolutely.
Well, the Persian could make one of those, not an Arab.
That's a very nice parallel, in fact, yeah, I mean, the same argument was being made, you're absolutely right, the same argument was being made by people in the U.S. military and the Bush administration, that, well, those EFPs could not have been made by Iraqis, they must have been, they're too well-made to be, you know, anything but an Iranian- But copper, Gareth, copper!
Yeah, right, of course.
What could an Arab possibly do with copper?
It just doesn't make sense.
They have to be Iranian.
But as we now know, I mean, the U.S. military had to walk that argument back because there was explicit, there were explicit fines that were reported in the news media of workshops that were producing precisely those sorts of EFPs.
I mean, you know, were there slight differences?
Perhaps so, but they were functioning exactly in the same way, is the point.
I don't know the footnote anymore, but Phil Giraldi, and we talked about this at such length back in 07 and 08 and all that during that propaganda, but I should find somewhere, I have it, I think, I saved it, the PDF file of a journal piece for some kind of technical military journal or something that Philip Giraldi did on those EFPs.
That's just absolutely outstanding.
Every bit of information that could have possibly been assembled for that thing.
Well, that sounds like a piece that was done by a source for one of my stories, who was a British guy, you know, in the business of studying these things, so that was his full-time job.
We're off on too far of a tangent here, we need to get back to Syria for a minute here.
So what about the Israeli intercepts?
You don't mention this in your article, but that came out right away that the Israelis heard the Syrian generals talking about what they had just done, much as it says that the Americans overheard the Turks celebrating.
This falls into the category of so many intelligence reports, reports about intelligence reports, which clearly, you know, somebody is inferring something from evidence that is much more murkier, much more ambiguous than we're being led to believe, and I'm reasonably confident that this report is of the same nature for various reasons.
I mean, you know, there's never been any specific quotes, there's never been any specifics offered.
It's always, you know, just a sort of vague allusion to the idea that was conveyed.
But, you know, there are different versions of it, and some of the versions suggest that the conversation was not as it was described in that specific version that was being pushed by certain sources that indicated clearly that they were admitting that they had carried out the attack on the country.
In other words, there were official reasons to doubt, at official-type levels, that were discussed, not just people in some alternative media.
There are so many ways in which that whole story could be completely distorted or simply totally false.
Let me ask you this here, real quick, I'm sorry we're so short on time, Gary, but what about what Hearst says about Porton Down Laboratory in the UK debunked that it was the same recipe at all?
Did you agree with that in your research?
Well, I did, in fact, look into this because there was a British correspondent, a defense correspondent for the Sunday Times, or for the Times, I guess it was, who tweeted that he had been told by a Porton Down spokesperson that they did not find what Hearst said.
In fact, they found that there was a match between the samples that they found that they were given to check on and the Syrian stocks.
And so I called and asked the spokesperson at Porton Downs, what about this?
And the spokesperson said, no, that's not what we said, we didn't say that, we would not comment on intelligence.
All we said was that some of the samples tested positive for sarin.
So it turns out, all I can tell you is that...
So they denied their denial?
They denied the denial, they denied what had been attributed to them by this correspondent of the Times, defense correspondent of the Times, and simply said, we never commented except to say that some of them were positive for sarin, which we already knew, and there's nothing new there.
It doesn't answer the question of what was your official report to the Prime Minister and to the American Intelligence Agency.
Yeah, they did not answer that.
No, of course not.
They did not answer that.
No, unfortunately.
All right.
Well, by the way, to end the show here, we're over time, but I'll let you go with the fact that our friend Fitzy G in the chat room reports that he's just sent a copy of your book to his friend in the Pentagon.
So...
That's fantastic news.
Thank you very much.
He's got some ripples there, out there in the pond, and hopefully he'll get that point across.
So congratulations on that work again, and thank you again for your time on the show, Gareth.
Great.
Thanks again for your support all this time.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
Manufactured Crisis is the book, and he writes at IPSnews.net and at Truthout.org.
You can find certainly all the IPS stuff.
All of the IPS stuff is at antiwar.com as well, original.antiwar.com slash Porter, if you want to find it there.
Probably a lot of the Truthout and maybe some other miscellaneous stuff in there, too.
Anyway, and the book is Manufactured Crisis.
Okay.
Thanks, y'all, for listening.
See ya.
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