All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Elizabeth Murray.
She is former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
And she has participated in this independent panel sponsored by the Courage Foundation at couragefound.org, and they have produced this criticism of the OPCW, that's the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, UN organization, and their investigation of the April 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm well, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining me on the show today to talk about this.
It's an extremely important issue, and let me mention here real quick before we get into too much of this, that some of the other panel members include Jose Bustani, who was the first Director General of the OPCW.
And people might remember, famously, John Bolton threatened his children when he was being so obstinate as to tell the truth about his inability to locate any of Saddam Hussein's mythical weapons of mass destruction during the weapons inspections of 2002.
And then you also have Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus at Princeton, a world-famous practitioner of international law, and so forth.
And again, can you describe a little bit your job at DIA for us here?
Or what was it?
I was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council, and our job was to- Oh, not DIA.
Pardon me.
I'm sorry.
That's fine.
My mistake.
I just, I read DIA in there somewhere, but that was my fault.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Oh, that's totally fine.
And our job was basically to gather together members of the 16 intelligence agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community to come together to produce a peer review document on issues in Middle Eastern countries of interest, such as Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, et cetera.
And I was one of three deputies who worked for the NIO, or the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East.
And we would sort of broker these papers and lead the intelligence community in producing them.
I'm sorry, but I have to ask, does that mean that you helped write the NIE on Iraq for 2002?
Actually, no, that was well before I was a part of that.
I only served two short years on the National Intelligence Council at the very end of my career.
But I'm glad you brought up the 2002 NIE, because it just shows how damaging the politicization of intelligence can be, because it can lead to horrific wars, such as the one on Iraq.
I mean, the 2002 NIE, along with Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations, those kinds of important events were used to justify a horrific war, which resulted in the loss of tremendous lives, I think over a million Iraqis, and I don't know how many casualties and deaths on the American side, but certainly the repercussions that both of our countries are going to feel for generations to come.
So politicization of intelligence, as since we're talking about the OPCW now, can be a very dangerous threat to world peace.
And yeah, I guess the bureaucrats at the top of the OPCW learned their lesson, that they shouldn't try to tug on Superman's cape, and that if USA wants to start an aggressive war, they better either help lie us into it or get out of the way, apparently.
Well, Scott, I mean, this is the problem with careerism, isn't it?
I think you're right that officials in these international bodies that the United States seeks to control for its own purposes have learned the hard way what happens if you do pull on the cape.
I mean, you just mentioned Dr. Jose Bustami, who was pressured to resign by John Bolton back in 2002, when he was basically making efforts to get Iraq on board with the Chemical Weapons Convention, and that would have taken away a justification to go to war.
He was an obstacle to war.
He had to go.
And others who get along, I mean, there are many at the top of these agencies who, as you say, are compliant with the U.S. foreign policy.
They go on to have very comfortable, successful careers, and those who don't pay the price, don't they?
Right.
And at least in the media, and TV news especially, which is so important in determining the narrative on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't matter how many times the intelligence agency's claims fail to hold up, and it doesn't matter how bad the consequences are, the next time they claim something, you better believe it.
The received wisdom is received.
And how dare you doubt the people who would bring us this terrible and important information?
A great example of that was just last week, or two weeks ago, when David Stockman, the former Reagan official, was on Fox News, and he disputed the chemical attack in Douma, and said, you know, these people, they were suffocating on dust.
And the White Helmets turned it into this big deal and pretended it was a chemical attack.
And it was a Fox News discussion.
And this woman was just absolutely indignant that, how dare you say that a claim, a completely unproven claim, but a claim by the CIA, is anything but the golden truth?
And he says, well, what about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
And being on Fox News, he could have said, what about they just spent the last three years falsely accusing our president of high treason, for dealing with the Kremlin, of all things, which turned out to be completely false?
And, which he might have been able to get through to them for a moment with that, anyway, but it doesn't really matter, because the next time that the CIA, or whichever members of the intelligence community, make a claim, it will go without saying that this must be right.
And the only reason that anyone would dispute it would be if they're the one with a problem.
Like for some reason, they have fallen in love with Bashar al-Assad, which is likely.
Yeah, groupthink is, as you say, is pervasive.
It's reinforced by the media.
And it's extremely dangerous, because of what the public isn't told.
I mean, you're right, there's this pervasive narrative.
People want, I think it's a cognitive dissonance.
People don't, dissonance, I'm sorry.
People don't want to believe that their government would do anything bad.
And so they swallow hook, line, and sinker what they're fed by the mainstream media.
And I mean, it's very sad how deeply you have to dig to find the truth these days.
I mean, it's anybody, like an investigative journalist, like yourself, or a member of the public, really has to sit for hours to sort through and figure out, okay, how do I sort this chaff out?
Because we're bombarded with it on a daily basis.
So you're absolutely right, Scott.
Yeah.
Although, you know, I should say, I'm not really an investigative journalist.
I'm a great radio host.
But the other Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer, does do real investigative journalism for Harper's Magazine.
So just in case our identities were confused there.
I often get credit for being him, and he gets blamed for being me.
But hey.
Well, you're interviewing me, so I'm giving you credit.
Cool.
And you know what?
There have been some original stories reported on this show from time to time.
So hey.
Yeah.
All right.
And speaking of which, so let's talk about this report.
So we have this third major gas attack in Syria.
First was Ghouta, which was in 2013.
And then in 2017 was Khan Sheikhoun, and then in 2018, Douma here.
So we're discussing the third one.
And this is essentially like Ghouta.
This is a suburb east of Damascus, is that right?
I believe so.
Okay.
And then now we have two major events that took place here.
One at an apartment building, and then, as far as I understand, seemingly a separate event that took place with some bomb shelters where people were essentially suffocating on dust in bomb shelters and had gone to the hospital, and then the White Helmets had sort of turned that into an impromptu stunt, it seemed like there.
But anyway, at this point, I guess I'd like to let you take it from whichever direction you want.
Do you have a list of problems that you guys had with the report?
Or maybe if you want to give us a little bit of a summary of the official story in the first place, at least, or something like that?
Well, I guess it's good to start in general with a timeline.
Okay.
April 7th, 2018, there's the alleged or purported chemical attack in Douma.
On April 14th, just one week later, and well before any kind of onsite investigation was able to take place, the United States, Britain, and France launch a series of airstrikes around Damascus, allegedly in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack that had yet to be proven.
The State Department just immediately on the day, April 7th, when this purported incident took place, the State Department immediately blamed the Assad government saying that they must be held accountable and that, quote, Russia ultimately bears responsibility before any kind of probe had taken place.
So how legitimate is that?
And then because there was a lot of bombing going on, the OPCW inspectors were not actually able to get onsite or on the ground until May 31st, so well after a month.
So you can see how much time there was to change the scene on the ground.
If somebody wanted to do a put-up job, it would have been easy.
July 6th, 2018, the OPCW issues an interim report.
The interim report is very process-oriented.
They don't dwell much on the analysis, but they do make a finding, which is interesting.
They say, quote, no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected either in environmental or plasmas samples from alleged casualties.
Although that interesting statement was left out of the final report, and the final report wasn't actually issued until March of 2019.
And there was a post-deployment investigation.
There was like a group that went back to Syria months later before the final report was issued.
But interestingly enough, that delegation excluded all but one of the original inspection team that had gone to Douma on the ground to see what was going on.
And so this whistleblower who spoke with our panel on October the 15th gave us just a whole slew of information, including primary sources, texts, emails, showing very strange occurrences in the decision-making process.
Again, the investigators who were originally on the ground in Douma, they were not included in the drafting process for the final report.
None of them even knew that it was issued to the public until after it was published.
I mean, it was really strange.
There were some methodology issues.
There was no, for example, there were 39 witnesses interviewed.
Twenty-one of them were interviewed in a country other than Syria.
It was identified to us as country X, which we assumed to be an adjacent country, probably controlled by the U.S.
Twenty-one witnesses of this incident or purported witnesses were interviewed there, and only 13 witnesses were interviewed inside Syria, which in itself is very strange.
And there is no indication how the witnesses were selected, how they were screened, or who did this process.
Five more witnesses were interviewed in this country X much later on from October 14th to the 22nd.
There was no set or standard line of questioning.
Very strange.
And as far as the identity of the witnesses, our whistleblower was hesitant.
He wanted to protect their identities.
But there were interesting statements from the hospital staff who were also interviewed.
They said that many of the people that they saw perished from suffocation, from the dust and rubble, because there was a lot of heavy bombing and shelling going on in Douma at the time of the alleged attack.
They say that suddenly, with no warning, some of them who were covered with smoke and dust just started screaming, chemical, chemical.
And then all of a sudden there were people who were rushing into the hospital, not necessarily hospital staff, just people rushing in, dousing kids with water, giving them inhalers and generating a huge atmosphere of panic inside the hospital.
The white helmets were also involved in the interviews.
And of course, that could be problematic because the white helmets have been linked to jihadist elements and moderate rebel elements who would be clearly biased in favor of blaming the Syrian government.
So also the fact finding commission believes that the final report is, quote, scientifically impoverished and possibly fraudulent.
And the reason they said these things was because the final report talked about that there were levels of chlorinated compounds detected, but they didn't say what the levels were and they didn't contain any of the key analysis that these senior scientists worked so hard to produce.
And the reason this is important, Scott, is that the evidence we were shown on October 15th indicated that the levels of chlorinated compounds and the levels of toxins, and I have the scientific names here if you're interested in the levels of toxins that were called chemical weapons.
These three, dichloroacetic acid, trichloroacetic acid and chloral hydrate are all present in drinking water and they're also present in coffee.
And the levels that these scientists found, they were actually less than what you would find in a glass of drinking water or in coffee.
And guess what?
That information, though available in the reports, it was left out of the final report.
Well, and you mentioned earlier, I want to go back to what you said about the sarin part, because this did make news even in the interim report that, well, I don't know how much mainstream news it made, but for people paying close attention, it was pointed out that, oh, look, see, they even say there was no sarin, no indication of sarin, but they're still looking at the possibility of chlorine and it looks like maybe there's some chlorine.
Anyway, the point being that you said that that was excluded from the final report, the statement that they were unable to find any sarin or sarin byproducts that you would find on breakdown.
But I wonder if in the final report, did they say anything positive about sarin at all or they just dropped their debunking of the major claim here that this was a sarin attack and they just ignored that and only addressed the chlorine?
Is that how it was?
You know, to be honest, I haven't read the entire final report.
I kind of came to this as pretty much a layman in terms of knowing about scientific things.
And I actually attended this panel on quite short notice.
But all the information that I have just indicated that there was a very sort of vague statement about some kind of chlorinated compounds found.
And it's just really odd because the information that I have here says that only one of two labs actually recorded any kind of chlorinated item.
I didn't see any reference to sarin during the presentation.
So it sounds like it's quite possible that it was simply completely removed from the final report.
It wasn't mentioned at all by the whistleblower.
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Okay, so now at the apartment building, this was where even Ted Postol believed the story for a while that this had been a chlorine attack, that these canisters had been dropped by helicopters, apparently, into this apartment building, and that the chlorine gas, being so heavy, had seeped right down the stairwell from this one room where it had all been concentrated, and then gone down the stairwell and had killed all these people.
But then it turned out that there was leaked an annex, a secret annex, or at least a buried annex to the final report, and that was done by the OPCW experts.
They're computer models, trying to replicate what it would look like to have metal canisters like this drop through the ceiling of an apartment building like this, and what that would look like and so forth.
And they said that that was completely unbelievable.
Not believable that it had happened that way.
And Postol came on this show and said he changed his mind and he was wrong, and when he looked at the leaked annex, that no, their story makes much more sense here, that those canisters were simply placed there for the photos, and that those people had died some other way.
And it was because of the science of the impact of the metal canisters on the concrete, and how they would have behaved.
And credit to Bernard at Moon of Alabama who got that right from the very beginning, that these obviously were just staged here, I think one on a balcony and one on a bed in a room.
But so, yeah, it turned out that both halves of this story were a hoax, or all three.
So there was no chemical attack for the kids at the hospital, no chemical attack at the apartment building, and on top of that, definitely no sarin, which was the cause of Spelly, right?
If they had just said it was a chlorine attack in the first place, they probably wouldn't have used that as an excuse to launch tomahawks and everything.
So amounts to nothing, sounds like.
Well, you know, it certainly raises major questions, and even with this huge wealth of evidence that definitely sort of puts the OPC in a corner where it really needs to take responsibility and respond to these allegations, it's amazing how various international journalists have put the question to the OPC, how do you respond to this, all this information?
And they simply, there has been no reply from them, you know, which is really unfortunate because all these whistleblowers want, and they, you know, this was made clear at our briefing in Brussels, all they want is transparency, all they want is the ability to express their dissenting views from the final report, show their evidence, and they said, you know, we don't want to go unquestioned or unchallenged.
We want people to question us, we want people to challenge us, we want to be able to do this in an open forum, and that's all they're asking.
Many of them say that there are many people of very high reputation and ability in the OPCW, and they really would like to see it straighten out and become the prestigious organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize back in 2013.
Many of them are actually, you know, there's actually more than one whistleblower that they're disheartened about having to go public with this.
They tried to go through the channels, and they wanted to discuss this with the leadership of the OPCW, and they were rebuffed, you know, so they came to us, and, you know, if I may, I mean, there were a couple of interesting observations that they found to be contradictory.
For example, they said that some witnesses that were interviewed said that they could hear the sound of cylinders dropping at, you know, during the time that this allegedly occurred, which apparently was also a time when there was intense aerial bombardment of the area.
So they say, though, that amid all this bombardment, they heard the cylinders drop, and that they didn't explode, and the scientists immediately wanted to know, but how could you actually hear two cylinders dropping and not exploding when there's bombing all around you?
And they characterized the witness statements as incoherent and inconsistent, and not consistent with any of the facts and findings that they were able to find.
They also said that some of the casualties coming into the hospital, again, this is quoting hospital staff who witnessed people coming in, they said they had, some of them had symptoms of excess salivation, frothing at the mouth, and that these symptoms were not consistent with chlorine poisoning.
So there was some confusion, and they said that it's possible that they could have been exposed to some other kind of nerve agent, but even that wasn't clear as well.
And they concluded that, you know, A, either the victims were exposed to a toxic CW agent that they were not able to discern, or the 43 fatalities were due to a nonchemical weapons incident.
In other words, the question was, were these supposed victims of a chemical weapon attack, were they killed by something else?
And because once the OPCW fact-finding mission got to Syria, they couldn't exhume the victims.
They had all been put in a mass grave.
They were not able to find the exact cause of death.
So there's just so many unknowns, and, you know, again, all they're asking is, can we present the reports that were not allowed to be shown in the final report?
Can we at least have a dissent?
You might recall that back when that notorious 2002 national intelligence estimate on Iraq came out, there actually was one dissenting party.
It was the Department of State.
And they said, no, we don't believe there's enough evidence here to show that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, and that those famous dual-use cylinders, we cannot say definitive that they are for chemical weapons.
So dissent is very important.
And even though it went on to be used as a basis for war, at least there was one agency that went on record to say, we don't buy this.
That's all these people are asking, is the right to dissent.
And for some reason, the fact-finding mission, which is a part of the OPCW, but somehow an entity unto itself, it has to report directly to the chief of cabinet of OPCW.
There's no peer review allowed of their assessments.
There's no challenging allowed to their assessments.
The rest of the OPCW is excluded from questioning or participating in evaluating the fact-finding mission's findings.
So this goes to the chief of cabinet, which then sends the documents directly to the OPCW director general.
And one of the emails that I saw, Scott, there was a reference to the need to have the language in the final report that would, quote, make the politicians happy or satisfy the politicians.
Now, there's no reference to who those politicians were.
And I have to say that this document that I'm quoting hasn't been released.
I'm sure it will at some point, but it was part of the evidence, the primary evidence that was shown to us that there was a politicization of this report and that the OPCW does have to answer who was pressuring the OPCW to leave out so much important information.
And don't they know that this kind of skewed reporting can result in another terrible war?
It already killed people during the bombing on April the 14th.
How many more people are going to have to lose their lives?
I mean, this is not a small matter at all.
Well, and that's the thing, too, is those strikes, the proposed strikes under Obama after Ghouta, and then the actual strikes that Trump carried out after Khan Sheikhoun and Douma against the Syrian regime, they amounted to pretty small scale strikes.
I think the military didn't really want to hit them very hard, but it sure could have gone the other way.
It could have really escalated from there into the regime change war that so many factions always wanted.
And it's pretty clear, and I know the other two attacks are outside of your purview for this interview and everything, but it's pretty clear that in all three of these cases, you essentially had al-Qaeda and their allies frame these things up, in Khan Sheikhoun, I think kind of after the fact they improvised, but still, in order to essentially act as false flag attacks to get the United States to take their side, to finally go all the way and bomb Damascus and change the regime, give them the opportunity to really get in there and overthrow Assad.
That's clearly the most likely explanation for all three of these attacks at this point.
Well, we know what our country's agenda is with regard to getting at Syria, getting the regime changed, and then we've also set our sights on Iran.
But the tragedy in all of this is taking a formerly very prestigious organization like the OPCW and pressuring the leadership so much where they're compromising their own reputation and they're skewing results to try to serve an agenda that doesn't serve anyone but the powers that be, you know, superpowers and their interests.
So that, to me, is a terrible thing where multilateral organizations start serving a unilateral agenda.
To me, that's an international tragedy.
And you're right, I mean, this is a playbook that we've seen over and over again, and it's not just the OPCW.
We know what happened to Mohammed al-Baradei from the International Atomic Agency when, again, you know, the United States thought he wasn't serving the campaign to go to war against Iraq, and he was replaced with Amano, who was much more compliant with the U.S. agenda.
And they did the same thing to Mary Robinson of the UN High Commission for Refugees when she started criticizing Israel's bombardment of the Palestinians.
She was also pushed out.
So I think we've seen this over and over again.
And you know, you have to wonder if there are any independent multilateral international organizations left.
Nah, I mean, they always were just a fig leaf for American power.
So it's, you know, shouldn't be too much of a surprise that this is how it works out.
But, you know, they can be very useful in preventing more, at least, you know, putting off war.
The IAEA, for example, has done heroic work in keeping America from attacking Iran over the years.
So there is some of that.
You know, America creates these institutions and then gets all upset when they get in our way.
But a lot of times, you know, their rules and regulations can be used as the excuse to attack, too.
Right?
George W. Bush invoked UN resolutions when he launched the war against Iraq.
Even though he didn't get his second vote, he just invoked the first one and the few before that claim that Iraq was in violation of them.
Yes, indeed.
And it seems like the U.S. is doing this more and more aggressively in order to promote its own agendas.
The sad thing is that once people catch on that these organizations are serving another agenda, you know, I don't know who's going to listen to what they have to say.
And certainly the mainstream narrative is still captive of the mainstream media.
But, you know, anyone who looks at social media can see how effective it is in disseminating these kind of dissenting reports that come out.
And there's a lot of skepticism.
And that does spread.
And I think that's why people like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are languishing in jail, because Chelsea Manning did a great service in exposing the killing, the gunning down of civilians and troops enjoying it in Iraq.
And of course, WikiLeaks has exposed a lot of other issues related to the politicization of international agencies.
And I think they like the powers that they would like to see an end to that kind of journalism.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Well, I will let you go.
Thank you so much for sharing some time with me this evening to record this thing.
It's such an important case.
And I really appreciate the work that you've done and hoping to bring attention to it.
Well, thank you, Scott.
All right.
You guys, that is Elizabeth Murray, formerly worked on the National Intelligence Council and is now, you know, served as part of this panel for the Courage Foundation with Jose Bustami and Richard Falk and other greats taking a critical look at the OPCW's report on the Douma attack of April 2018.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
