Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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 names, man, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and international security at MIT.
And so the last time we spoke was just a couple of months ago, and it was in regards to this article in The Intercept by James Harkin from February, called What Happened in Douma?
Searching for Facts in the Fog of Syria's Propaganda War.
And according to this article, half of the story of the Douma chemical attack was correct.
The part about the kids at the hospital being hosed down and all that, that was just dust inhalation and a hoax.
But the chlorine attack a few blocks away, it seemed might be true.
And they quoted our guest, Ted Postol, saying he thought so too.
And yet there are new developments in this case, which is a previously secret study by engineers from the OPCW, the Organization for Prevention of Chemical Weapons, and it sheds a whole new light on the situation.
So welcome to the show, Ted.
Great to talk to you again.
My pleasure to be here.
Good to talk to you, and especially I appreciate you joining us on a Sunday here.
Can you tell us, what did you learn from this report?
Well, the report is a highly professional, very high quality engineering analysis that was carefully written by someone who was summarizing a team effort that was a group of very expert individuals with various engineering capabilities.
And basically what the report unambiguously concludes, actually it provides unambiguous evidence in support of that conclusion, that the gas attacks, the chlorine cylinder gas attacks in Douma were staged.
That is to say they were set up by somebody to make it look like the Syrian government had actually executed those attacks.
Okay, so when we talked, we got to, well, they must have been dropped by government helicopters, because they must have been dropped by, you know, there's no other air power in the sky, so it must have been that.
So what was it that you had missed the first time around in analyzing the evidence that was available to you there?
Well, the way the interview with Mr. Harkin went, incidentally I did miss it, to be clear, but the way the interview with Mr. Harkin went is he asked me if it was plausible that a bunch of people could have been killed in that building.
So I wasn't at all focused on the credibility of the scene, although I must candidly state that it hadn't occurred to me that it was staged.
It was not even in my, you know, I didn't even think about the possibility.
But I was focused on the question of whether it was possible that the chlorine could have killed a bunch of people.
The reason this was an issue is that chlorine, if it's highly concentrated, can, of course, kill people.
But the nature of these attacks is that a chlorine cylinder typically drops on the ground.
The chlorine is given off.
It takes a while for the chlorine to come out of the canister.
It's kind of a yellowish, greenish color.
It tends to hug the ground because it's heavier than air.
So you can think of it as looking like a ground fog, although it has color, unlike a ground fog.
And if you were in the plume and close to the cylinder, you could potentially be killed by toxic exposure.
But as long as you're not on the ground and unconscious in the plume, you would know to step out of the plume and you would be, you know, you'd be able to survive.
It's not like a nerve agent where one whiff of it will kill you.
So my understanding of these chlorine attacks is basically that you could kill people in some situations, but most of the effect is to scare people.
And most people don't know the difference between a chlorine attack and a nerve agent attack.
They know that there are these deadly nerve agent attacks.
And if you want to scare people into leaving an area, for example, maybe you're going to send troops in or you just want the population to run away, you drop these chlorine cylinders.
Incidentally, this is not to suggest I approve.
You drop these chlorine cylinders, and, you know, a kilometer away, you can smell the chlorine in the air, even though it's not even close to toxic.
So for very long distances, people can smell chlorine.
They associate it with something like a nerve agent attack, and you really scare people and cause them to leave.
So that's why it's rare that you would kill people with a chlorine attack.
You can kill people if they are in a basement and they don't get out of the basement.
In other words, the chlorine could just sort of seep down through windows to the outside and reside in the basement at a high enough concentration that it could kill people.
But unless there's something to keep people in the basement, people will just run out of the basement.
And there is a general understanding, a rule that actually, I think, could have resulted in the deaths that we thought might have occurred.
Because what people are told is if there's a chlorine attack, run up to the top of a building.
And the reason for that is the chlorine tends to stick close to the ground, where it's most dense, close to the ground.
So that's a good strategy for minimizing your exposure.
So what I thought happened when Harkin approached me, because I couldn't understand why there were a lot of people killed.
I think there was some 30-odd people supposedly killed in this attack, and I couldn't understand it.
But when he showed me the images of this chlorine cylinder with its head sticking into a hole in the roof, I said, oh, now I can understand how this happened.
Because what would have happened if this had not been a staged attack, the chlorine would have been pouring into the building, sort of like injecting the chlorine into the building.
And it would have filled the room at the top of the building with an extremely high concentration of chlorine, enough that even though chlorine is not as toxic as you would think, certainly relative to nerve agent, if you opened the door to that room and the chlorine came out, just getting hit with that level of concentration of chlorine, you'd probably just drop to the floor.
Not necessarily killed instantly, but unconscious.
It was just a very, very dense level of chlorine.
So what I told Harkin is, well, I don't know what really happened, but here's what I think could have happened.
And so I explained how the chlorine could be very dense in the room.
It would have basically diffused out of the room or poured out of the room, almost like a fluid.
And because, again, it's low density, I mean, it's high density.
It weighs a lot more than the density of air.
And it would have just come down the stairs in this building.
It was a central staircase.
And it would have filled the building gradually with a very high concentration of chlorine.
And people in the building, again, this was speculation, would have certainly smelled the chlorine very quickly.
But it would not have been at a lethal concentration.
If you were on the ground floor of the building and you understood what was happening and you just opened the door and ran out of the building, you'd be fine.
But I speculated that the people, of course, they smelled the chlorine and they did what they understood was the smart thing to do, which was to go to the top of the building.
And, of course, when they went to the top of the building, they ran right into a wall of highly concentrated chlorine, so dense that they basically lost consciousness.
And once you lose consciousness, you're not mobile and you die in the remaining minutes of exposure.
So that's what I speculated had actually happened, you know, to Harkin.
And I had done some calculations for him and I went through it all with him so that he would have some idea.
Well, we talked about it on the show a couple of months ago, too.
Yeah, yeah.
And so that's what I thought the situation was.
But then I saw this engineering analysis.
I said, oh, my goodness, these guys are right.
I didn't know what I was talking about.
What they did is they inspected the scene.
This team was a lot of different people.
There was a very experienced group of people on the ground at the site of the alleged chlorine attack.
And they looked at the scene.
And my guess, I can't be sure, but my guess is the people on the scene immediately thought that they were staging.
And the reason I think, again, I'm speculating.
The reason I think they immediately thought they were staging was because there was a hole in the roof where the cylinder was inserted.
And that hole apparently, well, not surprisingly, looked like the holes in other roofs that had been hit with artillery rocket shells or mortars.
So they saw these kinds of holes in other buildings.
And these were experts.
They understood what the effects of an explosive charge would be in terms of creating the hole.
And they must have been immediately suspicious.
That's my guess.
But what they did is they went back to their home headquarters.
And they, the team, and it was a significant team, got together with some people who are experts in modeling how objects behave when they hit reinforced concrete, steel walls and ceilings.
There's a lot of work done on this because obviously people are worried about the integrity of buildings when they're constructed.
So there are these elaborate computer programs that, of course, you have to know what you're doing to put in the right parameters.
But they found some people who were experts in this.
And they simulated the dropping of a chlorine cylinder onto the roof.
And basically what they found is that the chlorine cylinder, if it hit the roof while it was falling in a vertical orientation, it would have gone right through the roof like a bullet goes through glass.
If the roof were to fail, it was just going to punch a hole in the roof and go right through.
So they couldn't find any scenario where the chlorine cylinder hit the roof, punched a hole in it, and stopped on the roof.
And they tried all kinds of things.
Instead of dropping the cylinder in a vertical direction, they dropped it horizontal to the roof, still went through the roof.
They assumed the cylinder that was empty, so it was much lighter, still went through the roof.
So then they went back and looked at the cylinder itself.
And they found that the markings, the places on the cylinder that were bent, because it hit something at a high speed.
And they couldn't match up the areas on the cylinder, the surfaces on the cylinder that were bent, with the damage on the concrete that it supposedly hit.
So basically they said the damage on the cylinder was not compatible with the damage it should have been producing on the roof.
Hence the scene was staged.
Someone had taken that cylinder from somewhere else and put it on the roof.
There was already a hole in the roof, and the cylinder was placed there.
So I think it was a first class piece of forensic technical analysis on the part of the OPCW inspection team.
Now what's really interesting is that there was an OPCW report that was published and provided to the UN Security Council.
And the report...
Oh wait, hold that thought for a minute.
I want to talk about some of the findings here for just a second.
I'm a little bit surprised, I actually only got halfway through the report before it's time to call you this morning.
Or I guess this afternoon, sorry.
Go ahead.
But I'm a little bit surprised, or I'd like a little bit of elaboration.
Does that sound right to you, that even if they dropped it horizontally, it would have punched right through steel-reinforced concrete and kept going?
Rather than when it's made out of steel, it's like a propane tank essentially, it wouldn't have exploded?
The tank itself would not have torn apart?
The tank, what they found in the cases where they dropped the chlorine cylinder roughly horizontal, it created a much longer hole, it sort of had an elongated hole, because there was another scene that they analyzed where a chlorine container had supposedly punched through the roof.
But what they also found is that the steel rebar, the rebar in the concrete, should have produced indents on the actual cylinder.
So the cylinder would have had stripes on it, indents, where it had interacted with the rebar.
And the rebar, according to their calculations, would have been stretched and failed, and would have been basically pointing roughly downward, as it failed, as the cylinder passed through.
Instead, the rebar was splayed outward, sort of imagine if you had a flower that was facing down through the crater, and the petals of the flower would be splayed out.
In other words, much more like an artillery shell had gone off there.
And in fact, they explained that by an explosive effect.
In other words, that's what you see when an explosive shell hits a concrete and steel wall and then blows through the wall.
It's that kind of phenomenon.
You see the rebar is splayed out like the petals of a flower, you know, facing through the wall.
So these guys were clearly experienced, and they knew what they were seeing, and they said, gee whiz, this doesn't look right.
Now, I don't know if they realized, you know, I'm reconstructing what I think happened based on the full discussion that I read.
They may or may not have known, the people on the scene may or may not have known to expect that there would be indents in the cylinder, but that was produced in the calculations where the cylinder penetrates through the roof by momentum.
And, you know, so my guess, again, it's a guess, it's not stated in the report itself.
What's stated in the report is, you know, discusses the rebar.
My guess is that people on the scene who obviously were experts, when you look at their description of what was going on, for example, they talked about a phenomenon called spallation.
Spallation occurs when you have a very intense shockwave passing through a solid, and eventually the shockwave gets to the other side of the solid.
And there's no material to cause a restoring force from the shockwave, and the wall just separates into fragments, and the fragments travel at high speed, you know, from the shattered inner wall, you know, from the shockwave.
And they talked about spallation, you know, concrete pieces that had traveled at high speed through the room below where the hole was.
And they say correctly that you would not have all these spallation fragments if the cylinder had gone through on its own, because you would have had big pieces of concrete, you would have had pieces of concrete, but they basically would have fallen vertically.
They wouldn't have gone, they wouldn't have traveled at high speed, you know, throughout in all directions of the room like they've described.
So whoever was looking at this probably was suspicious right from the beginning.
That's my guess, of course.
But certainly what is described in the analysis is the expert observations of people who were on the scene who knew what they were doing, and expert calculations by a totally different group of people who were truly expert in modeling the impact and piercing of a concrete and steel wall by a projectile.
That's clear.
So there were different groups involved, coordinated with each other, trying to solve this problem.
So this was not somebody who sat on a desk somewhere and just figured it out on their own.
This was a significant activity, which raises questions about why was it not reported?
Well, that's the whole thing, right?
These guys, however good of a job they did, they're the authoritative source in the world.
They're the OPCW.
And then this is what you were about to talk about is how they delivered a report to the UN Security Council that omitted all of this information.
Well, the good news is that somebody did this analysis probably under considerable internal pressure not to do it.
That's my guess.
Having worked in the Pentagon and the big bureaucracy, my guess is these characters are heroes.
They just said, this is our job, we're doing it, even though they were probably discouraged from doing it.
At least I don't know, but hopefully we will eventually find out.
Well, certainly against the consensus in the popular narrative, that's for sure.
Well, I think this is a political job.
The people above them, the people who have the oversight and reporting authority for the OPCW are the ones who are culpable here.
And they are culpable.
I want to be very clear.
This is not error.
This is fraud.
So error would be if you saw somebody did some work and they sort of made a mistake.
Error is what I did.
I had no idea.
I didn't know to look into this.
I didn't see the scene directly.
I had not had a chance to inspect everything.
I had not thought about the penetration problem.
So I was wrong.
But it's different from being wrong and having an elaborate scenario that you describe as if you studied it, and then it turns out not to be what you claim.
So let me explain what I mean by this.
If you read the actual report that was provided to the UN Security Council, there's a lot of language in that report borrowed from the OPCW leaked engineering report.
The report to the UN Security Council has a long discussion about the computational analyses that is also described in a leaked report.
The problem is the computational analyses proved that the scenes were staged.
The report that went to the UN Security Council borrowed the technical language from the engineering report and then changed the finding.
That is not error.
And what did they change the finding to?
Well, they found that the evidence showed that the Syrian Arab Republic was responsible for the attack.
That's what they said.
And so, yeah, that's not just an error of omission when, as you say, they went cherry-picking through this report, this buried report, for some of their language.
It's active fraud.
It is not an accident.
There is no way you would take the language that describes this detailed, very carefully done, highly professional analysis, go through it as they did in the public report, and then report the exact opposite of what that analysis showed.
It's just, you know, it's totally impossible to do.
Yeah.
You know, they're zero for three now.
Gouda, Khan Sheikhoun, and Douma.
It looked like maybe half of Douma was right, but nope, not even half of it.
Three major chemical attacks blamed on the Syrian government, none of which hold up.
And all of which, one of them almost led to strikes, two of which did lead to strikes.
But the OPCW report on Gouda was, I think, a very good report based on what they looked at.
In other words, there was no fraud in the OPCW report on Gouda.
There was fraud in the report on Khan Sheikhoun, and there was fraud in the report on Douma.
So something changed at the UN.
Now, the United States made fraudulent claims or claims that were wrong about Gouda.
So, for example, somebody should ask John Kerry, how did he make the claims that he made before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee?
Right.
But now the OPCW, what did they find on Gouda as their final conclusion there?
What the OPCW found was that there were these rockets, which I might point out, the rockets that delivered the sarin were first described by Dick Lloyd, my colleague, and me.
The UN found them a week afterward when they went in, and the New York Times published an article about what Dick Lloyd and I predicted had been the delivery systems.
And the reason was there were a lot of videos taken of the impact vehicles of the munitions, and Dick and I figured out that it was a rocket with a barrel attached to it filled with sarin.
And so we were the first to understand what the munition was.
We were also the first to understand, although later, that the munition could only travel a range of maybe two kilometers.
Whereas the U.S. government, the White House, and John Kerry claiming that his insights were from the U.S. intelligence community, was claiming a range of 16 kilometers for these sarin-containing missiles.
That was nonsense.
It was not true.
And I don't know where he got that number, because I don't believe he got it from the intelligence community.
Because after Dick and I published that result, the UN security team was asked in a hearing, did they agree with our finding, and they agreed.
So they agreed that the munition only went two kilometers.
The UN what agreed?
The UN, it was not part of their formal report.
But what happened is there was a press conference, and Oka Selstrom, the leader of the Gouda team, was asked about this munition.
He was asked something like, this MIT team reported this munition could only go two kilometers, and they asked him what he thought, and he said, well, we think that that's probably right.
Which was everything at the time, because the government sites were nine kilometers away, and so the hawks were saying, oh yeah, well, that was how we know it was fired from nine kilometers away, because that's where the government is, and this kind of question-begging.
Exactly, exactly.
If you had to make a guess, you still don't know who launched the attack, but if you had to make a guess, overwhelmingly the guess would be it was rebels killing their own people, because the areas from which these munitions had to be launched were rebel-controlled areas.
So it probably was a false flag attack by every probabilistic estimate you can make.
So in their final report, obviously they didn't say that, they wouldn't go that far, but they essentially agreed with your conclusion about the kind of rockets and the range and everything in their report, too?
Well, they never put it in their report, but the report had already been written when this discussion took place.
But they publicly agreed with the finding.
But you said that, compared to the other two, you didn't think this report was fraudulent.
Does that mean it was mistaken, or it was more or less correct?
No, I think it was a good report, given what they were trying to do.
They weren't focused on the range of the munition.
If they had been given the job of determining attribution, and they had more resources, they might well have analyzed the situation as we did.
They weren't assigned to solve the crime, they were assigned to...
To determine whether or not it was a siren attack.
I see.
So I don't hold them at fault for it.
I think the UN should have provided them with more resources, but everything at the UN is so cumbersome because of the need to get agreement from so many different groups, states.
But I think the Selstrom report was very well done within the constraints that Selstrom was told to operate.
He followed his orders, and he did a good job.
And he found evidence of siren.
He would not ascribe it to the Syrian Arab Republic, in spite of enormous pressures, public pressures that were put on him, because the analysis of the siren that the UN had done, apparently, I'm only saying apparently, because he would not say anything, apparently did not have the markers associated with Syrian government siren.
There tend to be trace chemicals when you produce the siren that tends to be somewhat unique to each country's chemical fabrication activity.
So they did not say the siren was identified as coming from the Syrian Arab Republic.
So they just said they couldn't identify the source of the siren.
That was the right thing to do, given that they couldn't.
So I think they did a good job.
It was a highly professional job.
It would have been nice if more had been done, but he's operating in a highly constrained bureaucratic environment, and he can't take actions that he hasn't been allowed to do.
And when he was asked at a press conference, they had obviously seen our report.
Obviously, they had enough information to verify to their satisfaction that we were correct.
And when the journalist asked him, he said, yes, we agree.
So I have no problem at all with Dr. Sosrom.
I think he did a good job.
And now is he the same guy in charge of the other two, or there was a regime change at the OPCW in the meantime?
No, no, no, he was not in charge.
I know, I happen to know, I can't say why, I'm sorry to say, but I know for a fact that he was under consideration for leading the other teams, and for some reason he was not chosen, which I find interesting.
And then, but on the other two, on Khan Sheikhoun and… He was not in charge of Khan Sheikhoun, and he was not in charge of Douma.
And on those reports both, well, we talked about Douma, but on Khan Sheikhoun, they were also willfully misleading there?
I would say the Khan Sheikhoun report is definitely as willfully misleading as the Douma report, for different reasons, because I have different evidence.
But the evidence that I accumulated, in fact, as you may already know, the evidence I accumulated was provided to the UN Security Council on April 15.
I wrote a report, a cover letter with supporting documents, and sent it to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and the president of the UN Security Council was at that time, it was Germany, on April 15 earlier.
So, that report was presumably floating around the UN for at least four and a half, five weeks before the leaked report about Douma.
Now, I don't, this is wild speculation, I want to be clear, I'm not taking credit for anything here, but knowing bureaucracies and how people sometimes get stimulated to do things, having been one myself, I don't rule out the possibility that people at the lower, at the working level, I won't say lower, at the working level, may have seen my report and said, God damn it, I've had it, with this lying, and leaked this document.
It's entirely possible.
Yeah, pretty close correlation there, if not causation, so reasonable cause for speculation along those lines, I'd say.
Yeah, well, if you look at the date the document was finished, it was February 27, 2019, and the fraudulent report was issued March 1 of 2019.
And my guess is there were people who had called this to the attention of the OPCW leadership, who was obviously politicizing the results, and that this report was just written well after the results had already been determined.
And these guys just said, or someone just said, this is enough, we're leaking it.
You know, you have different teams pulling things together.
The guys who are out looking at the damage area from April of 2018, they already would have been telling you, there's a real problem with the scenes, it looks like staging.
Yeah, the guys who did this report, that was cherry-picked for the official report, that then came to all these completely different conclusions, they might have taken that personally, I might.
Well, I wouldn't even say personally, they're professionals.
You don't waste your time being a professional at the UN so that your reports can be distorted.
These are dedicated people.
I look upon them like soldiers.
These are people who work for what they believe, and it may be right or wrong, but they work for what they believe is the right thing to do.
You don't go to work for the UN as a technical person so that you can be a participant in fraudulently – not if you're a real professional.
Maybe if you're a politicized individual and you're looking to advance yourself with the Americans or the French or the Brits, all of whom I think are involved in this.
I can't prove it, but I think they're behind it.
If you're looking to advance yourself politically, because you're a political person, yes, that's what you do.
But if you're a professional dedicating your life to finding the proof, you're not going to do this.
Yeah, it's a simple matter of integrity, right?
Right.
I think this shows a very high level of integrity and a very high level of professionalism, because that report is a real professional masterpiece.
It's well done.
Well, so I would say everyone can find – I was getting an internet error.
I'm sure it's fixed by now, but the Institute for Public Accuracy, Sam Hussaini's site there, has this great press release that includes a summary of a statement by you, as well as a link to the document.
Moon of Alabama, of course, has been covering this all along, and he has a link to the official report, as well as the new leaked one, and a lot of people want to check that out, as well.
Yes.
Well, you can get the official report right on the UN website.
That's where I got it.
Okay.
Well, there you go, too.
All right.
Well, listen, great to talk to you again, Ted.
Thank you very much for your time.
I sure appreciate it.
Well, I hope this is helpful, and I really want to see the mainstream press start picking up on this.
Yeah, well, good luck with that.
Well, I'm trying.
All right.
Well, you certainly are doing great work, so thank you again.
Well, thank you very much.
So are you.
You're doing great work, as well.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys.
That is Ted Postal.
He is professor of science, technology, and international security at MIT, and you can read this press release again here at the Institute for Public Accuracy.
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