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The Scott Horton Show.
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Introducing our friend Gareth Porter.
He's got a brand new and really important one here at Alternet.
Have we been deceived over Syrian sarin attack?
And by we, he means y'all.
Scrutinizing the evidence in an incident Trump used to justify bombing Syria.
In fact, he used that incident to justify bombing Syria in his United Nations speech just yesterday.
Gareth Porter, of course, is the author of Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare and about 10 million articles telling you the truth all about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria and all over the place.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Gareth?
Thanks again, Scott.
Glad to be back.
All right, good.
Happy to have you here.
All right, hey, so very important story here.
As you said, this was the basis, this was the Causus Belli for Trump to attack the Syrian regime.
Shades of the chemical attack of August, September, well, August, and then which resulted in the almost war of September 2013 that the American people made the president back down and not do the so-called redline attack and all that.
Now, so the same kind of thing happened under Trump's watch and he went ahead and did the airstrikes.
Unbelievably small pinprick strikes, as John Kerry might have said.
But anyway, so you're saying that, yeah, we have real reason to doubt the official reports of the different inspectors and all that, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which I guess that's a subsidiary of the United Nations, is that right?
Right, yeah.
And so, I mean, sorry to say, but I broke this story first.
I had Phil Giraldi citing military and CIA sources doubting the official story the same day and saying that it was a Syrian Air Force conventional strike on a building that had chemicals in it.
And that was what had killed the people.
That was his story.
The day actually recorded that thing, hours before the missile strike took place.
That would have been on April the 6th, I guess.
So anyway, I was first and then Seymour Hersh came out second and then now you got this thing, really going back over all the evidence, the very best we can tell.
And not only do you cast doubt on their story, but you have a better explanation, you think.
So I'll turn the floor over to you and I'll interject and ask follow-ups where I think I need to, but go ahead and I guess start with the crater, right?
Well, I do hope you'll intervene by all means because it's much too long for me to sort of present the whole thing in one spiel.
I would run out of breath.
But let me just try to summarize the most basic findings that I came up with after many, many weeks of investigating this.
This is the most time that I've ever spent on any story that I've ever written as a journalist by far.
And it is the most complex, I have to say.
I mean, it's not easy to piece together this story.
And the evidence of how difficult it is that no one is happy.
I'm not gonna say no one's happy, but most people are not gonna be happy with, and have already begun to express dissatisfaction with my analysis, my piecing together of the story.
So, I mean, that's just by way of introduction to- Well, and listen, let me go ahead and say here, I'm not familiar with all the objections.
So wherever you feel like working them in and say, now, listen, people have tried to quibble with this, but here's why I still think so, and that kind of thing.
And feel free to go ahead and add those things too.
Well, I don't know if I can do that because it would make it impossible to cover even the most basic basis of my story.
But I can tell you that Elliot Higgins has already weighed in on Twitter and then carried out a very determined attack on my article in a series of volleys, but one in particular that went to more than 20, as I recall, more than 20 tweets.
So, and I've tried to respond to some of them on Twitter, but I said, look, I'm not gonna respond to everything in 145 characters.
And I've written a follow-up that should be published if it hasn't been already published by now at Alternet.
So let me just run through the few basic pieces of the story that I have come up with.
The first point is that the story about the Sarin bomb crater, that is this hole in the middle of the road in Khan Sheikhoun with, which just happens to have, according to the videos and photographs of it that came out immediately after the event, happens to have a long piece of metal and some sort of filler cap that somehow magically land right in the hole itself.
That could not have happened.
That is simply an impossible story that there was a Sarin attack with a weapon that impacted at that spot and dispersed Sarin that caused the death and injuries.
And there are a number of reasons for that.
Part of it is that, I would say that the single biggest point that I make in my piece is that there should be pieces of the weapon.
They should have been found close by that crater if indeed there had been a Sarin bomb exploded there.
And this was the unanimous opinion of the people who I interviewed for this, including the former Defense Department head of the DOD's office that was in charge of inspections of chemical weapons for the U.S. Russia and the U.S. Soviet, the U.S. Soviet agreement on chemical weapons.
And so this is in the 1990s.
So this guy admitted, acknowledged, because he was trying to come up with a plausible way that this could be explained.
He admitted that the pieces of the weapon should have been found.
They would have fallen within a few dozens, excuse me, a few tens of meters of the crater, but there was nothing.
There was nothing there.
There was nothing ever photographed.
And indeed I interviewed Ole Solvang of Human Rights Watch, who was the author of their very highly publicized report on Khan Sheikhoun.
And he acknowledged to me that he had interviewed dozens of people in and around Khan Sheikhoun who claimed to be witnesses or even eyewitnesses.
And they all told him that they had not seen any evidence of pieces of a weapon.
They had never found or heard of or seen any pieces of a weapon.
So, and of course the local officials there and the media activists never claimed that they'd found it.
This was a huge blank spot.
There was a metal pipe.
You're saying that that wasn't a weapon?
The piece of pipe, yeah.
That is indeed what some people are arguing, that that was part of a weapon.
But without other parts, regardless of the origin and the nature of that piece of metal, that pipe, if you will, there's no case that you can make that there was an explosion of a bomb there.
You can't simply have some long piece of metal and claim that that's the evidence of the weapon.
Now, of course, it's true that Human Rights Watch tried to turn that pipe, if you will, into a former Soviet chemical weapon, a KHAB-250, as they designated it.
But a lot of digging around, particularly by Michael Cubs, a Berlin-based independent forensics expert or researcher, and some of my own research shows that it's simply impossible that that's the case.
For one thing, the pictures that were used by Human Rights Watch or the source that they relied on to make the case showed a former Soviet chemical weapon which had a fill cap, would look like a fill cap, but that picture would not have, the cap that was shown in the crater, pictured in the crater, could not have been the one that fitted into that weapon that was pictured by Human Rights Watch.
So that's just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
And what I found was that that weapon had been introduced in 1945, like 10 to 15 years, no, 10 years at least, before the Soviet Union even had a program to produce sarin.
And so it was not a weapon to disperse sarin.
And it was phased out in the 1960s, in the early 1960s, before, in fact, the Soviet Union did have, had produced sarin.
So that kind of scenario doesn't make any sense.
It's almost like they- The pictures that they relied on were pictures of the military- They just did an image search for, show me a pipe with a green stripe that could fit, and then tried to make it fit, or something like that.
Well, I mean, you know, that so-called green stripe, of course, is not real evidence of anything.
I mean- All right, but now answer me this, though, because it seems like there's a contradiction in your story here, where you quote a bunch of experts saying that, listen, you wouldn't even have a crater like that if it was a chemical round, because if you had enough explosive to create a crater like that, it would destroy all the chemical weapons.
So that makes sense.
You would have just enough explosive to open the thing and disperse the chemical.
But then you say, if it had been this Russian bomb, it would have left an even bigger crater than that.
And so I'm confused about that.
The Russian bomb that Michael Koobs finally located that was the closest thing to a 250, I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to, but that there was a reference to a larger Russian bomb.
It certainly would have created a much bigger crater.
The problem, yeah, I mean, the problem with the story about the crater is that a chemical weapon, sort of a normal chemical weapon, does not create that kind of crater, as you said.
Well, here's the part I'm referring to.
You say, even if it had been the KH-AB-250 and it had somehow appeared in Syria, the bomb could not have made the crater shown to the world as the site of the sarin attack, according to Gilbert, if it had, Gilbert explained, the crater would have been several times larger rather than smaller.
Right, because it was a much larger weapon, right.
I mean, it's true, yeah.
But he was the one who agreed that you would have found the pieces of the weapon.
There's nothing to indicate that there was such a thing.
And I did confront Eliot Higgins with this, by the way.
And his response to that point, that critical point, central point in my article was, well, I asked him to explain it.
He said, I prefer not to speculate.
So he doesn't have any clue as well.
You know, when you ask, where are the tail fins?
Where's the rest of the bomb?
He says, I prefer not to speculate.
In other words, he has no idea.
There's no idea, there's no answer.
And so this whole theory really has no support whatsoever.
And that should probably end, that was enough of an article right there.
But being who I am, I insisted on plowing ahead and trying to figure out, okay, what happened here in this city of 80,000 or so to cause a number of people, a large number of people to die and to be sent to a hospital.
And so that brings me to the story that Cy Hirsch published in Die Welt, which of course is a story of how the Russians use the deconfliction line to tell their American counterparts or counterparts that the Syrian Air Force was going to carry out a strike in Khan Sheikhoun on the 4th and that they were targeting a two-story building, a two-story dwelling that they had intelligence was gonna be used for a high-level jihadist meeting, an Al-Qaeda, maybe Al-Qaeda plus other people, it wasn't clear, meeting.
And furthermore, that there were stores of chemical weapons or they didn't say chemicals, they said pesticides and other supplies that were needed by the population, which is kind of an interesting, different, it's quite different from the initial Russian-Syrian story that they hit a warehouse or a storehouse that had chemicals in it for chemical weapons.
Now, the linkage between those two things, of course, is that I found evidence that the Syrian head of the opposition Hama Province Relief Organization, which of course operates under the authority of Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda and its jihadist or extremist allies, he actually moved to Khan Sheikhoun and he had rented that dwelling with his family.
And furthermore, he was there because he was helping to resettle farmers from northern Hama Province in the Khan Sheikhoun area.
Now, obviously part of the effort to resettle them would involve having insecticides so that they could take care of crops.
And this would account for the fact that there was a lethal gas released on that day.
And here's where I introduced an element of the story that certainly nobody else has ever thought about.
And that is that aluminum phosphide, which is the leading insecticide in the world, and we know that aluminum phosphide was found in Aleppo when the rebels left the city and the Russians and Syrians came in, they found sacks of aluminum phosphide there in a place where they claimed there were other chemicals that could be used for chemical weapon.
Now, aluminum phosphide can produce phosphine gas, which is highly lethal, if it comes in contact with moisture in the air.
Now, in Khan Sheikhoun, it's bound to have moisture in the air, and that would account for, if there was an explosion in an airstrike on a building, it would account for a phosphine gas cloud that could kill and injure dozens of people.
So that is the key linkage that I made.
Now, just to circle back to Sy Hersh's story, the Russian was making the case that there was a possibility that they suspected, let me put it that way, they suspected there were efforts to try to construct chemical weapons from what was found there, or what they had intelligence was located there.
Now, there is, of course, a trail of evidence that shows that both ISIS and Al-Qaeda could have, either did or could have been working on the chemical weapons that involved phosphine gas, and the first indication is that there was, reportedly, use of a chemical weapon with phosphine gas in it used by ISIS against Kurdish fighters in 2016.
And later in that year, as I said, the Russians came across supplies of aluminum phosphide and were suspecting that this must be somehow connected with chemical weapons.
I'm not suggesting that that is necessarily the case, but there is reason to think that the Russians and Syrians had suspicions about that.
So the final piece of evidence is that there was an attack, a bombing attack late last year on the grain, not the grain silos, but a warehouse right next to the grain silos, which basically destroyed one part of that.
You know, it suggests the possibility, at least, that there was a suspicion that there was some sort of supplies of aluminum phosphide that could be used as a chemical weapon.
So all of this, I'm suggesting, adds up to the case that it was that two-story building, which was in Khan Sheikhoun itself, according to multiple witnesses, it wasn't outside the city.
And of course, the official Russian-Syrian account of this is that the target of the airstrike carried out that day was at the White Helmet Complex, which is a few miles outside of Khan Sheikhoun, not in the city itself.
And of course, the timing was different.
The timing of that airstrike outside the city was around 11.30 p.m., and there was a bomb dropped there, no doubt about it.
There was at least one bomb drop, maybe more.
But the evidence that there was an airstrike in the city that destroyed this one dwelling and that two other bombs were dropped, one of which apparently hit a dwelling south of that two-story house, and then a third one, which dropped, didn't cause any damage.
That airstrike did take place on the 4th and accounts for the deaths and injuries.
All right, hang on just one second for me.
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All right, now, so let me ask you this.
I was wondering, or maybe you did say and I missed it, about where the moisture came from that turned this rat poison, this pesticide, into such a dangerous chemical cloud.
And I had wondered whether it was broken plumbing or what, but then you're saying just the moisture in the air.
So I'm wondering, how's anybody supposed to ever put this on their crops when the moisture in the air turns it into a chemical weapon and kills anybody nearby?
Well, you do have to, I mean, here's a little bit of background on aluminum phosphide as an insecticide.
People who disperse the insecticide have to wear protective gear because they know that it is dangerous.
It is highly injurious to human beings to inhale what is associated with the delivery of aluminum phosphide on crops, which is it's done as a fumigant.
So that, you know, they do take care, but we know from published research that people who deliver that particular fumigant suffer from the same sort of impacts on the human body.
That is the impact on the systems that regulate, well, sorry, the system that regulates the release of cholinesterase in the body is affected by all of these insecticides in some fashion.
And this is, it's been documented very well that there is a similarity between the way in which insecticides, including, and including, of course, phosphine gas is a particular case of an insecticide turned into something even more lethal, the way it operates in the human body and sarin.
They're very similar.
They operate in the same way.
Well, so I guess it makes sense.
Also, let me say, Scott, that there are many, just let me add, there are many cases of accidents that have taken place where people, you know, used the solid, what is initially a solid pellet on their lawns or in their houses, and thinking that they're using it in a space that is not gonna threaten the family.
There have been cases of families suffering even lethal doses of the gas from the aluminum phosphide, and other cases as well, where it has escaped from ships which had aluminum phosphide on board, and they thought it was in a tight compartment, but there was leaks, and there were injuries and deaths as well in those cases.
All right, now, so it makes sense, I guess, that so the Syrians bomb a thing that has this pesticide, and it's rat poison is what it was, right?
And then we said, well, it hasn't been used as a rat poison.
I think it's used for other insects as well, but anyway, rat poison is one of them, yeah.
So there's a cloud of poison gas, some people die, we'll get to more about the medical science and all that here in a second, but so then, okay, I mean, I'm speculating here, I'm imagining this part of it, the Al-Qaeda guys say, hey, let's make it look like they just used chemical weapons on us deliberately here, and there's a pothole, and we'll grab a pipe, we'll make it look like this is the impact crater, lights, camera, action, you got the white helmets who are more a PR team than a rescue group anyway, working with Al-Qaeda guys there.
So I guess that's, you know, sort of makes sense, probably makes more sense than, you know, the way that, you know, the official story here that Assad did this for no reason other than his joy at killing civilians or whatever their claim is, when he has everything to lose by doing something like this.
Your scenario is pretty much what I think is what happened.
I wonder if they had said, well, Al-Qaeda's claims are, in the first place, whether anyone would have taken them seriously at all, I mean, here, look at, you're doing all that heavy lifting to debunk the official narrative, which we got from the Soviet Union, we got from the servants of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Butcher of New York City.
How in the hell is that even real?
You mean the eyewitnesses that I'm suggesting are referring to the bomb dropping- Well, I'm talking about the white helmets and the al-Nusra guys who provided all the PR for the official narrative here.
They all work for this guy, al-Jilani, right?
Right, right, yes.
Zawahiri's guy.
So this is where we get our official narrative, and then we have to go to our alternative media to debunk the Al-Qaeda slash USA narrative of the event.
I just, you know, noting that's kind of curious and interesting.
But anyway, so, yeah, I could see it.
Sorry?
I was just saying, yeah, I could see what you're saying, though, that, so this accident takes place, or this effect, this inadvertent effect of this airstrike takes place, and the white helmets swing into action and make a little music video out of it, and next thing you know.
But now you're gonna have to really convince me all about these UN inspectors don't know what they're talking about, and that all the footage of the dying people means what you say it means and not them, so go ahead.
Well, first of all, let me just address the question of what were the Syrians thinking when they carried out the airstrike?
I mean, if I'm correct, what was the motive, what was the intention?
And I really can't answer that precisely.
I mean, in fact, in my piece, I suggest that this is a question that really needs to be addressed to the Russians and the Syrians.
I mean, precisely what was the calculation?
I mean, were you aware of the fact that this aluminum phosphide would have a serious, I mean, hitting that aluminum phosphide in the house would have the serious risk, bear the serious risk of mass casualties in Khan Sheikhoun.
And I don't know if they thought of that, whether they believed that it was going to be a smaller risk or what, but that's a question which clearly arises from the research that I've done.
Now, I don't think either side in this dispute, and by either side, I mean those who hold to the official line and those people who say, oh, it's all, you know, it was a false flag attack are interested in raising that question at this point.
And I'm not, you know, obviously the answer is neither side is interested in raising the question.
And, you know, I don't expect I'm gonna change very many people's minds.
I think that the sides are very, very strongly established in this thing, and that nobody's really interested in that question at this point.
They've already made up their mind.
So I just wanted to make that point.
But to come to the question that you just raised of the OPCW laboratory tests and so forth, I mean, this is a very important point in my view to understand that the report that the OPCW issued, which of course then became the basis for the mass media to reinforce, to reconfirm their finding of the earlier in the year that this was indeed a sarin attack by the Assad government, that this report is subject to very serious problems.
It's very problematic because the tests that they ran, the OPC laboratories, the laboratories that the OPC uses to test the samples that it collects, were subject to very serious problems of being fooled or simply being wrong.
And I talk about both the problem of environmental samples, of course, being tampered with, environmental samples collected by the White Helmets.
I mean, this is a matter of public record.
They showed videos of themselves collecting the samples from the crater and nearby the crater.
And those samples there were then sent to the, given to the OPC to be sent to their various laboratories.
And they of course came back more or less, not completely, but mostly positive for exposure to sarin.
But I show that, first of all, the tests that were done were basically tests that could not distinguish between sarin that had been exploded by a bomb or dispersed by a bomb and sarin that was planted by somebody in the Al-Qaeda authority there in Khan Sheikhoun.
I mean, in other words, they had no way of knowing where this came from.
And so the whole sampling process, the use of those samples was inherently deceptive.
And I'd go on to point out that the OPC itself adopted a rule four years ago, in 2013, when this question of chemical weapons use in first came up in Syria, that they would not use any samples, either biomedical samples or environmental samples that had not been collected by the OPCW staff itself.
And for very good reason, because it is relatively simple to tamper with samples.
And in this case, of course, there is a lot of information indicating that Al-Qaeda was working on getting access to sarin.
And despite the fact that the UK and the United States and other governments have repeatedly said, well, we have no confirmed evidence that the opposition has ever had possession of sarin, much less used it, that is by itself worthless because it doesn't mean that there are not intelligence reports indicating that they could have had access to sarin.
And that remains a big question mark surrounding the whole issue.
So that's the question of the environmental samples.
Then we come to the biomedical samples, which were also not collected by OPC because OPCW never set foot in Khan Sheikhoun.
They violated their own rule and accepted samples and used it in their report to violating fundamental rule that they had adopted.
And so the biomedical samples were collected by either the Idlib Health Authority or doctors who were working with it, who the OPCW has no idea what they put into the samples or how the samples were collected.
And in fact, the other major discovery that I made, or one of the major discoveries I made is that the test for exposure to sarin that the OPCW relies on in their test is, the first test is one that cannot distinguish between the breakdown product of sarin, IMPA or isopropyl methylphosphonate, and that is from a exposure to sarin and IMPA that is introduced into the body of the person giving the sample by either a drip in a hospital or a glass of water or some other way.
And so it's very simple for Al-Qaeda to use that means to basically tamper with or to create a false sample, which will show IMPA as the breakdown product, which has been used as the marker, the biomarker for sarin in the past, by OPCW still is today.
That IMPA is sold commercially on the open market by major chemical companies.
It's easy to get, you and I could order it from a chemical company.
So that takes care of that one.
And the third point I make in the piece and the final point that I wanna make about the testing by OPCW, testing and reporting is that the test that they do to try to recreate the binding compound, the compound that represents sarin binding with the enzymes in the human body, which is supposed to be the most reliable test that they have to find out whether someone has been exposed to sarin or not, that can be wrong because they cannot identify, that test cannot identify precisely what the nerve agent or if you will, the organophosphate nerve agent is actually being shown from the test.
It just shows that some kind of organophosphate nerve agent has a bound with the enzymes to produce this effect.
And so what I was able to find out from an expert on phosphine gas is that it breaks down in the human body into products that would bind with the enzymes in the same way that a nerve agent binds with the enzymes and produce the same effect.
They're unable to distinguish between sarin, a VX gas and a phosphine gas in terms of exposure.
And I'm waiting to be attacked on this, and I'm sure I will be, but the person who is an expert on phosphine gas told me that he is firmly convinced that they would not be able to distinguish between those different nerve agents.
And phosphine gas does act as a nerve agent.
Gareth, didn't he, that it's understandable that they wouldn't have found this because they wouldn't have been looking for it.
They would have been, they would have had their biases confirmed, but they wouldn't have found what he had found.
Yeah, it's obviously, it's a systematic bias because their job is to find evidence of nerve gas.
They've never done anything else.
And I guess I just want to underline the point that organophosphate fertilizer, sorry, insecticide, including aluminum phosphide, which turns into a phosphine gas, which then breaks down into various phosphate compounds has the same effect.
It can be considered as an organophosphate nerve agent.
And so I think they've just never considered that possibility.
It's just not within their scope.
That's the problem.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right, well, and then so, I'm sorry, I was a little bit distracted by email for one second there.
Did you mention the fact about, you know, on your speculation, or not really speculation, but you're saying that it was at least possible that someone could have just fed these people this chemical.
Did you mention the part about how at least some of the people tested should have no longer had the chemical in their bloodstream by the time that they were tested, but it was unanimous, they all did, but it was really a full two weeks later, something like that.
That seemed pretty interesting.
I did not mention that, but it's an additional point of evidence that should be taken into account that indeed the length of time that the evidence of exposure to sarin would be found in the blood taken is very, very seldom longer than a week.
And as you said, the records that were shown in the OPCW report show that all of the samples taken by the Idlib Health Authority, you know, are positive, and they were turned over to the OPCW 10 to 12 days after the samples were, excuse me, after the event of Khan Sheikh on April 4th.
So it's very dubious, to say the least.
All right, well, so I guess, talk to me a little bit more about, I hope it's not just Elliot Higgins and those guys, about, you know, what's supposedly at dispute in here?
You know, I brought up the one thing that really jumped out at me about the size of the crater there, whether it should have been small, medium, or large, or something like that.
But so what are the others attacking you for?
Well, the only thing that I can specifically recall at the moment is, there are two things that Elliot Higgins went a little bit over the top on.
The first is that he was saying that this two-story building, that I claimed that this building was totally destroyed, and he said, well, that's clearly not true.
You can look at the photo and see that it's not true.
I mean, the photo shows a completely destroyed building.
So, I mean, it's kind of a weird thing.
But then he came in with a comparison of before and after comparison photograph from the air of the entire block.
And you see that, you know, as is usually the case in Syrian cities or Middle Eastern cities, entire blocks are connected dwellings or shops.
You know, it's a solid line around either one side of a block or even more than one side of a block.
And that's the case in this instance.
But you can see that the dwelling that was destroyed in the before picture has a roof that is distinctly different from the rest of the roof.
So, you know, I mean, there's no question that this was a distinct dwelling apart from the rest of the block.
And he was nitpicking.
He was saying, I called it a building rather than a house.
So that's one of the things he attacked me on.
But the larger, a bigger issue that he tried to raise was the French government has made the claim that they got samples from Khan Sheikhoun and analyzed the samples, the environmental samples from Khan Sheikhoun and analyzed them and found, lo and behold, that the sarin that's in the samples matches the sarin that they had from a sample in Sadaqab in April of 2013.
That is the alleged sarin attack in Sadaqab of April, 2013.
And so, you know, the French government is saying that their analysis of these samples of sarin shows that it has to be the Syrian government because it has hexamine in it.
And they've always, you know, Higgins and Bellingcat and Dan Cozette have always made a big deal of the fact that the Syrian government turned over supplies of hexamine to the OPCW as part of the agreement to give up its chemical weapons program.
And so they're making the argument, well, you know, I've now debunked this in a separate article.
I don't wanna go into detail on that, but I've now written a follow-up article debunking the Higgins argument about the French government and its discovery.
I mean, there are multiple, multiple flaws in it, which I have pulled together for this article.
So you'll have to wait until that's published and we'll do another one.
Well, I'd like to see a piece on the military and CIA sources that the ones who talked to Giraldi, the ones who talked to Hearst, whether they're the same people or not, and whichever other ones too.
I mean, in Hearst's article, they were trying to talk him out of this.
I never can figure out who's more hawkish, the deep state or the president on any given issue.
It's like they just flip a coin, who's worse and trying to get the others to do the worst thing.
But anyway, in this case, apparently it was the CIA and the military were saying, hey boss, hold your horses.
And he was determined to go ahead anyway.
And I wanna know more about the politics of that.
Because last time around, it came out that some handful of analysts at least threatened to resign.
They refused adamantly to put their signature on a thing like this.
And they ended up putting out a White House government assessment, which was just a made up thing because they didn't have an intelligence assessment from Langley because they didn't wanna get hanged over this the way they did Iraq and the rest of it.
Which was their fault.
I think there is an explanation for this apparent contradiction.
And that is that at the very top of the CIA, clearly you have officials who are not just careerists, but political figures who are bound to attack with the political wind.
And the current incumbent is no exception.
I mean, he's obviously very, very politicized and has his own political agenda.
I mean, he's somebody who's far more than previous CIA directors has pushed policy positions on Iran specifically, but others as well, going well beyond the position that any CIA director should be taking.
He's not supposed to be taking policy positions.
But anyway, I have no doubt that there are plenty of people in the CIA who were fully supportive of the official line that was taken on what happened in Khan Sheikh.
And that there were some analysts who had information which contradicted it and weren't happy with that.
This is not a new story at all.
This is merely something that's been repeated over and over again over the years.
I mean, it's a big deal if it's really true and it can be proven that look, the Russians were flying a drone over there.
They were watching these guys.
Everybody knew it was al-Qaeda and Ahrar al-Sham and whoever were the ones dominant in that community.
The Russians are talking in English over the red phone with the Americans all day every day about everything they do.
I mean, this stuff is either true or it's false.
Gareth, come on, right?
It's not like the Russians are gonna coordinate with the Americans as they help the Syrians bomb a town with a chemical weapon.
Look, I have to say that you have to leave a little bit of room for nuance here.
Not every single thing that the Russians passed on to the Americans was necessarily 100% true.
I don't know.
Well, no, I hear you about what you're saying.
Their version of the story was later.
I'm talking about when it happened in real time.
Was this supposedly a surprise or wasn't it?
They had the deconfliction line open or it wasn't?
Right, right.
I mean, you definitely debunk a lot of their story in your story here.
You're not towing the Russian line at all.
You're saying that they got it wrong, and that's a big part of why people believe the other side, because the Russian side and Syrian government side doesn't necessarily make sense either.
It didn't add up, right, but I agree with you that there is a big issue here.
Was it true that they informed the United States ahead of time that there was gonna be a strike or not?
And you know what?
I raised a straw man earlier about, because it is, I mean, you turn on CNN, Assad enjoys killing his own people.
At what point will anyone ever stop him?
That's the whole of the narrative about the war going on over there.
And so, but that's too thin of a straw, man.
How about, I mean, I don't even know a good one to, I mean, I'm trying to play devil's advocate in a sound way as best I can here, but I don't really know a good one for why in the world would the Assad government do this?
I mean, is there any kind of solid argument or one that's valid but not sound, you know, that sort of makes sense on it, you know?
God, I didn't get into the whole controversy over the motivation of the Assad regime or the alleged motivation of the Assad regime, either one way or the other.
I mean, but I do believe that the evidence suggests that the fight that was going on in Hama province, south of Khan Sheikhoun, between basically Al-Qaeda and, you know, its allies on one hand, with some participation by, you know, the non-jihadist and the Syrian air force and army on the other hand, was, had tilted back toward the, in favor of the Syrian government in the days before the Khan Sheikhoun event.
And I mean, they were not in the desperate situation where they had to somehow, you know, alarm people to the point of panic.
I mean, of course, I don't buy the idea that that would have that effect at all.
I mean, you know, that doesn't really make much sense anyway but, you know, the basic strategic situation was not one that would lend itself to any kind of argument that there was a motivation to use a chemical weapon, to use a sarin weapon in Khan Sheikhoun at that point.
And on the other hand, I would argue that the people in charge of Khan Sheikhoun, the Al-Qaeda folks there, could have been in a panic over the indication just a couple of days before that the Trump administration was moving very rapidly toward a position of no regime change in Syria and was sort of settling on that policy.
And that that would give them a very strong motivation to pull something off like this, you know, false flag, not a false flag, but a false storyline about what happened.
So, I mean, and you know, it seems to me that there's not much of a case that you can make on the basis of motivation.
Yeah, I mean, certainly the Al-Qaeda guys did have the motivation to try to bring a halt to the withdrawal of the CIA program there.
And by the way, you know, I guess I'm embarrassed to say that my best source for that particular point is just that Washington Post story where they, you know, more or less accused Donald Trump of treason on behalf of Russia for stopping backing Al-Qaeda in Syria.
But then everybody took that absolutely, you know, seriously and I don't want to say at face value, I guess it seemed like there were no other stories that came out that said that that wasn't really true that I know of.
And so is that really right as far as you understand that they really have called off support for- As I understand it, an administration figure, unnamed, did confirm after that story in the Post that the program had, you know, had come to an end, had been stopped.
Well, you know, Nikki Haley brought up regime change there the other day and Donald Trump in his UN speech called it the criminal regime, which it surely is indistinguishable for most on earth if you ask me, but still.
But so what do you think that indicates for the policy?
Well, I think the policy is subject to a lot of contradictions and open-ended and they're not sure what they're going to do, but it's extremely unstable situation.
And the fact that US seems to be, you know, still on an attack that potentially brings it into military conflict with Iran and Russia is very unsettling.
I mean, I think it's very worse.
I think there's no doubt that this is not an administration that is getting out of Syria at this point.
It's quite the opposite.
All right, well, everybody, please go to Alternet.
It's also of course in Gareth's archive at antiwar.com.
It's alternet.org, the gray zone project.
Have we been deceived over Syrian sarin attack scrutinizing the evidence in an incident Trump used to justify bombing Syria?
And another masterpiece by the great Gareth Porter.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Glad to talk to you again.
All right, you guys, that's Gareth Porter.
The book is Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
The truth being, of course, that they never had a weapons program, even though you heard about 150 million lies about that in your life.
And Manufactured Crisis, get that.
And check them out again at alternet and antiwar.com.
I'm Scott Horton.
Find all my stuff at foolserend.us.
That's the book I wrote.
Hey, buy my book.
Also go to scotthorton.org.
I'll give you 4,500 MP3 interviews if you want.
All for you there at scotthorton.org.
And libertarianinstitute.org.
That's where I do an institute.
