For Pacifica Radio, September 8th, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Anti-War Radio.
This will be my first episode in the 8.30 slot Sunday morning.
I'm very happy to be here with you in KPFK's esteemed public affairs lineup Sunday morning here with you guys.
So thanks very much for tuning in.
Basically the deal is, I'm here to debunk war party lies.
None of these wars have any legitimate justification, only lies.
So my job is making sure that you guys have no reason to believe them.
Simple as that.
If you want to take a look at my full interview archive, there's almost 3,000 interviews now.
Going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
Including more than 150 with our guest today, Gareth Porter.
My very favorite reporter out of all of them, and I've got a lot of favorites.
But the great Gareth Porter is the master debunker of war party lies.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He writes primarily for Interpress Service at IPSnews.net.
That's IPSnews.net.
He also does a lot of great work at truthout.org.
In fact, last year won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for his work there about the surge in Afghanistan.
Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus' special operations and the civilians killed at truthout.org.
And at issue today is a truthout piece from last week, How Intelligence Was Twisted to Support an Attack on Syria.
Welcome to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
Good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us.
And I sure do want people to hear what you have to say.
Again, the piece is called How Intelligence Was Twisted to Support an Attack on Syria by Gareth Porter at truthout.org.
And there's another one coming out very soon.
So tell us about this government assessment, Gareth, that the administration put out, the intelligence assessment, about the alleged chemical weapons attack by the government of Syria on rebels in eastern Damascus last month.
Right.
This is my next piece, which I'm still working on, still finishing up.
The main two closely related points of the piece are that the general assumption, the general impression of the news media and Congress, which translated into the general impression of the public, that the administration had released a summary of the intelligence community's assessment of the evidence regarding the alleged August 21st chemical weapons attack is completely wrong because what actually happened, as I'm now able to report, is that the administration wrote its own assessment of the intelligence and presented it as though it were, you know, gave the impression clearly that it was, in fact, an intelligence community assessment.
So it is, in fact, even a worse misrepresentation of the intelligence, a more fundamental misrepresentation of the intelligence than I really said in my previous piece that you have referred to already.
This is, you know, in many ways worse than the Iraq misrepresentation of intelligence because at least it was clear that the intelligence community itself was responsible for having put out a flawed, deeply flawed intelligence assessment in October 2002.
There were differences within the intelligence community, and some of the differences were worked out in a way that simply did not represent the truth.
But in this case, the administration has really prevented the Congress from, you know, having any idea of what the differences are within the intelligence community.
In the case of Iraq, you know, the 2002 estimate did reflect the fact that there were differences within the intelligence community, but nevertheless the bad guys won out in the intelligence community and managed to sell the bioweapons lab story and the aluminum tube story, among other things.
But in this case, the administration has completely pulled the wool over the eyes of Congress and the news media and sold this bill of goods that they are revealing some of the essence of the intelligence community's assessment.
Whereas in fact, I have three former intelligence officials who are saying, yeah, this either is an administration document, or it certainly smells a great deal like an administration document.
And so that's one of the key points.
The second point is about why the administration is doing this.
Why is it that they're going so far out of their way to misrepresent the intelligence by pretending that, you know, it's the intelligence community's assessment, whereas in fact it's the White House assessment, the Obama administration's assessment.
Well, the reason is that there's an extremely important piece of intelligence that the CIA, which is responsible for tracking the chemical weapons in Syria, came up with in the process of giving the administration, you know, what they could about the August 21 event.
And what the CIA found out was that there was no evidence of any movement of chemical weapons from their storage places in Syria, indicating that they were going to be used for an attack on August 21.
And so this is obviously critical to understanding the overall viewpoint of the intelligence community.
And this was completely suppressed by the administration through this ruse.
Now, Gareth, what you're saying is that your intelligence sources are telling you that this is why the White House, in essence, forged an intelligence report, a CIA report, talking about we assess this with high confidence that, in order to make it seem like this is a CIA report, that the reason that they did so was because if they had just published what the CIA was saying, in their estimates, the CIA was unwilling to pipe down about them being confident on some level that the chemical weapons had not been moved, had not been readied by Assad's forces.
Scott, it's a little bit more complicated than that.
Let me be clear that my source on the nature of the crucial CIA intelligence about the chemical weapons in Syria is Larry Johnson, former CIA official and a former State Department counterterrorism official, who still is in touch with people inside the CIA and who has just come out on his own blog saying explicitly that the administration is not telling the truth about this.
And I interviewed him, and he told me, he gave me the details of this, saying that the intelligence community, basically the CIA through its technical means, has been keeping very close tabs on all of the chemical weapons sites in Syria.
And they have kept, essentially, a 24-hour watch on them, so they are going to be aware of any movement that would signal the beginning or the readiness for a chemical weapons attack.
And what he said was that his contact on the inside made it very clear that they did not get any such evidence, that they were quite clear that there was no evidence that the Assad regime had in fact carried out that attack because of this very close surveillance of the chemical weapons in the possession of the Assad regime.
So not just they did not see it happen, but they are confident that they would have seen it if it had happened.
Exactly.
The way Larry Johnson put it is that this is the big dog that did not bark in the case of U.S. intelligence.
And this is why the White House put out their own estimate that looked and smelled like a CIA estimate, but kind of had some flaws to it.
Let me be clear that that is my own analysis, putting, I believe, two and two together, and getting, the last time I checked, four.
Gotcha.
And it makes good sense, because there's a lot of other flaws in this thing, which you've already documented.
And it seems like even the White House, even if they're willing to lie about where this report came from, they still kind of admitted where they were lying.
In the piece, as you point out over and over again, they switch straight into mealy-mouthed weasel words when it comes to some of their starkest accusations against Assad.
It's pretty blatant.
Exactly right.
That in the actual White House document, their description of this set of intelligence, pieces of intelligence that they claim makes their case in an ironclad fashion, they had to resort to some very tricky language in order to present it in such a way as to make it persuasive.
Whereas, in fact, I make the case, and I think it's pretty clear that this is accurate.
They make a case on the basis of tricky language, because otherwise the evidence is extremely murky.
They simply had to make an inference which could not really be proven at all, that this was an indicator of Syrian government culpability in whatever happened.
Right.
And now this letter that you're referring to, that's at noquarterusa.net.
That's Larry Johnson, former CIA officer's blog.
Yes.
And also, by the way, Ray McGovern's Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which Larry Johnson belongs to, also had this statement that was put out, which included, I think, eight or nine, ten members, basically pointing to the problems of the intelligence more generally.
And Larry has associated himself with that.
But that's separate from his statement on his own blog and separate from his interview with me.
Well, and it's pretty strong language in that VIPS letter, too, where they say, kind of sarcastically, we regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was not responsible.
So this is a lot of former CIA, a long list of former CIA, saying current CIA are telling them this.
Right.
That's huge.
Well, you know, I think Ray is former CIA and a couple of others are.
Others are from different, from FBI and other categories.
But in any case, this is, the point is that this is based on Larry Johnson's personal contact within the agency, and people who are still telling the truth.
And, you know, he's able to get the word out.
Okay.
And now, well, maybe, Gareth, at this point, it's a minor point, but it's worth bringing up that the effects of the victims in the videos seem to fall short of a full-scale military sarin gas attack, according to the experts that you cite in your Truthout article, how intelligence was twisted here.
Yes, this is still a major anomaly, a major contradiction between the official line of the U.S. administration, that it's very clear that this was a sarin gas attack by the Syrian government, and the actual visual evidence that has been presented in dozens of videos that, as you say, the chemical weapons specialists that I've interviewed, as well as others that I didn't interview, have also said that the symptoms that are shown by the victims, shown in hospitals or medical centers, medical points, are simply not consistent with the pattern that you would expect from a sarin gas attack.
Without going into detail, I mean, you know, there may be a runny nose here and there.
There may be some tremors here and there.
But generally speaking, you simply do not see the pattern that would definitely be shown, and particularly the points that the people that I interviewed made most forcefully, particularly Dan Cozzetta, the former U.S. Army chemical corps of the U.S. Army, veteran and former White House advisor on chemical weapons, told me that what he was missing entirely is the presence, the prevalence of vomiting.
You know, you have to see a lot of vomiting in order to believe that there was a sarin attack.
It's either that they are vomiting or that they've gone past that, which means that they've gone into a coma.
And that is not what he said he saw, and that's not what I saw, and I've seen dozens of those videos as well.
Well, and there was the ratio of wounded to dead, too, where sarin gas attacks tend to not have that many survivors.
If you get hit with some sarin, you're pretty much a dead man, right?
Correct, unless you are treated within a very, very few minutes.
But in this case, they had way more survivors than dead.
That's precisely right.
I mean, you know, this was the second major anomaly.
And, in fact, what the two gentlemen that I interviewed at length, Dan Cozzetta and Steve Johnson, a British specialist, were saying was that this was really the biggest anomaly, that this was the thing that seemed most to tip over the conventional position that this must be a sarin attack.
Because what we were picking up from various sources, including one of the doctors who was quoted by one of the major networks, one of the Syrian doctors was saying, as I recall, he treated 900 people and 70 died.
That's, you know, that's less than, you know, 8% lethal rate of lethality, which is extremely low.
It's much too low for a sarin attack.
And the figures that were put forward by the Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders, similarly, were just completely out of whack.
I mean, they were showing less than 10% of the total number of victims had died from the attack.
So it should be the opposite, should be very much the opposite.
And now, were they saying that they were leaning really hard one way or the other, whether it was a different substance altogether or whether it was diluted?
Because it seems like the German and the Russian intelligence services are both saying that it looks like amateur-made, diluted weapons, maybe former military-grade stuff or something.
Well, I mean, I know that that is a theory.
It's not just Russians and other country specialists.
But, you know, specialists in Britain were also suggesting the idea of a low-dose attack.
But Cozzetta, in particular, was suggesting both to me and to Brown Moses, the blogger who specializes on chemical weapons in Syria or weapons in Syria, that there are some serious problems with that idea, that a low dose would be extremely difficult to achieve because the difference between a lethal dose and a non-lethal dose is so small, in the case of sarin and similar nerve agents, that to get it right, you have to be extremely skilled.
And the chances that you're going to go, you know, do it wrongly are just too great.
That would not be very likely.
Well, and so do you doubt the Russian report about the earlier gas attack, where the reason that they concluded that it was a rebel attack back in March was because of the amateur nature of the chemical weapons?
Well, first of all, let me just say that the specialists on chemical weapons who I interviewed, neither of them claims to understand what happened.
I mean, it's still a mystery.
They're still saying we need more information.
We're still struggling to figure this out.
They have not come up with their pet answer to that question.
And I'm still in the same place.
I do not have an answer to what remains a mystery.
And with regard to the earlier attacks, I'm still getting, sort of, I'm still researching this, and I'm going to write another piece once this one is finished.
But what strikes me is that they're quite different.
Each of the earlier attacks seems rather different from the one, or at least the ones that I've looked into.
The circumstances are quite different from the one on August 21st.
You know, I don't want to get into, try to take too much time right now on this, but, you know, in the first place, I mean, the first one where there's actually published information was a government-controlled town.
And the idea that the Syrian army was going to attack its own people, the people who were supporting it, doesn't make any sense.
And the official position of the United States, as you may know, is that, well, they made a mistake.
They meant to hit an opposition base, and they simply missed.
Well, I just don't think that's the case.
I mean, it was one, a single weapon of some sort that was dropped.
So that doesn't really add up.
So anyway, I just want to emphasize the differences that you find when you look into those earlier ones.
Not just the scale, but in the circumstances and, you know, even the nature of the weapon that is claimed to have been used.
All right, so I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter the Great from Interpress Service.
That's my name for him.
He doesn't call himself that.
He's far too modest.
IPSnews.net is where he does most of his journalism.
Also at Truthout.org.
And again, this one is how intelligence was twisted to support an attack on Syria.
And then there's a brand-new follow-up coming soon.
But I want to talk a little bit about domestic politics with you here because, wow, this is kind of really a momentous thing that there seems to be a really good chance that the people's will, through their House of Representatives, could stop a war or at least tell the president that he may not start one.
What do you think?
Well, I agree with you.
And I think it's an extraordinary moment in American history, one that I certainly did not predict.
I do not claim that I saw this coming at all.
In fact, when I was asked in a radio interview maybe a week or so ago, I said, well, you know, I think it might be reasonably close, but I have to believe the administration is going to prevail on this simply based on past experience.
And I think it turns out that we are at a tipping point.
You know, like many other tipping points, it's not something that you might have predicted well ahead of time.
But various trends sort of converge here.
And suddenly, you know, time has run out for the war makers in this particular instance.
They seem to have completely misunderstood the temper of this population.
And I would say particularly the temper of that proportion of the U.S. population that cares about war and peace issues.
I mean, what we're seeing and hearing from congressional offices is the most extraordinary thing that I've ever heard of.
You're hearing that in one case after another, the combination of phone calls, e-mails and letters that they're getting are running 95 to 98.5 or 99 percent against going to war.
This is the closest thing to a complete consensus that you'll ever see in American politics.
Right.
And on the right issue, on the right position, on such an important issue.
It really is amazing.
There's a piece in Military.com about Representative Tim Walz.
Apparently he's a Democrat from Minnesota and held a town hall.
And I think the way it reads is that he asked the people to kind of come up, line up and come up one at a time and talk to him about it so that they wouldn't feel pressure, you know, in front of everybody that they could really tell him what they felt.
And it was unanimous, 100 percent against it.
And then, of course, he says, well, I haven't made up my mind yet.
That is totally believable to me.
Absolutely.
And I mean, you know, it's it's really an indication that the war system has gone too far, has gone on too long, has extracted too much in the way of of treasure and blood and agony from the American people.
All right.
So then whose war is this anyway?
Well, I mean, this is this is, of course, I think the mystery of this of this moment.
Why?
Why do we have I mean, this is a war that has no visible means of support whatsoever.
I mean, there's no reason for it.
There's no there's no viable argument for it.
There's no constituency for it to speak of.
And yet you have this extraordinary effort by the White House to try to push this through.
First of all, you know, I do believe now something that I that I did suggest a couple of weeks ago, which is that Obama himself went to Congress as a way out of this.
He never wanted to fight in Syria.
He never wanted to use force in Syria.
As I think I mentioned on one of your shows previously, you know, he made this really significant statement a couple of weeks ago in which he said, you know, to the American people, he said, you know, there are some real downsides to the use of force in this situation.
And I want to outline them to you.
Now, no U.S. president has ever done that in my memory, except for Obama in this instance.
So, I mean, that was a clue that he really didn't want to do it.
And there he gets this pressure from Susan Rice and Kerry representing a kind of I don't know.
I have to think that it's a personal issues for both of them underlying their their desire to do this more than anything else.
And I mean, I know I think the Air Force would be would be fine with carrying out a war in Syria or carrying out a bombing campaign in Syria.
But nobody else in the Pentagon or the or the military is is in the slightest open to this.
Well, even the chief of the Air Force put out one leak against it saying, well, we don't have the forces.
He was mostly, I think, crabbing about sequestration and wanted his money.
Yeah, well, that could be.
But it was I mean, he was really saying we're not prepared to do this right now, which is pretty significant.
Right, right.
This is like this is like the military and the Pentagon in the wake of Vietnam.
They have to have a period of recovery.
And, you know, they they really are not.
It's just not a time for them to go to another war.
And I think besides that, I mean, they you know, that gives them a sense of realism.
And they're saying, well, wait a minute.
I mean, you know, what about the risks of this as well?
So so, you know, it does it does come back to some kind of X factor, which I do, in fact, believe is, you know, the the psychology of power with regard to John Kerry and Susan Rice.
I mean, I think that they're both they both have problems with their personalities that have to do with the need to feel important by doing something big.
And, you know, that the easiest way to do something big when you're in the national security environment is to make war.
And here's their opportunity.
Yeah.
But, you know, the first person I ever heard accused Bashar al-Assad of using chemical weapons was Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.
Yes, that's that's correct.
And as we both know, AIPAC is pushing for this in the Congress.
And one of the side benefits of this present situation, this incredible turning point, is that AIPAC could get its worst drubbing of all time and perhaps break the spell that it has had on members of Congress for so many years.
I sure would like to see it.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
We're far from out of issues to cover here, Gareth, but all out of time on the clock.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, Sean.
That's Anti-War Radio for this week.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks very much for listening.
My full interview archive is available at ScottHorton.org and you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at slash Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.
