United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and US Secretary of State John Kerry, September 2013. Allan Tannenbaum/Press Association. All rights reserved.On 18 August 2011, President Obama declared
that “the future of Syria must be
determined by its people”. But he
immediately contravened this basic democratic principle by saying that Bashir
al-Assad should cease to be President of Syria forthwith, irrespective of the
wishes of the Syrian people. In a joint statement the same day, the
UK, France and Germany dutifully agreed.
At that
point, regime change became the explicit policy of the US and its allies in
Syria. This policy was maintained for nearly six years with a bit of wavering
here and there about the timing of President Assad’s departure – until 30 March
2017, when it was overturned by President Trump's Ambassador to the UN, Nikki
Haley.
She made it clear
that the US was no longer going to focus on removing President Assad from
power, saying:
“You pick and choose your battles and when we're
looking at this, it's about changing up priorities and our priority is no
longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out”.
The same day
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson confirmed this reversal of US policy: asked at
a press conference in Ankara if President Assad should stay or go, he replied:
“I
think the status and the longer-term status of President Assad will be decided
by the Syrian people.”
This new policy
prioritised the defeat of ISIS over the removal of President Assad from power. As
such, it reflected the position on Syria that President Trump had expressed on
many occasions during his election campaign.
Victory for Assad
This reversal of US
policy was a staggering victory for President Assad. Thanks to assistance from
Russia over the previous eighteen months, his military position had improved
dramatically and the likelihood of him being ousted had diminished to near zero. Then, on 30 March 1017, his position was
copper fastened by the US withdrawing its objective of removing him from power.
Unlike Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddaffi before him, he had survived despite
being targeted for regime change by the US and its allies.
Five days later on 4
April 2017, if we are to believe the US, President Assad took the extraordinary
decision to mount an aerial attack using chemical weapons against civilians in
Khan Sheikhoun, a town held by the armed opposition in Idlib province, leading
to the deaths of around 100 people including many women and children. Predictably,
this brought down the wrath of the US and its allies on his head and on 6 April
2017, for the first time, the US took military action against the assets of the
Syrian regime itself, firing 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Shayrat air
base from which, according to the US, the chemical weapons attack had been
launched.
President Assad is in
a much weaker position now than he was before 4 April 2017, when he allegedly launched
the chemical attack – his removal from power is back on the US agenda and there
is now at least a possibility that the US will put its military weight behind
overthrowing him.
All this was the
predictable outcome of President Assad allegedly deciding to launch a chemical
weapons attack against civilians. He would have to be insane to take such a
decision – and he is not insane.
If you are trying to
identify who is responsible for an act of this kind, it is common sense to ask
who would gain from it. President Assad
certainly could not have expected to gain and he hasn’t gained – he has lost,
big time, and predictably so. The armed
opposition has gained in that the US shift away from supporting their goal of
regime change has been reversed. It
remains to be seen whether the reversal is accompanied by direct military
action by the US, or increased military support for the opposition by the US,
in order to bring about regime change – if so, they will have gained, very big
time.
US "confident” Assad guilty
On 11 April 2013, the
Trump administration published a 4-page document, entitled The Assad Regime’s Use of Chemical Weapons on April 4, 2017, to justify after
the event its attack on Shayrat air base. It began by stating:
“The United States is confident that the Syrian
regime conducted a chemical weapons, using the nerve gas sarin, against its own
people in the town of Shaykun in southern Idlib province on April 4, 2017. …
“We have confidence in our assessment because we
have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence … . We cannot publicly
release all available intelligence on this track due to the need to protect
sources and methods. …
“Our information indicates that the chemical agent
was delivered by regime SU-22 fixed-wing aircraft that took off from the
regime-controlled Shayrat Airfield. …”
This document didn’t
purport to be an assessment prepared by the US intelligence community and
published by the US
Director of National Intelligence.
For a document that
serves as a justification for unprecedented US military action against Syria,
it is remarkably lacking in certainty in respect of its critical conclusions:
it merely expresses “confidence” – rather than “high confidence” – that the
Syrian government was responsible and merely says that the available
information “indicates” that the chemical agent was delivered by air from
Shayrat Airfield.
As former CIA
officer Philip Giraldi wrote on 24 April 2017,
to date “no evidence has been produced to demonstrate convincingly that Syrian
forces dropped a chemical bomb on a civilian area”.
None of these
uncertainties found their way into the mainstream media reporting of this US
government assessment. Generally speaking they reported Assad’s guilt as a fact
and failed to address the crucial question of why he deliberately shot himself
in the foot.
Why did Assad do it?
The US government
assessment contains one sentence that attempts to address the question of why Assad
allegedly mounted an attack. It says:
“We assess that Damascus launched the chemical
attack in response to an opposition offensive in northern Hamah Province that
threatened key infrastructure.”
This is a
nonsensical claim because by 4 April 2017 when the alleged attack occurred, the
opposition offensive had failed and Syrian government forces had recaptured all
or almost all the territory taken over by the opposition in the early days of
the offensive. Furthermore, Khan
Shaykhun is north of the front line between government and opposition forces at
the time, and it’s difficult to see how an attack there – especially a chemical
attack with very little military value – could be a response to the offensive.
But, laying that
aside, what possible reason could there be for the Syrian government to use
chemical – rather than conventional – weapons on any target anywhere, when
their use was likely to provoke a military response, perhaps a devastating
response, from the US?
The Ghouta attack
The use of chemical weapons at Khan Sheikhoun was the second occasion during
the war in Syria when their use caused a large number of civilian deaths. The
first occurred in the early morning of 21 August 2013, when a sarin gas attack
took place in the Ghouta area of Damascus, resulting in the deaths of hundreds
of people (355 according to Médecins Sans Frontières, 1429
according to the US government).
On
that occasion also, as we will see, the US administration asserted that the
Syrian government was responsible for the attack on the basis of less than
conclusive evidence, as later confirmed by President Obama himself. On that occasion also, the Syrian government
denied responsibility.
On
21 August 2013, a UN Mission was already present in Damascus to investigate
allegations of earlier chemical weapons use.
It was redirected by the UN Secretary General to investigate the Ghouta
attack and it reported
on 16 September 2013, that “the environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected provide
clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the
nerve agent Sarin were used” in the attack. It was not part of the Mission’s
terms of reference to identify who was responsible for firing the rockets.
At
the time, the Obama administration asserted that the Syrian government was
responsible. On 30 August 2013, the White House published what it termed a “government
assessment” (significantly, not an assessment
prepared by the US intelligence community and published by the US Director of
National Intelligence). This
began by stating:
“The United States Government assesses with high
confidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack in
the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013. We further assess that the regime used
a nerve agent in the attack. These all-source assessments are based on human,
signals, and geospatial intelligence as well as a significant body of open
source reporting. … To protect sources and methods, we cannot publicly release
all available intelligence – but what follows is an unclassified summary of the
U.S. Intelligence Community’s analysis of what took place.”
But the assessment
contained no verifiable information to justify this conclusion. Nevertheless, at the time the mainstream media reported as a fact that
the Syrian government was the guilty party – and they continue to do so today
even though, as we will see, over time evidence to the contrary has steadily
mounted.
Intelligence not a “slam dunk”
A year earlier on 20
August 2012, President Obama was asked at a press conference whether he would
“envision using US military, if simply for nothing else, the safe keeping of
the chemical weapons”. He replied:
"We have been very clear to the Assad regime,
but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start
seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That
would change my calculus. That would change my equation."
From then on, the
expectation was that, if the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians
or opposition forces, the US would take punitive military action against Syrian
government assets in response.
But, President Obama
hesitated to take military action. One reason was the refusal of the UK
Parliament to back an immediate US strike. Another was that he had been warned
by his Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, that he couldn’t
guarantee that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical weapons
attack.
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in 2015. Wikicommons/Jay Godwin. Some rights reserved.This came to light in an interview
with Jeffrey Goldberg published in The
Atlantic in April 2016. There,
President Obama revealed that Clapper had made a point of emphasising to him that
the intelligence that the Syrian government was responsible wasn’t a “slam
dunk” (using the phrase used by George Tenet, the head of the CIA in 2003, to
assure President George Bush that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction”,
which was a trifle wide of the mark).
Here’s what Goldberg wrote:
“Obama
was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week [beginning 27 August
2013] from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who
interrupted the President’s Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each
morning from Clapper’s analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syria’s
use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a “slam dunk.” He chose the term
carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its
failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the
manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George
W. Bush a “slam dunk” in Iraq.”
So, the certainty expressed publicly by the
Obama administration that the Syrian government was responsible wasn’t
justified.
On 1 September 2013, when as immediate strike
was thought to be imminent, President Obama drew back and sought authorisation
from Congress for it. It quickly became clear that this was not forthcoming and
that if he was going to take military action he would have to do it without specific
Congress authorisation. Then, on 9 September 2013 Russia pulled his chestnuts
out of the fire by offering an alternative – Syria would join the Chemical
Weapons Convention and give up all its chemical weapons, providing the US
refrained from taking action against Syria.
The US agreed and nine months later John Kerry was confident that
Syria’s disarmament had been achieved:
“With
respect to Syria, we struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical
weapons out.” (NBC interview, 20 July 2014)
Were the
sarin carrying rockets launched from government controlled territory?
But, was the Syrian government responsible for
the Ghouta attack? A key question here
is: were the rockets which delivered the sarin launched from government
controlled territory?
The “government assessment” published on 30
August 2013 said:
“Multiple
streams of intelligence indicate that the regime executed a rocket and
artillery attack against the Damascus suburbs in the early hours of August 21.
Satellite detections corroborate that attacks from a regime-controlled area
struck neighborhoods where the chemical attacks reportedly occurred – including
Kafr Batna, Jawbar, ‘Ayn Tarma, Darayya, and Mu’addamiyah. This includes the
detection of rocket launches from regime controlled territory early in the
morning, approximately 90 minutes before the first report of a chemical attack
appeared in social media.”
This encourages the reader to believe that the
US had intelligence that the sarin carrying rockets were fired from
government-controlled territory but it doesn’t actually say so explicitly. However, in a briefing
on the day the assessment was published, Secretary of State John Kerry left no
room for doubt, saying:
“We
know where the rockets were launched from and at what time. We know where they
landed and when. We know rockets came only from regime-controlled areas and
went only to opposition-controlled or contested neighborhoods.”
And, on 16 September 2013, information published
by the New York Times appeared to put the question beyond doubt. In a front
page article, Forensic
Detail in UN report point to Assad’s Use of Gas, evidence was presented that claimed to show that
the rockets delivering the sarin were launched from a Syrian military complex. This was based on information in the UN
Mission’s report about the trajectory of two of the rockets, which were
believed to have delivered the gas with such appalling consequences:
“One
annex to the report identified azimuths, or angular measurements, from where rockets
had struck, back to their points of origin. When plotted and marked
independently on maps by analysts from Human Rights Watch and by The New York
Times, the United Nations data from two widely scattered impact sites [in
Moadamiya and Zamalka/Ein Tarma, east of Damascus] pointed directly to a Syrian
military complex.”
An accompanying map on the Times’ front page
showed the flight-path lines of the two rockets intersecting at a Syrian
military complex, near the Presidential Palace in Damascus. This scenario required the rockets to have a
range of at least 9.5 kilometres to travel from the postulated launch site in a
Syrian military complex to the impact sites in Moadamiya and Zamalka/Ein Tarma.
This HRW/NYT analysis received widespread
publicity and was almost universally regarded as proving the Syrian government’s
guilt.
However, there were major flaws in the Times’
analysis, which it was forced to admit a few months later (see New Study
Refines View of Sarin Attack in Syria,
28 December 2013). Robert Parry, an
experienced American investigative journalist, who has written many informative
articles on the Ghouta attack, described the flaws as follows:
“The
analytical flaws included the fact that one of the two missiles, the one
landing in Moadamiya, south of Damascus had clipped a building during its
descent making a precise calculation of its flight path impossible, plus the
discovery that the Moadamiya missile contained no Sarin, making its use in the
vectoring of two Sarin-laden rockets nonsensical.
“But
the Times’ analysis ultimately fell apart amid a consensus among missile
experts that the rockets would have had a maximum range of only around three
kilometers when the supposed launch site is about 9.5 kilometers from the
impact zones in Moadamiya and Zamalka/Ein Tarma, east of Damascus.”
(See NYT Backs Off Its Syria-Sarin Analysis, Consortium News,
29 December 2013)
The new study
referred to in the Times’ headline was by Theodore A Postol, Professor of Science,
Technology, and National Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) and Richard M Lloyd, a former UN weapons inspector. They concluded that the rockets had a range of
around two kilometres. This is in line
with an estimate given by the head of the UN Mission, Dr Åke Sellström, at a
press conference on 13 December 2013 (see video,
around 16 minutes in), when he said: “two kilometres could be a fair guess”.
Lloyd and Postol summarised
their findings as follows:
“The
U.S. intelligence community, supported by the remarkable capabilities of U.S.
space-based infrared satellites, supposedly observed that the chemical rockets
were launched from the heart of Syrian government-controlled areas, as shown on
the map that the White House released. For this to be the case, the munitions
would have had to fly about 10 to 15 kilometers, which is simply not possible.
“Our
analysis of the munition used in the attack on Zamalka reveals that the
munition’s range is actually about two kilometers. The United Nations conducted
a completely independent analysis of the munition and reached exactly the same
conclusion.
“In
other words, the entire basis for the U.S. intelligence claim is wrong.”
This indicates that the sarin carrying rockets
could not have been fired “from regime-controlled areas” as asserted by John
Kerry in his briefing on 30 August 2013.
Most likely, they were fired from areas controlled by the armed
opposition – and therefore fired by the armed opposition.
Unfortunately, this crucial correction to the
flawed analysis published by the Times a few months earlier got very little
attention from the mainstream media, then or since.
Was the
armed opposition capable of mounting the Ghouta attack?
But, was the armed opposition capable of mounting
the Ghouta attack? At the time, the Obama
administration stated continuously that it had no evidence that the opposition
was capable of doing so. For example,
Secretary of State John Kerry emphasised
to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 3 September 2013:
“We
are certain that none of the opposition has the weapons or capacity to effect a
strike of this scale particularly from
the heart of regime territory.”
And, in a briefing to journalists on 16 September 2013, US Ambassador to
the UN Samantha Power said:
“The
regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses
sarin."
Seymour Hersh is an investigate journalist
with a legendary reputation dating back to his exposure of the My Lai massacre
during the Vietnam War and including his revelations about the torture and
other abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the US occupation of Iraq forty
years later. He has written two
extensive articles on the Ghouta attack, which were published in the London
Review of Books. He claims that in
August 2013 the Obama administration had ample evidence that elements of the
armed opposition were working with sarin.
In his first article Whose sarin? (December 2013), Hersh asserted that
“by late May 2013 … the CIA had briefed the Obama
administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming
reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in
Iraq (AQI) [later Islamic State], also understood the science of producing
sarin”.
Furthermore:
“On
20 June [2013] a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned
about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
This confirmed that “al-Nusra had the ability
to acquire and use sarin”.
Hersh concludes:
“In
both its public and private briefings after 21 August [2013], the
administration disregarded the available intelligence about al-Nusra’s
potential access to sarin and continued to claim that the Assad government was
in sole possession of chemical weapons. This was the message conveyed in the
various secret briefings that members of Congress received in the days after
the attack, when Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive
against Syrian military installations.”
The only source Hersh gives for this
information is “a senior intelligence consultant”, but given his formidable record
as a journalist what he writes deserves to be taken seriously.
Turkey a
prime mover?
In his second article, The Red Line and the Rat Line
(April 2014), he asserted that Turkey was a prime mover in the Ghouta sarin
attack:
“A
US intelligence consultant told me that a few weeks before 21 August [2013] he
saw a highly classified briefing prepared for [the Chairman of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff General Martin] Dempsey and the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel,
which described ‘the acute anxiety’ of the Erdoğan administration about the
rebels’ dwindling prospects. The analysis warned that the Turkish leadership
had expressed ‘the need to do something that would precipitate a US military
response’. By late summer, the Syrian army still had the advantage over the
rebels, the former intelligence official said, and only American air power
could turn the tide. In the autumn, the former intelligence official went on,
the US intelligence analysts who kept working on the events of 21 August
‘sensed that Syria had not done the gas attack. But the 500 pound gorilla was,
how did it happen? The immediate suspect was the Turks, because they had all
the pieces to make it happen.’
“As
intercepts and other data related to the 21 August attacks were gathered, the
intelligence community saw evidence to support its suspicions. ‘We now know it
was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red
line,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas
attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus on
18 August to investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were there. The deal was to
do something spectacular. Our senior military officers have been told by the
DIA and other intelligence assets that the sarin was supplied through Turkey –
that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also
provided the training in producing the sarin and handling it.’ Much of the
support for that assessment came from the Turks themselves, via intercepted
conversations in the immediate aftermath of the attack. …
“The
post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the White House.
‘Nobody wants to talk about all this,’ the former intelligence official told
me. ‘There is great reluctance to contradict the president, although no
all-source intelligence community analysis supported his leap to convict. There
has not been one single piece of additional evidence of Syrian involvement in
the sarin attack produced by the White House since the bombing raid was called
off. My government can’t say anything because we have acted so irresponsibly.
And since we blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame Erdoğan.’”
I’m not in a position to verify this account
of how the Ghouta attack came about.
But, given Erdoğan’s enthusiasm for overthrowing Assad, it certainly
made sense for the Turkish state to help manufacture a “false flag” chemical
weapons attack to which, given his foolish setting of a red line, Obama would
almost certainly have to respond by taking military action against Syrian state
assets.
It made absolutely no sense for President
Assad, when he was in the ascendant militarily, to take a decision to mount
such an attack himself, in the full knowledge that Obama would almost certainly
respond militarily – which could have led to victory for the armed opposition
and his own removal from power. He would
have to have been suicidal to engage in such a provocation.
As former UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asked
rhetorically at the time;
“Why was chemical attack of any interest for
the Assad regime, given the fact that in recent months they’ve been making
advances rather than retreating? And why would Assad – by all account such an
extremely unpleasant regime, but it’s not irrational – why would he decide to
risk the wrath of US when he was making progress in any event?"
Endnote
In August 2013 the Obama administration
declared with “high confidence” that Assad was responsible for the Ghouta
attack even though the available intelligence to that effect wasn’t a “slam
dunk” (unlike the US intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of
mass destruction”). Today the Trump
administration declares that it is merely “confident” that Assad is guilty of
the Khan Sheikhoun attack –
which presumably means that the available intelligence is not a “slam dunk”
either. Sean Spicer should be asked to
clarify.