1.
AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in
Oslo as its staff prepare to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.
According to a U.S.-Russia deal that stopped possible U.S. military strikes
against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Syria is to disperse—Syria will be
dispersing its arsenal of almost 1,300 tons of chemical weapons by mid-2014.
The head of the mission overseeing the destruction of the country’s chemical
arms said last week fighting on the ground poses a major obstacle to
implementing the agreement. This is Sigrid Kaag.
2.
SIGRID KAAG: Despite the significant progress achieved to date in a very
short span of time, the most complex and challenging work lies ahead. The
removal of the Syrian Arab Republic’s chemical agents for destruction outside
of its territory will require tremendous coordination and collective effort.
Security remains a key challenge for all of us. As you know, the destruction of
a chemical weapons program has never taken place under such challenging and
dangerous conditions.
3.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the head of the OPCW mission
to Syria, Sigrid Kaag. This comes as a major new article
casts doubts on the veracity of the Obama administration’s claims that only the
Assad regime could have carried out the attacks in the Damascus suburb of
Ghouta earlier this year. Writing in the London Review of Books,
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh argues the Obama administration, quote, “cherry-picked
intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.” He reports U.S. was also aware
that al-Nusra, a militant group fighting in Syria’s civil war, had, quote, “mastered
the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in
quantity.” To find out more about the piece, we go to Washington, D.C., to
speak with Seymour Hersh himself, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative
journalist. His latest piece in the London Review of Books is headlined “Whose
Sarin?” Over the decades, Hersh has broken numerous landmark pieces, including
the Abu Ghraib prison abuses and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Welcome back
to Democracy Now!, Sy. Lay out your case for what it is that the Obama
administration did or didn’t tell us.
4.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Actually, Amy, it’s really not my
case; it’s the case of people in the administration who believe when they—when
they take the oath, they take the oath of office to the Constitution and not to
their immediate general or admiral or not to the—or not to the president even.
It’s about truth. And there are an awful lot of people in the government who
just were really very, very upset with the way the information about the gas
attack took place. And that’s not to say that I have—I certainly don’t
know who did what, but there’s no question my government does not. And there’s
also no question that the American president that we now have—a guy I voted
for, who has a lot of good
things about him—was willing to go to war, wanted to throw missiles at
Syria, without really having a case and knowing he didn’t have much of a case.
And that, to me, is very troubling. We’re talking about a major war crime here,
because certainly hundreds, if not more, of innocent civilians—and some bad
guys, too, rebels and others—were killed by sarin, which is a gross violation. The case is simple. We had—in the spring, there were a
number of chemical warfare attacks in various parts of Syria that were
investigated by everybody. The U.N. looked at it. They determined there were
four instances of small cases of maybe 10—I shouldn’t say small; one dead is more than enough—but
maybe 15 to 20 people killed by sarin and others incapacitated. And eventually
they concluded, like they always do, the U.N., no decision on who did what. So
we began looking at it. The Israelis, of course, they’re a neighboring country;
they’re very concerned about Syrian chemical—the arsenal. It’s a strategic
threat for Israel. And we got some sarin, and we got some evidence. And the
thing that surprised us the most is there was a lot of reporting in—known to
the American community and to our allies, that al-Nusra, one of the more jihadi
groups in—more radical, if you will, Islamist groups fighting against Bashar,
and other groups, too, to a lesser degree, AQI, al-Qaeda of Iraq—sometimes we
call it al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia—had not only the capacity and potential and the
know-how, how to produce sarin, but also had done some production of sarin. And
these are reports that were very highly classified that went up the chain of
command. In some cases, they were so secret that not many people in the
government knew about it. They went to senior officials in the Defense
Intelligence Agency. The CIA certainly was forwarding many of these reports. It
got to the point where the American government, the military, the Pentagon,
looked into the whole prospect of let’s go in and clean out all the—all the
nerve gas on both sides. And they did what they call an ops study, operations study. It’s an ops
order, really, it’s called. It’s a major, major study, 60 or 70 various
sub-parts to it. You’re going to send—they concluded 70,000 American soldiers would
have to go into Syria to clean out the chemical weapons on both sides. And that’s
a big deal. You know, you’ve got to feed them. You’ve got to protect them. You’ve
got to find out how much toilet paper you’re going to need. A major,
major study was done over this summer. I think—I’ve been told it was supposed
to—there was supposed to be what they call an NIE, a National Intelligence Estimate, on
the capability of the opposition, the rebels, to manufacture sarin, but that
never happened. And there we are. These reports were there. They were certainly
known to the community. I
can’t tell you that the president himself read those documents; I don’t know. But
clearly, whether or not—if he didn’t, he should have. And when he went public
after the incident, right away—you know, it was just this. The narrative was—the real issue was the
narrative was Bashar, who we don’t like, who’s done terrible things—you
know, certainly he’s—in order to defend his regime and his government, he has
killed a lot of people, and also, we have to acknowledge, had an awful lot of
his soldiers killed. There’s—it’s a real rebel war there, civil war. And the
point was that at no time did the United States ever consider al-Nusra to be a
potential target of investigation. They were simply excluded from the
conversation. And the narrative was Bashar did it. And it was bought by the
mainstream press, as we all know, and by most people in the world. And this is why, you know, creepy troublemakers like me
stay in business.
5.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to White House
Press Secretary Jay Carney. He was being
questioned in late August about the Syrian chemical weapons attack.
6.
REPORTER: Jay, you were very
firm in saying just now that there’s little doubt that the Syrian regime was in
fact responsible for this chemical attack. So, in that context, what is the
purpose of this intelligence report? Is it to legitimize—to get rid of any
remaining doubt and therefore legitimize a response in the eyes of the
international community?
7.
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: I’m
not aware of any doubt that exists. Again, it’s undeniable that chemical
weapons were used on a large scale. We know that the regime maintains custody
of the chemical weapons in Syria and uses the types of rockets that were used
to deliver chemical weapons on August 21st. The opposition does not. We also
know that the opposition does not have the capabilities that the Syrian regime
has. And as I mentioned earlier, we have already had an assessment by the
intelligence community, with a high degree of confidence that the Syrian regime
has used, on a smaller scale, chemical weapons in this conflict already. So,
suggestions that there’s any doubt about who is responsible for this are as
preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn’t occur.
8.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh,
your response to what Jay Carney said at the end of August?
9.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, my mother
would have said that he should wash his mouth out with soap.
10.
AMY GOODMAN: Because?
11.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, because—look, he’s not lying;
he’s being told what to say, and he does it. He’s being told. But
four days earlier, the State Department spokesman said—a woman spokesperson
said for the State Department, “We’re looking at”—on the 23rd, “We have no information
about what’s going on. We’re looking at it.” The fact is that the United States
has a very, very sophisticated sensor system that we’ve put up, just as we also
had in Iran, which helped us to conclude — I wrote about this for years at The New Yorker
— that we pretty much were pretty sure there was no secret underground
facility in Iran, even though the press still talks about that possibility. We
looked at it hard. We have sensors that were very, very good. America has great
technical capability. And the same thing happened inside Syria. We have
sensors. And the problem with talking about it is, once—I had no choice,
because you have to mention it, but people start asking questions about what do
they look like, where are they, and that’s too bad, because they’re very
useful. We have passive sensors that not only tell us when the Syrian—at every
Syrian depot, chemical warfare depot—and sarin isn’t stored. Nobody keeps sarin. It’s a very volatile, acidic poison
that degrades quickly. You keep the chemicals that make sarin. They’re what
are called precursors. There’s two
chemicals, when mixed, poof, alacadabra, you have sarin. So, the Syrian
arsenal, the reason you can get rid of it pretty easily, as the report heard
they’re doing it, is because there’s two inert substances that could be
disposed independently. One is even an alcohol. You could just flush it. But
the point being that the sensors monitor not only when the—when sarin or the
chemicals are moved; more importantly, they’re capable of monitoring when the
Syrian army begins to mix the stuff. And once they mix the stuff, it’s—as I
wrote, it’s a use-it-or-lose-it process. You have
to use it quickly, because it degrades quickly. It doesn’t stay long in the
shells; it erodes the shells. And not only that, the Israelis are right
there with us on this sensor system. And so, it’s like a fire alarm, early
warning system. You know, it’s—an alarm goes off, and
the Israelis know about it, as we know about it, right away. And we are not
going to let the Syrian military or army get—take—create weapons, pour this
stuff into warheads, move it and be ready to fire. That’s not going to happen. The
Israelis will attack before that happens. So, this system said nada,
nothing, on the 21st, the 22nd. I write about the fact there’s internal
reports. It wasn’t until the 23rd, when the American internal—the secret
government and, you know, the secret intelligence community began writing
internal reports for the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, saying that we’ve got a problem here in Syria. For days, we didn’t
know, because—and what does that mean? What that means is that if—if chemical
warfare was used on the 21st, it didn’t come from that arsenal, because there
was no warning of any mixing. That doesn’t mean something else could have
happened, that some renegade group got some and did something. But the main
warning system we had was quiet. That’s a clue. That’s a big clue that at least
you should consider something other than the Syrian army when you begin an
investigation. And so, what the press secretary said is silly. It’s just wrong. I
don’t blame him. He happens to be a very nice guy,
Jay Carney. He’s just doing what he’s told.
12.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, we’re going
to break and then come back to this discussion and talk about, well, what your
reputation is based on, the people, whether you name them or not, in your
article, the high-level intelligence officials and analysts who were raising
very serious questions behind the scenes, why weren’t their warnings being
heeded. We’re talking to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His
latest piece
headlined “Whose Sarin?” is appearing in the London Review of Books.
Stay with us. [break] In our next segment, we’re going
to be speaking with the Reverend Jesse Jackson about Nelson Mandela, the myth
and the facts, but first we continue with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Seymour Hersh, whose piece, “Whose
Sarin?” has just come out in the London Review of Books. We’ll also find
out why it didn’t come out in his traditional place of publication, The New
Yorker, also The Washington Post. But first, in a written statement
to BuzzFeed, Shawn
Turner, spokesman for the director of national intelligence, denied the
claims in Seymour Hersh’s article. He wrote, quote, “We were clear with The
Washington Post and Mr. Hersh that the intelligence gathered about the 21
August chemical weapons attack indicated [that] the Assad regime and only the
Assad regime could have been responsible. Any suggestion that there was an
effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is
simply false.” Turner also said no American intelligence agency, quote, “assesses
that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture
sarin.” If you would respond, Seymour Hersh?
13.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, what’s to say? I
mean, he said what he said, and I write what I did. You know, when I did—you mentioned
Abu Ghraib. The senior spokesman for the Pentagon at the time, when I first
began to write about Abu Ghraib, said that—literally—he literally said that, “Oh,
Hersh is just throwing crap against this wall to see what sticks.” I mean, a
spokesman’s job is to carry out what the administration wants him to say. The fact is that I think the administration should just
take the high road here and put out what it knows. I have every reason to
believe they know more than they’ve indicated about who did what and what the
sarin looked like. And, you know, as I wrote in
the article, here you have a president of the United States that one day is
telling us he’s going to bomb Syria, and the next day he suddenly cuts a deal. He’s suddenly a
great constitutionalist, and he’s now going to go to the Congress, because the War
Powers Act, that every president has ignored, and this president ignored when he attacked Libya, suddenly is very
paramount to him. So he’s going to go—he’s not going to bomb, despite he
was—despite saying, with great braggadocio, how tough he’s going to be. They
crossed the red line, which was a very big phrase for him, and he’s going to show
that nobody can cross a red line and get away with it. And then, not only—then
he decides overnight to go to Congress, and then he accepts a very rational
deal—and I’m glad he did—that the Russians put forward, with the Syrians, to
dispose of the chemical arsenal or the chemicals that are in Syria. Why? Why
the turnaround? Is it because they had no information that anybody else had
any—there’s no other alternative? I mean, just what the—just what the—the
statement you read by the press secretary—or the spokesman for the Office of
National Intelligence, would raise just profound questions. If you have no
information that contradicts the notion that Bashar did it, why are you walking
away? And so, you know, there’s more to this story, I assure you. I don’t have
it all. I’ve heard things, and—
14.
AMY GOODMAN: So, who were the
intelligence officials, the analysts, who you talked to, whether you name them
or not?
15.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, you’ve got to be—
16.
AMY GOODMAN: But tell us what they said
to you and which agencies they were with.
17.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I can’t—look, you know
what? You can go up and down, back and forth, and raise
questions about anonymous sources, but believe me, if these guys—you know, they’d all be
living like Snowden in Russia for the rest of their lives, if they were lucky. Nobody’s going to talk for the record. These are—
18.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me turn to David
Shedd, who you do quote, the deputy director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence
Agency.
19.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I quote a document.
No, I don’t quote—I quote a document that was sent to him.
20.
AMY GOODMAN: But let me go directly to
him—
21.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Sure.
22.
AMY GOODMAN: —who spoke in July at the
Aspen Security Forum about the Syrian opposition.
23.
DAVID SHEDD: I count no less than 1,200
disparate groups in the opposition. And so, to a large extent, the conditions
of Syria benefit those who have a tendency toward or are actually in the far
extreme, because what happens is, they go for the space and organization and
certainly what they view as their mission vis-à-vis the Bashar Assad regime and
its proxy fighters with Hezbollah and so forth. They are the most effective end
of that spectrum of those 1,200 groups. They are increasingly stronger within
the opposition in their relative capabilities against the regime. That is not a
statement on the flow and the ebb that pertains to how the regime is doing
against the opposition. But within the opposition, I think, to your question, I
think the al-Nusra Front is gaining in strength and is a case of serious
concern for us.
24.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s David Shedd, the
deputy director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, speaking in
July. The significance of what Shedd said, and what he also couldn’t say,
Seymour Hersh?
25.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I
don’t know what he could or could not say. I’m not in—I can’t get into his
mindset. I just know that by then he had received one major report, and also
the ops order was being conducted. And Shedd, by—Shedd’s been around a
long time. He was in the CIA. And I haven’t talked to him, and I didn’t discuss
this with him. But he’s a
fine intelligence officer. And I—he’s reflecting on what—look, by the
time he’s talking, inside the community, for the last year, it’s been known
that the only game in town, whether you like it or don’t like it, was Bashar,
because otherwise the—what we call the secular anti—the opposition to Bashar,
the legitimate, non-radical, if you will, dissenters, people from within the
army, people—civilians who didn’t like the lack of more social progress, etc.,
etc., they were overrun, even by—we know that beginning in early in the year.
We knew they were being overrun by jihadists. And so, the only solution, it
seemed to me, for—it seems for the government at the time, the people I
know—and I’ve talked to people about this for years; it’s been more than a year
of talk—is, the only solution for stability was Bashar. You have to just like
it or don’t like it. Israel, which—don’t forget,
Damascus is, what, 40 miles, 45 miles from the Golan Heights and 130 miles
south of—north of—northeast of Tel Aviv, easily within range of any missiles.
The Israelis are not going to tolerate a jihadist government inside Syria, or
even any area that the jihadists will claim as an area of sharia law. They’ll
hit it. The only potential for stability was to keep Bashar
there, or at least to get him in a position where maybe he’d be willing to
negotiate some sort of collaborative government, which seems to be the only
sensible theme right now. And so, Shedd could well have been talking
just about that. The reason I wrote about it, mentioned what he said, is
because he got—he said what he said after getting a lot of very tough
intelligence about al-Nusra and its capability. And I will also tell you there
was a very scary incident in May in Turkey, in which some al-Nusra groups were
found, initially reported, to have more than four pounds of sarin, and they
were going to use it to hit an American air base in a place called Adana. We
have a big air base there, and it caused some trouble there. I didn’t write
about it because by the time that case got to a trial, a further-along
indictment, the government, the Turkish government, no longer claimed that they
had sarin, but they were looking for it. And as we—as many in the audience in
the audience may not know, Erdogan, the head of—the prime minister of Turkey,
and his intelligence—chief intelligence officer, a gentleman named Fidan, are
very pro-Islamist, and there’s a lot of tension there about that in the region.
So you have Turkey in one side that really wants Bashar to go down, but it’s
also an ally of ours, and it also tries to maintain good relationships with
Iran. It’s a very complicated, messy thing.
26.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour—
27.
SEYMOUR HERSH: And the nerve gas—
28.
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.
29.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, go ahead. I’m sorry.
No, go ahead. I’m fine.
30.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did the piece appear in
the London Review of Books and not in your traditional place where you
publish, in The New Yorker or, as it was expected to appear, in The
Washington Post, with Executive Editor Marty Baron saying the sourcing in the article
didn’t meet the _Post_’s standards?
31.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that’s what he told me in an—or one of his
editors said in an email, after the story, when it had been, I thought,
scheduled to run for a few weeks, was—and, you know, he’s—look, he’s the boss.
He’s a rational, good editor, and he’s entitled to say it didn’t meet—the
information I got is that it didn’t meet the standards of The Washington
Post. And I respect that. He’s no fool, you
know, and I don’t know the guy, but everything I heard about him is that he’s a
very competent editor. I know people that worked with him when he was that the L.A.
Times, which he was. And
so, I don’t begrudge an editor to say what he wants. You know, look, people like me, we really wear out
welcomes very quickly. You know, sometimes you get tired of reporters coming in
and saying, you know, the sky is always black, and it’s not sunny. And that’s
what we do. So, investigative reporters, we have a very short shelf life. You
know, we’re the Bad News Bears.
32.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the information
that came out of the documents that NSA contractor Edward Snowden released and
how they bear on this, Sy.
33.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that’s why I went to
the Post. Snowden
gave—you know, Snowden—by the way, the Post, you’ve got to admire the Post
for publishing Snowden, too, a mainstream press newspaper doing it, obviously
getting heat from the White House. One of the documents Snowden gave
that ended up being in The Washington Post’s hands was sort of an annual
budget request by the intelligence community, and it included information about
the National Security Agency, a much, very much higher document than
top-secret, etc., etc. And there was a section of it—the Post ran only a
dozen or two—less than that, maybe 17, 18 pages of the document. The rest they
withheld at the request of the government, which is their right. And—but in the
story, a summary story, they mentioned two things that made me think—that
really woke me up. They mentioned the sensor system. And I had known about the
sensor system from people inside. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult,
because passive sensors are something that, as a journalist, I’m glad we have.
Passive, nobody’s hurt. We collect information that we can make judgments on.
34.
AMY GOODMAN: These are run by the
National Reconnaissance Office.
35.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, and the National
Security Agency, too, runs a lot of them. And presumably,
they’re not to be tampered with, the findings. This administration tampered, is one of the points of the article in the London Review
of Books, was that they tampered with something they shouldn’t tamper with,
a system that should be taken very seriously. But that article in The
Washington Post mentioned the sensor system. And it also mentioned
something else, that from the day the opposition, the rebel war, began in Syria
years ago—it’s been a couple years now—we lost the ability to monitor Bashar
and his senior persons. The NSA was no longer able to capture them. They
changed the way they communicate. And, you know, one of the—one of the caveats
about this whole notion of being able to intercept is an awful lot of stuff
in—we have—America, we have couriers flying all day all the time, all over the
world, with documents for CIA station chiefs, for ambassadors, that aren’t put
into communication devices, so they can’t be intercepted. And we lost Bashar
when the rebel war began. And I don’t think—I’ve talked to people. We still don’t
have him, and there’s no question we would have picked up some clue if Bashar
had been actively involved in ordering the nerve gas attack. And one thing the
government, to its credit, has not said in this whole thing since August the
21st, this White House has never claimed to know a thing about Bashar. We use
his name all the time. We say, “Oh, Bashar did this and that.” But we’ve never
claimed to know anything about what he did or did not say, because we don’t
have it. And so, that led
me, to be honest, to the Post. And, you know, the problem was, it’s not
the _Post_’s problem; it’s my problem. You know, why did I think a mainstream
press paper would want to go so hard against—you know, from a freelancer. It
was silly of me. I should have just gone to the London Review very
quickly. My mistake.
36.
AMY GOODMAN: And why this is significant
today? In the end, President Obama chose not to strike Syria because the
American people just overwhelmingly said no. But what this means for what’s
happening in Syria today? And also, why then did the Syrian—
37.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me interrupt
you, Amy.
38.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
39.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Amy, let me interrupt you.
He didn’t—I’m telling you, he didn’t do it because the American people said no.
He knew it because he didn’t have a case. And there was incredible opposition that
will be, one of these days, written about, maybe in history books. There was
incredible operation from some very, very strong-minded, constitutionally
minded people in the Pentagon. That’s the real story. I don’t have it; I could
just tell you I know it. And so, it wasn’t just a case—you know, from the military’s point of
view, this was a president who many respected in many ways. There’s many good
things about Obama. There’s a lot of things—as I said, I voted for him twice.
And he’s probably going to be the brightest president we’re ever going to have,
and maybe the best president we’re ever going to have. The system is—doesn’t
produce always the very best, our system. But the fact of the matter is that
this president was going to go to a war because he felt he had to protect what
he said about a red line. That’s what it was about, in the military’s point of
view. And that’s not acceptable. You don’t go to war, you don’t throw missiles
at a country, when there’s no immediate national security to the United States.
And you don’t even talk about it in public. That’s wrong, and that was a
terrible thing to do. And that’s what this
story is really about. It’s about a president choosing to make political use of
a war crime and not do the right thing. And I think that’s—to me, Amy, that’s a lot more
important than where it was published and who told me no and who told me yes. I
know the press likes to focus on that stuff, but that’s not the story. The story is what he was going to do, and what it says maybe
about him, what it says about that office, what it says about the Power, that
you can simply—you can create a narrative, which he did, and you know the
mainstream press is going to carry out that narrative. I mean, it’s
almost impossible for some of the mainstream newspapers, who have consistently
supported the administration. This is after we had the WMD scandal, when
everybody wanted to be on the team. It turns out our job, as newspaper people,
is not to be on the team. You know, we’ve got a world
run by a lot of yahoos and wackos, and it’s our job as reporters to do the kind
of work and make it hard for the nincompoops that run the world to get away
with some of the stuff we’re doing. That’s what we should be doing more
and more of. And that’s just—you know, I don’t think there’s any virtue in it;
it’s just the job we have. And there’s heroism—you know, there’s nothing heroic
about what we do. It’s heroic for some of the people, reporters in Africa, to
do some of that work when they’re at personal risk. We’re not at personal risk.
It’s just
not so hard to hold the people in office to the highest standard. And the press
should be doing it more and more.
40.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour—
41.
SEYMOUR HERSH: So he didn’t do it—and one
thing, last thing. He didn’t do it because of public opinion. He was willing to flout
it, I think.
42.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to
thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist,
speaking to us from Washington, D.C. We will link to your latest piece in
the London Review of Books, headlined “Whose Sarin?” at
democracynow.org. When we
come back, Reverend Jesse Jackson joins us before he heads to South Africa.
Nelson Mandela will be laid to rest this week. He died last week at the age of
95. Stay with us.
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