Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn
when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the
chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he
omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as
facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US
intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the
country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study
concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket
attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies
produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal
Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing
evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had
mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in
quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the
administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10
September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held
suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was
prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical
weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a
thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that
is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national
security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of
chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.’ Obama was going to war to
back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did
what in the early morning of 21 August.
He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won
evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we
know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an
area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then
they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that
the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s
certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who
told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the
intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.
But in recent interviews with intelligence and
military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern,
and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate
manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email
to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s
responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’,
he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama
administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing
and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence
retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed
in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded
him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration
reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of
the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense
frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are
throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama
– “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they
go along?”’
The complaints focus on what Washington did not have:
any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military
intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning
intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national
security adviser and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report
includes no political or economic information, but provides a summary of
important military events around the world, with all available intelligence
about them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the
attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two days –
20 and 21 August – there was no mention of Syria. On 22 August the lead item in
the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal
change in the command structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing
was noted about the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day. It was not until 23
August that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of
photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on YouTube,
Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the administration knew
no more than the public.
Obama left Washington early on 21 August for a hectic
two-day speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania; according to the White
House press office, he was briefed later that day on the attack, and the
growing public and media furore. The lack of any immediate inside intelligence
was made clear on 22 August, when Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the State
Department, told reporters: ‘We are unable to conclusively determine [chemical
weapons] use. But we are focused every minute of every day since these events
happened … on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the
facts.’ The administration’s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney,
Obama’s press secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific
information – that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not
responsible ‘are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn’t
occur’.
The absence of immediate alarm inside the American
intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian
intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the
US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top
secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent
months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
On 29 August, the Washington Post published
excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes,
agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama
administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the
178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it
summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area
was the gap in coverage targeting Assad’s office. The document said that the
NSA’s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor
unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the
civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad’s
forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA no longer had
access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which
would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a
nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama
administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad
himself to the attack.)
The Post report also provided the first
indication of a secret sensor system inside Syria, designed to provide early
warning of any change in status of the regime’s chemical weapons arsenal. The
sensors are monitored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that
controls all US intelligence satellites in orbit. According to the Post
summary, the NRO is also assigned ‘to extract data from sensors placed on the
ground’ inside Syria. The former senior intelligence official, who had direct
knowledge of the programme, told me that NRO sensors have been implanted near
all known chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are designed to provide
constant monitoring of the movement of chemical warheads stored by the
military. But far more important, in terms of early warning, is the sensors’
ability to alert US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded
with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for
changes in the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American
intelligence on early warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin,
has a shelf life of a few days or less – the nerve agent begins eroding the
rocket almost immediately: it’s a use-it-or-lose-it mass killer. ‘The Syrian
army doesn’t have three days to prepare for a chemical attack,’ the former
senior intelligence official told me. ‘We created the sensor system for
immediate reaction, like an air raid warning or a fire alarm. You can’t have a
warning over three days because everyone involved would be dead. It is either
right now or you’re history. You do not spend three days getting ready to fire
nerve gas.’ The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21
August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been
supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that
Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.
The sensors had worked in the past, as the Syrian
leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system picked up signs
of what seemed to be sarin production at a chemical weapons depot. It was not
immediately clear whether the Syrian army was simulating sarin production as
part of an exercise (all militaries constantly carry out such exercises) or
actually preparing an attack. At the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that
using sarin was ‘totally unacceptable’; a similar message was also passed by
diplomatic means. The event was later determined to be part of a series of
exercises, according to the former senior intelligence official: ‘If what the
sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and
say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the same warning three days
before the gas attack in August?’
The NSA would of course monitor Assad’s office around
the clock if it could, the former official said. Other communications – from
various army units in combat throughout Syria – would be far less important,
and not analysed in real time. ‘There are literally thousands of tactical radio
frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,’
he said, ‘and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to
listen in – and the useful return would be zilch.’ But the ‘chatter’ is
routinely stored on computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was
understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to
the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A
keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find
relevant conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence
weenies started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter
that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a high
confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad
ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The
cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.
The White House needed nine days to assemble its case
against the Syrian government. On 30 August it invited a select group of
Washington journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay,
the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited),
and handed them a document carefully labelled as a ‘government assessment’,
rather than as an assessment by the intelligence community. The document laid
out what was essentially a political argument to bolster the administration’s
case against the Assad government. It was, however, more specific than Obama
would be later, in his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it
stated, knew that Syria had begun ‘preparing chemical munitions’ three days
before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided
more details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel were on the
ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We know that the
Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas
masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.’ The government
assessment and Kerry’s comments made it seem as if the administration had been
tracking the sarin attack as it happened. It is this version of events, untrue
but unchallenged, that was widely reported at the time.
An unforeseen reaction came in the form of complaints
from the Free Syrian Army’s leadership and others about the lack of warning.
‘It’s unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime
before the crime,’ Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of
the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail
was more blunt: ‘Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas
attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people – including more
than 400 children.’ (The number of deaths attributable to the attack varied
widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by the Obama administration,
to many fewer. A Syrian human rights group reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans
Frontières put it at 355; and a French report listed 281 known fatalities. The
strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal
to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA
analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern Ghouta
into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In other words, it
was little more than a guess.)
Five days later, a spokesman for the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement to
the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier
administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but
recovered only subsequently: ‘Let’s be clear, the United States did not watch,
in real time, as this horrible attack took place. The intelligence community
was able to gather and analyse information after the fact and determine that
elements of the Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to using
chemical weapons.’ But since the American press corps had their story, the
retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post,
relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page
that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the Syrian army
attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the launching of
rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials’. It did not
publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the
narrative.
So when Obama said on 10 September that his
administration knew Assad’s chemical weapons personnel had prepared the attack
in advance, he was basing the statement not on an intercept caught as it happened,
but on communications analysed days after 21 August. The former senior
intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to
the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to
the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and
distributed gas masks to its troops. The White House’s government assessment
and Obama’s speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to
the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would
have followed for any chemical attack. ‘They put together a back story,’ the
former official said, ‘and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The
template they used was the template that goes back to December.’ It is possible,
of course, that Obama was unaware that this account was obtained from an
analysis of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas attack, rather than from
direct evidence. Either way he had come to a hasty judgment.
The press would follow suit. The UN report on 16
September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note that its
investigators’ access to the attack sites, which came five days after the
gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces. ‘As with other sites,’ the report
warned, ‘the locations have been well travelled by other individuals prior to
the arrival of the mission … During the time spent at these locations,
individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such
potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.’ Still, the New
York Times seized on the report, as did American and British officials, and
claimed that it provided crucial evidence backing up the administration’s
assertions. An annex to the UN report reproduced YouTube photographs of some
recovered munitions, including a rocket that ‘indicatively matches’ the
specifics of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket. The New York Times wrote
that the existence of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government
was responsible for the attack ‘because the weapons in question had not been
previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency’.
Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national
security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues
and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was
very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was ‘something you could
produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he
added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known
to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data
in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets
that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of
descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more
than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the
scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that
the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual
observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were,
as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study demonstrated
that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two
kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two
weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets
involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times
reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading
weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and
range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the
newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.
The White House’s misrepresentation of what it knew
about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence
that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned al-Nusra, the
Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist
organisation. Al-Nusra is known to have carried out scores of suicide bombings
against Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim sects inside Syria, and to have
attacked its nominal ally in the civil war, the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA).
Its stated goal is to overthrow the Assad regime and establish sharia law. (On
25 September al-Nusra joined several other Islamist rebel groups in repudiating
the FSA and another secular faction, the Syrian National Coalition.)
The flurry of American interest in al-Nusra and sarin
stemmed from a series of small-scale chemical weapons attacks in March and
April; at the time, the Syrian government and the rebels each insisted the
other was responsible. The UN eventually concluded that four chemical attacks
had been carried out, but did not assign responsibility. A White House official
told the press in late April that the intelligence community had assessed ‘with
varying degrees of confidence’ that the Syrian government was responsible for
the attacks. Assad had crossed Obama’s ‘red line’. The April assessment made
headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation. The unnamed
official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence community
assessments ‘are not alone sufficient’. ‘We want,’ he said, ‘to investigate
above and beyond those intelligence assessments to gather facts so that we can
establish a credible and corroborated set of information that can then inform
our decision-making.’ In other words, the White House had no direct evidence of
Syrian army or government involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted
in the press coverage. Obama’s tough talk played well with the public and
Congress, who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.
Two months later, a White House statement announced a
change in the assessment of Syrian culpability and declared that the
intelligence community now had ‘high confidence’ that the Assad government was
responsible for as many as 150 deaths from attacks with sarin. More headlines
were generated and the press was told that Obama, in response to the new
intelligence, had ordered an increase in non-lethal aid to the Syrian
opposition. But once again there were significant caveats. The new intelligence
included a report that Syrian officials had planned and executed the attacks.
No specifics were provided, nor were those who provided the reports identified.
The White House statement said that laboratory analysis had confirmed the use
of sarin, but also that a positive finding of the nerve agent ‘does not tell us
how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the
dissemination’. The White House further declared: ‘We have no reliable
corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or
used chemical weapons.’ The statement contradicted evidence that at the time
was streaming into US intelligence agencies.
Already by late May, the senior intelligence
consultant told me, 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), also understood
the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas
close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in
mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert
formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be
operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been
identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in
Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded
as a high-profile target by the American military.
On 20 June 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. ‘What Shedd
was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the consultant said. ‘It was
not a bunch of “we believes”.’ He told me that the cable made no assessment as
to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and
April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to
acquire and use sarin. A sample of the sarin that had been used was also
recovered – with the help of an Israeli agent – but, according to the
consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic.
Independently of these assessments, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, assuming that US troops might be ordered into Syria to seize the
government’s stockpile of chemical agents, called for an all-source analysis of
the potential threat. ‘The Op Order provides the basis of execution of a
military mission, if so ordered,’ the former senior intelligence official
explained. ‘This includes the possible need to send American soldiers to a
Syrian chemical site to defend it against rebel seizure. If the jihadist rebels
were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that Assad would not fight us
because we were protecting the chemical from the rebels. All Op Orders contain
an intelligence threat component. We had technical analysts from the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I
& W [indications and warnings] people working on the problem … They
concluded that the rebel forces were capable of attacking an American force
with sarin because they were able to produce the lethal gas. The examination
relied on signals and human intelligence, as well as the expressed intention
and technical capability of the rebels.’
There is evidence that during the summer some members
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by the prospect of a ground invasion
of Syria as well as by Obama’s professed desire to give rebel factions
non-lethal support. In July, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, provided a gloomy assessment, telling the Senate Armed Services
Committee in public testimony that ‘thousands of special operations forces and
other ground forces’ would be needed to seize Syria’s widely dispersed chemical
warfare arsenal, along with ‘hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other
enablers’. Pentagon estimates put the number of troops at seventy thousand, in
part because US forces would also have to guard the Syrian rocket fleet:
accessing large volumes of the chemicals that create sarin without the means to
deliver it would be of little value to a rebel force. In a letter to Senator
Carl Levin, Dempsey cautioned that a decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could
have unintended consequences: ‘We have learned from the past ten years,
however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power
without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a
functioning state … Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of
a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the
very chemical weapons we seek to control.’
The CIA declined to comment for this article. Spokesmen
for the DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were
not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable
markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head
of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American intelligence agency,
including the DIA, ‘assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in
developing a capacity to manufacture sarin’.
The administration’s public affairs officials are not
as concerned about al-Nusra’s military potential as Shedd has been in his
public statements. In late July, he gave an alarming account of al-Nusra’s
strength at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. ‘I count no less than
1200 disparate groups in the opposition,’ Shedd said, according to a recording
of his presentation. ‘And within the opposition, the al-Nusra Front is … most
effective and is gaining in strength.’ This, he said, ‘is of serious concern to
us. If left unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements’ – he
also cited al-Qaida in Iraq – ‘will take over.’ The civil war, he went on,
‘will only grow worse over time … Unfathomable violence is yet to come.’ Shedd
made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he was not allowed to: the
reports his office received were highly classified.
A series of secret dispatches from Syria over the
summer reported that members of the FSA were complaining to American
intelligence operatives about repeated attacks on their forces by al-Nusra and
al-Qaida fighters. The reports, according to the senior intelligence consultant
who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is ‘more worried about the
crazies than it is about Assad’. The FSA is largely composed of defectors from
the Syrian army. The Obama administration, committed to the end of the Assad
regime and continued support for the rebels, has sought in its public
statements since the attack to downplay the influence of Salafist and Wahhabist
factions. In early September, John Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing
with a sudden claim that al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority
players in the Syrian opposition. He later withdrew the claim.
In both its public and private briefings after 21
August, 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. One legislator with
more than two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came
away from one such briefing persuaded that ‘only the Assad government had sarin
and the rebels did not.’ Similarly, following the release of the UN report on
16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha Power, the
US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: ‘It’s very important to note
that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the
opposition possesses sarin.’
It is not known whether the highly classified
reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power’s office, but her comment was
a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration. ‘The
immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,’ the former senior
intelligence official told me. ‘The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan,
jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: “Look at what
I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot
of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there
was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force
Obama’s hand: “This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now
Obama can react.” Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the
administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were
alerted that he was going to attack weren’t so sure it was a good thing.’
The proposed American missile attack on Syria never
won public support and Obama turned quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal
for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare complex. Any possibility of
military action was definitively averted on 26 September when the
administration joined Russia in approving a draft UN resolution calling on the
Assad government to get rid of its chemical arsenal. Obama’s retreat brought
relief to many senior military officers. (One high-level special operations
adviser told me that the ill-conceived American missile attack on Syrian
military airfields and missile emplacements, as initially envisaged by the White
House, would have been ‘like providing close air support for al-Nusra’.)
The administration’s distortion of the facts
surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the
whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red line’ threat to
bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to
take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his
chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted
with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to
cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.
The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September
by the Security Council, dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces
such as al-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm: ‘no party in Syria should
use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer [chemical]
weapons.’ The resolution also calls for the immediate notification of the Security
Council in the event that any ‘non-state actors’ acquire chemical weapons. No
group was cited by name. While the Syrian regime continues the process of
eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of
precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as
the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create
sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone. There
may be more to negotiate.
Letters
For a second time the LRB has aired Seymour
Hersh’s highly shaky claim that the opposition was responsible for the chemical
weapons attack on the Ghouta on 21 August 2013 (LRB,
17 April). Hersh provides only one source for the key claims in his piece:
a ‘former intelligence official’. As the bloggers Eliot Higgins and Scott Lucas
have shown, he entirely ignores the overwhelming balance of tangible evidence
that indicates the responsibility of the regime for the Ghouta attack. The two
types of munitions found at the site were the Soviet M14 and an improvised type
of rocket known as ‘the Volcano’. Both have been spotted in several combat
videos, always being used by regime forces and never by the opposition.
Contrary to Hersh’s claims in his first article, all of the rockets used were
well within range of regime-held areas (LRB, 19
December 2013). The position of the intact munitions, in particular
‘Missile 197’, indicates a firing point to the north, where the regime-held
areas were. The 21 August incident involved multiple rocket attacks on the
Ghouta from those directions.
A lot hinges on Hersh’s implication that the Islamist
fighters arrested in Turkey in May 2013 were part of a sarin-producing
operation. Indeed, the local press did report that the men were carrying two
kilogrammes of sarin. The charges laid by the court did not say this: they said
that the men were carrying chemicals that could have been used to produce
sarin. Perhaps they intended to do so, but they would have needed much more
time. At least eight ‘Volcanoes’ were fired on the Ghouta. Each warhead carries
an estimated fifty litres of sarin. It took Aum Shinrikyo years, trillions of
yen and a dedicated factory to come up with less than a tenth of that. Not only
did the jihadists supposedly come up with the sarin in miraculously large
quantities without anyone knowing about it, according to Hersh’s intelligence
official they then filled perfect copies of regime munitions with the stuff,
transported them to areas north of the Ghouta (unopposed by the regime forces
occupying those areas) and launched them at their own side.
Hersh has dropped his arguments of December –
including the claim that a secret US sensory system in Syria should have shown
evidence of the attack – and wants us to take the word of a single unnamed
spook instead. Likewise, the Russian Foreign Ministry initially said there had
been no attack and that the YouTube footage was false, on the basis of the
timestamp on the videos. When it was pointed out that this was due to the time
difference between Syria and the US, where YouTube marks its timestamps, and
that the actual timing was entirely consistent with reports of the attack, the
idea was dropped without further ado. This is not a method of argument that
inspires confidence.
Whose sarin? Assad’s, almost certainly. Why did he do
it? Perhaps he thought Russian diplomatic cover would let him get away with it.
That is what happened, after all.
Jamie Allinson
London NW6
Jamie Allinson makes some false technical claims in
his critique of Seymour Hersh (Letters, 8 May). What
Hersh reports is entirely plausible, and consistent with facts that emerged
from our more limited but irrefutable technical studies of the circumstances
surrounding the nerve agent attack in Damascus on 21 August 2013. Our findings,
which have become the basis for the ‘new’ arguments being made against Hersh by
people like Allinson, and supposedly knowledgeable non-government organisations
like Human Rights Watch and the New York Times, raise the most serious
questions about whether the White House lied about technical intelligence
associated with the attack.
Allinson is correct that the improvised rockets he
calls Volcanoes each contained about fifty litres of sarin, but wrong in his
claim that they were fired from a regime-held area ‘to the north’. These claims
are not original, but repeat those of Eliot Higgins, a blogger who, although he
has been widely quoted as an expert in the American mainstream media, has changed
his facts every time new technical information has challenged his conclusion
that the Syrian government must have been responsible for the sarin attack. In
addition, the claims that Higgins makes that are correct are all derived from
our findings, which have been transmitted to him in numerous exchanges.
Before we began reporting findings from our analyses,
there were published reports estimating that the sarin load carried by the
rockets was about five litres. We showed, from detailed engineering analyses of
rocket debris, that the rockets contained as much as fifty litres. This finding
was hailed by members of the US government and non-government organisations,
such as Human Rights Watch and the New York Times, as proof that the
Syrian government had executed the atrocity of 21 August. In a follow-up
analysis, we found that it could not possibly have been the case that the
deadly rockets were fired from Syrian government-controlled areas as far as ten
kilometres away, as claimed by the US government and non-government
organisations. We showed that the shape of the rockets resulted in extreme
aerodynamic drag, limiting their range to about 2 to 2.5 kilometres. This
finding was met with great resistance in the media.
We also analysed the impact debris from the single
rocket for which data was available (there is no data for multiple rocket
impacts despite Allinson’s claim). We showed that those who argued that the
Syrian government had fired the rockets had incorrectly determined the
direction of arrival as being from the northwest. We showed that the actual
direction was from the north. This new technical insight quickly prompted a new
‘discovery’. There was a checkpoint to the north, close to the area controlled
by Syrian government forces, from which the deadly short-range rockets could
have been launched. However, if they had been fired from this location, the
impact pattern of the rockets used in the attack would have required them to
have a range well in excess of five kilometres – which we have shown cannot be
the case.
We do not claim to know who was actually behind the
attack of 21 August in Damascus. But we can say for sure that neither do the
people who claim to have clear evidence that it was the Syrian government. The
mainstream American media have done a disservice to the public by allowing
politically motivated individuals, governments, and non-government
organisations to misrepresent facts that clearly point to serious breaches of
the truth by the White House.
Richard Lloyd; Ted Postol
Spokane, Washington; Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
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