Three Major Flaws in the Official Case for Bombing Syria

Three Major Flaws in the Official Case for Bombing Syria

White House assessment marked by false claims and misreported intelligence

by Christopher David, September 09, 2013

In making their case for urgent airstrikes against Syria, top White House officials are relying heavily on a four-page document entitled ‘Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013‘.

The report contains false claims easily disproven by open sources, logical fallacies, and verifiable misreporting of intelligence.

Three major flaws stand out:

FLAW #1. FALSE CLAIM: “We assess that the opposition has not used chemical weapons.”

This statement appears at the end of a paragraph with no supporting evidence or explanation.

It is directly contradicted by video evidence, news reports, and statements by a key UN investigator.

At the time of the August 21 attack, UN investigators had arrived in the area three days prior, investigating chemical weapons use in a separate incident on March 19 of this year.

Rebels also claimed that chemical weapons use in the March 19 incident was ordered by Assad’s forces.

In May, a member of the United Nations commission investigating the March 19 incident said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television that there was “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.”

The investigator, Carla DelPonte, is a former Swiss attorney general and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

“I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got… they were about the use of nerve gas by the opposition,” she said.

DelPonte repeated the assertion in subsequent comments a few days after the interview.

“What appears to our investigation is that it was used by the opponents, by the rebels,” she said. “We have no indication at all that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons.”

In June, Russia called on Turkey to share its findings in the case of Syrian rebels who were seized near the Turkish-Syrian border with a 2kg cylinder full of the nerve gas sarin.

From the Turkish Weekly article in June:

Russia’s top foreign official Sergei Lavrov today said the Kremlin wanted to get clear on the issue of chemical weapons used in Syria, since the allegation had taken on the role of a trading card in the conflict, becoming a focus of constant provocations.

“I do not rule out that some force may want to use it [the rumor] to say that the “red line” has been crossed and a foreign intervention is needed,” the minister said.

This week the Russian Foreign Ministry revealed the key findings from a 100-page report sent to the UN in July.

BERLIN – Russia says it has compiled a 100-page report detailing what it says is evidence that Syrian rebels, not forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, were behind a deadly sarin gas attack in an Aleppo suburb earlier this year.

In a statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website late Wednesday, Russia said the report had been delivered to the United Nations in July and includes detailed scientific analysis of samples that Russian technicians collected at the site of the alleged attack, Khan al Asal.

Additionally, a rebel-produced video [the first video at that link] shows anti-government militants firing gas canisters into a residential area, with the word “sarin” clearly audible.

In light of the above reports, the White House assessment’s lack of evidence tying the Assad regime specifically to the use of chemical weapons in the August 21 attack is a major flaw in its case for urgent military strikes.

This flaw strikes at the core argument of the report, which is that chemical weapons use had to come from Assad’s forces, because the rebels had no chemical weapons or no capability to use them.

If both sides had access to chemical weapons, as the actual evidence suggests, the burden of proof remains on the U.S. government to prove the culpability of the Assad regime in ordering the use of chemical weapons.

Evidence of conventional shelling by Assad forces, before the subsequent release of poison gas, does not prove that the chemical weapons use was the work of Assad. Because correlation does not imply causation.

A plausible alternative scenario is presented below, after Flaw #3.

Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo summarizes:

We don’t know where Syria’s chemical weapons are located, we don’t know who has possession of them, and we have no real idea why some 300-plus Syrians died with hundreds of others injured in this incident. Yet we are willing to go to war based on – what? YouTube videos made by professional propagandists? Please.

FLAW #2. MISREPORTED INTELLIGENCE: Intercepted phone call offered as “proof” actually proves nothing other than Syrian officials were asking questions about chemical weapons use.

From page 4 of the report:

We have a body of information, including past Syrian practice, that leads us to conclude that regime officials were witting of and directed the attack on August 21. We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on August 21 and was concerned with the U.N. inspectors obtaining evidence. On the afternoon of August 21, we have intelligence that Syrian chemical weapons personnel were directed to cease operations.

The only other “evidence” subsequently provided as part of that “body of information” refers merely to publicly known facts about the intensity of the regime’s conventional shelling on August 21, nothing else specific to chemical weapons.

This entire section of the report hinges on the intercepted phone calls.

From the Foreign Policy article, the first US media report on the calls:

Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by US intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they’re certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar al-Assad regime – and why the US military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days.

But the intercept raises questions about culpability for the chemical massacre, even as it answers others: Was the attack on Aug. 21 the work of a Syrian officer overstepping his bounds? Or was the strike explicitly directed by senior members of the Assad regime? “It’s unclear where control lies,” one US intelligence official toldThe Cable. “Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?”

Look again at that first sentence. A Syrian government official asked panicked questions about chemical weapons usage. Nothing about any response. If the response was “Yes, we used gas on them,” don’t you think that would be reported?

There’s more. From an excellent article by Kenneth Timmerman, president of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran:

The Obama administration has selectively used intelligence to justify military strikes on Syria, former military officers with access to the original intelligence reports say, in a manner that goes far beyond what critics charged the Bush administration of doing in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.

According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel’s famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.

[…]

According to the doctored report, the chemical attack was carried out by the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother.

However, the original communication intercepted by Unit 8200 between a major in command of the rocket troops assigned to the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division, and the general staff, shows just the opposite.

The general staff officer asked the major if he was responsible for the chemical weapons attack. From the tone of the conversation, it was clear that “the Syrian general staff were out of their minds with panic that an unauthorized strike had been launched by the 155th Brigade in express defiance of their instructions,” the former officers say.

According to the transcript of the original Unit 8200 report, the major “hotly denied firing any of his missiles” and invited the general staff to come and verify that all his weapons were present.

The report contains a note at the end that the major was interrogated by Syrian intelligence for three days, then returned to command of his unit. “All of his weapons were accounted for,” the report stated.

The New York Times reported this morning that the White House is now backing off its claims to have a “smoking gun that directly links President Bashar al-Assad to the attack.”

The new argument is more deductive: since the Assad regime has chemical weapons and chemical weapons were used in Mouadhamiya, therefore the Syrian regime must have been the ones to use them.

That is in fact the entirety of the new argument: chemical weapons were used, therefore they were used by Assad.

That core argument was shown above – see Flaw #1 – to be invalid.

We have still seen no solid evidence tying the Assad regime to the use of chemical weapons in the August 21 attack.

Is there a likelier explanation?

FLAW #3. IGNORES BROADER CONTEXT: Assessment ignores broader context that suggests different culprits.

A broader analysis of the Syrian conflict suggests a plausible alternative scenario.

Contrary to the assessment’s assertions of regime “frustration” leading to the decision to use chemical weapons, there is good reason to doubt that the Assad regime would engage in an action sure to mobilize international opinion in opposition.

From an article on TIME.com:

Still, it’s hard to imagine that the Syrian government would be so foolish as to fire chemical weapons on the outskirts of Damascus, three days after the arrival of a UN team tasked with investigating three other incidents of alleged chemical weapons attacks that took place six months ago.

The August 21 attacks took place a short distance away from the UN inspectors’ hotel on the outskirts of Damascus.

What is the likelihood that the Syrian government would use chemical weapons in an attack on residential neighborhoods very close to where UN inspectors are trying to determine culpability for a previous chemical weapons attack?

Compare that to the likelihood of Syrian rebels timing the release of gas weapons around a conventional shelling by the Assad regime immediately after the UN inspectors entered the Damascus area.

That would have the double effect of distracting attention from the investigation into the March 19 incident, in which mounting evidence indicates the rebel use of chemical weapons, while accomplishing a key objective of the rebels: to drag the US and international community into war on their behalf.

Considering the above evidence, the latter scenario just makes more sense. It also happens to be the position of the Syrian government.

An official spokesman at the Foreign and Expatriates Ministry said that the cooperation agreement between Syria and the international committee for investigating the use of weapons of mass destruction in some areas in Syria didn’t please the terrorists and the countries supporting them, which is why they came up with new false allegations that the Armed Forces used toxic gas in Damascus Countryside.

Could it be that the chemical weapons usage on August 21 was deliberately intended to draw Western forces into a war?

Kenneth Timmerman continues:

An Egyptian intelligence report describes a meeting in Turkey between military intelligence officials from Turkey and Qatar and Syrian rebels. One of the participants states, “there will be a game changing event on August 21st” that will “bring the US into a bombing campaign” against the Syrian regime.

As mentioned in the Turkish Weekly article quoted above, Syrian rebels were caught near the Turkish-Syrian border with a 2kg cylinder full of the nerve gas sarin.

Russia Today reported that the group caught with the cylinder of sarin was Jabhat al-Nusra, or the al-Nusra Front.

In May, Sen. John McCain entered Syria to meet with Syrian rebels including Gen. Salem Idriss, Commander of the Free Syrian Army.

Idriss recently expressed his admiration for the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra:

Jabhat al-Nusra has proved to be the most effective in fighting the Syrian army.

And it was the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra that was caught smuggling sarin into Syria.

What did Jabhat al-Nusra intend to do with that sarin gas?

From an August 2 article in Central Asia Online:

Iraqi national security advisor Faleh al-Fayyadh said the army’s intelligence service has formed a special cell to work alongside the Intelligence Service and the Interior Ministry’s Intelligence Agency to investigate al-Qaeda’s production and planned use of banned chemical and biological weapons.

Al-Fayyadh said further investigations revealed that plans were put in place for al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra to get access to those weapons and “further aggravate the tragedy of the Syrian people.”

And where might Jabhat al-Nusra have gotten that sarin gas?

From an exclusive story written by Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak and Jordanian journalist Yahya Ababneh for the Minnesota-based media outlet Mint Press:

However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing [sic] gas attack.

“My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry,” said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta.

Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a “tube-like structure” while others were like a “huge gas bottle.”

Ghouta townspeople said the rebels were using mosques and private houses to sleep while storing their weapons in tunnels.

Abdel-Moneim said his son and the others died during the chemical weapons attack. That same day, the militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, which is linked to al-Qaida, announced that it would similarly attack civilians in the Assad regime’s heartland of Latakia on Syria’s western coast, in purported retaliation.

“They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them,” complained a female fighter named ‘K.’ “We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.”

“When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them,” she warned. She, like other Syrians, do not want to use their full names for fear of retribution.

A well-known rebel leader in Ghouta named ‘J’ agreed. “Jabhat al-Nusra militants do not cooperate with other rebels, except with fighting on the ground. They do not share secret information. They merely used some ordinary rebels to carry and operate this material,” he said.

“We were very curious about these arms. And unfortunately, some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set off the explosions,” ‘J’ said.

Doctors who treated the chemical weapons attack victims cautioned interviewers to be careful about asking questions regarding who, exactly, was responsible for the deadly assault.

[…]

More than a dozen rebels interviewed reported that their salaries came from the Saudi government.

The Mint Press article appears to be substantiated by available photo and video evidence, in which weapons with a “tube-like structure” supporting a “huge gas bottle” are being fired by rebels at residential areas amid cries of “sarin”. And note also the picture of chemical materials from a rebel weapons stockpile clearly labeled as originating from a factory in Saudi Arabia.

The article continues with an in-depth analysis of Saudi Prince Bandar’s new position as Saudi intelligence chief, placing him in charge of the Saudi push to unseat Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the CIA realized Saudi Arabia was “serious” about toppling Assad when the Saudi king named Prince Bandar to lead the effort.

In a leaked transcript of a private meeting in July between Prince Bandar and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, Bandar says the following:

We have lost some regimes. And what we got in return were terrorist experiences, as evidenced by the experience of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the extremist groups in Libya. … As an example, I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us, and they will not move in the Syrian territory’s direction without coordinating with us. These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role or influence in Syria’s political future.

Above Saudi Prince Bandar admits that Saudi intelligence controls various terrorist groups and uses them against Assad’s regime.

The report on the meeting concludes:

As soon as Putin finished his speech, Prince Bandar warned that in light of the course of the talks, things were likely to intensify, especially in the Syrian arena, although he appreciated the Russians’ understanding of Saudi Arabia’s position on Egypt and their readiness to support the Egyptian army despite their fears for Egypt’s future.

The head of the Saudi intelligence services said that the dispute over the approach to the Syrian issue leads to the conclusion that “there is no escape from the military option, because it is the only currently available choice given that the political settlement ended in stalemate. We believe that the Geneva II Conference will be very difficult in light of this raging situation.”

At the end of the meeting, the Russian and Saudi sides agreed to continue talks, provided that the current meeting remained under wraps. This was before one of the two sides leaked it via the Russian press.

In light of all the above evidence, the following scenario emerges as a plausible alternative to the official narrative: that the newly installed Saudi intelligence chief, intent on removing Assad from power, supplied Jabhat al-Nusra with sarin gas to smuggle it into Syria; at which point al-Nusra was to disperse the weapons among ‘ordinary’ rebels in the suburbs of Damascus, so that upon a conventional shelling by Assad’s forces after the UN inspectors entered the area, those weapons would detonate, giving the impression to the world that the Assad regime ordered the use of chemical weapons.

Geopolitics is a complex game, with many actors and many agendas. It is impossible to now say conclusively who did what on August 21.

And that is exactly the point.

As White House and congressional leaders attempt to convince legislators and the American public to support an attack against the Syrian regime, it is more important now than ever to determine the truth of the claims used to justify that aggression.

Our future is at stake.

In 2003, the US government rushed to war in Iraq based on misinformation and misreported intelligence.

Let us not repeat our past mistakes.

Christopher David is a youth advocate and 2012 congressional candidate (CA-33). He lives in Los Angeles and can be reached on Twitter @MillennialChris.

http://original.antiwar.com/Christopher-David/2013/09/08/three-major-flaws-in-the-official-case-for-bombing-syria/