[Peace-discuss] Gareth Porter: How Intelligence Was Twisted to Support an Attack on Syria

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18559-how-intelligence-was-twisted-to-support-an-attack-on-syria

How Intelligence Was Twisted to Support an Attack on Syria
Tuesday, 03 September 2013 09:05
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News

Secretary of State John Kerry assured the public that the Obama
administration's summary of the intelligence on which it is basing the case
for military action to punish the Assad regime for an alleged use of
chemical weapons was put together with an acute awareness of the fiasco of
the 2002 Iraq WMD intelligence estimate.

Nevertheless, the unclassified summary of the intelligence assessment made
public August 30, 2013, utilizes misleading language evocative of the
infamous Iraq estimate's deceptive phrasing. The summary cites signals,
geospatial and human source intelligence that purportedly show that the
Syrian government prepared, carried out and "confirmed" a chemical weapons
attack on August 21. And it claims visual evidence "consistent with" a
nerve gas attack.

But a careful examination of those claims reveals a series of convolutedly
worded characterizations of the intelligence that don't really mean what
they appear to say at first glance.

The document displays multiple indications that the integrity of the
assessment process was seriously compromised by using language that
distorted the intelligence in ways that would justify an attack on Syria.

Spinning the Secret Intelligence

That pattern was particularly clear in the case of the intelligence
gathered by covert means. The summary claims, "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."

That seems to indicate that U.S. intelligence intercepted such
communiations. But former British Ambassador Craig Murray has pointed out
on his blog August 31 that the Mount Troodos listening post in Cyprus is
used by British and U.S. intelligence to monitor “all radio, satellite and
microwave traffic across the Middle East … ” and that “almost all landline
telephone communications in this region is routed through microwave links
at some stage [and] picked up on Troodos.”

All intelligence picked by the Troodos listening post is shared between the
U.S. and British intelligence, Murray wrote, but no commmunictions such as
the ones described in the U.S. intelligence summary were shared with the
British Joint Intelligence Organisation.  Murray said a personal contact in
U.S. intelligence had told him the reason was that the purported intercept
came from the Israelis. The Israeli origin of the intelligence was reported
in the U.S. press as well, because an Israeli source apparently leaked it
to a German magazine.

The clumsy attempt to pass off intelligence claimed dubiously by the
Israelis as a U.S. intercept raises a major question about the integrity of
the entire document. The Israelis have an interest in promoting a U.S.
attack on Syria, and the authenticity of the alleged intercept cannot be
assumed. Murray believes that it is fraudulent.

But even if the intercept is authentic, the description of it in the
intelligence summary appears to be misleading. Another description of the
same intercept leaked to The Cable by an administration official suggests
that the summary’s description is extremely tendentious. The story
described those same communications as an exchange of "panicked phone
calls" between a Syrian Defense Ministry official and someone in a chemical
weapons unit in which the defense ministry official was "demanding answers
for [about?] a nerve agent strike." That description clearly suggests that
the Syrian senior official's questions were prompted by the charges being
made on August 21 by opposition sources in Ghouta. The use of the word
"panicked", which slants the interpretation made by readers of the
document, may have been added later by an official eager to make the story
more compatible with the administration’s policy.

But the main problem with the description is that it doesn't answer the
most obvious and important question about the conversation: Did the
purported chemical weapons officer at the other end of the line say that
the regime had used chemical weapons or not? If the officer said that such
weapons had been used, that would obviously have been the primary point of
the report of the intercept. But the summary assessment does not say that,
so the reader can reasonably infer that the officer did not make any such
admission. The significance of the intercept is, therefore, that an
admission of chemicals weapons use was not made.

The carefully chosen wording of the summary - the ministry official was
"concerned with the U.N. inspectors obtaining evidence" - suggests that the
official wanted to make sure that UN inspectors would not find evidence of
a nerve gas attack. But it could also mean precisely the opposite - that
the official wanted the inspectors to be able ascertain that there was no
use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces in eastern Ghouta. The latter
possibility is bolstered by the fact that the regime agreed within 24 hours
of the first formal request on August 24 from UN envoy Angela Kane for
unimpeded access to eastern Ghouta. As late as Friday, August 23, the UN
Department of Safety and Security had not yet decided to give permission to
the UN investigators to go into the area because of uncertainties about
their safety.

The intelligence summary makes no effort to explain why the regime promptly
granted access to the investigators. Another anomaly: the fact that the UN
investigators were already present in Damascus, having been initially
requested by the Assad regime to look into a gas attack the regime had
charged was carried out by the rebels on March 19. The two-page assessment
by the British Joint Intelligence Organisation released August 29, pointed
to this question:"There is no obvious political or military trigger," it
said, "for regime use of Chemical War on an apparently larger scale now,
particularly given the current presence of the UN investigating team."

Another obvious case of a misleading description of intelligence in the
summary involves information from US geospatial and signals intelligence
purporting to show that the Assad regime was preparing for a chemical
attack in the three days prior to August 21. The intelligence summary
describes the intelligence as follows: "Syrian chemical weapons personnel
were operating in the Damascus suburb of Adra from Sunday, August 18 until
early in the morning on Wednesday, August 21 near an area that the regime
uses to mix chemical weapons, including sarin."

That seems like damning evidence at first glance. However, despite the use
of the term "operating," the US intelligence had no information about the
actual activities of the individual or individuals being tracked through
geospatial and signals intelligence. When administration officials leaked
the information to CBS news last week, they conceded that the presence of
the individual being tracked in the area in question had been viewed at the
time as "nothing out of the ordinary."

Yet, after the August 21 event, the same information was suddenly
transformed into "evidence" that supports the official line. The summary
refers to "streams of human signals and geospatial intelligence that
revealed regime activities that we assessed were associated with
preparations for a chemical attack." Thus the same information that
provided no indication of "preparations" was now presented as though it
included knowledge of some "activities" somehow related to getting ready
for chemical warfare.

A third piece of intelligence cited in the summary - unsourced but
presumably from an intelligence agent – might seem to denote the intent to
carry out a chemical weapons attack. However, the wording is slippery. "On
August 21," the document says, "a Syrian regime element prepared for a
chemical weapons attack in the Damascus area, including through the
utilization of gas masks." That intelligence, if accurate, doesn’t
establish an intent by the government to carry out an attack; it could
conversely suggest the government’s anticipation of a chemical attack by
the rebels. The intelligence's language is ambiguous; it contains no
certainty that the chemical weapons attack for which the regime was
preparing was one it intended to initiate itself.

Behind the Uncertainty on "Nerve Gas"

The intelligence summary includes a notable indication that the
intelligence community was far from convinced that nerve gas had been used
August 21.

The summary said the intelligence community had "high confidence" that the
government had carried out a "chemical weapons attack," and added, "We
further assess that the regime used a nerve agent in the attack." The fact
that a separate sentence was used to characterize the assessment of the
nerve agent issue and that it did not indicate any level of confidence is a
signal that the intelligence community does not have much confidence in the
assessment that nerve gas was used, according to a former senior US
intelligence official who insisted on anonymity. The former official told
Truthout that the choice of wording actually means the intelligence
analysts "do not know" if nerve gas was used.

The summary includes yet another sign of the analysts' lack of confidence
that nerve gas was used, which was equally well-disguised. "We have
identified one hundred videos attributed to the attack," it said, "many of
which show large numbers of bodies exhibiting physical signs consistent
with, but not unique to, nerve agent exposure." Unless it is read
carefully, the use of the word "bodies" - meaning corpses - instead of
"victims" might be missed. But why would the intelligence community be
focused on how many "bodies" – meaning corpses – exhibit particular
"physical signs" when the far more relevant indicator of nerve gas would
the number of "victims" exhibiting certain symptoms?

That strange choice averts acknowledgement of a fundamental problem for the
intelligence community: Most of the alleged victims being shown in the
videos posted online do not show symptoms associated with exposure to nerve
agent. Corpses without any sign of wounds, on the other hand, would be
"consistent" with a nerve agent attack.

The symptoms of a nerve agent attack are clear-cut: Soon after initial
symptoms of tightness of chest, pinpoint pupils and running nose, the
victim begins to vomit and to defecate and urinate uncontrollably, followed
by twitching and jerking. Ultimately, the victim becomes comatose and
suffocates in a series of convulsive spasms. The symptoms shown in dozens
of videos of victims being treated in medical centers in Ghouta, however,
are quite different. In an interview with Truthout, Dan Kaszeta, a
specialist on chemical, biological and radiological weapons who has advised
the White House on those issues, pointed out that a nerve gas attack would
have been accompanied by a pattern of symptoms that are not shown in the
videos posted online. "There should be more or less universal vomiting,"
Kaszeta said. But he did not see any vomiting or evidence of such vomiting
on the clothing or on the floor in any of the videos he saw. Stephen G.
Johnson, a chemical weapons forensics expert at Cranfield University in the
United Kingdom, noticed the same thing. "Why aren't more people vomiting?"
he asked Truthout in an interview.

A number of specialists, including Kaszeta and Johnson, also noticed that
personnel were shown handling the victims without any special protective
clothing but not exhibiting any symptoms themselves. Paula Vanninen,
director of the Finnish Institute for Verification of Chemical Weapons, and
Gwynn Winfield, the editor of CBRNe World, a magazine specializing in
chemical weapons, made the same point in interviews with AFP on August 21.
The only evidence of such effects is secondhand at best: Statements issued
the following day by both the spokesman for the Supreme Military Council of
the Free Syrian Army, Khaled Saleh, and the spokesman for its Washington,
DC, arm, the Syrian Support Group, said that doctors and "first responders"
had reported that they were suffering symptoms of neurotoxic poisoning.
Saleh claimed that at least six doctors had died.

Experts noticed yet another anomaly: The number of those treated who
survived far outnumbered the dead, contrary to what would be expected in a
nerve gas attack. Dr. Ghazwan Bwidany told CBS news August 24 that his
mobile medical unit had treated 900 people after the attack and that 70 had
died. Medecins Sans Frontieres reported that 3,600 patients had been
treated at hospitals in the area of the attack and that 355 had died. Such
ratios of survivors to dead were the opposite of what chemical weapons
specialists would have expected from a nerve gas attack. Kaszeta told
Truthout that the "most nagging doubt" he had about the assumption that a
nerve gas attack had taken place is the roughly 10-to-1 ratio of total
number treated to the dead. "The proportions are all wrong," he said.
"There should be more dead people." Johnson agreed. In an actual nerve gas
attack, he said, "You'd get some survivors, but it would be very low. This
[is] a very low level of lethality."

These multiple anomalies prompted some specialists to come up with the
theory that the government had somehow diluted the nerve gas to make it
less detectable and thus made it less lethal. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a
former commander of the chemical biological and nuclear terrorism unit in
the UK Ministry of Defense, told USA Today August 23 that the absence of
symptoms associated with nerve gas attack might be explainable by a "low
dose" chemical weapons attack.

Three days later, Winfield wrote in an article for CNN that the symptoms
seen in the videos indicated "lower toxicity" than was associated with
nerve agents. Winfield suggested that nerve agent might have been mixed
with other substances that were likely to remain in the environment longer
than a nerve agent such as sarin.

But Kaszeta cast doubt on the idea of a "low dose" nerve agent being used.
In an interview with blogger Eliot Higgins, who specializes in weapons
associated with the Syrian conflict under the name Brown Moses, he said,
"There's not much leeway between the incapacitating doses and lethal doses
with Sarin." The concentration causing any symptoms at all, he said, "would
quickly lead to absorption of a lethal dose."

Case Not Closed

If it wasn't a nerve gas attack, then, what other chemical weapon could
have produced the symptoms exhibited in the videos? In an analysis on the
Strongpoint Security website, Kaszeta considered each known type of
chemical weapon in turn and concluded that the symptoms exhibited in the
videos were not consistent with those associated with any of them. And as
Kaszeta told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, the fact that none of the people
treating casualties were suffering obvious symptoms "would seem to rule out
most types of military-grade chemical weapons. … "

Instead of addressing the issue, the intelligence community opted to accept
information about the numbers and the cause of death provided by sources
that were presumably subject to the influence of opposition forces in the
area. The intelligence summary cites a "preliminary U.S. government
assessment" that 1,429 people were killed by chemical weapons, including
"at least 426 children." It provides no indication of how the analysts
arrived at such a precise estimate, which is highly unusual for an
intelligence assessment. The normal practice in arriving at such an
estimate is to give a range of figures reflecting different data sources as
well as assumptions.

The intelligence community's main center for analyzing all issues relating
to weapons of mass destruction is the CIA's Office of Weapons Intelligence,
Nonproliferation and Arms Control (WINPAC) Center. It is the same center
that tilted the 2002 Iraq estimate toward conclusions that were not
supported by technical facts. As the Robb-Silverman report on the Iraq WMD
intelligence fiasco pointed out, intelligence analysts at WINPAC explained
to the staff privately that they had reversed the normal intelligence
analysis burden of proof and operated on the assumption that Iraq did have
WMD programs.

That dynamic seems to have re-emerged in the case of Syrian chemical
weapons, especially with the appearance of hundreds of videos containing
highly emotive scenes of children suffering and, in many cases, already
having died. The contradiction between the emotionally charged visual
evidence and the technical analysis by chemical weapons specialists,
however, poses an unresolved issue. The uncertainty about what actually
happened on August 21 can be resolved only on the basis of actual blood
samples from victims who have been gathered by the UN inspectors and are
now being analyzed in European laboratories.

Both Médecins Sans Frontières and Human Rights Watch issued statements
citing statistics and descriptions of symptoms provided by local medical
personnel and, in the case of Human Rights Watch, local activists and other
contacts. However Human Rights Watch acting Middle East Director Joe Stork
stated, "The only way to find out what really happened in Ghouta is let the
UN inspectors in."

Médecins Sans Frontières made it clear in its original August 24 statement
that it could not confirm the figure of 3,600 patients with "neurotoxic
symptoms," because its own staff did not have access to the medical
facilities in question. And in an August 28 statement, the organization
said scientific confirmation of the toxic agent was required, and that the
data it had been given could not be a "substitute for the [UN]
investigation."

But the advocates of an attack on Syria within the Obama administration
have not demonstrated a willingness to rely on the definitive evidence from
the UN investigators. Instead, they have evinced a strong hostility toward
the UN investigation ever since the Syrian government agreed to allow it
unimpeded access to the locations where chemical attacks were alleged.
National Security Adviser Susan Rice sent an e-mail to key officials August
25 asserting that the UN investigation was pointless.

Since then, administration officials have dismissed the UN investigation as
representing a Syrian political tactic. Kerry claimed in his statement
Friday that when the UN inspections were "finally given access, that access
- as we now know – was restricted and controlled."

But Farhan Haq, the associate spokesperson for Secretary General Ban
Ki-Moon, who has been getting regular reports from the UN team on its work
in Syria, told Truthout that he was unaware of any restrictions on the
team's work.

The Obama administration has made it clear it does not intend to rely on
the UN investigation's findings. Kerry declared on Sunday that samples of
blood and hair from medical personnel in eastern Ghouta had been found to
contain traces of sarin nerve gas.

However, those samples did not go through the UN investigators, but were
smuggled out of Syria by opposition activists. The spokesman for the Free
Syrian Army's Supreme National Council, Khaled Saleh, had announced August
22 that "activists" had collected their own hair, blood and soil samples
and were smuggling them out of the country.

The Obama administration had obtained physiological samples related to
previous alleged nerve gas attacks, which had tested positive for sarin,
but administration officials had insisted that, without being certain of
the chain of custody, "they couldn't be sure who had handled those
samples," as one official put it.

Despite the knowledge that samples lacking a clear chain of custody could
have been tampered with, however, the administration began to disregard
that key factor in June. It adopted a policy of accepting such samples as
evidence of government guilt, on the argument, as one official explained,
"It's impossible that the opposition is faking the stuff in so many
instances in so many locations."

That policy shift is part of the undeclared framework in which the
intelligence assessment was carried out.

Regardless of what evidence emerges in coming weeks, we would do well to
note the inconsistencies and misleading language contained in the
assessment, bearing in mind the consequences of utilizing ambiguous
intelligence to justify an act of war.

GARETH PORTER

Gareth Porter (@GarethPorter), an independent investigative journalist and
historian covering US national security policy, was awarded the Gellhorn
Prize for journalism for 2011 by the UK-based Martha Gellhorn Trust.

-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
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