Syria: Deciphering the Propaganda War over the Ghouta Massacre
http://www.popularresistance.org/syria-deciphering-the-propaganda-war-over-the-ghouta-massacre/
(this reads best on the web site)
Educate! Chemical Weapons, Syria
By Nafeez Ahmed, ceasefiremagazine.co.uk
September 21st, 2013
2
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The politicised debate over the realities of last months chemical attack
in Ghouta is a further manifestation of a propaganda war being fought on
all sides and for competing national and geopolitical interests that
shows scant regard for the human cost of the conflict.
If there is anything to learn from the Syrian conflict, it is that, in the
fog of war, truth really is the first casualty. Narratives and
counter-narratives of the conflict have plagued media accounts and the
blogosphere ever since peaceful protests erupted on the streets of Syria
over two years ago, and increasingly so in the wake of the Ghouta chemical
weapons attack of the 21st August.
While the Wests case against Assad in this respect appears politicised
and less than conclusive, the same, if not worse, can be said about the
case against the rebels. Almost every single piece of evidence that has
been put forward to support that case has been disputed at the very least,
or proved entirely false. And the politicisation of Russian and Iranian
intelligence, the role of Assad in spearheading propaganda, has been
overlooked.
>From the White House dossier to the United Nations report, from Syrian
nuns to revelations from former and active intelligence officials, the
propaganda war between pro and anti-interventionists to control the
paradigm through which we understand the conflict manifesting itself in
Bashar al-Assads latest call for a ceasefire may be feeding into
little-known strategic imperatives that see the Syrian people as mere
pawns in a wider gambit.
The Ghouta verdict
On September 16th, a UN investigation released its interim findings on the
chemical weapons incident in Ghouta, Damascus of August 21st, stating
that:
the environmental, chemical and medical samples, we have collected,
provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets
containing the nerve agent sarin were used in Ein Tarma, Moadamiyah and
Zamalka in the Ghouta area of Damascus.
But there were faultlines. Acknowledging that the investigation would not
have been possible without the consent of both the Syrian government and
on-the-ground cooperation of opposition forces, the report is fully
cognisant of potential efforts to manipulate evidence at the various sites
of the attack. In Moadamiya (p. 18), the report notes that: The sites
have been well travelled by other individuals both before and during the
investigation. Fragments and other possible evidence have clearly been
handled/moved prior to arrival of the investigation team.
UN1
And in Zamalka and Ein Tarma (p. 22), the report flags up similar
reservations that the locations have been well travelled by other
individuals prior to the arrival of the Mission Even while the inspectors
were present, individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions
indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly
manipulated:
UN2
These caveats are important, but they should not be overblown. That the
inspection team recognised these issues and took them into account in
assessing the implications of the physical evidence mitigates against
jumping quickly to the sort of simplistic counter-conclusion
opportunistically (and misleadingly) misinterpreted by the likes of Irans
state-controlled Press TV. On the other hand, the fact that the UN team
documented efforts by individuals at these rebel-controlled areas to
possibly manipulate some potential evidence at the sites is a concern.
But the UN report was also corroborated by independent experts. Dan
Kaszeta, a chemical weapons specialist formerly with the U.S. Army
Chemical Corps who had previous expressed doubt about the attacks due to
inconsistencies in symptoms and other issues, nevertheless assessed that
the UN report had identified conclusive evidence from environmental and
medical data that this was a Sarin gas attack. Kaszeta pointed out that to
address the limitations identified, the inspection team utilised a range
of controls to ensure a lack of cross-contamination, and obtained a
variety of different samples from in and around sites to avoid potential
effects of tampering. An earlier Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation
undertaken with support from independent experts noted that the nature of
the munitions, their trajectories, as well as the testimony from victims
and eyewitnesses, pointed to a sophisticated operation most likely to
have been carried out by the Syrian military via a regime-held base.
Counter-posed to these assessments is a barely-literate,
self-contradictory report based essentially on analysis of YouTube
videos by an unidentified investigative team headed up by Sister Agnes
Miriam de la Croix, a Carmelite nun based in Syria who has long openly
supported Assad. If there remain questions about the UNs findings (itself
arguable), this report is far worse, making a large number of interlinked
and largely spurious claims implying that there was no chemical weapons
attack at all, and the Ghouta massacre was entirely staged by the rebels
with the complicity of international news media. Agnes Miriam, however,
has a track record of unreliability and unverifiable accusations,
explicable in the context of being close to Assads security servicesso
close, that according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists
(CPJ), the nun was complicit in a successful regime plot to kill
international journalists. Unfortunately, that dearth of credibility has
not prevented outlets like Russia Today from broadcasting the nun and
her claims on satellite television. Thats not entirely surprising though,
because Russian intelligence attributing the attack to the rebels
appears to be based exactly on such speculative partisan online analysis
proven wrong in the past.
Dodgy Dossier?
Not surprisingly, the White House moved quickly to stating that the UNs
findings vindicated its case that the attacks were carried out by Assads
forces. On Aug. 30, the White House had published a document squarely
attributing the Aug. 21 use of chemical weapons in Ghouta to the Syrian
military. The document described itself as a U.S. government assessment,
encapsulating an unclassified summary of the U.S. intelligence
communitys analysis of the attack. But the document admitted to falling
short of conclusive confirmation.
White House assessment
Less than a week after the White House assessment was published, on Sept.
6, an open letter to president Barack Obama signed by a respected group of
retired US intelligence officers claimed that active U.S. intelligence
community officials disagreed with the White House assessment. The memo by
the group known as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS)led by 27-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern who chaired National
Intelligence Estimates and prepared the Presidents Daily Briefopens as
follows:
our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to
the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows
that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that
killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British
intelligence officials also know this.
VIPS
The veterans group does have a solid track record, having addressed its
first memo to President George W. Bush warning presciently that Secretary
of State Colin Powells notorious 2003 UN speech on Iraqs weapons of mass
destruction intelligence was fraudulent. The groups other members include
well-known former intelligence officers from the CIA, State Department and
National Security Agency.
They wrote that CIA officers working on the Syria issue told them that
Syrias chemical incident was not the result of an attack by the Syrian
Army using military-grade chemical weapons from its arsenal. On the
contrary: They tell us that CIA Director John Brennan is perpetrating a
pre-Iraq-War-type fraud on members of Congress, the media, the publicand
perhaps even you.
The memo describes the White House report as a political, not an
intelligence document. It cites Middle East sources linked to the Syrian
opposition confirming that the August 21 chemical incident was a
pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish
supporters, designed precisely to bring the United States into the war.
The memo quickly went viral online. If the VIPS account is accurate, of
course, then it raises serious questions not just about the White House
assessment that it contested, but also about the possibility that the
rebels supporters could have interfered with evidence critical to the
integrity of the UN investigation.
So who is right?
Politicisation of Intelligence
Backing up the VIPS case, other intelligence experts have stated that the
very nature of the White House document probably means it does not
represent the untarnished conclusions of the US intelligence community.
One anonymous ex-senior intelligence official who held dozens of security
classifications over a decades-long career said that the language used by
the White House means that this is not an intelligence community
document. He had never seen a document about an international crisis at
any classification described/slugged as a U.S. government assessment.
This means that the administration decided on a position and
cherry-picked the intelligence to fit it
The result is not a balanced
assessment of the intelligence.
Paul Pillar, a former National Intelligence Council (NIC) officer who
participated in drafting national intelligence estimates, described the
White House report as evidently an administration document. Even if
senior intelligence officials signed off on the document at some stage, he
said, the White House may have drafted its own paper to avoid attention
to analytic differences within the intelligence community.
Others have pointed out that the document appears to mislead on its
sources of information. At one point, for instance, it claims:
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 UN inspectors obtaining evidence.
However, as noted by former British Ambassador Craig Murray who headed the
British Foreign Offices Cyprus section in the 1990s, the Mount Troodos
listening post in Cyprus responsible for monitoring all electronic
communications across the Middle East on behalf of both U.S. and British
intelligence (which share all this information as a matter of protocol)
did not appear to have picked up these intercepts. Murrays intelligence
sources told him that such intercepts were not available to the UK Joint
Intelligence Committee but if they had been picked up, they should have
been. The only explanation was that the alleged intercept evidence was
provided by Mossad, he saidbut the fact that Troodos did not pick up on
it suggests Mossad may have doctored the intercepts.
On the other hand, German intelligence picked up intercepts showing that
Syrian military officers had been requesting Assad permission to use
chemical weapons for over the preceding four monthsbut crucially that
Assad himself had always denied permission up to and including the Ghouta
attack.
Dodgier Dossier?
So at first glance, the VIPS memos core contention that U.S. intelligence
is being politicized over Syria, as happened in the run-up to the 2003
Iraq War, appears compelling.
But a deeper look reveals that the VIPS memo fails to withstand the same
level of scrutiny and verifiability it demands from the Obama
administration. From where, for instance, does its narrative of the Aug.
21 attack actually come from?
Disturbingly, certain sections of the VIPS letter to Obama seem to
plagiarise verbatim an older article by Yossef Bodanksy, former Director
the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare
of the U.S. House of Representatives, published in the Washington DC
journal Defense & Foreign Affairs. The latter, a publication of the
International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA)a private intelligence
group providing consultancy services for the U.S. and other governments
and corporationsattributed the chemical weapon attacks to the rebels.
Here are some extracts from the VIPs memo and the Bodanksy
articlepublished about a week before the former (and available online
here)which are almost exactly the same (added emphasis ours):
Bodansky:
There is a growing volume of new evidence from numerous sources in the
Middle Eastmostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its sponsors
and supportersthat makes a very strong case, based on solid
circumstantial evidence, that the August 21, 2013, chemical strike in
Damascus suburbs was indeed a pre-meditated provocation by the Syrian
opposition.
VIPS:
There is a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle
Eastmostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its
supportersproviding a strong circumstantial case that the August 21
chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition
and its Saudi and Turkish supporters. The aim is reported to have been to
create the kind of incident that would bring the United States into the
war.
Bodansky:
Western-sponsored opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations
for a major and irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior
opposition military commanders and representatives of Qatari, Turkish and
US intelligence took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in
Antakya, Hatay Province, used as the command center and headquarters of
the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors. Very senior
opposition commanders who had arrived from Istanbul briefed the regional
commanders of an imminent escalation in the fighting due to a
war-changing development which would, in turn, lead to a U.S.-led bombing
of Syria.
VIPS:
In addition, we have learned that on August 13-14, 2013, Western-sponsored
opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations for a major,
irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior opposition
military commanders and Qatari, Turkish and U.S. intelligence officials
took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay
Province, now used as the command center and headquarters of the Free
Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors.
Senior opposition commanders who came from Istanbul pre-briefed the
regional commanders on an imminent escalation in the fighting due to a
war-changing development, which, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led
bombing of Syria.
Bodansky:
The opposition forces had to quickly prepare their forces for exploiting
the US-led bombing in order to march on Damascus and topple the Bashar
al-Assad Government, the senior commanders explained. The Qatari and
Turkish intelligence officials assured the Syrian regional commanders that
they would be provided with plenty of weapons for the coming offensive.
Indeed, unprecedented weapons distribution started in all opposition camps
in Hatay Province on August 21-23, 2013. In the Reyhanli area alone,
opposition forces received well in excess of 400 tons of weapons, mainly
anti-aircraft weaponry from shoulder-fired missiles to ammunition for
light-guns and machine guns. The weapons were distributed from
store-houses controlled by Qatari and Turkish intelligence under the tight
supervision of U.S. intelligence.
VIPS:
Opposition leaders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit
the U.S. bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Bashar al-Assad
government.
The Qatari and Turkish intelligence officials assured the Syrian regional
commanders that they would be provided with plenty of weapons for the
coming offensive. And they were. A weapons distribution operation
unprecedented in scope began in all opposition camps on August 21-23. The
weapons were distributed from storehouses controlled by Qatari and Turkish
intelligence under the tight supervision of U.S. intelligence officers.
I queried several VIPS signatories regarding their alleged sources for
this narrative. Ex-NSA senior executive Thomas Drake described the sources
as sensitive but attributed primary authorship of the memo to Ray
McGovernBodanskys article, of course, being available for free online is
hardly a sensitive source.
Former CIA and State Department counter-terrorism officer Larry Johnson
said that he had obtained some information related to this account from
one highly reliable and trusted source, rather than multiple sources.
When asked if the source was based in the Middle East or Syrian
opposition, as claimed in the memo, Johnson said he would not divulge any
other information about this source.
Further, when pressed to elaborate on the nature of their sources, VIPS
chair McGovern referred to: Senior officials in the U.S. intelligence
community with access to this information.
However, their realunacknowledgedsource is Bodanksys article, as the
clear textual evidence of blatant plagiarism above reveals. But Bodansky
is not a senior official in the U.S. intelligence community. VIPS do not
have on the ground sources in the Middle East or among the Syrian
opposition at all. Rather than learning the lesson of the plagiarised
British dossier on Iraqs (non-existent) WMD, the VIPS memo replicates it
in a misguided effort to oppose an intervention.
When I then put the charge of plagiarism to VIPS, McGovern responded by
saying: Sorry if I did not make it clear. Senior officials and Bodansky
are two separate and distinct things. The former have nothing to do with
the latter. Were it not for the former, we would not have written the
piece. The former CIA analyst added:
If, as we are told by people we trust (amid suspicions from a whole array
of other circumstantial evidence) that the government is not telling the
truth, then, in essence we have (or almost had) Iraq Part II, as far as
fraudulent intelligence is concerned.
I asked him why VIPS needed to rely on Bodanskys narrative if their U.S.
intelligence sources were privy to information proving Assads innocence,
and whether they had verified Bodanksys own alleged sources, but received
no further comment.
Vacuous Viral Memes
The contradictory White House and VIPS memos are part of an ongoing
propaganda war to fix the intelligence on Syria for partisan interests,
well meaning or not. They illustrate how difficult it is to make sense of
the situation in Syria for outside observers due to inherently
politicised, conflicting reports. Neither the U.S. and British, nor
Iranian and Russian media are impartial sources of information.
Is it possible to assess whether Bodanskys claims have any merit?
Although he has been right in the past, his services having been sought as
a U.S. government defence consultant, he has also been ridiculously wrong.
In relation to Syria, Bodansky is openly supportive of Bashar al-Assads
regime, as well as of Alawite domination of Syria. He specifically
supported Assads uncle Rifaat, who led the 1982 massacre in Hama. So his
alleged sources might well also be partisan. (Bodansky could not be
reached for comment on his relationship with the Assad regime or the
reliability of his own alleged sources, and my email to him on these
issues received no response.)
Are VIPS being too credulous about pro-Assad propaganda? Responding to
questions about sources over Twitter, Thomas Drake replied with a link to
another viral article by Jordan-based Dave Gavlak, a veteran Middle East
correspondent for Associated Press, co-writing with on-the-ground reporter
Yahya Ababneh. The report cited interviews with mostly unnamed doctors,
Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families saying that the Aug.
21 attack was conducted accidentally by rebels supplied with chemical
weapons by Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar
reportedly provided the weapons to the rebels via the al-Qaeda affiliated
al-Nusra Front. But the article, published by a little-known alternative
news outlet known as Mint Press News, came with the following caveat:
Some information in this article could not be independently verified.
Mint Press News will continue to provide further information and updates.
Subsequently, the integrity of the report was completely thrown into
question when its purported lead author, Gavlak, issued a statement
confirming that he had, in fact, nothing to do with the authorship of the
article, and had repeatedly requested Mint Press News to remove his name
from the piece without success:
To date, Mint Press News has refused to act professionally or honestly in
regards to disclosing the actual authorship and sources for this story. I
did not travel to Syria, have any discussions with Syrian rebels, or do
any other reporting on which the article is based. The article is not
based on my personal observations and should not be given credence based
on my journalistic reputation. Also, it is false and misleading to
attribute comments made in the story as if they were my own statements.
Worse, the story is disputed by accounts obtained by Londons Independent
from Ghouta residents who repeatedly recounted separate landings of
chemicals at Kafr Batna, Zayina, Ein Tarma, Zamalka, Ain Tarma and
Moadamiyeh Al Sham, at varying times, pointing out that a single home-made
rocket could not have carried out multiple strikes. While tunnels in
Ghouta do exist, any chemical accidents in them would not have reached
the areas affected, the residents insisted. Additionally, al-Nusra has
no presence of any significance in Ghouta, with the largest Islamist
group in the area being Liwa al-Islam, who are not as hardline.
How to explain the discrepancy between the two stories? The Houla massacre
provides a cluein that case, Assad agents were bribing poor Syrians to
spread propaganda blaming the rebels for the killings. The propaganda even
made news attributed to so-called Syrian opposition sources, but was
eventually discredited by UN investigators. The simple physical and
eyewitness evidence at the sites of multiple surface-to-surface rocket
attacks also undermines the Mint Press News claims about an accidental
underground detonation.
Another viral story blaming the rebels for the Aug. 21 attacks cites two
Belgian and Italian writers who had been taken hostage by Syrian rebel
forces for five months. After their release on 8th September, they
described overhearing a conversation between their captors saying the
rebels had launched the attack to trigger a Western intervention.
Compelling? The Italian journalist later emphasised he did not know the
rebels were responsible for the chemical attack, as he could not tell
whether the overheard conversation was based on real events as opposed to
discussion of rumour or hearsay, and could not even confirm the exact
identities of its participants.
Proxy War
The ongoing war of words illustrates that Syria is not just a civil war,
but a propaganda war being fought for competing geopolitical interests.
The end-result of this tug of war between pro-interventionist and
anti-interventionist narratives has been the victory of neither, and thus,
the entrenchment of violence amidst a Syrian stalemate.
Unfortunately, some parties see this stalemate as a strategic boon. Noting
the synergy between the Israeli and American positions, the New York
Times recently reported that: For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as
it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a
victory by Mr. Assads government and his Iranian backers or a
strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.
In this context, the threat of limited military strikes is more about
sending a message to Iran and Syria, rather than about decisively
defeating Assadwhich may be because the West needs more time to prop up
opposition forces it finds more palatable.
This coheres uncannily well with a 2008 U.S. Army-funded RAND report
tasked with setting out strategic options for regional policy, whose key
objective it describes as protecting Western access to Persian Gulf oil
supplies. This requires shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan as a way of containing Iranian power and
influence in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, as well as exploiting
fault lines between jihadist groups to turn them against each other and
dissipate their energy on internal conflicts. This is now well underway
in Syria, where al-Qaeda and Hizbullah are being dragged into a spiral of
mutually-debilitating violence.
Another strategic upshot is the sidelining of longstanding regional
pipeline plans that could challenge U.S. aspirations to become a major gas
exporter to European markets, directly competing with Russian hegemony.
With Qatar and Iran at loggerheads over potential Syria-crossing transit
routes designed to supply gas to Europe (with Assad favouring the
Iran-backed route based on utilising the Russian-controlled Syrian port of
Tartus), the civil war stalemate prevents both from materialising, giving
the U.S. an unexpected edge as its shale gas production booms.
In short, the U.S. gets to sideline its gas export competitors while
undermining Iranian influence; Israel gets its regional enemies embroiled
in war-without-end; Russia gets its arms sales to Iran and Syria; Saudi
Arabia and Qatar get to escalate their game of geopolitical brinkmanship;
and even the UN gets to rack up its depleted peacekeeping credentials
over self-congratulatory chemical weapons negotiations. And as the world
has watched the debate over intervention drag on like an obscene
international game of ping pong, the military-industrial complex rakes in
huge profits from rocketing share prices.
Meanwhile, Syrian civilians continue to be killed largely by conventional,
not chemical, weapons. According to the latest UN human rights report,
both Syrian government forces and Free Syrian Army rebelsand not just
those affiliated to al-Qaedahave committed war crimes, although
government forces are culpable in the vast bulk of the violence including
at least eight massacres. But under the feel-good smokescreen of chemical
peacemaking resulting in the rightly-lauded framework agreement, the
U.S. and Russia are still fuelling the conflict by stepping up military
support to their favoured sides.
Despite the heavy-handed moral rhetoric from all quarters, it seems that
everyone is jockeying in pursuit of their own interests, the Syrian people
be damned.
Related Posts:
UN Report Provides Information, Not Intelligence September 22, 2013
Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity Warn Obama On Syrian
September 7, 2013
White House Mum on Rebel Chem Weapons Use September 15, 2013
Debunking Obamas Chemical Weapons Case Against Syria September 2, 2013
Syria Asks UN To Immediately Investigate 3 New Chemical Attacks
August 29, 2013
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