{"id":91430,"date":"2017-05-01T12:01:37","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T11:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=91430"},"modified":"2017-04-27T17:07:15","modified_gmt":"2017-04-27T16:07:15","slug":"intel-vets-voice-doubts-on-syrian-chemical-weapons-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/05\/intel-vets-voice-doubts-on-syrian-chemical-weapons-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"Intel Vets Voice Doubts on Syrian Chemical Weapons Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

26 Apr 2017 – Two dozen former U.S. intelligence professionals are urging the American people to demand clear evidence that the Syrian government was behind the April 4 chemical incident before President Trump dives deeper into another war.<\/em><\/p>\n

An Open Memorandum for the American People<\/strong><\/p>\n

Subject: Mattis \u2018No Doubt\u2019 Stance on Alleged Syrian CW Smacks of Politicized Intelligence<\/em><\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s new Secretary of Defense, retired Marine General James \u201cMad Dog\u201d Mattis, during a recent trip to Israel, commented on the issue of Syria\u2019s retention and use of chemical weapons in violation of its obligations to dispose of the totality of its declared chemical weapons capability in accordance with the provisions of both the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman hold a news conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, April 21, 2017. (U.S. Embassy photo by Matty Stern)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThere can be no doubt,\u201d Secretary Mattis said during a April 21, 2017 joint news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman, \u201cin the international community\u2019s mind that Syria has retained chemical weapons in violation of its agreement and its statement that it had removed them all.\u201d To the contrary, Mattis noted, \u201cI can say authoritatively they have retained some.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lieberman joined Mattis in his assessment, noting that Israel had \u201c100 percent information that [the] Assad regime used chemical weapons against [Syrian] rebels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Mattis and Lieberman seemed to be channeling assessments offered to reporters two days prior, on April 19, 2017, by anonymous Israeli defense officials that the April 4, 2017 chemical weapons attack on the Syrian village of Khan Shaykhun was ordered by Syrian military commanders, with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s personal knowledge, and that Syria retained a stock of \u201cbetween one and three tons\u201d of chemical weapons.<\/p>\n

The Israeli intelligence followed on the heels of an April 13, 2017 speech given by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that, once information had come in about a chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun, the CIA had been able to \u201cdevelop several hypothesis around that, and then to begin to develop fact patterns which either supported or suggested that the hypothesis wasn\u2019t right.\u201d The CIA, Pompeo said, was \u201cin relatively short order able to deliver to [President Trump] a high-confidence assessment that, in fact, it was the Syrian regime that had launched chemical strikes against its own people in [Khan Shaykhun.]\u201d<\/p>\n

The speed in which this assessment was made is of some concern. Both Director Pompeo, during his CSIS remarks, and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, during comments to the press on April 6, 2017, note that President Trump turned to the intelligence community early on in the crisis to understand better \u201cthe circumstances of the attack and who was responsible.\u201d McMaster indicated that the U.S. Intelligence Community, working with allied partners, was able to determine with \u201ca very high degree of confidence\u201d where the attack originated.<\/p>\n

Both McMaster and Pompeo spoke of the importance of open source imagery in confirming that a chemical attack had taken place, along with evidence collected from the victims themselves \u2013 presumably blood samples \u2013 that confirmed the type of agent that was used in the attack. This initial assessment drove the decision to use military force \u2013 McMaster goes on to discuss a series of National Security Council meetings where military options were discussed and decided upon; the discussion about the intelligence underpinning the decision to strike Syria was over.<\/p>\n

The danger of this rush toward an intelligence decision by Director Pompeo and National Security Advisor McMaster is that once the President and his top national security advisors have endorsed an intelligence-based conclusion, and authorized military action based upon that conclusion, it becomes virtually impossible for that conclusion to change. Intelligence assessments from that point forward will embrace facts that sustain this conclusion, and reject those that don\u2019t; it is the definition of politicized intelligence, even if those involved disagree.<\/p>\n

A similar \u201cno doubt\u201d moment had occurred nearly 15 years ago when, in August 2002, Vice President Cheney delivered a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. \u201cThere is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,\u201d Cheney declared. \u201cThere is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.\u201d The message Cheney was sending to the Intelligence Community was clear: Saddam Hussein had WMD; there was no need to answer that question anymore.<\/p>\n

The CIA vehemently denies that either Vice President Cheney or anyone at the White House put pressure on its analysts to alter their assessments. This may very well be true, but if it is, then the record of certainty \u2013 and arrogance \u2013 that existed in the mindset of senior intelligence managers and analysts only further erodes public confidence in the assessments produced by the CIA, especially when, as is the case with Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction \u2013 the agency was found so lacking. Stuart Cohen, a veteran CIA intelligence analyst who served as the acting Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw the production of the 2002 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to make case for Iraq possessing WMD that was used to justify war.<\/p>\n

According to Mr. Cohen, he had four National Intelligence Officers with \u201cover 100 years\u2019 collective work experience on weapons of mass destruction issues\u201d backed up by hundreds of analysts with \u201cthousands of man-years invested in studying these issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the basis of this commitment of talent alone, Mr. Cohen assessed that \u201cno reasonable person could have viewed the totality of the information that the Intelligence Community had at its disposal \u2026 and reached any conclusion or alternative views that were profoundly different from those that we reached,\u201d namely that \u2013 judged with high confidence \u2013 \u201cIraq had chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of the 150 kilometer limit imposed by the UN Security Council.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two facts emerge from this expression of intellectual hubris. First, the U.S. Intelligence Community was, in fact, wrong in its estimate on Iraq\u2019s WMD capability, throwing into question the standards used to assign \u201chigh confidence\u201d ratings to official assessments. Second, the \u201creasonable person\u201d standard cited by Cohen must be reassessed, perhaps based upon a benchmark derived from a history of analytical accuracy rather than time spent behind a desk.<\/p>\n

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Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on Feb. 5. 2003, citing satellite photos and other \u201cintelligence\u201d which supposedly proved that Iraq had WMD, but the evidence proved bogus.<\/p><\/div>\n

The major lesson learned here, however, is that the U.S. Intelligence Community, and in particular the CIA, more often than not hides behind self-generated platitudes (\u201chigh confidence\u201d, \u201creasonable person\u201d) to disguise a process of intelligence analysis that has long ago been subordinated to domestic politics.<\/p>\n

It is important to point out the fact that Israel, too, was wrong about Iraq\u2019s WMD. According to Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli Intelligence Officer, Israeli intelligence seriously overplayed the threat posed by Iraqi WMD in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War, including a 2002 briefing to NATO provided by Efraim Halevy, who at the time headed the Israeli Mossad, or intelligence service, that Israel had \u201cclear indications\u201d that Iraq had reconstituted its WMD programs after U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998.<\/p>\n

The Israeli intelligence assessments on Iraq, Mr. Brom concluded, were most likely colored by political considerations, such as the desire for regime change in Iraq. In this light, neither the presence of Avigdor Leiberman, nor the anonymous background briefings provided by Israel about Syria\u2019s chemical weapons capabilities, should be used to provide any credence to Secretary Mattis\u2019s embrace of the \u201cno doubt\u201d standard when it comes to Syria\u2019s alleged possession of chemical weapons.<\/p>\n

The intelligence data that has been used to back up the allegations of Syrian chemical weapons use has been far from conclusive. Allusions to intercepted Syrian communications have been offered as \u201cproof\u201d, but the Iraq experience \u2013 in particular former Secretary of State Colin Powell\u2019s unfortunate experience before the U.N. Security Council \u2013 show how easily such intelligence can be misunderstood and misused.<\/p>\n

Inconsistencies in the publicly available imagery which the White House (and CIA) have so heavily relied upon have raised legitimate questions about the veracity of any conclusions drawn from these sources (and begs the question as to where the CIA\u2019s own Open Source Intelligence Center was in this episode.) The blood samples used to back up claims of the presence of nerve agent among the victims was collected void of any verifiable chain of custody, making their sourcing impossible to verify, and as such invalidates any conclusions based upon their analysis.<\/p>\n

In the end, the conclusions CIA Director Pompeo provided to the President was driven by a fundamental rethinking of the CIA\u2019s analysts when it came to Syria and chemical weapons that took place in 2014. Initial CIA assessments in the aftermath of the disarmament of Syria\u2019s chemical weapons seemed to support the Syrian government\u2019s stance that it had declared the totality of its holding of chemical weapons, and had turned everything over to the OPCW for disposal. However, in 2014, OPCW inspectors had detected traces of Sarin and VX nerve agent precursors at sites where the Syrians had indicated no chemical weapons activity had taken place; other samples showed the presence of weaponized Sarin nerve agent.<\/p>\n

The Syrian explanation that the samples detected were caused by cross-contamination brought on by the emergency evacuation of chemical precursors and equipment used to handle chemical weapons necessitated by the ongoing Civil War was not accepted by the inspectors, and this doubt made its way into the minds of the CIA analysts, who closely followed the work of the OPCW inspectors in Syria.<\/p>\n

One would think that the CIA would operate using the adage of \u201conce bitten, twice shy\u201d when assessing inspector-driven doubt; U.N. inspectors in Iraq, driven by a combination of the positive sampling combined with unverifiable Iraqi explanations, created an atmosphere of doubt about the veracity of Iraqi declarations that all chemical weapons had been destroyed. The CIA embraced the U.N. inspectors\u2019 conclusions, and discounted the Iraqi version of events; as it turned out, Iraq was telling the truth.<\/p>\n

While the jury is still out about whether or not Syria is, like Iraq, telling the truth, or whether the suspicions of inspectors are well founded, one thing is clear: a reasonable person would do well to withhold final judgment until all the facts are in. (Note: The U.S. proclivity for endorsing the findings of U.N. inspectors appears not to include the Khan Shaykhun attack; while both Syria and Russia have asked the OPCW to conduct a thorough investigation of the April 4, 2017 incident, the OPCW has been blocked from doing so by the United States and its allies.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photograph of men in Khan Sheikdoun in Syria, allegedly inside a crater where a sarin-gas bomb landed on April 4, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

CIA Director Pompeo\u2019s job is not to make policy \u2013 the intelligence his agency provides simply informs policy. It is not known if the U.S. Intelligence Community will be producing a formal National Intelligence Estimate addressing the Syrian chemical weapons issue, although the fact that the United States has undertaken military action under the premise that these weapons exist more than underscores the need for such a document, especially in light of repeated threats made by the Trump administration that follow-on strikes might be necessary.<\/p>\n

Making policy is, however, the job of Secretary of Defense Mattis. At the end of the day, Secretary of Defense Mattis will need to make his own mind up as to the veracity of any intelligence used to justify military action. Mattis\u2019s new job requires that he does more than simply advise the President on military options; he needs to ensure that the employment of these options is justified by the facts.<\/p>\n

In the case of Syria, the \u201cno doubt\u201d standard Mattis has employed does not meet the \u201creasonable man\u201d standard. Given the consequences that are attached to his every word, Secretary Mattis would be well advised not to commit to a \u201cno doubt\u201d standard until there is, literally, no doubt.<\/p>\n

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity<\/strong><\/p>\n

William Binney, Technical Director, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)<\/p>\n

Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer (ret) and former Office Division Director in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research<\/p>\n

Thomas Drake, former Senior Executive, NSA<\/p>\n

Bogdan Dzakovic, Former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)<\/p>\n

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)<\/p>\n

Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)<\/p>\n

Larry C Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)<\/p>\n

Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (Ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA\/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC)<\/p>\n

Brady Kiesling, former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, ret. (Associate VIPS)<\/p>\n

Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003<\/p>\n

Lisa Ling, TSgt USAF (ret.)<\/p>\n

Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)<\/p>\n

Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)<\/p>\n

David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Near East, CIA and National Intelligence Council (ret.)<\/p>\n

Torin Nelson, former Intelligence Officer\/Interrogator (GG-12) HQ, Department of the Army<\/p>\n

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)<\/p>\n

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)<\/p>\n

Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq<\/p>\n

Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)<\/p>\n

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA<\/p>\n

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)<\/p>\n

Sarah G. Wilton, Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.); Commander, US Naval Reserve (ret.)<\/p>\n

Robert Wing,\u00a0former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Apr 2017 – Two dozen former U.S. intelligence professionals are urging the American people to demand clear evidence that the Syrian government was behind the April 4 chemical incident before President Trump dives deeper into another war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syria-in-context"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}