Scott
Ritter, the most experienced American weapons inspector, is probably
the last word on this, bar an official report from the OPCW
Weapons Inspector Refutes U.S. Syria Chemical Claims
By Dennis J Bernstein
27
April, 2018
Scott
Ritter is arguably the most experienced American weapons inspector
and in this interview with Dennis J. Bernstein he levels a frank
assessment of U.S. government assertions about chemical weapons use.
In
the 1980’s, Scott Ritter was a commissioned officer in the United
States Marine Corps, specializing in intelligence. In 1987,
Ritter was assigned to the On-Site Inspection Agency, which was put
together to go into the Soviet Union and oversee the implementation
of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. This was the first
time that on-site inspection had been used as part of a disarmament
verification process.
Ritter
was one of the groundbreakers in developing on-site inspection
techniques and methodologies. With this unique experience behind him,
Ritter was asked in 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, to join the
United Nations Special Commission, which was tasked by the Security
Council to oversee the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction. From 1991 to 1998, Ritter served as a chief
weapons inspector and led a number of teams into Iraq.
According
to Ritter, in the following Flashpoints Radio interview with Dennis
Bernstein conducted on April 23rd, US, British and French claims that
the Syrian Government used chemical weapons against civilians last
month appear to be totally bogus.
Dennis
Bernstein: You have been speaking out recently about the
use of chemical weapons in Syria. Could you outline your case?
Scott
Ritter: There are a lot of similarities between the Syrian
case and the Iraqi case. Both countries possess weapons of mass
destruction. Syria had a very large chemical weapons program.
In
2013 there was an incident in a suburb of Damascus called Ghouta, the
same suburb where the current controversy is taking place. The
allegations were that the Syrian government used sarin nerve agent
against the civilian population. The Syrian government denied that,
but as a result of that incident the international community got
together and compelled Syria into signing the Chemical Weapons
Convention, declaring the totality of its chemical weapons holdings,
and opening itself to be disarmed by inspections of the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Russia was chosen to
be the guarantor of Syria’s compliance. The bottom line is that
Syria had the weapons but was verified by 2016 as being in 100%
compliance. The totality of Syria’s chemical weapons program was
eliminated.
At
the same time that this disarmament process was taking place, Syria
was being engulfed in a civil war which has resulted in a
humanitarian crisis. Over a half million people have died. It
is a war that pits the Syrian government against a variety of
anti-regime forces, many of which are Islamic in nature: the Islamic
State, Al Nusra, Al Qaeda. Some of these Islamic factions have
been in the vicinity of Ghouta since 2012.
Earlier
this year, the Syrian government initiated an offensive to liberate
that area of these factions. It was very heavy fighting,
thousands of civilians were killed, with massive aerial bombardment.
Government forces were prevailing and by April 6 it looked as if the
militants were preparing to surrender.
Suddenly
the allegations come out that there was this chemical weapons attack.
It wasn’t a massive chemical weapons attack,
it was dropping one or two so-
called “barrel bombs,” improvised
devices that contained chlorine gas canisters.
According to the
militants, between 40 and 70 people were killed and up to 500 people
were made ill. The United States and other nations picked up on this,
saying that this was proof positive that Syria has been lying about
its chemical weapons program and that Russia has been behind Syria’s
retention of chemical weapons. This is the case the US made to
launch its missile strike [on April 14].
There
are a lot of problems with this scenario. Again, why would the
Syrian government, at the moment of victory, use a pinprick chemical
attack with zero military value? It added nothing to the
military campaign and invited the wrath of the West at a critical
time, when the rebels were begging for Western intervention.
Many,
including the Russian government, believe that this was a staged
event. There has been no hard evidence put forward by anyone
that an attack took place. Shortly after allegations of the
attack came out, the entire town of Douma was taken over by the
Syrian Army while the rebels were evacuated.
The
places that were alleged to have been attacked were inspected by
Russian chemical weapons specialists, who found zero trace of any
chemicals weapons activity. The same inspectors who oversaw the
disarmament of Syria were mobilized to return to Syria and do an
investigation. They were supposed to start their work this past
weekend [April 21-22]. They arrived in Damascus the day after
the missile strikes occurred but they still haven’t been out to the
sites. The United States, France and Great Britain have all admitted
that the only evidence they have used to justify this attack were the
photographs and videotapes sent to them by the rebel forces.
I
have great concern about the United States carrying out an attack on
a sovereign nation based on no hard evidence. The longer we
wait, the longer it takes to get inspectors onto the site, the more
claims we are going to get that the Russians have sanitized it. I
believe that the last thing the United States wanted was inspectors
to get on-site and carry out a forensic investigation that would have
found that a chemical attack did not in fact take place.
DB: It
is sort of like cleaning up a police crime scene before you check for
evidence.
SR: The
United States didn’t actually bomb the site that was attacked.
They bombed three other facilities. One was in the suburbs of
Damascus, a major metropolitan area. The generals said that
they believed there were quantities of nerve agent there. So, in a
building in a densely populated area where we believe nerve agent is
stored, what do we do? We blow it up! If there had in fact been
nerve agent there, it would have resulted in hundreds or even
thousands of deaths. That fact that nobody died is the clearest
evidence yet that there was no nerve agent there. The United
States is just winging it, making it up.
One
of the tragedies is that we can no longer trust our military, our
intelligence services, our politicians. They will manufacture
whatever narrative they need to justify an action that they deem to
be politically expedient.
DB: Isn’t
it also the case that there were problems with the allegations
concerning Syria using chemical weapons in 2013 and then again in
2015? I believe The New York Times had to
retract their 2013 story.
SR: They
put out a story about thousands of people dying, claiming that it was
definitely done by the Syrian government. It turned out
later that the number of deaths was far lower and that the weapons
systems used were probably in the possession of the rebels. It
was a case of the rebels staging a chemical attack in order to get
the world to intervene on their behalf.
A
similar scenario unfolded last year when the Syrian government
dropped two or three bombs on a village and suddenly there were
reports that there was sarin nerve agent and chlorine gas wafting
through the village, killing scores of people. Videotapes were
taken of dead and dying and suffering people which prompted Trump to
intervene. Inspectors never went to the site. Instead they relied
upon evidence collected by the rebels.
As
a weapons inspector, I can tell you that chain of custody of any
samples that are to be used in the investigation is an absolute. You
have to be at the site when it is collected, it has to be certified
to be in your possession until the laboratory.
Any break in the chain
of custody makes that evidence useless for a legitimate
investigation. So we have evidence collected by the rebels.
They videotaped themselves carrying out the inspection, wearing
training suits that would not have protected them at all from
chemical weapons! Like almost everything having to do with these
rebels, this was a staged event, an act of theater.
DB: Who
has been supporting this particular group of rebels?
SR:
On the one hand, we have the actual fighters, the Army of
Islam, a Saudi-backed fundamentalist group who are extraordinarily
brutal. Embedded within the fighters are a variety of
Western-trained and Western-funded NGOs such as the White Helmets and
the Syrian-American Medical Society. But their primary focus
isn’t rescue, in the case of the White Helmets, or medical care in
the case of the Syrian-American Medical Society, but rather
anti-regime propaganda. Many of the reports that came out of
Douma originated with these two NGO’s.
DB: You
mentioned “chain of custody.” That’s what was most
ridiculous about sending in inspectors. The first thing you
would want to do is establish chain of custody and nail down the
crime scene.
SR: I
was a participant in the Gulf War and we spent the bulk of that war
conducting a massive aerial campaign against Iraq. I was one of
the people who helped come up with the target list that was used to
attack. Each target had to have a purpose.
Let’s
look what happened in Syria [on April 14]. We bombed three
targets, a research facility in Damascus and two bunker facilities in
western Syria. It was claimed that all three targets were
involved with a Syrian chemical weapons program. But the Syria
weapons program was verified to be disarmed. So what chemical
weapons program are we talking about? Then US officials said that one
of these sites stored sarin nerve agent and chemical production
equipment. That is a very specific statement. Now, if Syria was
verified to be disarmed last year, with all this material eliminated,
what are they talking about? What evidence do they have that any of
this material exists? They just make it up.
If
I had been a member of that inspections team, I would have been able
to tell you with 100% certainty what took place at that site. It
wasn’t that long ago that the allegations took place, there are
very good forensic techniques that can be applied. We would be able
to reverse engineer that site and tell you exactly what happened
when. Let’s say an inspection team had gone in and we found
that there was sarin nerve agent. Now, the US government can say,
there is not supposed to be any sarin nerve agent in Syria, therefore
we can state that the Syrians have a covert sarin nerve agent
capability. But still you don’t know where it
is, so now you have to say we assess that it could be
in this bunker.
We
bombed empty buildings. We didn’t degrade Syria’s chemical
weapons capability. They got rid of it. We were among the
nations that certified that they had been disarmed. We just
created this phantom threat out of nothing so that we could attack
Syria and our president could be seen as being presidential, as being
the commander in chief at a time when his credibility was being
attacked on the home front.
DB: Amazing.
That helps clarify the situation. Of course, it also
leaves us terrified because we are so far away from the truth.
SR: As
an American citizen who happens to be empowered with knowledge about
how weapons inspections work, how decisions are made regarding war, I
am disillusioned beyond belief.
This
isn’t the first time we have been lied to by the president. But
we have been lied to by military officers who are supposed to be
above that. Three top Marine Corps officers stood before the
American people and told bald-faced lies about what was going on. We
have been lied to by Congress, who are supposed to be the people’s
representatives who provide a check against executive overreach. And
we have been lied to by the corporate media, a bunch of paid
mouthpieces who repeat what the government tells them without
question.
So
Donald Trump can say there are chemical weapons in Syria, the
generals parrot his words, the Congress nods its head dumbly, and the
mass media repeats it over and over again to the American public.
DB: Are
you worried that we might end up in a shooting war with Russia at
this point?
SR: A
week ago I was very worried. If I am going to give kudos to Jim
Mattis it will be because he took the desire of Trump and Bolton to
create a major crisis with Russia over the allegations of Syrian
chemical weapons use and was able to water that down into putting on
a show for the American people. We warned the Russians in
advance, there were no casualties, we blew up three empty buildings.
We spent a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money and we got
to pat ourselves on the back and tell everybody how great we are. But
we avoided a needless confrontation with the Russians and I am a lot
calmer today about the potential of a shooting war with Russia than I
was a week ago.
Dennis
J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio
network and the author of Special
Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
You can access the audio of this interview and the audio
archives at www.flashpoints.net.
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