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.
AN OPEN MEMORANDUM FOR THE
AMERICAN PEOPLE
From: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Subject: Mattis ‘No Doubt’ Stance on Alleged Syrian CW Smacks of Politicized Intelligence
Donald Trump’s new Secretary of Defense, retired Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, during a recent trip to Israel, commented on the issue of Syria’s 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.
“There can be no doubt,”
Secretary Mattis said during a April 21, 2017 joint news conference with his
Israeli counterpart, Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman, “in the international
community’s mind that Syria has retained chemical weapons in violation of its
agreement and its statement that it had removed them all.” To the contrary,
Mattis noted, “I can say authoritatively they have retained some.”
Lieberman joined Mattis in his
assessment, noting that Israel had “100 percent information that [the] Assad
regime used chemical weapons against [Syrian] rebels.”
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’s personal knowledge, and that Syria retained
a stock of “between one and three tons” of chemical weapons.
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
“develop several hypothesis around that, and then to begin to develop fact
patterns which either supported or suggested that the hypothesis wasn’t right.”
The CIA, Pompeo said, was “in 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.]”
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 “the circumstances of the attack and who was
responsible.” McMaster indicated that the U.S. Intelligence Community, working
with allied partners, was able to determine with “a very high degree of
confidence” where the attack originated.
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 –
presumably blood samples – that confirmed the type of agent that was used in
the attack. This initial assessment drove the decision to use military force –
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.
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’t; it is the definition of
politicized intelligence, even if those involved disagree.
A similar “no doubt” moment had
occurred nearly 15 years ago when, in August 2002, Vice President Cheney delivered a speech
before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,”
Cheney declared. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against
our friends, against our allies and against us.” The message Cheney was sending
to the Intelligence Community was clear: Saddam Hussein had WMD; there was no
need to answer that question anymore.
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 – and arrogance – 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 – 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.
On the basis of this commitment
of talent alone, Mr. Cohen assessed that “no reasonable person could have
viewed the totality of the information that the Intelligence Community had at
its disposal … and reached any conclusion or alternative views that were
profoundly different from those that we reached,” namely that – judged with
high confidence – “Iraq had chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles
with ranges in excess of the 150 kilometer limit imposed by the UN Security
Council.”
Two facts emerge from this
expression of intellectual hubris. First, the U.S. Intelligence Community was,
in fact, wrong in its estimate on Iraq’s WMD capability, throwing into question
the standards used to assign “high confidence” ratings to official assessments.
Second, the “reasonable person” 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.
Secretary of State
Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on Feb. 5. 2003, citing satellite
photos and other “intelligence” which supposedly proved that Iraq had WMD, but
the evidence proved bogus.
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 (“high confidence”,
“reasonable person”) to disguise a process of intelligence analysis that has
long ago been subordinated to domestic politics.
It is important to point out the
fact that Israel, too, was wrong about Iraq’s 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 “clear indications” that Iraq had reconstituted its
WMD programs after U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998.
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’s chemical weapons capabilities, should be used to provide any
credence to Secretary
Mattis’s embrace of the “no doubt” standard when it comes to Syria’s
alleged possession of chemical weapons.
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 “proof”, but the Iraq experience – in particular former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s
unfortunate experience before the U.N. Security Council – show how easily such
intelligence can be misunderstood and misused.
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’s 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.
In the end, the conclusions CIA Director Pompeo
provided to the President was driven by a fundamental rethinking of the CIA’s
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’s chemical
weapons seemed to support the Syrian government’s 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.
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.
One would think that the CIA
would operate using the adage of “once bitten, twice shy” 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’ conclusions,
and discounted the Iraqi version of events; as it turned out, Iraq was telling
the truth.
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.)
CIA Director Pompeo’s job is not to make policy – 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.
CIA Director Pompeo’s job is not to make policy – 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.
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’s 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.
In the case of Syria, the “no doubt” standard Mattis has employed does
not meet the “reasonable man” standard. Given
the consequences that are attached to his every word, Secretary Mattis would be
well advised not to commit to a “no doubt” standard until there is, literally,
no doubt.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
William Binney, Technical
Director, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign
Service Officer (ret) and former Office Division Director in the State
Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Thomas Drake, former Senior
Executive, NSA
Bogdan Dzakovic, Former Team
Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate
VIPS)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations
Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC,
Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C Johnson, CIA & State
Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (Ret.);
ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and
Special Mission Units (JSOC)
Brady Kiesling, former U.S.
Foreign Service Officer, ret. (Associate VIPS)
Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt.
Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the
manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Lisa Ling, TSgt USAF (ret.)
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness
policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic
Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael, National
Intelligence Council (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National
Intelligence Officer for Near East, CIA and National Intelligence Council
(ret.)
Torin Nelson, former Intelligence
Officer/Interrogator (GG-12) HQ, Department of the Army
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army
Judge Advocate (ret.)
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent
and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC,
former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department
of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior
Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA,
ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate
VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton, Intelligence
Officer, DIA (ret.); Commander, US Naval Reserve (ret.)
Robert Wing, former Foreign
Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.);
Foreign Service Officer (resigned)
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.
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