Syria Gas Attack and Russian Election Hacking...Debunking Fake News With Scott Ritter
Former Marine Intelligence Officer and former UN Chief Weapons Inspector for Iraq, Scott Ritter, joins the Liberty Report today to explain why in his vast intelligence and WMD experience he believes the "Russia hacking" US Intel Report is bogus and why the "Assad used gas" conventional wisdom is just more fake news. Ritter's expertise sheds much-welcome actual light onto these two vexing issues, where so much empty speculation seems to drive the thinking.
Former Marine Intelligence Officer and former UN Chief Weapons Inspector for Iraq, Scott Ritter, joins the Liberty Report today to explain why in his vast intelligence and WMD experience he believes the "Russia hacking" US Intel Report is bogus and why the "Assad used gas" conventional wisdom is just more fake news. Ritter's expertise sheds much-welcome actual light onto these two vexing issues, where so much empty speculation seems to drive the thinking.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today, co-host Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Oh, very good.
We have a special guest today.
Somebody that we remember well when we were debating whether or not we should go to war, and guess what position we took?
And I took very strongly.
It was a silly old war, it was useless, and we should stay out.
And there was an individual that helped us on this to put our arguments together because I had in 71, 2, and 3 there, it had already been started because I mentioned in 1998 they started talking about when's the war going to start against Iraq.
And that individual was the UN inspector from 1991 to 1998 for the weapons in Iraq.
And that is Scott Ritter, and he has a lot of good information for us because he's had some real experience.
Scott, welcome to our program today.
Well, thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Well, wonderful.
You've had the experience, and like I said in the introduction, you were a great help to us in figuring this out.
And you might just talk to the audience a little bit.
Tell the audience a little bit about your experience as a UN inspector leading up.
Of course, you weren't the inspector at the time the war, the debate was going on, was in, I guess, in 2002 and the early part of 2003.
But tell us a little bit about your work between 91 and 98, setting the stage for that confrontation with those who said that we were about to be attacked by the Iraqis with the nuclear weapons.
And with, you know, it was all this war propaganda.
So let us know a little bit about what your activities were like.
Well, first of all, I think we need to understand why the UN picked me to be a weapons inspector.
They just don't draw names out of a hat.
Normally, when people come into an organization like the United Nations Special Commission, you either have an expertise in nuclear weapons, biological weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons.
My expertise is in the area of intelligence.
I was a Marine Corps intelligence officer.
I served in the former Soviet Union as one of the first inspectors for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, getting rid of those weapons.
I served on the staff of General Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War.
I was a counter-Scud specialist, so I hunted down Iraq's Scud missiles.
And because of this experience, I was picked to come to the United Nations to head up their intelligence capability.
When I was brought in, it was a couple months after the inspection process had started, and it was clear that the Iraqis were not telling the truth.
And what we needed to do, we being the United Nations, needed to do, was break through their deceit, their lies.
So I was brought in to create, help create an intelligence organization that would gather information from around the world and turn that into inspections on the ground.
And this is a fairly unique job because I didn't just gather the intelligence, but I also planned the missions and I executed the missions as the chief inspector.
My responsibility was to take the real experts, the chemical weapons experts, the biologists, the nuclear physicists, the rocket scientists, take them into Iraq and unleash them on the target and then control the politics that surrounded that, gather intelligence, come back and recycle the intelligence cycle so that we could start anew.
And I did this for seven years.
It was a very interesting job, a very challenging job.
Right.
Daniel?
And so bring us down to where you were sort of the lone wolf.
You had sort of the entire weight of the world on you because you were the one person who stood up and said, I'm not buying this stuff.
This is not what I experienced when I was there.
Something is wrong.
What happened in those at that point?
Well, I mean, the fact of the matter is, I was one of the most aggressive inspectors in terms of holding the Iraqis to account for their job, their responsibility of disarmament.
By 1996, we had disarmed Iraq to a level of about 95%, 98% certainty, meaning that we knew darn well what happened to the vast majority of their weapons of mass destruction.
But the United States would not let the Security Council close the books.
They said there's a little bit of material unaccounted for, and you need to find that before we can close the books.
So then my job became literally trying to search for a needle in the haystack.
And I did a number of very aggressive inspections that singled out what we call the concealment mechanism, how the Iraqis might hide weapons.
And this activity led to a lot of confusion because a lot of people say, well, wait a minute, Ritter, you said there was a lot of weapon, that Iraq had a weapons capability.
What I said was that Iraq had an unaccounted for weapons capability that the Security Council of the United Nations deemed to be a threat to the rest of the world.
And they're my bosses.
And as long as they say this is a threat, I have to search for it.
There's a difference between implementing a resolution calling for the disarm of Iraq and going to war in Iraq.
And this is where I drew the line.
And around 1999, after weapons inspectors were kicked out of Iraq, primarily because of American intelligence interference in the work of the inspectors, I said, look, you know, we have to stop seeking to hunt for every nut, bolt, and screw in Iraq.
And we have to start looking at it from a qualitative standpoint.
Is the material that's unaccounted for, does it constitute a meaningful threat to the United States worthy of the loss of American military life?
As a former Marine who's been to war for my country, the answer was no.
We know for a fact that Iraq does not have a retained operational capability, that whatever they may have hid from us, and we have no evidence that they hid it from us today, what they may have hidden no longer could be a viable weapon.
So why are we talking about Iraq as a threat worthy of war?
What we should be talking about is a resumption of weapons inspections to complete the tax so that we could move on, lift sanctions, and bring Iraq back into the community of nations.
Intelligence Missteps and Deception00:06:25
But that wasn't the mission of the United States saw.
To me, it's such a tragedy.
The information was there, it was available to me, and yet, you know, the war propagandists, the warmongers were able to get away with it to the point where everybody was behind going to war because they were so fearful.
But I don't think things have changed a whole lot when people want to control what's going on in the media.
And now you've been writing and talking about what's going on with Russia and Syria.
And this consensus, you know, constantly we heard there's a consensus of all 17 agencies that we know what Russia has done.
Can you give us a little bit of insight there?
At times it gets a little bit confusing, but give us an insight to what is going on and where is the deception and who propagates this deception.
Absolutely.
Look, to start off, we need to understand that, again, going back to Iraq, I think everybody is familiar with the fact that the WMD intelligence assessment put out by the intelligence community of the United States got it wrong, 100% wrong.
They didn't get it right.
And after that, there was a commission put together by the Senate.
The president put together a commission.
And the purpose of these commissions was to ensure that in the future, the intelligence community would not make such an egregious mistake.
And in order to prevent that, you had standard operating procedures put in place.
You had analytical guidelines put in place so that when the intelligence community spoke, it spoke with a single voice based upon consensus assessments.
So now we fast forward to the situation we have vis-a-vis Russia.
In January of this year, there was an intelligence community assessment published.
And a lot of people said, oh, this means 17 intelligence agencies have come to a consensual agreement about the threat posed by Russia.
This is not the case.
First of all, only three agencies were actually involved in this.
The National Security Agency, the FBI, and the CIA.
And even when we get to that, these were not agency assessments, but rather hand-picked analysts from each of these agencies brought together in a special task force.
And what we've done is, what has been done is that they're playing a game of smoke and mirrors.
They put out this document and they say this is a consensus assessment, but it's not.
It's cherry-picked information interpreted by cherry-picked analysts.
It's the exact same mistake we made going into Iraq, where you had a groupthink mentality controlled by analysts who were predisposed to accept a conclusion based upon incomplete information.
I mean, we just assumed that Russia did it because Russia is automatically evil.
We've demonized Russia.
Therefore, anything we say that's negative about Putin or Russia, deserved or otherwise, is automatically accepted as truth.
One of the great failures of Iraq was that the intelligence community would not even consider the possibility that Saddam Hussein would have willfully gotten rid of his weapons in 1991.
We know today that that was a fact.
That happened.
But the intelligence community simply would not accept that as a possibility.
The same way today, when President Putin, and I'm not saying we have to believe him, but when he puts it out there that Russia was not involved, people just reject this out of hand, saying it's inconceivable that Russia, that we could believe a Putin, that Putin could be telling the truth.
Well, the fact of the matter is, because there is no hard smoking gun evidence, we have to at least consider the possibility that maybe Vladimir Putin might be telling the truth.
I'm not saying he is, but we shouldn't be dismissive of this, especially after the Iraq fiasco.
Well, that's exactly what they said around the time of Saddam.
If you questioned the conventional wisdom, oh, you're on the side of Saddam, you're a Saddam lover.
Oh, you're Putin's poodle if you listen.
It's amazing how infantile it is.
But, you know, and you pointed out, by the way, I should say, these are two blockbuster articles you've done for the American Conservative magazine, just I think a week or so apart, the one on the Syria investigation and the one on the Russia so-called hacking.
These are fantastic articles, really well done, well researched.
But you point out in the 2002 NIE on Iraq, which as you well point out, got it completely wrong.
Nevertheless, because it was an agency-wide, intelligence community-wide assessment, state's INR was able to take out a footnote in which they ended up being absolutely correct.
Of course, it was brushed aside by Condi Rice at the time, but it turns out it was very significant that the state's intelligence and research got it right on this, and this is the exact kind of mechanism that wasn't allowed on this so-called assessment that came out in January.
Well, it's very curious that the story we hear from James Clapper and John Brennan, the former director of national intelligence and the former director of the CIA, is that only those agencies who were qualified to talk about this subject were invited in.
And yet one of the things they're talking about is Russian diplomatic intent.
There's no better agency to assess Russian diplomatic intent than the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
They also focus on the Russian military intelligence, the GRU.
There's no agency better positioned to talk about the GRU than the Defense Intelligence Agency.
These two agencies weren't even invited to the table.
So everything they say about trying to legitimize this assessment is absurd on the face.
It's an illegitimate document.
The analysis that was used to underpin it is shallow.
It's an embarrassment to the intelligence community.
And what's even more embarrassing is that the United States Congress has embraced this assessment as if it is, you know, it's the Bible.
No, it's not.
It's really a bad piece of analysis.
And before we talk about confronting Russia to the level they're talking about, increased sanctions, potential military conflict in Syria and the Baltics, we need to take a step back and say, hey, are we barking up the wrong tree here?
Do we have our facts correct?
Did Russia really do this?
Switching Perspectives00:08:12
You know, instead, we're basically buying into the group think that, you know, again, we can't defend Vladimir Putin because that makes us anti-American.
No, what makes you anti-American is the refusal to seek the facts out before you send American men and women off to fight and die in a war that perhaps doesn't need to be fought.
Scott, I think you're in a unique position because you've had a lot of experience and you've spoken out.
And I'm delighted that you're doing a little bit more now and you're getting a little bit more attention.
But you know, I believe you are in a unique position because if I'm not mistaken, you were probably in the Marines during the time when the Soviets were still around.
So you dealt with the Soviets and the Russians at a time when it was quite a bit different.
I understand you got a degree in Russian history and now it's switched.
And we at our institute thought, well, maybe there was going to be a peace dividend, you know, when the Soviet system collapsed.
And there was, I think, to a degree because there was some trade.
And then we were sort of pleased when we heard the campaign going on, and there was a different approach by the Republican candidate that we might have a different appeal to Russia.
But all of a sudden, there's this switch.
There's a little bit of a quandary now on exactly where we stand, but it's not the same.
I want to see if I can get you to give us an opinion on what causes this switch, because I do think there's a switch and there's a confusion because we're not going out of our way.
You just demonstrated, you know, how the Congress is reading things the way they want to read it, as far as I'm concerned.
That why would this switch come?
Who's behind the scenes might be the motivator for this?
Oh, yes, before the Russians were good, there is a peace dividend.
We need to talk with them and they're trading with Europe.
And then all of a sudden, the whole thing switches.
And it still befuddles me on who pushes this information, who directs this policy.
Well, you're absolutely correct.
When I started in the Marine Corps, I came in in 1984, and I was a Soviet specialist.
In 1988, I was selected to go to the Soviet Union and serve as a weapons inspector there.
You know, this was my specialty, the Soviet Union, Soviet intelligence.
I got two classified commendations from the director of the CIA for my work.
So I don't come at this as a casual observer.
This was the heart and soul of what I did.
And I've married, my wife is from the former Soviet Union.
I have intellectual and emotional roots to that area of the world.
So I followed it with great interest.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, I think one of the great mistakes we made was to declare victory as if we were solely responsible for what transpired causing the hammer and sickle to come down and the Russian tricolor to go up, instead of reflecting on the reality of the difficult state that existed in this Soviet Union, Russia at that time.
By declaring victory, we treated the Russians as a defeated enemy.
If you go back to the 1990s and take a look at what the United States did in Russia, going in there, dominating their economy for the sole advantage of the West and at the disadvantage of the Russian people, supporting a drunken laut like Boris Yeltsin as their president.
Speaking of interfering in elections, we actively pushed to get Boris Yeltsin re-elected.
We helped write the Russian Constitution.
We tried to make Russia a state in our own image, and it failed miserably.
The Russia of the 1990s is one of the great tragedies of our time.
Then comes this guy named Vladimir Putin.
I'm not defending him at all.
I'm just saying he was a product of his era.
He came in and he became a president.
He has said that the demise of the Soviet Union is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.
That's his point of view.
It's a point of view shared by many Russians.
We in the United States simply ignore this fact.
We continue to expand NATO in violation of the oral agreement that was made between the United States and Mikhail Gorbachev in the aftermath of German reunification that no NATO troops would go beyond the borders of West Germany.
Instead, we've expanded NATO right up to the borders of Russia.
This is viewed as an existential threat by the Russians.
We put in ballistic missile defense systems.
We've abrogated the ABM Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Now the Russians feel that they're at a strategic disadvantage.
We've never treated Russia with even a modicum of respect.
And as a result, Russia feeling threatened by the expansion of NATO, American military involvement on their periphery, both in South Korea, with Japan, in Afghanistan.
The Russians have reacted.
They've reacted in a manner that best fits Russian national interest.
It's not American national interest, and that's insulting to us.
We have an entire system, intellectual system that's based upon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Atlantic Council, the Council for Foreign Relations, all defend America's ongoing military involvement in Europe.
We have an economic system that's based upon the world's largest military that can only be justified by speaking about a threat against NATO, against Europe.
This is Russia, of course.
And so when you have a president, a presidential candidate like Donald Trump coming in saying, hey, I'd like to turn things around.
Maybe this isn't the direction we need to be going in.
I mean, that was, you know, I'm not the biggest Donald Trump supporter in the world, but I will tell you that that aspect of his platform was extremely attractive to me because it took America away from the direction of, for instance, thermonuclear war, a general nuclear exchange, the kind of thing that would terminate life across this country.
And so I said, this is good.
Why can't we speak of opening the door to Russia, not rolling over for Russia, not letting Russia get away with murder, but actually saying, how can we peacefully coexist with this country?
This was a threat to people who have made their living casting Russia as a threat.
The various intellectual think tanks, the various defense industries, et cetera.
Everybody makes their dollar off of the Russian threat.
And when Donald Trump said, I'm no longer going to treat Russia like a threat, he's threatening a lot of vested political and economic interests here in the United States and around the world.
And this is why I think we're seeing this backlash, not because he's intellectually wrong.
In fact, I haven't seen very many intellectually based arguments that are out there that can stand toe-to-toe with the basic rationale of improving relations with Russia.
But they attack him on superficial things, like this ridiculous Don Jr. meeting, the invented hacking story.
I don't know what happened with the hacking.
The reason why we don't know is we don't have the truth.
We don't have all the facts.
They're not telling us everything.
They hide behind this intelligence community assessment as if it's the last word when it's not even the first word.
But Donald Trump has stepped on a lot of toes, and I think that's why we're seeing such a backlash.
Okay, I think Daniel has another question.
We're going to close up here in a little bit, but we have time for another question or two.
Okay, yeah.
I just would clarify, interestingly, one of the things that Putin clarified about this biggest tragedy, the collapse of the Soviet Union, was the fact that millions of Russians woke up the next morning and found themselves outside their own country.
And that's certainly true in the Baltics and elsewhere.
But I know we've covered a lot of territory on Russia.
If I can just indulge you a little bit to switch gears, because you had another terrific piece on the Syria gas story.
OPCW Samples Controversy00:07:34
And, you know, this is something that you're an expert in, these kinds of inspections.
You came down saying that this whole OPCW, the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the whole report is very suspicious.
On one hand, you've got Hirsch, Seymour Hirsch's arguments.
On the other hand, you have Elliott Higgins.
Interestingly enough, you brought in Aristotle to make your points.
And I thought that was a very inventive way of doing it.
I know we're getting close on time, but if you could give us that in a nutshell, that article, I think it would be very interesting for our viewers.
Certainly.
Look, I'm not here to defend Seymour Hirsch, and I'm not here to attack Elliott Higgins.
They're welcome to their opinion.
I'm not here to support the Russian version of events or the rebel version of events.
What I have done, though, is singled in on the fact that many people who want to point the finger at Syria have adopted the findings of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW's conclusions that sarin or a sarin-like agent was used at Khan Sheikhun.
And I focus in on how did they reach this conclusion.
And again, I come at this from the perspective of a weapons inspector.
The protocols that the OPCW uses in Syria were developed by my teams and teams that I was affiliated with in Iraq back in the 1990s.
The whole concept of chain of custody to protect the integrity of samples, the sampling protocol, how to actually take samples on the ground.
These are all things that I developed, that I was intimately involved in.
So I don't come at this casually.
And I took apart the OPCW report.
And right off the bat, when you have samples taken by an interested party, in this case, the rebels on the ground, in particular, an NGO known as the White Helmets, they took sampling without any protocol on the 4th of April.
Nine days later, they turned these samples over to the OPCW, and the OPCW accepts these as viable sampling.
Right off the bat, any finding that is derived from these samples is illegitimate in the eyes of the inspection business.
So why the OPCW goes further and says these samples show this, that's irrelevant.
These samples aren't samples.
They don't count as samples.
They weren't taken by your team.
Your team can't vouch for their veracity.
Therefore, you shouldn't be talking about them.
And that's the heart of My problem here is that the OPCW violated every procedure it has in place that's supposed to guarantee its integrity as an organization, and in doing so, it's lost its integrity.
And as you point out, the white helmets are not an uninterested party.
They're funded by the United States government and other Western governments in the millions of dollars.
So even that would certainly raise the conflict of interest suspicion, would it not?
Well, not just that.
They peacefully coexist with Al-Nusra, which is an al-Qaeda affiliate.
And, you know, I just, that automatically disqualifies them.
But even more so, you know, I asked the OPCW to explain.
They used the term chemical sampling unit.
They're supposedly a chemical sampling unit with the white helmets.
I looked at the videos.
They're wearing training suits.
Well, no, no, some of them actually wore, it's like they're playing Halloween dress-up.
They dressed up as if they were actual inspectors taking samples, but they're wearing training suits, which provide no protection.
It's a joke.
What they did, everything they did was theatrical.
It was a visual designed to confuse or send a false signal to an unknowing audience.
But to an expert like me, I was a hazardous materials specialist on the USAR team, urban search and rescue team here in New York.
That was my job is to do hazardous material sampling at a chemical weapons release site.
What they did was a joke.
It didn't even come close to meeting any standard of quality control, any professionalism.
You could not accept what they did as being a sample.
And yet, that's what the OPCW did, and that is why their finding must be rejected.
It cannot be accepted because it's simply not a legitimate finding.
It's a politicized finding designed to rush to a preordained conclusion, which is, oh, the Syrian government did this.
And that's what ultimately people want everybody to think.
Maybe the Syrian government did do it.
I'm not saying they didn't.
I'm just saying that based upon the evidence that's put out there, you can't reach that conclusion.
They certainly seem to bamboozle the president, though.
That's got to be slightly disconcerting to those of us hoping he would be a little bit more reluctant.
Yeah, no, but again, they bamboozled everybody.
I mean, they know exactly what they're doing.
They're a professional propaganda outfit.
They received a lot of money and a lot of training from the United States and elsewhere on how to use social media, how to take digitized imagery, to package it, and to sell it via the social media.
The OPCW deployed inspectors to Syria based upon these images, and the president of the United States ordered a military attack against a sovereign state based upon these images.
So we can sit here and make fun of them all we want, but they were very successful in what they did.
They got the president to do something.
They got the OPCW to do something.
They got an Oscar nomination.
I think they actually won the Oscar.
So they're doing quite well with their propaganda, but this does not mean that what they've done, what they do, and the conclusions they helped reach are valid.
They're simply not.
Scott, I want to thank you very much for being on the program.
Our viewers are going to really enjoy this program.
And it just reminds me of the fact that you were helpful to us to understand and build up our arguments against the insanity of going into Iraq, which is an ongoing war even still today.
And that the people who are honestly looking for information about trying to prevent more fiasco as they need to look and see what you're doing and what you're writing.
And I understand you're going to have a book coming out later this year.
You might mention, in closing, the name of that book and about when that book might be available.
Well, the name of the book is Deal of the Century.
It's about the Iranian nuclear agreement.
But it's written from the Iranian perspective.
I think one of the problems we get is that we get fed spoonfuls of garbage from the American point of view, et cetera, about what transpired.
And we rarely look at the issue from the other side, the other angle.
So I'm trying to take a look at the Iranian nuclear deal from the perspective of Iran so that an American audience might have a better understanding of just how complex this story is.
And frankly speaking, right now we have President Trump, again, speaking.
He just certified the fact that the Iranians are cooperating, but he very much wants to undo this deal.
And he does it on the basis that the deal is fundamentally flawed.
And I think publishing a book like this will help people see that actually the deal isn't fundamentally flawed.
It's a very good deal.
It probably prevented a war with Iran.
And as long as we stay in this deal, it'll keep us from needlessly going to war with Iran in the future.
I'm not giving the Iranians a clean bill of help on their ballistic missile program, their support for terrorism, et cetera.
But on the issue of nuclear weapons, I think it's imperative that we understand the Iranian perspective.
And once we do, we'll realize that there is no nuclear weapons program.
And this truly was the deal of the century.
Scott, thank you very much for being with us today.
Well, thank you for having me.
Good.
And I want to thank our viewers for joining in today.