BERLIN — A series of
revelations about the rocket believed to have delivered poison sarin gas
to a Damascus suburb last summer are challenging American intelligence
assumptions about that attack and suggest that the case U.S. officials
initially made for retaliatory military action was flawed.
A team
of security and arms experts, meeting this week in Washington to discuss
the matter, has concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered
sarin in the largest attack that night was too short for the device to
have been fired from the Syrian government positions where the Obama
administration insists they originated.
Separately, international
weapons experts are puzzling over why the rocket in question – an
improvised 330mm to 350mm rocket equipped with a large receptacle on its
nose to hold chemicals – reportedly did not appear in the Syrian
government’s declaration of its arsenal to the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and apparently was not uncovered by OPCW
inspectors who believe they’ve destroyed Syria’s ability to deliver a
chemical attack.
Neither development proves decisively that Syrian
government forces did not fire the chemicals that killed hundreds of
Syrians in the early morning hours of Aug. 21. U.S. officials continue
to insist that the case for Syrian government responsibility for the
attack in East Ghouta is stronger than any suggestion of rebel
involvement, while experts say it is possible Syria left the rockets out
of its chemical weapons declaration simply to make certain it could not
be tied to the attack.
Obama "Cherry-Picked" Intelligence on Syrian Chemical Attack to Justify U.S. Strike Video
“That failure to declare can mean
different things,” said Ralf Trapp, an original member of the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and a former
secretary of the group’s scientific advisory board. “It can mean the
Syrian government doesn’t have them, or that they are hiding them.”
In
Washington, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said
its assertion of Syrian government responsibility remains unchanged.
“The
body of information used to make the assessment regarding the August 21
attack included intelligence pertaining to the regime’s preparations
for this attack and its means of delivery, multiple streams of
intelligence about the attack itself and its effect, our post-attack
observations, and the differences between the capabilities of the regime
and the opposition. That assessment made clear that the opposition had
not used chemical weapons in Syria,” it said Wednesday in an email.
But
the authors of a report released Wednesday said that their study of the
rocket’s design, its likely payload and its possible trajectories show
that it would have been impossible for the rocket to have been fired
from inside areas controlled by the government of Syrian President
Bashar Assad.
In the report, titled “Possible Implications of
Faulty U.S. Technical Intelligence,” Richard Lloyd, a former United
Nations weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor of science,
technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, argue that the question about the rocket’s range
indicates a major weakness in the case for military action initially
pressed by Obama administration officials.
The administration
eventually withdrew its request for congressional authorization for a
military strike after Syria agreed to submit to the Chemical Weapons
Convention, which bans the weapons. Polls showed overwhelming public
opposition to a military strike, however, and it was doubtful Congress
would have authorized an attack.
Lloyd and Postol’s report
is the most recent installment in a months-long debate among rocket and
weapons experts, much of it carried out in detailed papers posted on the
Internet, about the nature of the munitions used in the Aug. 21 attack
on rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus.
The report’s authors
admit that they deal only with one area of the attacks, the eastern
suburb of Zamalka, where the largest quantity of sarin was released that
night. They acknowledge that smaller rockets likely used in areas
southwest of the capital could have come from government-controlled
territory.
Relying on mathematical projections about the
likely force of the rocket and noting that its design – some have
described it as a trash can on a stick – would have made it awkward in
flight, Lloyd and Postol conclude that the rocket likely had a maximum
range of 2 kilometers, or just more than 1.2 miles. That range, the
report explains in detail, means the rockets could not have come from
land controlled by the Syrian government.
To emphasize their
point, the authors used a map produced by the White House that showed
which areas were under government and rebel control on Aug. 21 and where
the chemical weapons attack occurred. Drawing circles around Zamalka to
show the range from which the rocket could have come, the authors
conclude that all of the likely launching points were in rebel-held
areas or areas that were in dispute. The area securely in government
hands was miles from the possible launch zones.
In an
interview, Postol said that a basic analysis of the weapon – some also
have described as a looking like a push pop, a fat cylinder filled with
sarin atop a thin stick that holds the engine – would have shown that it
wasn’t capable of flying the 6 miles from the center of the Syrian
government-controlled part of Damascus to the point of impact in the
suburbs, or even the 3.6 miles from the edges of government-controlled
ground.
He questioned whether U.S. intelligence officials had
actually analyzed the improbability of a rocket with such a
non-aerodynamic design traveling so far before Secretary of State John
Kerry declared on Sept. 3 that “we are certain that none of the
opposition has the weapons or capacity to effect a strike of this scale –
particularly from the heart of regime territory.”
“I honestly
have no idea what happened,” Postol said. “My view when I started this
process was that it couldn’t be anything but the Syrian government
behind the attack. But now I’m not sure of anything. The administration
narrative was not even close to reality. Our intelligence cannot
possibly be correct.”
Lloyd, who has spent the past half-year
studying the weapons and capabilities in the Syrian conflict, disputed
the assumption that the rebels are less capable of making rockets than
the Syrian military.
“The Syrian rebels most definitely have the
ability to make these weapons,” he said. “I think they might have more
ability than the Syrian government.”
Both said they were not
making a case that the rebels were behind the attack, just that a case
for military action was made without even a basic understanding of what
might have happened.
For instance, they said that Kerry’s
insistence that U.S. satellite images had shown the impact points of the
chemical weapons was unlikely to be true. The charges that detonate
chemical weapons are generally so small, they said, that their
detonations would not be visible in a satellite image.
The report
also raised questions whether the Obama administration misused
intelligence information in a way similar to the administration of
President George W. Bush in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Then, U.S. officials insisted that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had an
active program to develop weapons of mass destruction. Subsequent
inspections turned up no such program or weapons.
“What, exactly, are we spending all this money on intelligence for?” Postol asked.
As
for the failure of the Syrians to list the rocket in its chemical
weapons inventory, experts are undecided on what it means and leery
about discussing it in public.
A spokeswoman for the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in Damascus declined to comment
on what was listed in the declaration. It would violate the Chemical
Weapons Convention for anyone who has read the declaration – it’s
distributed to all nations that have joined the treaty – to reveal its
contents.
Knowledgeable experts said discussion of the apparent
omission has been muted because no one wants to say anything that would
disrupt what appears to have been the successful dismantling of Syria’s
chemical weapons program.
Some say they are worried that the failure to declare one delivery system may also mean that other items went undeclared.
“The
most likely explanation for some of the delivery systems not showing up
on the chemical declaration is that Assad doesn’t want to incriminate
himself or his regime,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of
the Arms Control Association.
Jonathan S. Landay in Damascus, Syria, and Hannah Allam and Anita Kumar in Washington contributed to this report.
