US spies missed signs of Aug. 21 Syrian WMD Strike
By KIMBERLY DOZIER
Associated Press, 4 September 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence agencies did not detect the Syrian regime readying a massive chemical weapons attack in the days ahead of the strike, only piecing together what had happened after the fact, U.S. officials say.
One of the key pieces of intelligence that Secretary of State John Kerry later used to link the attack to the Syrian government — intercepts of communications telling Syrian military units to prepare for the strikes — was in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies but had not yet been “processed,” according to senior U.S. officials.
Special attention to last four paras on page 2. Administration is forcing IC beyond its objective collection/reporting role into political advocacy.
Intelligence Community Unclassified Assessment
Chemical Weapons Attack by the Syrian Regime
The United States Government assesses with high confidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013, resulting in a large number of casualties, including the deaths of 1,429 people, among them 426 children. We further assess that the regime used a nerve agent in the attack.
This assessment is based on a wide variety of sources, including: human, signals and geospatial intelligence; multiple accounts describing chemical-filled rockets impacting opposition-controlled areas; accounts from international and Syrian medical personnel; thousands of social media reports; and information from a highly credible international organization reporting that three hospitals in the Damascus area received approximately 3,600 patients displaying symptoms consistent with nerve agent exposure.
Syrian regime officials prepared for the attack. We have intelligence leads us to assess that Syrian government chemical weapons personnel were operating in a Damascus suburb near an area that the regime uses to mix chemical weapons, including sarin. On August 21, a Syrian regime element prepared for a chemical attack in the Damascus area, including through the utilization of gas masks.
Syrian forces conducted the attack. Satellite detections corroborate that attacks from a regime-controlled area struck neighborhoods where the chemical attacks reportedly occurred. This includes the detection of rocket launches from regime controlled territory early in the morning, approximately 90 minutes before the first report of a chemical attack appeared in social media.
Syrian regime officials discussed the attack. We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on 21 August and who was concerned with the U.N. inspectors obtaining evidence. On the afternoon of 21 August, we have intelligence that Syrian chemical weapons personnel were directed to cease operations. At the same time, the regime intensified the artillery barrage targeting many of the neighborhoods where chemical attacks occurred. In the 24 hour period after the attack, we detected indications of artillery and rocket fire at a rate approximately four times higher than the ten preceding days.
Victims displayed the symptoms of chemical weapons. One hundred videos relating to the attack show large numbers of victims exhibiting physical signs consistent with, but not unique to, nerve agent exposure—including unconsciousness, foaming from the nose and mouth, constricted pupils, rapid heartbeat, and difficulty breathing. Several videos show what appear to be numerous fatalities with no visible injuries, which is consistent with death from chemical weapons and inconsistent with death from small-arms, high-explosive munitions or blister agents.
This is not the first time that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons. The Syrian regime possesses numerous chemical agents, including mustard, sarin, and VX and has thousands of munitions that can be used to deliver chemical warfare agents. We assess with high
2
confidence the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year. We assess that the regime’s frustration with its inability to secure large portions of Damascus may have contributed to its decision to use chemical weapons on August 21.
It is highly unlikely that the opposition could have executed or fabricated the attack. We have seen no indication that the opposition has carried out a large-scale, coordinated rocket and artillery attack like the one that occurred on August 21. Our intelligence sources in the Damascus area did not detect any indications in the days prior to the attack that opposition affiliates were planning to use chemical weapons. Moreover, we assess the Syrian opposition does not have the capability to fabricate all of the videos, physical symptoms verified by medical personnel and NGOs, and other information associated with this chemical attack.
The use of chemical weapons in Syria threatens U.S. national security interests. Threatening to unravel the long-established international norm against the use of chemical weapons, for which there must be accountability and consequences; risking further violence and instability that threatens the region including close allies and partners like Israel, Turkey and Jordan; and increasing the risk that these weapons will be obtained by terrorist groups who might use them against the United States.
The international community is condemning this attack and calling for action. The Arab League declared that they have decided “to hold the Syrian regime fully responsible for this crime.” The Organization for Islamic Cooperation has said that the regime must be held “legally and morally accountable for this heinous crime.” NATO’s North Atlantic Council declared that “any use of such weapons is unacceptable and cannot go unanswered. Those responsible must be held accountable”.
The purpose of any response would be limited. The President has not yet made a final decision on how to respond. That said, any response would be focused on the regime’s use of chemical weapons. We need to send a clear message to Assad, his allies, and the world that the use of chemical weapons will not be tolerated. This is important to achieving the goal of stopping chemical weapons use in Syria, saving lives and deterring the use of chemical weapons by others in the future.
This is not Iraq 2003. The response that the President is considering is limited, tailored, and focused on the issue of chemical weapons. The President has made clear that he is not considering an open-ended military intervention aimed at regime change, nor is he considering U.S. boots on the ground. This is not Iraq or Afghanistan (ground forces) or Libya (a sustained air campaign).
The latest Snowden document is the US intelligence “black budget.” There’s a lot of information in the few pages the Washington Post decided to publish, including an introduction by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In it, he drops a tantalizing hint: “Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”
Honestly, I’m skeptical. Whatever the NSA has up its top-secret sleeves, the mathematics of cryptography will still be the most secure part of any encryption system. I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks. Those are where the real vulnerabilities are, and where the NSA spends the bulk of its efforts.
Last week, President Obama met with the five-member review board that he recently appointed to review the National Security Agency’s (NSA) controversial electronic surveillance program. The review board is part of the president’s effort to build confidence in the surveillance program and its respect for privacy rights.
But when Obama speaks about the program, he leaves the impression that its existing privacy protections are sufficient, if only we knew enough to appreciate them. That hardly instills confidence. If the president is serious about fixing the enormous overreach of U.S. surveillance that Edward Snowden helped to highlight, he should take these steps:
First, recognize 4th Amendment protection for our metadata. More than 30 years ago, in a different technological era, the Supreme Court ruled that, unlike the content of our phone conversations, we have no privacy rights in the numbers we call. The rationale was that we share those numbers with the phone company. The intrusion mattered little at the time because if the police wanted to reconstruct someone’s circle of contacts, they had to undertake the enormously time-consuming process of manually linking phone number to phone number.
Emphasis below added by Milt Bearden, former CIA chief in Pakistan also responsible for the field aspects of the CIA's covert support against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Eikenberry, Obama, and General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, March 2010. (Pete Souza / White House)
KARL W. EIKENBERRY is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He served as Commanding General of the Combined Forces Command–Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011.
Since 9/11, two consecutive U.S. administrations have labored mightily to help Afghanistan create a state inhospitable to terrorist organizations with transnational aspirations and capabilities. The goal has been clear enough, but its attainment has proved vexing. Officials have struggled to define the necessary attributes of a stable post-Taliban Afghan state and to agree on the best means for achieving them. This is not surprising. The U.S. intervention required improvisation in a distant, mountainous land with de jure, but not de facto, sovereignty; a traumatized and divided population; and staggering political, economic, and social problems. Achieving even minimal strategic objectives in such a context was never going to be quick, easy, or cheap.
Of the various strategies that the United States has employed in Afghanistan over the past dozen years, the 2009 troop surge was by far the most ambitious and expensive. Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine was at the heart of the Afghan surge. Rediscovered by the U.S. military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, counterinsurgency was updated and codified in 2006 in Field Manual 3-24, jointly published by the U.S. Army and the Marines. The revised
doctrine placed high confidence in the infallibility of military leadership at all levels of engagement (from privates to generals) with the indigenous population throughout the conflict zone. Military doctrine provides guidelines that inform how armed forces contribute to campaigns, operations, and battles. Contingent on context, military doctrine is
meant to be suggestive, not prescriptive.
Broadly stated, modern COIN doctrine stresses the need to protect civilian populations, eliminate insurgent leaders and infrastructure, and help establish a legitimate and accountable host-nation government able to deliver essential human services. Field Manual 3-24 also makes clear the extensive length and expense of COIN campaigns: “Insurgencies are protracted by nature. Thus, COIN operations always demand considerable expenditures of time and resources.”
The press stories that follow a document release like this often do not bother to do this. They look, instead, for a key—or the key—fact, around which the news story then develops. In this case, unsurprisingly, the key fact is that the NSA gathered tens of thousands of email communication by Americans before the FISA Court declared its actions unconstitutional. As the Washington Post puts it in its lead:
For several years, the National Security Agency unlawfully gathered tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-revised collection method, according to a 2011 secret court opinion.
An article titled NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails on ProPublica brings up an interesting glitch in the NSA’s surveillance technology. In spite of having the capability to sort through big data with a supercomputer, when it comes to doing a search of NSA’s over 30,000 employees they are at a loss. The article explains,
“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added… It’s actually common for large corporations to do bulk searches of their employees email as part of internalinvestigations or legal discovery.”
The article also brings up the point that federal agencies often don’t have the funding they need for public records. However, if any agency should have the capability to keep tabs on its employees, it is the agency charged with surveillance of the nation. Lacking that ability limits NSA operatives to searching emails by individuals one at a time instead of searching for keywords or in bulk. This is very interesting in light of recent events, no further comment.
