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| U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaking Friday |
In his second statement on Syria in five days, U.S. Secretary
of State John Kerry said Friday the United States government “now knows that at
least 1,429 Syrians were killed” in the August 21 attack in the Damascus
suburbs, “including at least 426 children… This is the indiscriminate,
inconceivable horror of chemical weapons. This is what Assad did to his own
people."
This comes with the release of the “U.S.
Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on
August 21, 2013.”
“Its findings are as clear as they are compelling. I'm not
asking you to take my word for it. Read for yourself, everyone, those listening,
all of you, read for yourselves the evidence from thousands of sources,
evidence that is already publicly available,” Kerry advised.
Following is the full text of Kerry’s remarks delivered at
the State Department. As last Monday (August 26), Kerry did not take any
questions:
* * * * *
President Obama has spent many days now consulting with
Congress and talking with leaders around the world about the situation in
Syria.
And last night the president asked all of us on his national
security team to consult with the leaders of Congress, as well, including the
leadership of the congressional national security committees. And he asked us
to consult about what we know regarding the horrific chemical weapons attack in
the Damascus suburbs last week.
I will tell you that as someone who spent nearly three
decades in the United States Congress, I know that that consultation is the
right way for a president to approach a decision of when and how and if to use
military force. And it's important to ask the tough questions and get the tough
answers before taking action, not just afterward.
And I believe, as President Obama does, that it is also
important to discuss this directly with the American people. That's our
responsibility, to talk with the citizens who have entrusted all of us in the
administration and Congress with responsibility for their security.
That's why this morning's release of our government's
unclassified estimate of what took place in Syria is so important. Its findings
are as clear as they are compelling. I'm not asking you to take my word for it.
Read for yourself, everyone, those listening, all of you, read for yourselves
the evidence from thousands of sources, evidence that is already publicly
available.
And read for yourselves the verdict, reached by our
intelligence community about the chemical weapons attack the Assad regime
inflicted on the opposition and on opposition controlled or contested
neighborhoods in the Damascus suburbs on the early morning of August 21st.
Our intelligence community has carefully reviewed and
re-reviewed information regarding this attack. And I will tell you it has done
so more than mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment.
Accordingly, we have taken unprecedented steps to declassify and make facts
available to people who can judge for themselves.
But still, in order to protect sources and methods, some of
what we know will only be released to members of Congress, the representatives
of the American people. That means that some things we do know, we can't talk
about publicly.
So what do we really know that we can talk about?
Well, we know that the Assad regime has the largest chemical
weapons programs in the entire Middle East. We know that the regime has used
those weapons multiple times this year, and has used them on a smaller scale
but still it has used them against its own people, including not very far from
where last Wednesday’s attack happened.
We know that the regime was specifically determined to rid
the Damascus suburbs of the opposition, and it was frustrated that it hadn’t
succeeded in doing so.
We know that for three days before the attack, the Syrian
regime’s chemical weapons personnel were on the ground in the area, making
preparations.
And we know that the Syrian regime elements were told to
prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions
associated with chemical weapons.
We know that these were specific instructions.
We know where the rockets were launched from, and at what
time. We know where they landed, and when. We know rockets came only from
regime-controlled areas and went only to opposition-controlled or contested
neighborhoods.
And we know, as does the world, that just 90 minutes later all
hell broke loose in the social media. With our own eyes we have seen the
thousands of reports from 11 separate sites in the Damascus suburbs. All of
them show and report victims with breathing difficulties, people twitching with
spasms, coughing, rapid heartbeats, foaming at the mouth, unconsciousness, and
death. And we know it was ordinary Syrian citizens who reported all of these
horrors.
And just as important, we know what the doctors and the
nurses who treated them didn’t report -- not a scratch, not a shrapnel wound,
not a cut, not a gunshot sound. We saw rows of dead lined up in burial shrouds,
the white linen unstained by a single drop of blood.
Instead of being tucked safely in their beds at home, we saw
rows of children lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital floor, all of them
dead from Assad’s gas and surrounded by parents and grandparents who had
suffered the same fate.
The United States government now knows that at least 1,429
Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least 426 children. Even the
first-responders, the doctors, nurses and medics who tried to save them, they
became victims themselves. We saw them gasping for air, terrified that their
own lives were in danger.
This is the indiscriminate, inconceivable horror of chemical
weapons. This is what Assad did to his own people.
We also know many disturbing details about the aftermath. We
know that a senior regime official who knew about the attack confirmed that
chemical weapons were used by the regime, reviewed the impact, and actually was
afraid that they would be discovered.
We know this.
And we know what they did next. I personally called the
foreign minister of Syria, and I said to him, “If, as you say, your nation has
nothing to hide then let the United Nations in immediately and give the
inspectors the unfettered access, so they have the opportunity to tell your
story.”
Instead, for four days, they shelled the neighborhood in
order to destroy evidence, bombarding block after black at a rate four times
higher than they had over the previous 10 days. And, when the U.N. inspectors
finally gained access, that access -- as we now know -- was restricted and
controlled.
In all of these things that I have listed, in all of these
things that we know -- all of them -- the American intelligence community has
high confidence, high confidence. This is common sense. This is evidence. These
are facts.
So the primary question is really no longer, what do we know.
The question is, what are we -- we collectively -- what are we in the world
gonna do about it.
As previous storms in history have gathered, when unspeakable
crimes were within our power to stop them, we have been warned against the
temptations of looking the other way. History is full of leaders who have
warned against inaction, indifference and especially against silence when it
mattered most.
Our choices then, in history, had great consequences. And our
choice today has great consequences. It matters that nearly 100 years ago in
direct response to the utter horror and inhumanity of World War I that the
civilized world agreed that chemical weapons should never be used again. That
was the world’s resolve then. And that began nearly a century of effort to
create a clear red line for the international community.
It matters today that we are working as an international
community to rid the world of the worst weapons. That’s why we signed agreements
like the START Treaty, the New START Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention,
which more than 180 countries, including Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, have signed on
to.
It matters to our security and the security of our allies. It
matters to Israel. It matters to our close friends Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon,
all of whom live just a stiff breeze away from Damascus. It matters to all of
them where the Syrian chemical weapons are -- and if unchecked they can cause
even greater death and destruction to those friends.
And it matters deeply to the credibility and the future
interests of the United States of America and our allies. It matters because a
lot of other countries, whose policy has challenged these international norms,
are watching. They are watching. They want to see whether the United States and
our friends mean what we say.
It is directly related to our credibility and whether
countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are
watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can
put the world at greater risk.
And make no mistake, in an increasingly complicated world of
sectarian and religious extremist violence, what we choose to do or not do
matters in real ways to our own security. Some site the risk of doing things.
But we need to ask, “What is the risk of doing nothing?”
It matters because if we choose to live in the world where a
thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people
with impunity, even after the United States and our allies said no, and then
the world does nothing about it, there will be no end to the test of our
resolve and the dangers that will flow from those others who believe that they
can do as they will.
This matters also beyond the limits of Syria’s borders. It is
about whether Iran, which itself has been a victim of chemical weapons’
attacks, will now feel emboldened in the absence of action to obtain nuclear
weapons.
It is about Hezbollah and North Korea and every other
terrorist group or dictator that might ever again contemplate the use of
weapons of mass destruction. Will they remember that the Assad regime was
stopped from those weapons’ current or future use? Or will they remember that
the world stood aside and created impunity?
So our concern is not just about some far-off land oceans
away. That’s not what this is about. Our concern with the cause of the
defenseless people of Syria is about choices that will directly affect our role
in the world and our interests in the world.
It is also profoundly about who we are. We are the United
States of America. We are the country that has tried, not always successfully,
but always tried to honor a set of universal values around which we have
organized our lives and our aspirations.
This crime against conscience, this crime against humanity,
this crime against the most fundamental principles of international community,
against the norm of the international community, this matters to us.
And it matters to who we are. And it matters to leadership
and to our credibility in the world.
My friends, it matters here if nothing is done. It matters if
the world speaks out in condemnation and then nothing happens.
America should feel confident and gratified that we are not
alone in our condemnation and we are not alone in our will to do something
about it and to act.
The world is speaking out. And many friends stand ready to
respond. The Arab League pledged, quote, “to hold the Syrian regime fully
responsible for this crime.” The Organization for Islamic Cooperation condemned
the regime and said we needed, quote, “to hold the Syrian government legally
and morally accountable for this heinous crime.”
Turkey said there is no doubt that the regime is responsible.
Our oldest ally, the French, said the regime, quote,
“committed this vile action, and it is an outrage to use weapons that the
community has banned for the last 90 years in all international conventions.”
The Australian prime minister said he didn’t want history to
record that we were, quote, “a party to turning such a blind eye.”
So now that we know what we know, the question we must all be
asking is: What will we do? Let me emphasize, President Obama, we in the United
States, we believe in the United Nations. And we have great respect for the
brave inspectors who endured regime gunfire and obstructions to their
investigation.
But as Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general, has said again and
again, the U.N. investigation will not affirm who used these chemical weapons.
That is not the mandate of the U.N. investigation. They will only affirm
whether such weapons were used. By the definition of their own mandate, the
U.N. can’t tell us anything that we haven’t shared with you this afternoon or
that we don’t already know.
And because of the guaranteed Russian obstructionism of any
action through the U.N. Security Council, the U.N. cannot galvanize the world
to act as it should. So let me be clear. We will continue talking to the
Congress, talking to our allies, and most importantly, talking to the American
people.
President Obama will ensure that the United States of America
makes our own decisions on our own timelines, based on our values and our
interests. Now, we know that after a decade of conflict, the American people
are tired of war. Believe me, I am, too.
But fatigue does not absolve us of our responsibility. Just
longing for peace does not necessarily bring it about. And history would judge
us all extraordinarily harshly if we turned a blind eye to a dictator’s wanton
use of weapons of mass destruction against all warnings, against all common
understanding of decency, these things we do know.
We also know that we have a president that does what he says
that he will do. And he has said, very clearly, that whatever decision he makes
in Syria it will bear no resemblance to Afghanistan, Iraq or even Libya. It
will not involve any boots on the ground. It will not be open ended. And it
will not assume responsibility for a civil war that is already well underway.
The president has been clear: Any action that he might decide
to take will be limited and (sic) tailored response to ensure that, a despots
brutal and flagrant use of chemical weapons is held accountable. And
ultimately, ultimately we are committed -- we remain committed, we believe it’s
-- the primary objective is (sic) to have a diplomatic process that can resolve
this through negotiation, because we know there is no ultimate military
solution.
It has to be political.
It has to happen at the negotiating table.
And we are deeply committed to getting there.
So that is what we know. That is what the leaders of Congress
now know. And that’s what the American people need to know. And that is, at the
core of the decisions that must now be made for the security of our country,
and for the promise of a planet, where the world’s most heinous weapons must
never again be used against the world’s most vulnerable people.
Thank you, very much.
