The Syria chemical attack correction
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The Syria chemical attack correction is John Kiriakou's retraction, delivered in public and unprompted by any pressure to make it, of a claim in his own book.

The question

A reader who had used Kiriakou's book on Iran's crisis as an insider source noted that Kiriakou mentions an Assad chemical attack near Damascus in August 2013 but does not go into it, and asked what information he had and what his opinion was.

The retraction

Kiriakou answered that he wrote that passage before the United Nations whistleblowers came forward and said they did not believe the attack was a Syrian government chemical attack, and that they believed instead that it came from Islamic State. He thanked the questioner for allowing him to correct it.

He then set out what he had been relying on. The conventional wisdom, and, he stresses, this was just according to media reporting, was that Bashar al-Assad had launched the chemical attack on his own people, to stem an uprising and to put people in their place as his father had done in Hama so many years earlier.

His current position is that this was untrue: at least according to these United Nations whistleblowers, there was no evidence that it was a Syrian government attack, and it most likely was a product of Islamic State.

Placement

The correction is consistent with Kiriakou's broader treatment of Syria, in which he describes having been a vocal advocate of the closest possible relations with the Assad government, not because he thought Assad a good man, but because he regarded him as the only thing standing between Syria's religious minorities and annihilation. It is also one of the clearer instances of him revising a published claim on the record rather than defending it.

See also

- The Damascus consulate strike
- Iran Nuclear Assessment
