The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: What about [previous guest speaker, Lawrence Korb’s comments regarding Syria’s agreement allowing the international community to control its chemical weapons], Mr. Dankof? Does it make it get closer to all nations destroying their chemical weapons, such as the United States, such as Israel?

Dankof: Well, quite right. I think it’s noteworthy that Secretary of State John Kerry misspoke when he said that Syria had the largest chemical weapons arsenal in the Middle East. That honor belongs to Israel along with their nuclear weapons, some 300 warheads that are known to exist, along with their biological agents that are a part of the Israeli arsenal.

The fact of the matter is that Israel should be brought under the same microscope as Syria. [Until] Israel is forced to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and after they open their nuclear, chemical and biological capability to international inspection and sanction, we’re going to continue to have problems.

I think that as you quite rightly pointed out, all of the nations of the world including the United States, whose track record on weapons of mass destruction goes back to the mass murder of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 - until everybody is held to the same standard, we’re going to have a very, very serious ongoing problem.

Press TV: What do you make of what our guest in Washington has said, Mr. Dankof? Of course, all of it appears as if it has been proven that the Syrian government, first of all, has used chemical weapons and, of course, we’re still waiting for the United Nations to come back with their report. Let’s look at that in general, what do you make of this, that before anything has been proven, these are still accusations, but the United States has still just gone in and basically - it’s either they turn in these weapons or they are attacked! Let’s look at this according to international law. How is this allowed?

Dankof: It’s totally illegal and I would have to say in terms of what Mr. Korb has said, I believe all of the circumstances point not to President Assad’s utilization of these chemical weapons; but in fact, CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a well-known international figure, says that I believe all of the evidence points to the fact that this is a false-flag attack that was undertaken by the Sunni Wahhabic extremists who are being supported by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel against the Assad regime as a prelude to an attack on Iran.

The fact of the matter is there’s no proof whatsoever on this score. I agree with President Putin and also with Foreign Minister Lavrov with Russia that there is no evidence at all that Assad was the one who used these weapons.

All of the circumstantial evidence points to Assad’s opposition as having employed chemical weapons. The United States’ military, we now learned through a declassified document, is admitting that these rebels have sarin nerve gas, among other things.

Again, as we look at all of the circumstances of this, Assad would have had no reason to use these weapons because he was gaining the upper hand with his conventional army. He was gaining the upper hand with his air force.

Again, when we look at this opposition, this is an opposition largely consisting of foreign imported mercenaries and terrorists representing groups like al-Qaeda and al-Nusra that were being commissioned by the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia for different reasons to destroy Assad because they want to destroy Iran’s best friend in the Arab world - is a prelude to an American and Zionist attack on Iran. That’s what’s behind this. I don’t buy for one minute the notion that Assad is the guilty party here.

Press TV: Mr. Dankof, what do you make of [Mr. Korb’s comments]? As I said, this is something that is repeated and repeated in the mainstream media, that the insurgents do not have any means of being able to carry out chemical attacks.

Dankof: In the first place, Carla Del Ponte who was the former attorney general of Switzerland, who has been a part of this UN effort to inspect what’s been going on in Syria, has seconded what Ray McGovern has already said, that all of the evidence points to these rebels that are opposing Assad being the people that have utilized the chemical weapons.

The fact of the matter is, when you look at the types of chemical weapons that were apparently used, these were so-called homemade weapons, certainly not being capable of being delivered over a wide geographic area by some sort of a delivery system, but infinitely capable of being utilized in the fashion that they were in the outskirts of Damascus where some 1,400 people were believed to have died. Again, I think that what Del Ponte has said is suggestive here, what Ray McGovern said is suggestive here.

The fact of the matter is that when you look at the two million Christians in Syria who are in between the Alawite Shias and the Sunnis in a civil war, virtually all of these Christian people support President Assad. They don’t support al-Qaeda. They don’t support al-Nusra. They don’t support these Wahhabic extremists because they understand that if these people get the upper hand, all two million of these Christians in Syria will either be killed or displaced.

Vladimir Putin and Mr. Lavrov also understand that they want no part of this sort of Wahhabic extremism threatening their situation in the southern part of Russia. There’s a great deal that’s at stake in this.

Certainly when we look at the history of the nation of Israel going all the way back to Menachem Begin’s bombing of the King David hotel in the late 1940s, the “Diaria” scene slaughter in Palestine, not to mention everything that Israel has done since then, this is a state that was founded through the explicative utilization of terrorism.

This is a state that continues to commit criminal acts, not simply in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem but in Israel’s employment of the Mujahedin-e Khalq to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, just as one example.

Do we want a regime like that in possession of nuclear weapons? Do we want a regime like that in possession of chemical weapons and the biological weapons that both Ray McGovern and Gordon Thomas indicate that Israel is in possession of?

Clearly the responsible elements in the international community don’t want that. I say the ‘responsible elements’ because that doesn’t include the United States government where when we look at the amount of money that is bankrolling American Congressional elections courtesy of the Israeli lobby, we can understand very quickly that the money trail explains why the United States lets Israel get away with anything it wants to do no matter how egregiously it violates international law while holding a gun to the head of the Syrians and the Iranians. That’s clear what’s happening here.

Press TV: What about that, Mr. Dankof, what our guest in Washington has said [regarding US’ stance on banning the use of chemical weapons, while possessing chemical weapons itself]?

Dankof:

Well, a couple of things I think we need to underscore here in regard to the double standards of all of this, in the first noting Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, it’s noteworthy that this was done with the complete approval and sponsorship of the United States, which was egging Saddam Hussein on to attack the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a matter of public record.

In regard to the American record otherwise, in regard to arms proliferation, chemical weapons and nuclear weapons, I’d like to remind all of our listeners and viewers that my father was a United States Air Force colonel. He worked for the Air Force Technical Applications Center which was running the U2 spy program for the Central Intelligence Agency at the height of the Cold War.

My dad was under first-name basis with General Paul Tibbets who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He was my parent’s next door neighbor at the air Proving Ground in Miami in the late 1940s.

My father was on a first name basis with General Curtis LeMay, the father of the Strategic Air Command and the architect of American aerial policies of World War II, both in Europe and Japan. General Lemay told my father personally, he also went on record publically before he died as saying that the Hiroshima, Nagasaki bombings by the United States had nothing to do with Japan or Japan’s willingness to surrender. General LeMay told me father that he basically believed that American policy in that situation was despicable.

In that regard, General LeMay indicated that General MacArthur, General Eisenhower and Admiral Nimitz all knew the truth of why the United States really used these weapons on Japan and that was simply to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that we had them.

The fact of the matter is that all of these Japanese people lost their lives in the most horrible fashion imaginable just so we could put on a show of demonstration of our possession of these weapons of mass destruction. This is the actual American record. This is something that some of the best military leadership in World War II opposed and were overruled by Harry Truman for other reasons that we could get into here.

The fact of the matter is that just in terms of what happened in World War II alone, not to mention the fact that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that we went ahead, the United States went ahead and started running American missiles deeply into formerly Soviet territories, or attempting to, and the United States went ahead in exploiting the dissolution of the Soviet Union and began recruiting former Soviet bloc countries for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

This is, I think, the actual American record on this sort of thing and it has no credibility whatsoever with the international community that we have now reached this impasse on Syria. The United States, John Kerry, Barack Obama, not to mention many of their Republican colleagues, simply don’t want the public finding out and understanding how lamentable our own record really is.