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Hersh: Turkey Behind Sarin Attacks In Syria
Last December Seymour Hersh wrote that the CIA knew that Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda affiliated fundamentalists in Syria, were capable of producing Sarin and were likely the ones who used it last August in Ghouta near Damascus. The U.S. then claimed that the Syrian government had used the lethal gas and Obama threatened an all out air attack against it. Obama stopped the operation and went to Congress which denied to sanction any attack. A deal proposed by the Russian Federation for Syria to give up all its chemical weapons allowed Obama to publicly back down from his red-line.
Hersh now has a new piece out that goes much deeper into the issue. According to his sources:
- In 2012 the CIA build a rat-line to provide weapons from Libya via Turkey to the Syrian insurgents.
- That rat-line was stopped by the CIA after the attack on the U.S. "consulate" in Benghazi but the Turks continued to run it on their own.
- The Turkish prime minister had bet all his cards one the Syrian insurgency. His intelligence service MIT was supporting not only the Free Syrian Army but also Al-Nusra. When the war turned against the insurgents and the Syrian government was on the verge of winning Turkey needed to change the game.
- Turkey trained al-Nusra on the production of Sarin and provided the precursor chemicals.
- After several Sarin incidents, on of which killed some Syrian soldiers, Erdogan pushed the White House to react to the supposed breach of Obama's red-line against the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. Obama at first declined.
- In August 2013 chemical weapon inspectors arrived in Damascus. The Turks used the visit to instigate a spectacular chemical warfare incident in Ghouta. This incident pushed Obama to declare that the red-line had been crossed and that he would use air attacks against the Syrian government.
- Provided with physical probes from the incident via the Russians and the British U.S. government laboratories found that the Sarin used in Ghouta did not match the Sarin the Syrian government was supposed to have.
- Knowing that the case was weak and the proposed action would likely escalate throughout the Middle East the U.S. military urged to call the attack off. Obama then threw the ball over to Congress and, after Congress declined to pick it up, took the Russian deal.
The Turks are furious that they did not get the attack they had demanded. Erdogan still needs a victory over the Syrian government and his support for al-Nusra and other radicals continues. As Hersh tells it the U.S. is unable or unwilling to stop him:
Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s continued support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special case. They’re a Nato ally. The Turks don’t trust the West. They can’t live with us if we take any active role against Turkish interests. If we went public with what we know about Erdoğan’s role with the gas, it’d be disastrous. The Turks would say: “We hate you for telling us what we can and can’t do.”’
The story, as Hersh tells it, makes sense and fits the known circumstances. Erdogan has bet his house on the fall of the Syrian government and continues his best to achieve that.
Turkey obviously supports the current onslaught on Latakia and the Armenian town of Kessab in north-west Syria which is led by Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra. Recently over 1,000 mercenaries were flown from north Jordan to Turkey to join the fight. In the last week anti-tank missiles from U.S. production, of which the Saudi government recently bought 15,000, have been used in these attacks.
As the U.S. is unable or, more likely in my view, unwilling to stop Turkey on its way to become another Pakistan something else has to happen to change Erdogan's calculations. What could that be and who could provide it?
I think b has called this one well. Looking at the Hersh article, it seems to be a very tightly written one, and doesn’t wander off into conjecture. First of all, I see nothing in the text to justify the conclusions of some around here,who offer that Obama is being let off the hook for supporting al Nusra and the rest, while Erdogan is being set up as the “fall guy”. The Hersh piece doesn’t minimize Obama’s criminality, nor does it ignore the president’s ambition to do a monstrous level of damage to civilians, and civilian infrastructure, if the attack over the “red line” had come to pass.
In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.
And also, there’s this:
The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of the attack was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria. Last April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.’
Dempsey’s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under the assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack – would be a military blunder, the former intelligence official said
Hersh has written something that adds more context, and confirms stories our host has already submitted about Erdogan and his recklessness over the past months. I believe that some people fired from the hip in these comments, without bothering to read the linked article.
And I don’t believe that a public hearing in Congress, that shows open policy conflict between the State Department and the Pentagon, provides anything like a reasonable hook, for charges that the Hersh article is nothing but a “limited hangout” operation, to fob off all blame on the Turkish leader.
Hersh confirms the role of the so-called Benghazi “consulate”, sending Libyan arms, via Turkey, to Syrian insurgents:
The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’
And so, I think that b is correct in his assessment here:
“The story, as Hersh tells it, makes sense and fits the known circumstances. Erdogan has bet his house on the fall of the Syrian government and continues his best to achieve that.”
Posted by: Copeland | Apr 7 2014 4:48 utc | 63
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