Please read the summary (by Jonathan Cook) of an essay written by the outstanding journalist Seymour Hersh, concerning the sarin gas attack on Ghouta, in August 2013. His first article on that issue was written on December 8, 2013 and it was based on information provided by intelligenge officers. Now, Mr. Hersh is revealing in full details the role of the Turkish government during the Syrian crisis.
If you like you can read the full story, following the link at the end of the summary. It is astonishingly fascinating.
Media Manipulation: Seymour Hersh Unearths More Lies on Syria
By Jonathan Cook
Global Research, April 06, 2014, jonathan-cook.net
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has a second fascinating
essay that rewrites the official record of the sarin gas attack on
Ghouta, near Damascus, in August last year. As usual, Hersh uses his
sources in the US security establishment to throw light on what really
took place. The bottom line: Turkey was almost certainly the party
responsible for the attack, hoping it would force Obama to honour his
threatened "red line" if Assad used chemical weapons. Was the Assad
regime to be brought down by a US military campaign, Turkey assumed it
would be able to turn Syria into a client state.
Like the earlier article, this one will probably gain very little
attention. It is published in the obscure UK literary publication the
London Review of Books. Presumably like last time, Hersh could not find a
mainstream publication willing to take it - and I'm guessing that, like
last time, these stunningly important revelations will be shunned by
the liberal media. Instead, it will be consigned to the memory hole,
along with so much other evidence of western crimes against humanity.
Pundits and analysts will continue to tell us confidently that Assad
carried out the Ghouta attack, oblivious to Hersh's findings.
The reason the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian
have been studiously ignoring Hersh's investigations on this, it seems
to me, is that they show the Obama administration's foreign policy is
just as criminal as the previous Bush White House's.
Here is a summary of Hersh's main findings:
* Obama's sudden climbdown on his threatened military strike against
Assad was in part forced on him by a chemical analysis of samples of the
sarin used in Ghouta, which showed that its signature did not match
that of the stockpiles held by the Assad regime.
* Despite US claims, the White House knew that the Syrian rebels had
developed chemical weapons production facilities. UN investigators
thought the Syrian opposition were the most likely culprits behind
earlier chemical weapons attacks, in April and May 2013.
The American and British intelligence communities had
been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were
developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense
Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page 'talking
points' briefing for the DIA's deputy director, David Shedd, which
stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell.
* The military strike being prepared by the White House after the
Ghouta attack was, far from small-scale, as secretary of state John
Kerry intimated, modelled on the shock and awe campaign against Saddam
Hussein.
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 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.
* The US developed a back channel of weapons-smuggling to the Syrian
rebels, known as the rat line, in cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia
and Qatar, using the "liberated" arsenals from Libya following the
west's ousting of Gaddafi.
The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to
funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across
the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who
ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated
with al-Qaida. ... By the terms of the agreement, funding came from
Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of
MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi's arsenals into
Syria. ... The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who
would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his
biographer.
* The job of the US consulate in Libya - the one where ambassador
Christopher Stevens was killed - was to provide logistical assistance
with the rat line. That was the reason the 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.' ... Washington abruptly
ended the CIA's role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack
on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. 'The United States was
no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,'
the former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty
portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads,
were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of
the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo
had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian
transport helicopter. 'The Obama administration,' Warrick wrote, 'has
steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles,
warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be
used to shoot down commercial aircraft.'
* By late 2012 the US had assessed that the rebels were losing the
civil war, and started to downgrade their involvement in the rat line.
That left Turkey's Recep Erdogan the main loser.
The American decision to end CIA support of the weapons
shipments into Syria left Erdogan exposed politically and militarily.
'One of the issues at that May summit was the fact that Turkey is the
only avenue to supply the rebels in Syria,' the former intelligence
official said. ... Without US military support for the rebels, the former
intelligence official said, 'Erdogan's dream of having a client state in
Syria is evaporating and he thinks we're the reason why. When Syria
wins the war, he knows the rebels are just as likely to turn on him -
where else can they go? So now he will have thousands of radicals in his
backyard.'
* Erdogan therefore became focused on exploiting the "red line" Obama
had set on Assad's use of chemical weapons to force the US to attack
Syria.
Erdogan knew that if he stopped his support of the
jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war
because of logistics - the distances involved and the difficulty of
moving weapons and supplies. Erdogan's hope was to instigate an event
that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn't respond
in March and April.' ... We now
know it was a covert action planned by Erdogan's people to push Obama
over the red line,' the former intelligence official said. 'They had to
escalate to a gas attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors' -
who arrived in Damascus on 18 August to investigate the earlier use of
gas - 'were there. The deal was to do something spectacular. ... Barring a
major change in policy by Obama, Turkey's meddling in the Syrian civil
war is likely to go on.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2014/04/06/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line
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