Posts
Whose Sarin Now?
Turkey and the company
Just about
everything is confirmed now except why Seymour Hersh is called "Cy".
The plane
crash in the Indian Ocean has kept a great deal of news out, but the Syrian
victory is pretty much accomplished which is why Syria hasn't been covered much
lately.
The whole
"mass gassings," we learn, despite the tentative wording of the
interview, was accomplished by funding from Saudi Arabia and another of those
rich oil countries, recruitment and money laundering through Libya (remember
that evil Gaddafi?) and the use of RAT tunnels (the Company loves terms like
that, "let's run it through the rat') from Turkey to Syria. The gas used was launched by missiles not
owned by Syria and was not the type that the government possessed. We mentioned that here at the time, but why
not mention it again, just for the sheer joy of it?
Meanwhile,
Israel has managed to cause all sorts of trouble without being noticed.
Russia did
not attack Georgia, btw., Georgia attacked Russia and Russia moved in and
protected the few Russian ethnics in Georgia right along the border. We put a big ship there. Wow.
Now, Russian
ethnics in Ukraine in Donetsk have occupied the government and voted to secede
and join Russia. So have a couple other
provinces. They are reacting to
persecution to "Ultra-Nationalist" and pro-western elements in
Ukraine that have taken over the government in Kiev. We sent a big ship there.
Senile McCain
doesn't like it, but he was asked if he wanted us to go to war with
Russia. He didn't answer, just said his
hero was Teddy Roosevelt.
With all this
unreported activity by the CIA, some people might be led to believe that it was
in on the assassination of JFK. One
does not mean the other. Al Sharpton,
once an undercover agent for the FBI will tell you that.
Well, have
fun everyone. I've had enough of this
right now.
Here is the
interview with Hersh:
MONDAY, APRIL 7, 2014
Sy Hersh Reveals Potential Turkish Role in Syria Chemical Strike That Almost Sparked U.S. Bombing
Was Turkey behind last year’s Syrian chemical
weapons attack? That is the question raised in a new exposé by Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh on the intelligence debate over the
deaths of hundreds of Syrians in Ghouta last year. The United States, and much
of the international community, blamed forces loyal to the Assad government,
almost leading to a U.S. attack on Syria. But Hersh reveals the U.S.
intelligence community feared Turkey was supplying sarin gas to Syrian rebels
in the months before the attack took place — information never made public as
President Obama made the case for launching a strike. Hersh joins us to discuss
his findings.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in
its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As Syria continues to remove its chemical weapons arsenal
under the monitoring of the United Nations, a new article by the Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh questions what happened last year in the
Syrian city of Ghouta, when hundreds of Syrians died in a chemical weapons
attack. The United States and much of the international community blamed forces
loyal to the Assad government, and the incident almost led the U.S. to attack
Syria. But according to Hersh, while President Obama and Secretary of State
John Kerry were making the case for U.S. strikes, analysts inside the U.S.
military and intelligence community were privately questioning the
administration’s central claim about who was behind the chemical weapons
attack.
According to Hersh, the U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page "talking
points" briefing on June 19th which stated the Syrian rebel group al-Nusra
maintained a sarin production cell. According to the DIA, it was,
quote, "the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11
effort." The DIA document
went on to state, quote, "Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators
were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely
for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria." A month
before the DIA briefing was written, more than ten
members of al-Nusra were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police
told the press were two kilograms of sarin.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh now
joins us from Washington, D.C. His latestpiece is headlined "The Red Line and
the Rat Line." It was just published in theLondon Review of Books.
Sy Hersh, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out what you have found.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you just laid out part of it. I think the most
important thing about the document is that—as you know, I was on this show,
and the London Review did a piece that I wrote, months ago, questioning
just the whole issue of "Whose Sarin?"—was the title. It wasn’t
clear. This doesn’t mean we know exactly what happened in eastern Ghouta. What
we do know—I’m talking about the military, the Pentagon and the analysts—is
that the sarin that was recovered wasn’t the kind of sarin that exists in the
Syrian arsenal. It just raises a grave question about one of the basic elements
of the president’s argument for planning to go to war. The real point of the
Shedd document, and the reason I wrote so much about it, is because when I did
that piece months ago, the White House said they know of no such document, and
there’s no—they have no information about sarin being in the hands of al-Nusra
or other radical groups or jihadist groups inside Syria.
Here’s what’s scary
about it. What’s scary about it is the military community—I know that the
Southern Command, etc., were very worried about this possibility. The war is
going badly for some of these jihadist groups. They obviously—more than
al-Nusra, other groups obviously have the capacity now to manufacture sarin,
with the help of Turkey, and the fear is that as the war goes bad, some of this
sarin—you can call it a strategic weapon, perhaps; when used right, it can kill
an awful lot of people very quickly—is going to be shipped to their various
units outside of Syria. In other words, they’re going to farm out the chemicals
they have, who knows where—northern Africa, the Middle East, other places—and
then you have a different situation that we are confronting in terms of the war
on terror. That’s the reality.
Meanwhile, the White
House’s position, again, with this article, once again, even though we—this
document they claim no longer existed, we ran a big chunk of it. Clearly, I
have access to it. They are still insisting, "We know of no such
document." This head-in-the-sand approach really has to do with something
I write about in the article. I quote people as saying, once the president
makes a decision, it’s almost impossible to change—to get it changed. The
president decided that the Syrians did it, and we’re justified in thinking that
and continuing to think that, no other option exists. And so, he’s predicated a
foreign policy which is a head-in-the-sand policy, because, meanwhile, we have
a serious problem with these kind of weapons, particularly as Syria gets rid of
the weapons. The only people inside Syria with those weapons are the wackos.
And so, there we are.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the rat line?
SEYMOUR HERSH: The rat line is an informal designation of a—the CIA is—there’s a lot of very competent
people in the CIA.
I give it a hard time, but you’ve got to acknowledge a very—a lot of very
bright people still work there, and they know what they’re doing. During the
Iranian war, when—during when Cheney and Bush were deeply involved in trying to
find out whether there was a secret underground nuclear facility inside
Iran—they absolutely believed it—we would send in Joint Special Operation
Command teams undercover from Pakistan, from wherever, through routes that the CIA had known for smuggling and moving
cash. They would use those rat lines to go in.
And the rat line in
this case is, very early in 2012, when this—I don’t know why, but maybe because
of the hubris over what—the victory we thought we had in Libya ousting Gaddafi,
which is a mess of its own, we set up a covert, a very secret operation inside
Libya to funnel arms through Turkey into the Syrian opposition, including all
sides—those who were secular, those who had legitimate grievances against the
Assad government, and the other groups sponsored by the Saudis and Qataris, who
are really trying to create a Wahhabi or Salafist government in Syria, take it
over. And this was a very secret operation. It went for a long time. It only
ended when the consulate in Benghazi was overrun. And it was done without—as I
write, without telling Congress. And the reason we even know about it, there
was a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi that was
published a few months back raising questions about security, etc., the same
issues Republicans constantly talk about, but there was a secret annex to the
report that described this process of funneling stuff. And it was done with
money, actually, from the Turks, from the Saudis and the Qataris. We sort of
used their money, and we funneled—to use it to buy weapons and funnel it. The CIA was deeply involved in this.
In effect, you could
almost say that, in his own way, Obama—you can call it shrewd or brilliant. He
was almost channeling Saudi Arabia and Qatari and the Turks to get something
done we wanted done, which was to have the opposition defeat Bashar al-Assad. And
that’s what it was. It was a long-running operation. It only ended—and, by the
way, when it ended with the—when we shut it down after Benghazi was overrun, we
suddenly saw all kinds of crazy weapons be showing up, including MANPADS, the
shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles. We showed—they were suddenly showing up
inside—inside Syria in the hands of various jihadist groups. So, clearly, the
rat line we set up after we shut it down had a life of its own, which is often
that happens in these kind of operations.
AMY GOODMAN: After the Syria talks concluded earlier this year,
Secretary of State John Kerry renewed his backing of the departure of Bashar
al-Assad and said the United States is prepared to increase support for the
rebel opposition.
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: No one has done more to make Syria a magnet for terrorists
than Bashar al-Assad. He is the single greatest magnet for terrorism that there
is in the region. And he has long since, because of his choice of weapons,
because of what he has done, lost any legitimacy. ... I will just say to you
that lots of different avenues will be pursued, including continued support to
the opposition and augmented support to the opposition.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Secretary of State John Kerry. Sy Hersh, your response?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, by this time, they knew from the Joint Chiefs of
Staff—they knew that the British had come to us with sarin that had been
analyzed at their laboratory and that—we share a laboratory on chemical and
biological warfare issues with Britain, place called Porton Down. It’s their
chemical warfare facility. And we, Americans, share that in terms of analyzing
international problems when it comes to chemical and biological warfare. So
it’s a lot of—we have a lot of confidence in the British competence. And so,
the Brits came to us with samples of sarin, and they were very clear there was
a real problem with these samples, because they did not reflect what the Brits
know and we know, the Russians knew, everybody knew, is inside the Syrian arsenal.
They have—professionals armies have additives to sarin that make it more
persistent, easier to use. The amateur stuff, they call it kitchen sarin, sort
of a cold phrase. You can make sarin very easily with a couple of inert
chemicals, but the sarin you make isn’t very—isn’t as lethal as a professional
military-grade sarin and doesn’t have certain additives. So, you can actually
calibrate what’s in it. They came to us, very early, within six, eight days, 10
days, of the August 21, last year’s terrible incident inside—near Damascus,
when hundreds were killed. And it was overwhelming evidence.
And so, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, led by its chairman, Martin Dempsey, an Army officer of many
years of experience—he was commander of the Central Command, covered the Middle
East—they did go to the president, and they raised questions. They let him know
the problems. And they also talked about the fact that the military was, I can
say, unhappy. Military people tend to be—when you give them an assignment,
they’ll do it, but often they see the risk more than civilian leaders. The
first—the president wanted a wave of bombing, and the military came up with a
list of a number of targets—I think 21, 31, something like that,
targets—runways and other stuff. And they were told by the White House—I don’t
know who—that they wanted something that would create more pain for Bashar. So
then, the next thing you know, they’re coming back with a massive bombing
attack, two air wings of B-52 bombers dropping 2,000-pound bombs, hitting power
nodes, electricity nodes, etc., the kind of attack that would cause an awful
lot of damage to civilian infrastructure. And that was an awful lot for the
Joint Chiefs, and they really raised that question with the president.
And as I write, I don’t
think there’s any other issue that would have forced him to stop as he did. The
notion of we’re going to suddenly go back and sign a chemical disarmament
treaty with the Syrians, that the Russians had been talking about, that had
been raised a year earlier, and we didn’t bite them. He clearly jumped on it
then. And he—look, you’ve got to give the president credit. As much as he
wanted to and as much as he talked about it, when faced with reality, he backed
down. He didn’t say why. But, you know, we don’t expect—we have learned not to
expect very much credibility on foreign policy issues. Unfortunately, the fact
that we don’t get straight talk from the top means that the bureaucracy can’t
do straight talk. If you’re inside the bureaucracy, you can’t really tell the
White House something they don’t want to know.
AMY GOODMAN: Uh—
SEYMOUR HERSH: That’s—yes, go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy, I want to talk Turkey for a minute.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: In your piece, you mention the leaked video of a discussion
between the Turkish prime minister, Erdogan, and senior officials of a false
flag operation that would justify Turkish military intervention in Syria. This
is Erdogan’s response to the leaked recording.
PRIME MINISTER RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN: [translated] Today they posted a video on YouTube. There
was a meeting at the Turkish Foreign Ministry on Syria, on the tomb of Suleyman
Shah. And they even leaked this on YouTube. This is villainous. This is
dishonesty.
AMY GOODMAN: Turkey briefly imposed a ban on YouTube following the
leaked recording. Sy Hersh, could you explain what the Erdogan administration’s
support for the rebels, the Turkish support for the rebels, has consisted of
and where the U.S. now stands on this?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, where we stand on it now is that there’s not much we
can do about it, because—well, let me just tell you what we know. What we do
know, that Turkey is—that al-Nusra groups have been inside Turkey buying
equipment. There’s also reports that they’ve also received some training from
the Turkish intelligence services, which is very—is headed by a man named
Fidan, who is very known. There’s reports, wonderful report in The Wall Street Journal recently about Fidan’s closeness not
only to Erdogan, the prime minister and the leader of Turkey, but also to the
most radical units. And so is Erdogan. They’re all supporting—if they have a
choice, they’re supporting the more fundamental groups inside Syria. And so, we
know they supply training. We know also there’s a—there’s, I guess you could
call it, another rat line. There’s a flow—if you’re going to send the chemicals
that, when mixed together, meddled together, make sarin, they flow—that flow
comes from inside Turkey. A sort of a paramilitary unit known as the
gendarmy—Gendarmerie and theMIT [Milli Istihbarat Teskilati] both are
responsible for funneling these things into radical groups. There’s actually a
flow of trucks that brings the stuff in. And so, Turkish involvement is
intense.
And I can tell you,
and as I wrote in this article, the conclusion of many in the intelligence
community—I can’t say it’s a report, because they didn’t write a report about
it—the conclusion was, based on intercepts we have, particularly after the
event, was that there were elements of the Turkish government that took credit
for what happened in eastern Ghouta, with the point being that this sarin
attack crossed Obama’s famous red line. If you know, Obama had said in the
summer of 2012, there’s a red line that, if they cross in terms of using
chemicals or doing too much, the opposition, he will bomb to stop Bashar. And
so, Turkey was dying, trying, repeatedly in the spring—there’s a lot of
evidence there were some attacks in the spring. The U.N. knows this, although
they don’t say it. I write about that, too, in the article. And also, the
American community knew. That’s the reason why that secret report I wrote
about, the talking paper, was written. We knew that the radicals were—had
used—the jihadist groups had access to nerve agent and had used it against Syrian
soldiers in March and April. Those incidents that were always described by our
government as being the responsibility of the rebels, with high confidence,
it’s just not so. And the report makes it clear. We have had a huge problem
before the August attack in—near Damascus. We knew about this potential for
months before. We just—it’s the kind of information, for some reason, it
doesn’t fit with what the administration wanted to hear, so it just never got
out. And that—
AMY GOODMAN: On—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy, on Sunday, the website EA WorldView published a pieceheadlined
"There is No Chemical Weapons Conspiracy—Dissecting Hersh’s 'Exclusive' on
Insurgents Once More." The author, Scott Lucas, questioned the claim that
rebels could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack last August,
given the range and scale of the operation. He wrote, quote, "Reports on
the day and subsequently indicated that 7-12 sites were attacked with chemical
agents at the same time. In other words, whoever was responsible for the
attacks launched multiple surface-to-surface rockets with chemical payloads
against opposition-held towns in East Ghouta and one town in West Ghouta, near
Damascus. [The chemical] attacks were ... followed by ... heavy conventional
attacks." The author, Scott Lucas, says that you fail to ask questions
about whether anyone, apart from the regime, would have the ability to carry
out such an extensive operation. Sy?
SEYMOUR HERSH: [inaudible] first article on—we’re past that. We now know.
Actually, The New York Times even ran a retraction, of sorts. You
had a—it was like reading Pravda.
But if you read the article carefully, The
New York Times had run a
series of articles after the event saying that the warheads in question that
did the damage came from a Syrian army base, something like nine kilometers,
six miles, away. And at that time, there were a number of analysts, a group
from MIT[Massachusetts
Institute of Technology], led by Ted Postol, who used to be a science adviser
to the CNO,
the chief of naval operations, clearly somebody with a great deal of background
and no bias. He did a series of studies with his team that concluded that the
warheads probably didn’t go more than one or two, at most, kilometers—two
kilometers, 1.2 miles. And we now know from the U.N. report—a man named Ake
Sellstrom, who ran the U.N. investigation, he’s concluded the same thing: These
missiles that were fired were fired no more than a mile.
They were—one
looks—just from the footage one saw, they were homemade. They didn’t fit any of
the nomenclature of the known weapons. And don’t think we don’t have a very
good picture of what the Syrians have in terms of warheads. They have a series
of warheads that can deliver chemical weapons, and we know the dimensions of
all of them. And none of these weapons fit that. And so, you have a U.N.
report. You have this independent report saying they were—went no more than one
or two kilometers. And so, I don’t know why we’re talking about multiple-launch
rockets. These are homemade weapons. And it seems very clear to most
observers—as I say, even to the U.N. team that did the final report—the U.N.,
because of whatever rules they have, wasn’t able to say that—who fired what.
They could just say—they just could describe the weapons and never make a
judgment. But I can tell you, I quote somebody from inside that investigation
unit who was very clear that the weapons fired were homemade and were not
Syrian army. This is asked and answered; these are arguments that go on. This
is—I assume it’s a blog. I don’t know the—I don’t know the blog.
AMY GOODMAN: And—
SEYMOUR HERSH: But this has been going—yes?
AMY GOODMAN: And Turkey’s interest, if it were the case, in pushing the
red line and supporting an attack that would be attributed to Assad—their
interest in getting the U.S. to attack Syria?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, my god, totally of great interest, because Erdogan has
put—the prime minister of Turkey has put an enormous amount of effort and funds
and others, including his intelligence service, in the disposable in the—he and
Bashar are like, you know, at loggerheads. He wants to see him go. And he’s
been on the attack constantly, supporting the most radical factions there. And
also, I must say he’s also supporting the secular factions, the people who
seriously want to overthrow Bashar and don’t want to see a jihadist regime;
they just want to see a government that’s not controlled by one family, you
know? But there’s no question Turkey has a deep investment in this. And it’s
going badly. It’s very clear now that the Syrian army has the upper hand and is
essentially—the war is essentially over. I know, I don’t like to—in terms of
getting rid of Bashar, that’s no longer a done deal. There’s going to be some
outpost, perhaps, in areas near Turkey where there will be various factions.
They’ll be under pressure from the Syrian army all the way. But, essentially,
this is a losing card we have. We don’t like to admit it, but that’s it. Bashar
has held on. And whatever that means—
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you very much for being
with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Washington, [D.C.].
We will have a link to your latest piece in the London Review of Books,
headlined "The Red Line and the Rat Line." This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, The War and
Peace Report. When we come back, 20 years ago today, the genocide in
Rwanda began. We’ll go to Kigali. Stay with us.
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