Seymour Hersh, false flags, sarin gas

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When Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh published a report last year indicating that Syr­ ian “rebels,” rather than the military forces of dicta­ tor Bashar Assad, fired deadly sarin gas missiles on Aug. 21, 2013, into the “rebel”-held town of Ghouta, a Damascus suburb, few took notice. Others responded with denunciations or efforts at refutation that lacked credibility.

The initial line up at the level of world governments was U.S. imperialism and its imperial associates on the one side—calling for blood—and a few nations that have learned to sometimes question U.S. “facts” on the other. The latter included the governments of Germany and the England, traditional U.S. allies, who refused to endorse the new “coalition of the willing” that the U.S. sought to assemble to punish Syria in the manner that all of the above did in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

Hersh’s most recent defense of his position, entitled, “The Red Line and the Rat Line: Erdoğan and the Syr­ ian rebels,” appears in the April 17, 2014, issue of the London Review of Books. Based on an impressive ar­ ray of sources, including U.S. intelligence representa­ tives he interviewed, United Nations documents, and classified U.S. government reports that came into his possession (documents that the Obama administra­ tion claim do not exist but that Hersh read from in a public radio interview), he presents a powerful refu­ tation of the U.S. government’s still official position that the Assad government, and not the “rebels,” used sarin gas. Below, we quote liberally from Hersh’s text to provide readers with the essence of his arguments.

The deadly sarin gas attack, said at the time to have killed some 1429 innocent civilians, including 300 “rebel” fighters, was front-page headlines the world over. Assad had crossed President Obama’s often re­ peated “red line,” the corporate media near unani­ mously blared, and would soon pay the price. Syria was slated to be yet another “humanitarian” U.S. ven­ ture, wherein evil would be punished and justice, American style, would be meted out—once again, according to Hersh’s report, in the form of massive bombings—this time of Syria’s critical military instal­ lations and basic infrastructure.

Hersh asserted that the covert “rebel” action was a “false flag” or an orchestrated “rebel” pretext aimed at bringing on a massive U.S. retaliation. Readers will note my quotation marks around the word “rebel.” To­ day, and without exception, the Syrian rebels, wheth­ er of the jihadist/al-Qaida variety or the secular Free Syrian Army, are armed, financed, and most often organized by American imperialism and/or its allied governments in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

The original popular forces that peacefully mobi­ 6 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2014 lized against Assad’s neoliberal policies, and who were severely repressed in 2011, have long ago left the stage as social actors. Lacking any progressive leadership deeply implanted in Syrian society, they have no organized voice, not to mention having no military expression. The war in Syria rather rapidly devolved into a U.S.-backed military onslaught, with a reactionary agenda that differs little from that of the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

President Obama, and every U.S. government official who was allowed to speak on the sarin gas atrocity, closed ranks, insisting that the evidence pointing to Assad was irrefutable. Indeed, The New York Times headlined “Forensic Details in U.N. Report Point to Assad’s Use of Gas.” The Times included front-page U.S.-government-provided maps indicating the trajec­ tory of the missiles from Assad’s military installations to Ghouta.

A subsequent report by two American weapons specialists—Richard Lloyd, a former United Nations weapons inspector who is now associated with Tesla Laboratories, and Theodore A. Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—entitled “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelli­ gence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack,” neverthe­ less insisted that the government’s assertions were scientifically impossible because the range of the key rocket carrying sarin gas was less than a third of what the U.S. government was claiming. The maximum range of these rockets, pieces of which were found on the scene, was 2.5 to 3 kilometers, whereas the near­ est Syrian military base was located at least 9.5 kilo­ meters away.

The Obama administration asserted that it would soon release declassified evidence to prove its case, including telephone intercepts from Syrian govern­ ment officials. But no such evidence was ever pro­ vided. “We know where the rockets were launched from and at what time,” Secretary of State John Kerry insisted. “We know where they landed and when. We know rockets came only from regime-controlled ar­ eas and went only to opposition-controlled or con­ tested neighborhoods.”

Journalist Robert Parry noted at the time, “Kerry also hyped the emotional case for war by presenting claims about casualty totals that now appear to have been wildly exaggerated and based on more dubious intelligence.” Parry continued by quoting Kerry: ‘“The United States government now knows that at least 1429 Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least 426 children,’ Kerry said, citing a number that the Wall Street Journal later reported was derived from applying facial recognition software to videos of bodies posted on YouTube by the Syrian opposition and then subtracting bodies in bloody shrouds. This would inevitably be told, Obama backed off, supposedly in the face of a Russian-U.S.Syrian government agreement that Syria’s stock of sarin gas would be removed under international supervision.

Seymour Hersh is a regular contributor on military and security matters to The New Yorker magazine. He has won two National Magazine Awards and is a “five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award.” Here’s a sample of the evi­ dence he employed in the London Review of Books to make his case: • “British intelligence had obtained a sam­ ple of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff.”

• “Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turk­ ish government,’ a former senior US intelligence offi­ cial, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria—and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’”

• “The American and British intelligence commu­ nities 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 In­ telligence 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: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort.’”

• “Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what lo­ cal police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construc­ tion of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin.”

• “A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the [UN] mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign respon­ sibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’”

• “In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian con­ flict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House (continued on page 7)

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(continued from page 6) chief of staff.”

• “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 “pain­ ful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infra­ structure. 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.”

• “The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposi­ tion in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama ad­ ministration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. 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 end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war. ‘Erdoğan was pissed,’ the former intelligence official said, ‘and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the Turkish government—through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gen­ darmerie, a militarised law-enforcement organiza­ tion—was working directly with al-Nusra and its al­ lies to develop a chemical warfare capability.

“[A former intelligence official said]: ‘Stepping up Turkey’s role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his Seymour Hersh has contributed to lifting the veil of secrecy that is used to camouflage (Above) Syrian government blamed rebels for killing 25 in March 2013 chemical attack in Aleppo.

based on English but has a greatly reduced and sim­ plified vocabulary and grammar. This suits the totali­ tarian regime of the Party, [or state power] whose aim is to make any alternative thinking—‘thoughtcrime’, or ‘crimethink’—impossible by removing any words