U.S. foreign policy
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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 weap ons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event that would force the US to cross the red line.
• “A US intelligence consultant told me that a few weeks before 21 August he saw a highly classified briefing prepared for Dempsey and the defense secre tary, Chuck Hagel, which described ‘the acute anxiety’ of the Erdoğan administration about the rebels’ dwin dling prospects. The analysis warned that the Turkish leadership had expressed ‘the need to do something that would precipitate a US military response.’ … In the autumn, the former intelligence official went on, the US intelligence analysts who kept working on the events of 21 August ‘sensed that Syria had not done the gas attack. But the 500 pound gorilla was, how did it happen? The immediate suspect was the Turks, be cause they had all the pieces to make it happen.’
• “As intercepts and other data related to the 21 Au gust attacks were gathered, the intelligence commu nity saw evidence to support its suspicions. ‘We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s peo ple to push Obama over the red line,’ the former intel ligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas at tack 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. Our senior military officers have been told by the DIA and other intelligence as sets that the sarin was supplied through Turkey—that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support.”
• “The post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the White House. ‘Nobody wants to talk about all this,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘There is great reluctance to contradict the presi dent, although no all-source intelligence community analysis supported his leap to convict. There has not been one single piece of additional evidence of Syrian involvement in the sarin attack produced by the White House since the bombing raid was called off. My gov ernment can’t say anything because we have acted so irresponsibly. And since we blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame Erdoğan.’”
Hersh is no conspiracy theorist. What he reports with regard to U.S. plans and plots to bomb Syria has been repeated for decades, indeed for more than a century, with U.S. false flags or pretexts for war being the rule, not the exception. “Remember the Maine” was among the early pretexts, with regard to Cuba in 1898, when the U.S. insisted that Cuban independence fighters sunk the mothballed ship the Maine. The sub sequent U.S. invasion ended with the annexation of Guantanamo, Cuba, where U.S. forces remain today, conducting monstrous torture operations on alleged terrorists with no charges leveled against them and virtually no means to defend themselves.
The U.S. government waged a 10-year war in Viet nam on the pretext that a Vietnamese boat fired on an American destroyer. Four million Vietnamese were slaughtered following that pretext. The U.S. chief spy agency, the CIA, similarly conducted coups that re moved elected governments in Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953) and the Dominican Republic (1965). It supported the 1965 military coup in Indonesia where one million were slaughtered in a matter of days.
Today the list of covert interventions in the name of the “war on terror” are endless—covering most of the African continent, the Middle East and now in Ukraine, where the U.S. and European Union supported a coup carried out by neo-fascist militia forces—the Svoboda and Right Sector parties.
In every instance, the objective was and remains to advance the economic, political and mili tary interest of a U.S. corporate elite, ever in competition with its rivals to secure for itself the world’s wealth and resources.
Seymour Hersh’s contribution to expos ing yet another false-flag war effort is a welcome contribution to lifting the veil of secrecy that is consciously employed to camouflage an imperialist foreign pol icy that knows few, if any, limits. Facing a world economic crisis that is the product of its inherent and irreversible contradic tions, we are witness to a world where austerity has become the norm, where workers rights are subordinated to capi talist profit, where the environment is subjected to grievous if not irreparable assault, and where the resort to military means to advance the interests of the few U.S. and other oligarchs the world over who own and control the vast and increas ingly larger share of the wealth created by working people.
Hersh’s winning of the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language put him in the company of several noted jour nalists the world over who told the truth at a time when its revelation advanced the interests of all those who oppose today’s endless U.S. wars, interventions and con quests. That the U.S. government covered up, if not indirectly participated in, the brutal sarin gas murders conducted by its Turkish NATO ally using jihadist and other reactionary forces should serve as a stern warning that nothing that appears in the corporate-controlled media can be taken for granted.
Orwell’s classic, then futuristic, novel of authoritarian government repression, “1984,” uses the term “Newspeak,” “a lan guage” that Wikipedia defines as “closely or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom or rebellion.”
U.S.-style “Newspeak” proved insufficient to railroad the world into yet another “regime change” war in Syria, wherein the Assad regime would be replaced by another capitalist government more beholden to U.S. interests. The combination of mass U.S. public and in ternational opposition to Obama’s proposed war and the increasing lack of credibility of U.S. lies uttered as “irrefutable facts” at least temporarily thwarted an overt U.S. war on Syria. Obama’s administration, how ever, continues to intervene in the conflict.
The widely reported U.S. provision of tank-piercing missiles to the “rebels” at the end of April tells us that antiwar activists must continue to mobilize demand ing in Syria and everywhere else: “U.S. Out Now! Bring the Troops and War Dollars Home! Money for Jobs and Education Not War! n Socialist