[Peace-discuss] Important

[Karen Aram]

Stephen 
 
Thank you for the information related to Turkish politics, however the article and concern is about the scam the US government is playing on our people.
Our responsibility is not to control Turkey, but to control our government. We did everything possible to prevent war, protests, petitions, phone calls, and even personal discussions with our elected representatives. We were successful, but, what if we had not been? What if Russia had not intervened?
 
The fact that our government was aware that the chemical weapons being used on the Syrian population were not coming from the Syrian government, but from the rebels, whom we and/or Turkey were supporting, needs to be revealed to every American. Carla Del Ponte of the UN, on May 6th, 2013 did speculate based upon interviews with the doctors who treated the victims that they did not believe the gas/chemicals were coming from the government, but likely one of the rebel groups, her claims were ignored and little of her interviews in Europe, were available to the US.
 
Seymour Hersh the author of the article, a highly credible pulitzer prize winner, for breaking the story of the atrocities of My Lai, had to take his information to England to have it published.
The points made about Benghazi are also "enlightening" and deserve further discussion.
 
The whole issue needs further examination by the American public so that in future we can be ever vigilent to manipulation by propaganda. I therefore urge you and others to disseminate Mr. Hersches article to all. The original is with the "London Review of Books", or his interview with Amy Goodman can be viewed at DemocracyNow.org dated 4/7/14
 
Karen Aram
  
 
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 10:01:56 -0700
From: stephenf1113 at yahoo.com
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Important
To: karenaram at hotmail.com; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss at anti-war.net

oops... in a hurryThe source is WayneMadsenReport....you need a subscription to read the original.
     On Wednesday, April 9, 2014 12:45 PM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com> wrote:
    Stephen I agree, there is a deeper issue involved in relation to Turkey. Please identify the publications from which your information below has been acquired?  Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 07:47:47 -0700From: stephenf1113 at yahoo.comSubject: Re: [Peace-discuss] ImportantTo: karenaram at hotmail.com; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss at anti-war.netThis is a great article, but there's a deeper issue involved:June 2-3, 2013 -- No "Turkish Spring" but a "Red Hot Summer"Turkish
 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in deep political trouble. WMR's Turkish sources report that the wave of anti-Erdogan protests sweeping Turkey's major cities is not a George Soros/Gene Sharp-inspired seasonal or themed revolution, regardless of how much they and their hired provocateurs are trying to capitalize on the protest situation, but a popular reaction against Erdogan's policy of aligning Turkey with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey's realignment has seen the country switch from a policy of friendship with Syria's President Bashar al Assad to one of supporting Salafist guerrillas fighting Damascus. The Syrian radical Sunni rebels have the support of Riyadh and Doha, as well as NATO and Israel.A mass protest first erupted in Istanbul's Taksim Square after Erdogan's government said it was going to raze Taksim's Gezi Park, one of the last green spaces in Istanbul, to rebuild an Ottoman-era military barracks, which would also house a shopping mall.Erdogan and his enigmatic ally, Turkish charismatic Muslim lay leader and billionaire industrialist and media mogul Fethullah Gulen, have been accused by their opponents of pushing the concept of "Turanism," which is a desire to resurrect the ancient Turanian Empire that once stretched from the Balkans to western China and included all the Turkic-speaking peoples of Asia. Erdogan also announced a law that would ban alcohol sales from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., which resulted in charges that the move was a first step to imposing Saudi-style prohibition on the country.During a mid-May visit to Washington, Erdogan sent his Deputy Prime Minister, Bulent Arinc, on a trip
 to Pennsylvania to meet with the self-exiled Gulen, an imam who supposedly pushes a moderate brand of Islam but who stands accused of acting as a CIA agent of influence to extend American influence throughout the Muslim and non-Muslim world through Gulenist charter schools and "Kismet" charities. Gulenists are also found throughout the Turkish police force. Erdogan, himself, wanted to personally meet with Gulen in Pennsylvania and details about the AKP-Gulen summit were sketchy, at best.According to the propaganda emanating from Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) and various
 Gulen organizations, Gulen's brand of Islam is adamantly opposed to Saudi Wahhabism and Salafism. However, many countries, including Russia and Syria, see no difference in the goals of the Sunni Muslim Salafists and Gulenists. It was through Gulenist operations, such as schools and "civil society" organizations, that the CIA, Saudis, and Qataris were able to gain an entreé with Islamist radicals in Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and the independent "stans" of central Asia. In fact, Gulen's movement was accused of arranging for CIA weapons sales to Albanian Muslim guerrillas fighting against Serbian forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Gulen has also been tied to CIA operations in Chechnya that armed Muslim forces fighting Russian troops. Turkey was used by the CIA as a base for the Balkans and Caucasus operations in support of Muslim radical insurgents fighting the Serbs and Russians.However, it is in Syria where
 Erdogan and Gulen are, for
 the first time, facing substantial resistance to their pan-Turkic and Turanian plans for central Asia and the Middle East. Erdogan's and Gulen's joint plans include a revived Turan Empire, stretching from the Balkans to Siberia. Their plans hit a major snag on the Road to Damascus.Protesters who poured into the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya, and other cities also voiced opposition to Erdogan's support for Syrian Sunni and heavily Salafist-influenced rebels engaged in battle with the forces loyal to Assad, who, like a number of Turks in the Syrian-Turkish border region and Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the Kemal Ataturk secularist opposition Republican People's Party (CHP),
 is an Alawite Muslim, a sect with ties to the Shi'as who dominate Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, both of which have sent volunteers to fight the Salafist rebels in Syria.Erdogan accused Kilicdaroglu of being behind the May 11 terrorist bombing in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli, which killed 52 people. That charge prompted Kilicdaroglu to charge Erdogan with a false flag terrorist attack in order to blame the CHP and Syria. Erdogan claimed that the Turkish Intelligence Organization (MIT) had discovered that Kilicdaroglu and Syrian officials planned the bombing during a recent visit by the CHP leader to Damascus. Erdogan called on Kilicdaroglu to resign as CHP party leader. The CHP and other opposition
 parties decried Erdogan's fascist insinuations that the Turkish opposition was working with Syria to create political problems for Erdogan's AKP.In fact, Erdogan's problems and those of Gulen are all of their own making, according to WMR's sources in Turkey. It has also been alleged by the Turkish opposition that Hakan Fidan, the head of MIT, has secret links with guerrillas of the Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and that their services may have been procured by Erdogan's government to stage the Reyhanli bombing. Russia is also aware that Erdogan and his Qatari friends are trying
 to toppled Assad in order to make way for a natural gas pipeline from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, and then to Turkey to reduce western Europe's dependence on the Russian natural gas pipeline which currently provides for most of western Europe's gas needs. Assad is opposed to such a pipeline through Syria but the Syrian rebels have backed the plan. Russian intelligence has also been keeping an eye on the activities of Saudi- and Qatari-backed Chechen and "Caucasus Emirate" insurgent forces based in Turkey with Erdogan's blessing.The net result of Erdogan's dalliance with Salafism and pan-Turanian Gulenism is the creation of a united front of Russia, Syria's Assad (who is being armed with the S-300 air defense missile system and advanced MiGs from Russia), a wide spectrum of the Turkish opposition, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Iran, the Shi'a-led government of Iraq, and further behind the scenes, Armenia and
 China.Hezbollah has
 ordered Hamas fighters in Lebanon, believed to be assisting Salafist forces in Syria, to leave Lebanon immediately. Hamas serves as a useful tool for Erdogan who plans to visit Hamas-controlled Gaza soon, and the Saudis and Qataris. Hamas also serves the interests of Israel by keeping Palestinian political leadership divided between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank.The Kremlin, Assad's government, the Kemalists of Turkey, the Alawites and Christians of the Middle East, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran, and Iraq have drawn a final line in the sand and are daring the Salafists and Erdogan and their American, Israeli, and "Old Europe" friends to cross it. The road to Damascus may become as eye opening for Mr. Obama and his Turkish, Israeli, and European friends as it once was to an ignorant Pharisee named Paul.     On Tuesday, April 8, 2014 8:00 PM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com> wrote:    


This article is important because it reveals that we almost went to war last summer over false information. Please read below or for the full unedited version see the London Review of Books, or an interview with Seymour Hersh on Democracynow.org 4/7/14. Select a languageAfrikaans>العربيةČeštinaDeutschΕλληνικάEnglishEspañolفارسیFrançaisBahasa IndonesiaItalianoPolskiPortuguêsRomânăРусскийSrpskohrvatskiSinhaleseதமிழ்Türkçe中文            World Socialist Web Site   wsws.org   New exposé by Seymour Hersh: Turkey staged gas attack to provoke US war on Syria      By      Patrick Martin             7 April 2014   In a lengthy article published Sunday by the London Review of Books, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports that the sarin gas attack on a Damascus suburb on August 21, 2013 was actually carried out by Syrian “rebel” forces acting at the behest of Turkey, for the purpose of providing a pretext for a US attack on Syria.The gas attack killed many hundreds of people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, and the Obama administration and the corporate-controlled US media immediately blamed the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad for
 the atrocity. The New York Times, in particular, published a lengthy analysis by its military “expert,” C. J. Chivers, which purported to show, based on rocket trajectories, prevailing winds and other technical factors, that the gas shells could only have been fired from Syrian army artillery positions.For several weeks, the Ghouta attack became the pretext for a warmongering campaign by the White House and the US and European media. Obama threatened immediate air strikes, claiming that the Syrian government had crossed a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons, which he had laid down in 2012.The US president then abruptly reversed himself and announced he would seek congressional approval first, only to call off any overt military action in favor of a deal brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin in which Assad agreed to the supervised dismantling of his chemical weapons stockpiles.By Hersh’s account,
 “Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample 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… As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.”The US military leadership also knew that White House claims that there could be no other source for the sarin gas than the Syrian army were false. “The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons,” Hersh reports. “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…”Hersh quotes extensively from this US government document, which the office of the US director of national intelligence now denies ever existed:“Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW [chemical weapons] aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future… 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.”Hersh notes that members of al-Nusra were arrested in Turkey last May in possession of two kilograms of sarin. They were charged in a 130-page indictment with “attempting to purchase fuses, piping for
 the construction of mortars, and chemical
 precursors for sarin.” All have since been released pending trial, or had charges dropped altogether.Those arrests followed chemical weapons attacks in Syria in March and April 2013, where a UN investigation found evidence implicating the Syrian “rebels.” One source told Hersh, “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.”The “no one,” of course, was the US government, its European allies, and its UN stooges—as well as their political apologists in the media and the pseudo-left groups such as the International Socialist Organization that were either openly campaigning for military intervention in Syria or justifying it by portraying the US-financed “rebels” as the bearers of a democratic revolution.When the August 21 attack
 took place, Obama ordered the Pentagon to
 draw up plans for bombing Syria, and, as a former intelligence official told Hersh, “the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently ‘painful’ to the Assad regime.”The US bombing plan ultimately envisioned “a monster strike” involving two wings of B-52 bombers equipped with 2,000-pound bombs, as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from submarines and surface warships.Hersh continues: “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 bombing attack drawn up at the direction of the Obama White House would have itself constituted a war crime,
 causing thousands if not tens of thousands of
 casualties and crippling Syria as a functioning society.Hersh then passes on to his most important revelation: that US officials believed the Turkish government, or its intelligence agencies, had instigated the gas attack in Ghouta.He cites concerns among US military and intelligence leaders that “there were some in the Turkish government” who supported “dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria—and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.”This was reinforced by the British military intelligence finding on the type of gas used in Ghouta. This included a message to the Americans: “We’re being set up here.” This was followed by a further message about the Ghouta attack that “a senior official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It was not the result of the current regime [i.e., Assad]’. UK & US know this.”Hersh suggests that the bitter controversy over
 the attack on a US consulate and CIA mission in
 Benghazi, Libya in 2012, which killed four Americans including the ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, is directly linked to the infighting over Syria.It has been widely reported that the CIA organized the shipment of Libyan weapons stockpiles from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels. Hersh cites a “highly classified annex” to the report of the Senate committee that investigated the Benghazi attack.This document “described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and [Turkish] Erdogan administrations… 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. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage
 procurement and shipping. 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.”According to Hersh, after the Benghazi fiasco, the CIA was pulled out, but the Libya to Turkey to Syria pipeline continued, possibly including “manpads”—portable surface-to-air missile launchers, which the Obama administration had opposed supplying the rebels out of concern that they would be used to attack civilian airliners.Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan tasked Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) with engineering a provocation that would give a pretext for direct US military intervention. Hersh quotes his source: “‘The MIT was running the political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training—including training in chemical warfare,’ the former intelligence official said.
 ‘Stepping up Turkey’s
 role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there… 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.’”Two sources described to Hersh a working dinner during Erdogan’s visit to Washington in May 2013 in which Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon met Erdogan, foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu and MIT chief Hakan Fidan. Erdogan appealed for Obama to attack Syria, telling him “your red line has been crossed.” Obama then pointed at Fidan and said, “We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria.”Hersh cites a “US intelligence consultant” who describes a classified briefing for Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, prepared before the August 21 gas attack. The briefing noted “the acute anxiety” in the Erdogan
 regime over the military
 setbacks for the Syrian rebels and warned that the Turkish leadership felt “the need to do something that would precipitate a US military response.”In the period following the gas attack, Hersh’s former intelligence official source explained, communications intercepts and other data supported the suspicion that Turkey had organized the Ghouta attack. “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. Our senior military officers have been told by the DIA and other intelligence assets that the sarin was supplied through Turkey—that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training
 in producing
 the sarin and handling it.’”Only a week ago, evidence surfaced that supports the credibility of Hersh’s report. A video was posted on YouTube of a meeting of Turkish officials, including Fikan, in which the intelligence chief suggests that Turkish agents should mount an attack on a Muslim shrine inside Syria to provide a pretext for a Turkish invasion of the country.Hersh’s account is his second long exposé in four months of the “false flag” gas attack in Damascus. Both articles were published in the British journal because no major US newspaper or magazine will any longer publish material from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.Beginning with his reporting of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam for the New York Times, Hersh has specialized in developing sources in the US military and intelligence apparatus, frequently those with policy differences with the current administration in
 Washington. Hersh left the Times
 for Newsday, and then wrote for the New Yorker for many years.Both the New Yorker and the Washington Post refused to publish his first report on the Ghouta gas attack, which charged that the sarin attack had been carried out by Syrian rebels in the al-Nusra Front, forcing Hersh to find a British publisher for his account. The US press was largely silent on that report, and it has so far blacked out the latest exposure. 		 	   		  
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