[Peace-discuss] More on Syrian Gas attacks

[Karen Aram]

I am not able to post on FB for some reason this morning, so I will forward here:
 
 



Nile Bowie is a political
analyst and photographer currently residing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He can
be reached on Twitter
or at nilebowie at gmail.com 





People
being treated at a field hospital after an alleged poison gas attack by troops
loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the rebel-held city of Daraya, southwest
of the capital Damascus, on January 13, 2014. (AFP Photo / Fadi Dirani)


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Politics, Syria, USA, Violence, War 


​Who crossed the red line
in Syria? Figures within US intelligence circles may know who engineered the
August 21 chemical attack in Ghouta, but the Obama administration has a stake
in making sure the responsible parties are not held accountable.


For a few days last summer,
the United States teetered on the precipice of a decision that would have
profound ethical, political and security implications. The Obama administration
claimed to have an ironclad case against the Syrian government, who it said was
the only party that could have been responsible for carrying out an attack
using sarin nerve gas in Ghouta, an eastern suburb of Damascus. 


US spokespersons regarded
any question of the Syrian government not being responsible for the attack as a
preposterous notion, while Secretary of State John Kerry spoke at length of the
moral imperative to respond militarily. 


President Obama’s ‘red
line’
had been crossed, prompting him to unveil plans for allied airstrikes across
Syria to ‘punish’ the government of Bashar
Assad. The administration aggressively asserted its stance – that Assad, and
only Assad, could have used sarin – in the days following August 21, only for
Obama to call for congressional approval for the intervention less than two
days before the planned strikes. The congressional vote was called off once
Washington agreed to a UN-backed plan to dismantle Syria’s chemical arsenal. 


If the administration was
so confident of its assessment of the events that unfolded on August 21, what
influenced Obama to cancel his plans for military action? If the president
chose not to consult Congress prior to his approval of intervention in Libya,
why did he feel compelled to ask for congressional approval to strike Syria in
the face of what the administration considered an egregious violation of his ‘red
line’? 


Despite the unrelenting
resolve of Washington that the Syrian government committed a heinous crime, why
has the White House failed to provide any additional evidence of Syrian involvement
in the sarin attack since the airstrikes were canceled? 


A groundbreaking exposé on
the US administration’s Syria policy recently published by Pulitzer
Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh clarifies some of these
queries. Hersh’s article – ‘The Red Line and the Rat
Line’ –
appears in the London Review of Books, and cites well-placed former US
intelligence officials speaking on condition of anonymity to provide a
plausible rendering of the August 21 sarin attack and what happened behind the
scenes in Washington thereafter. 


Whose sarin? 


According to Hersh’s
sources, the Obama administration received reports from British intelligence
experts shortly after the events of August 21. The results of their analysis
confirmed that the gas used did not match the substances known to exist in the
Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. 


Contrary to the official US
stance, which claimed that Assad’s forces were the only party with the
capability to launch sarin attacks, intelligence circles in Britain and the US
became aware that rebel units in Syria such as the Al-Nusra Front had been
developing chemical weapons since the spring of 2013. 





AFP
Photo / Amr Radwan Al-Homsi


Hersh claims that analysts
from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) were already aware by June 2013
that Al-Nusra Front’s sarin production unit was “the
most advanced sarin plot since Al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 effort,” and that Turkey and
Saudi-based chemical facilitators were attempting to purchase sarin chemical
precursors in bulk for anticipated production efforts inside Syria. 


A source formerly
high-level within the Defense Department told Hersh that White House Chief of
Staff Denis McDonough ordered the publishing of intelligence pertaining to
chemical weapons be blacked-out and restricted in the DIA’s daily briefs on
Syria following small-scale sarin attacks in March and April. Carla Del Ponte,
the UN inspector who investigated the earlier attacks, would later claim that evidence
she compiled suggested that rebels had used the weapons. 


Hersh’s sources claim that
members of the Syrian opposition in exile became frustrated how earlier Western
intelligence assessments failed to conclude that sarin had been used, keeping
Obama’s ‘red line’ technically intact.
Following the events of August 21, the Syrian opposition claimed that sarin had
been used before any analysis had taken place, while the White House backed the
claim, endorsing it from the outset. 


Hersh’s sources also claim
that US intelligence officials were aware since spring of 2013 that the Turkish
government and its intelligence services were working directly with Al-Nusra
Front and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. Turkey’s Prime
Minister Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, who adopted a strong position against Damascus
from the onset of the conflict, was said to be highly frustrated by the rebels
losing ground against Syrian government forces and felt that intervention
served as the only reliable route to neutralize Assad. Hersh cited a former US
intelligence official in his report who told him, “We
knew there were some in the Turkish government 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.” 


‘Monster strike’ averted 


Hersh’s report reveals how
the question of enforcing Obama’s ‘red
line’
polarized the US establishment. On the one side, figures in the White House
were committed to military intervention despite probably being aware that
Turkish intelligence played a role in engineering the August 21 attack that
crossed the ‘red line’. On the other, Pentagon
officials who felt that the evidence to support claims of Assad’s complicity
were weak and that military strikes would be a disastrous shortcut to a wider
regional war. The latter’s advice was ultimately heeded by President Obama, who
likely felt that the costs of intervention would ultimately undermine his
position and create disastrous political consequences that would necessitate a
greater US military commitment. 


In the face of too many
unknowns, Obama looked for a way to backpedal out of his vow to strike Syria
militarily, which culminated in his calls for congressional approval and the
subsequent endorsement of the UN-backed disarmament plan. Although Obama backed
off military intervention for purely pragmatic reasons, Hersh’s exposé details
how the administration was willing to target military and civilian
infrastructure, and enact airstrikes that would have incurred significant
civilian causalities – all to ‘punish’ Assad and topple his
government. 


The White House allegedly
dismissed the Pentagon’s initial suggestions of airstrike targets over concerns
that their plans would be insufficiently “painful” to Syrian forces, and
pressured the Pentagon to revise their list of targets, creating what a former
intelligence official called “a monster strike” scenario. The attack plans
called for two wings of B-52 bombers, navy submarines and ships equipped with
Tomahawk cruise missiles to target 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. 





AFP
Photo / Ahmed Aboud


The governments of Britain
and France were enthusiastic and deeply committed to taking part in the planned
American air war. Hersh’s sources claim that General Martin Dempsey, the
officer charged with planning and executing the proposed Syria strikes, reacted
skeptically toward the administration’s claims that Assad used chemical
armaments and called for more evidence. Dempsey allegedly believed that Assad
was winning the war and wouldn’t have used sarin at that stage of the conflict,
and repeatedly warned Congress of the dangers of militarily intervening in
Syria. 


Hersh claims that the initial
tests on sarin samples conducted by British intelligence, which vindicated
Assad, influenced the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to persuade Obama into canceling
the strikes, which would have ultimately been considered an unjustified act of
aggression. 


Erdogan’s false flag 


As a key actor in the
destabilization of Syria, the government of Turkey has materially assisted and
trained various rebel factions, allowing militias to be based in and around
southern Turkey near the border with Syria. Erdogan was known to be
increasingly frustrated by the rebels’ inability to hold their ground on the
battlefield, and irritated by the CIA’s inconsistent stream of weapon shipments
and supplies. Sources claim that his administration feared a blowback scenario,
in which Assad’s forces would ultimately win the war and consolidate control
over the country, prompting the remaining radical fighters to scatter and
regroup on the Turkish side of the border. 


“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,” claims the former intelligence official in Hersh’s
exposé. The source claims that senior US military officers were informed by the
Defense Intelligence Agency that Turkish intelligence operatives supplied the
sarin used on August 21, an assessment that was further corroborated through
intercepted conversations in the immediate aftermath of the attack that saw
Turkish officials claiming credit for the operation’s success. 


Prior to the publication of
Hersh’s report, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
authored an investigation of the August 21 attack. Richard Lloyd, a
former UN weapons inspector, and Professor Theodore Postol studied the rockets
used in the attack and their trajectories, and concluded that the sarin could
not have been fired from Syrian government territory as the White House
claimed. 


The sequence of events
reported by Hersh becomes all the more conceivable in light of the recent
audio leaks of a conversation that appears to show Turkish ministers talking
about engineering a crisis to provoke military intervention in Syria. As a NATO
member and a key player in the war against Assad, the Obama administration
would not likely hold members of the Turkish government to account if they
indeed engineered the August 21 attack. 


The extent of the Obama
administration’s foreknowledge and complicity in the operation may never be fully
ascertained. The way the White House quietly distanced itself from the
assertions made by top administration officials following August 21 attack, and
their failure to make available any new evidence to implicate Assad, suggests
that the official narrative had unraveled past the point of being salvageable. 


Hersh’s assessment of the
August 21 attacks present a parallel version of recent history that will be
written about for decades to come, and it is now the responsibility of
academics, journalists and activists to establish the truth, and to hold the
perpetrators of a war crime accountable for their actions. 


 		 	   		  
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