Role of Turkey & Saudi Arabia in Syria’s 2013 Sarin Gas Attacks

Is the Obama Admin Ignoring the Role of Turkey & Saudi Arabia in
Syria’s 2013 Sarin Gas Attacks?

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/25/is_the_obama_admin_ignoring_the

 Nancy—we know this from something Nancy Pelosi said, then the House  speaker. They were going to have hearings on this whole issue, after  the bombing began. And General Dempsey, the one that I wrote about,  who told them there was no there there when it came to proving it  was—the sarin we found [From the CHEMICAL ATTACK]  had no relationship to the sarin known to be  in the [Syrian] arsenal. Dempsey told him he would testify honestly to  Congress, too. He would say—he would raise the questions.

Now, you have to understand, I’m not saying I know what happened. I’m just saying, in the article I wrote then and saying now, we had a  crime. Sarin was used. People died—not as many as we said, 1,400. That was just the number we estimated. Most of the medical—up to 350, 380 was the number. One is more than enough.

But as—what we—the only villain we looked at, the only person we looked at, was the Syrian
government, when the United States had had internal high-level CIA reports that al-Nusra and other….extremist groups were getting the precursor chemicals needed to make sarin from the Turks and also from the Saudis.

… In any case, what happened, what I now know, is that we did supply a ship, a major Merchant Marine ship, that was parked out in the Mediterranean, that was involved—and we paid for this. Thirteen hundred and eight tons of stuff were trucked by the Syrians to the coast, moved to the ship, where they—it was a Merchant Marine ship called the Cape May, an American ship, that was—had two large containers that had been put into it, at great cost. It was done quickly. They
decontaminated the stuff.

And guess what happened when we had all of that stuff coming in, all of his sarin and all of his weapons, all of the rockets used to deliver weapons. They gave up their whole arsenal. We had a forensic analysis team there that concluded—this isn’t what you’re going to hear from the government, but it concluded then—this is almost six months later—that the “DNA” and the—of the material they got rid of did not match anything we know to be in the Syrian arsenal. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a rogue operation somewhere, but it sure changes the story for me.

..The quick announcement that Bashar al-Assad did it is simply not true. And the president did not go forward, not because of an agreement; he went forward because he knew it was the wrong thing to do, and he also wouldn’t get backing necessarily from Congress. And he’s permitted that lie, this blood lie, to be kept on told. We keep on saying—he’s never stopped from saying that Bashar—that there’s—he’s never suggested there was a question about it. And this isn’t a brief for Bashar. It’s about what I—what we pay our presidents to do. We don’t tell them to spread, you know—or to not make it clear what the caveats are. That isn’t what we do, not in this kind of a world, when it’s so tense and there’s so much trouble in the Middle East anyway. And so, we’re driven by—we’re driven by instinctive Cold War hatred of Russia in much of our policy, and from a belief that Syria—Bashar has to go. I’ll tell you something. The talks in Geneva failed because the opposition there—and Bashar did go to the talks—they failed because the opposition said, whatever happens, he can’t run for election.

And the reality is, and I know this—I know this—I know a lot of people in the international world who are not pro-Assad—it’s not about anybody being pro-Assad. The reality on the ground is, he [President Bashar Assad] would win [even a fair] an election, because most of the Sunnis see him as a much better alternative to the chaos that would exist if something like ISIS or al-Nusra or one of those crazy groups got in. And so, we have this story wrong. And, you know, it’s unpopular to say it, but I will tell you right now–

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the Foreign Policy article
headlined “Sy Hersh’s Chemical Misfire: What the legendary reporter
gets wrong about Syria’s sarin attacks.” Eliot Higgins cites video and
other documentary footage questioning your piece, writing, quote,
“There is no evidence of Syrian rebel forces ever using this type of
munition—and only Syrian government forces have ever been shown using
them.”

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, tell that to the U.N. There’s been a couple of studies done, in which they don’t—you know, everything that’s been said—..all these international groups, organization for the prohibition of weapons. And none of them have ever accused—all these great groups that have done all the investigations, they always said that the chemicals are there.

And I will tell you, I don’t like to write about highly classified stuff I’ve seen, but I have seen—I have seen documents, from the highest level, all sorts of documents, involving overhead, agent reports, Israeli intelligence, all of our friends, beginning in April and May of 2013, four months, three months before the..incident in the use..of sarin in—near Damascus, that was—caused so much trouble, where 1,400  were allegedly killed. We’ve been reporting for four months before that, and it went to the president. It went to the White House; I can’t say what the president reads. It certainly went to the—went to the DIA, to the CIA. And it said clearly, great concern about the fact that the Turks, the Turkish Gendarmerie, which is a sort of a special branch, sort of a paramilitary police force—this Gendarmerie, who are right now killing PKK like crazy in Turkey. Like crazy. It’s real massacres this guy Erdogan is doing, who’s one of the big problems of the area. He’s always supported the crazies—ISIS, etc. And we look the other way. I don’t know why we do, but we do. And also the Saudis were supplying [chemical weapons to jihadist "rebel" militants]

Sarin is made by taking two chemicals and melding them. It’s really high dangerous. And what the Syrians do in their arsenal is they add—they put additives in it that make the whole—make the stuff less toxic and more reliable, easier to handle. But in the field [meaning by non-Government actors], they just mix the stuff in, you know, a witch’s brew, like in Macbeth, I guess, the first scene. And they [western backed Jihadist "rebels"]  have the stuff. And we’ve known that. We’ve known that for four months before the incident in August of 2013.

And so, I don’t know who Higgins is. And all I know is that a group at MIT, headed by Ted Postol, who at one time he was a professor there for many years at MIT and also served years as the chief adviser on missilery and other stuff to the chairman—the head of the Navy—head of the Navy, the chief admiral running the Navy. He was an adviser there for many years. He knows what he’s doing. He’s written report after report rebuking what Mr. Higgins said. I haven’t actually looked at much of his stuff, Higgins.

Full interview and video at:

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/25/is_the_obama_admin_ignoring_the

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