Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Seymour Hersh, in a
sensational article “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” published in the
London Review of Books, discloses that the Turkish government secretly
orchestrated the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria, killing
hundreds of civilians. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had hoped
that the Syrian regime would be blamed for that chemical attack, leading
to a retaliatory U.S. strike on Syria, since President Obama had warned
Syrian leaders that using chemical weapons against rebel fighters would
cross a “red line.”
Erdogan’s plot almost worked! In the aftermath of the sarin attack,
Obama began planning a massive U.S. strike on dozens of Syrian targets,
even though British intelligence had informed the U.S. joint chiefs of
staff that samples of the sarin gas obtained from the site of the attack
did not match the chemical weapons in Syria’s possession. A former U.S.
intelligence official told Hersh that “Erdogan was known to be
supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel
opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups.” Hirsh revealed that
the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had issued “a highly classified”
document on June 20, 2013, confirming that “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.”
Last May, several members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in
Turkey with two kilograms of sarin. A Turkish court accused the group of
planning to acquire other related materials to launch a chemical attack
in Syria. Five of the arrestees were freed shortly thereafter, while
the rest were released pending trial. They were not seen again!
After a special UN mission went to Syria to investigate two earlier
chemical attacks in spring 2013, a person with close knowledge of the
UN’s activity told Hersh that “there was evidence linking the Syrian
opposition to the first gas attack, on March 19 in Khan al-Assal, a
village near Aleppo… It was clear that the rebels used the gas.”
Just before launching the joint U.S., British, and French attack on
Syria in September 2013, Obama suddenly decided to postpone the strike,
using the excuse that he needed congressional approval. The real reason
for the delay was the president’s discovery that he was being set up by
Turkey for an “unjustified” attack on Syria, but did not want to
publicly acknowledge his near blunder with potentially catastrophic
consequences for the entire Middle East. Ironically, Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov was the one who rescued Obama from embarrassment
by securing Syria’s agreement to hand over its chemical stockpile, thus
providing the president a cover for canceling his threatened attack.
Hersh further revealed that the chemical weapons had reached the
Syrian rebels through a CIA operation code named “rat line”—a secret
Turkish-U.S. agreement in 2012 to funnel weapons and ammunition from
Libya to Syria through Turkey. After the terrorist attack on its
consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the hub of this clandestine activity, the
U.S. pulled out of the covert arrangement, yet Turkey continued to
supply Libyan weapons to the Syrian rebels.
By the end of 2012, as the rebels were losing the battle against the
Assad regime, a former U.S. intelligence official told Hersh that
“Erdogan was pissed,” leading him to concoct a scheme to have the rebels
use sarin gas and falsely blame the Syrian government, thus instigating
an attack by the United States on Syria.
To personally plead his case for a U.S. attack on Syria to save the
rebels from defeat, Turkey’s prime minister flew to Washington. On May
16, 2013, Erdogan, along with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and the
head of Turkish intelligence, Hakan Fidan, had a working dinner at the
White House, with Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and National
Security Advisor Tom Donilon. Infuriated by Obama’s unwillingness to
take military action against Syria, Erdogan “fucking waved his finger at
the president inside the White House,” Donilon recounted to a foreign
policy expert who reported it to Hersh.
“The American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments
into Syria left Erdogan exposed politically and militarily,” Hersh
explained. “Without U.S. military support for the rebels, the former
intelligence official said, ‘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.’”
After the August 2013 sarin attack near Damascus, a former
intelligence official told Hersh: “We now know it was a covert action
planned by Erdogan’s people to push Obama over the red line. … The deal
was to do something spectacular. … The sarin was supplied through
Turkey.” Another indication of Turkish officials’ complicity was Hersh’s
report that phone calls intercepted by the U.S. revealed their joy with
the success of their orchestrated chemical attack!
Hersh concludes his exposé by relaying a most worrisome observation
from a former U.S. intelligence official: “I asked my colleagues if
there was any way to stop Erdogan’s continued support for the rebels,
especially now that it’s going so wrong, the answer was: ‘We’re
screwed.’ We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdogan, but
Turkey is a special case. They are a NATO ally. The Turks don’t trust
the West. They can’t live with us if we take any active role against
Turkish interests. If we went public with what we know about Erdogan’s
role with the gas, it’d be disastrous. The Turks would say: ‘We hate you
for telling us what we can and can’t do.’”
For almost a century, successive U.S. governments have failed to
understand a fundamental geostrategic truth: Turkey needs the U.S. much
more than the United States will ever need Turkey. There is indeed
something terribly wrong when the tail wags the dog!
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