by Eric Zuesse
\nStrategic-Culture.org<\/p>\n
The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the\u00a0London Review of Books\u00a0(“Whose Sarin?”<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0“The Red Line and the Rat Line”<\/a>)<\/em> has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria\u2019s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria<\/strong>; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn\u2019t come from Assad\u2019s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the US could invade and overthrow Assad.<\/p>\n “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\u2019s arsenals into Syria.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hersh didn\u2019t say whether these ‘arms’ included the precursor chemicals for making sarin which were stockpiled in Libya, but there\u00a0have<\/a>\u00a0been\u00a0multiple<\/a>\u00a0independent\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0that Libya\u2019s Gaddafi possessed such stockpiles, and also that the US Consulate in Benghazi Libya was operating a “rat line” for Gaddafi\u2019s captured weapons into Syria through Turkey. <\/strong>So, Hersh isn\u2019t the only reporter who has been covering this. Indeed, the investigative journalist Christoph Lehmann\u00a0headlined<\/a>\u00a0on 7 October 2013, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria” and reported, on the basis of very different sources than Hersh used, that:<\/p>\n “Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia\u00b4s Interior Ministry.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n And, as if that weren\u2019t enough, even the definitive analysis of the evidence that was performed by two leading US analysts, the\u00a0Lloyd-Postal report<\/a>, concluded that:<\/p>\n “The US Government\u2019s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Obama has clearly been lying.<\/strong><\/p>\n However, now, for the first time, Hersh has implicated Hillary Clinton directly in this ‘rat line’. <\/strong><\/u>In an\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with\u00a0Alternet.org, Hersh was asked about the then-US-Secretary-of-State\u2019s role in the Benghazi Libya US consulate\u2019s operation to collect weapons from Libyan stockpiles and send them through Turkey into Syria for a set-up sarin-gas attack, to be blamed on Assad in order to \u2018justify\u2019 the US invading Syria, as the US had invaded Libya to eliminate Gaddafi. Hersh said:<\/p>\n “That ambassador who was killed<\/strong>, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody, who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company.<\/strong> He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there\u2019s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This was, in fact, the Syrian part of the State Department\u2019s Libyan operation, Obama\u2019s operation to set up an excuse for the US doing in Syria what they had\u00a0already done<\/a>\u00a0in Libya.<\/p>\n The interviewer then asked:<\/p>\n “In the\u00a0book<\/a>\u00a0[Hersh\u2019s\u00a0The Killing of Osama bin Laden, just out]\u00a0you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets\u00a0[for the planned US invasion of Syria]\u00a0provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only \u2013 nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.) Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure. What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House\u2019s proposed strike had been carried out?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hersh responded by saying that the US tradition in that regard has long been to ignore civilian casualties;<\/strong> i.e., collateral damage of US attacks is okay or even desired (so as to terrorize the population into surrender) \u2013 not an \u2018issue\u2019, except, perhaps, for the PR people.<\/p>\n The interviewer asked why Obama is so obsessed to replace Assad in Syria, since\u00a0“The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups”<\/strong>; and Hersh replied that not only he, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff,\u00a0“nobody could figure out why”.\u00a0He said,\u00a0“Our policy has always been against him\u00a0[Assad]. Period”<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0This has actually been the case not only since the Party that Assad leads, the Ba\u2019ath Party, was the subject of a shelved CIA\u00a0coup-plot in 1957<\/a>\u00a0to overthrow and replace it; but, actually, the CIA\u2019s first coup had been not just planned but\u00a0was carried out in 1949<\/a>\u00a0in Syria, overthrowing there a democratically elected leader, in order to enable a pipeline for the Sauds\u2019 oil to become built through Syria into the largest oil market, Europe; and, construction of the pipeline started the following year.<\/strong> But, there were then a succession of Syrian coups (domestic instead of by foreign powers \u2013\u00a01954<\/a>,\u00a01963<\/a>,\u00a01966<\/a>, and, finally, in\u00a01970<\/a>), concluding in the accession to power of Hafez al-Assad during the 1970 coup. And, the Sauds’ long-planned\u00a0Trans-Arabia Pipeline<\/a>\u00a0has\u00a0still\u00a0not been built.<\/u><\/strong> The Saudi royal family, who own the world\u2019s largest oil company, Aramco, don\u2019t want to wait any longer. Obama is the first US President to have seriously tried to carry out their long-desired “regime change” in Syria, so as to enable not only the Sauds\u2019 Trans-Arabian Pipeline to\u00a0be\u00a0built, but also to build through Syria the\u00a0Qatar-Turkey Gas Pipeline<\/a>\u00a0that the Thani royal family (friends of the Sauds) who own Qatar want also to be built there. The US is allied with the Saud family (and with their friends, the royal families of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman). Russia is allied with the leaders of Syria \u2013 as Russia had earlier been allied with Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and\u00a0Yanukovych in Ukraine<\/a>\u00a0(all of whom\u00a0except\u00a0Syria\u2019s Ba\u2019ath Party, the US has successfully overthrown).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Hersh was wrong to say that\u00a0“nobody could figure out why”\u00a0Obama is obsessed with overthrowing Assad and his Ba\u2019ath Party, even if nobody that he spoke with was willing to\u00a0say\u00a0why. They have all been hired to do a job, which didn\u2019t change even when the Soviet Union ended and the Warsaw Pact was disbanded; and, anyone who has been at this job for as long as those people have, can pretty well figure out what the job actually is \u2013 even if Hersh can\u2019t.<\/p>\n Hersh then said that Obama wanted to fill Syria with foreign jihadists to serve as the necessary ground forces for his planned aerial bombardment there, <\/strong>and,\u00a0“if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, \u2018Go, go, go\u2026 overthrow Bashar!\u2019 So, they actually pushed a lot of people\u00a0[jihadists]\u00a0to go. I don\u2019t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas”.<\/p>\n However, it\u2019s not actually part of America\u2019s deal with its allies the fundamentalist-Sunni Arabic royal families and the fundamentalist Sunni Erdogan of Turkey, for the US to supply the\u00a0salaries<\/a>\u00a0(to be “paying for them”, as Hersh put it there) to those fundamentalist Sunni jihadists \u2013 that\u2019s instead the function of\u00a0the Sauds<\/a>\u00a0and of their friends,\u00a0the other Arab royals, and their friends<\/a>, to do.<\/strong> (Those are the people who finance the terrorists to perpetrate attacks in the US, Europe, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, India, Nigeria, etc. \u2013 i.e., anywhere except in their\u00a0own\u00a0countries.) And, Erdogan in Turkey mainly gives their jihadists just safe passage into Syria, and he takes part of the proceeds from the jihadists\u2019 sales of stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil. But, they all work together as a team (with the jihadists sometimes killing each other in the process \u2013\u00a0that\u2019s even part of the plan<\/a>) \u2013 though each national leader has PR problems at home in order to fool his respective public into thinking that they\u2019re against terrorists, and that only the \u2018enemy\u2019 is to blame. (Meanwhile, the aristocrats who supply the\u00a0“salaries”<\/a>\u00a0of the jihadists, walk off with all the money.)<\/p>\n This way, US oil and gas companies will refine, and pipeline into Europe, the Sauds\u2019 oil and\u00a0the Thanis\u2019 gas<\/a>, and not only will Russia\u2019s major oil-and-gas market become squeezed away by that, but Obama\u2019s economic sanctions against Russia, plus the yet-further isolation of Russia (as well as of China and the rest of the BRICS countries) by\u00a0excluding them<\/a>\u00a0from Obama\u2019s three mega-trade-deals (TTIP, TPP & TISA), will place the US aristocracy firmly in control of the world, to dominate the 21st Century, as it has dominated ever since the end of WW II.<\/strong><\/em><\/u><\/p>\n Then, came this question from Hersh:<\/p>\n “Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let\u2019s work together?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n His interviewer immediately seconded that by repeating it,\u00a0“So why don\u2019t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational”.\u00a0Hersh replied simply:\u00a0“I don\u2019t know”.\u00a0<\/strong>He didn\u2019t venture so much as a guess \u2013 not even an educated one. But, when journalists who are as knowledgeable as he, don\u2019t present some credible explanation, to challenge the obvious lies (which make no sense that accords with the blatantly contrary evidence those journalists know of against those lies) that come from people such as Barack Obama, aren\u2019t they thereby \u2013 though passively \u2013\u00a0participating in the fraud, instead of contradicting and challenging it?<\/strong><\/u><\/em> Or, is the underlying assumption, there: The general public is going to be as deeply immersed in the background information here as I am, so that they don\u2019t need me to bring it all together for them into a coherent (and fully documented) whole, which\u00a0does\u00a0make sense? Is\u00a0that\u00a0the underlying assumption? Because: if it is, it\u2019s\u00a0false.<\/p>\n Hersh\u2019s journalism is among the best (after all: he went so far as to say, of\u00a0Christopher Stephens<\/a>, regarding Hillary Clinton,\u00a0“there\u2019s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel”), but it\u2019s certainly\u00a0not good enough. However, it\u2019s\u00a0too good to be published<\/a>\u00a0any longer in places like the\u00a0New Yorker. And the reporting by\u00a0Christof Lehmann<\/a>\u00a0was better, and it was issued even earlier than Hersh\u2019s; and it\u00a0is\u00a0good enough, because it named names, and it explained motivations, in an honest and forthright way, which is why\u00a0Lehmann\u2019s piece<\/a>\u00a0was published only on a Montenegrin site, and only online, not in a Western print medium, such as the\u00a0New Yorker. The sites that are owned by members of the Western aristocracy don\u2019t issue reports like that \u2013 journalism that\u2019s\u00a0good enough. They won\u2019t inform the public when a US Secretary of State, and her boss the US President, are the persons actually behind a sarin gas attack they\u2019re blaming on a foreign leader the US aristocrats and their allied foreign aristocrats are determined to topple and replace.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Is this\u00a0really\u00a0a\u00a0democracy<\/a>?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n