It was said, “In 2011, Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya.” That was putting it mildly – without consulting US Congress. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s impudent and dubious ways were pressuring Obama to go to war with Libya and take over the country. Her foreign policy advice was coming from Sidney Blumenthal, a very close friend with little to no foreign policy experience.
What Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State already knew with her co-conspirators, who were adversarial foreign donors and rich company executives, was that Muammar Gaddafi was sitting on gold mine(s) and Libya was the third largest provider of oil.
The “Clinton Cash” documentary by Peter Schweizer exposed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton going into Nigeria, South Sudan and the Republic of Congo to steal Africa’s rich mineral deposits in pay for play schemes with rich billionaires & oligarchs to protect them! To leave children to further starve and hurt from the injustices in this world.
Hillary Clinton had already been involved in pay for play shenanigans with rich foreign donors like Ambassador Joe Wilson, Frank Giustra, Lukas Lundin and Gilbert Chagoury, who were almost as pathologically inflicted by greed in the pursuit of power as she was, and of course all wanted access to the gold mine(s) and the Libyan oil.
This time is was the Clintons copying what the Bushes had done with the Saudi Arabian monarchy which made them extremely wealthy and invited the worst atrocity committed by radical jihadist terrorists on 9/11.
Hillary and Bill Clinton were professional grifters who already knew how to strategically place themselves as the enablers, deal makers, and takers of such lucrative deals for rich mineral deposits of oil, gas, and gold mines in Nigeria, South Sudan, and Democratic Republic of Congo.
Hillary Clinton was setting her crooked sights along with rich foreign company owners who would pay for play in Libya. She would do almost anything when it came to the Clinton Foundation and her rich foreign donors with the very important prospect of a lucrative deal worth billions of dollars, momentarily satisfying her pathological greed in pursuit of the highest corrupted power next to Obama. Hillary was the Queen Bee and Obama made sure she was protected and isolated to do her bargaining and money laundering; Hillary’s unprotected email server scandal.
There are unanswered questions regarding Sidney Blumenthal’s role and contribution in bringing down Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. Hillary could no longer dust herself off by debunking the crimes that kept mounting and eventually exposed her. It’s not difficult to assume that the inexperienced foreign policy adviser and her very dear friend, Sidney Blumenthal, was promised a new title in Hillary’s Presidency. After all, he had sent Hillary Clinton hundreds of emails during the Libyan Civil War providing inexperienced “intelligence reports” on foreign policy. These reports started in January 2011, even before the first protests in Libya on February 17, 2011.
All this led to another Middle Eastern crisis on August 21, 2013, after a Sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Obama was suddenly ready to launch an allied air strike to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 regarding the use of chemical weapons. Well, President Trump set no red line and did make good on his promise to protect Americans and the children of Syria.
At first, Obama went with his usual modus operandi and didn’t care to consult with Congress as he had already demonstrated and committed in various treasonous crimes before and after this major decision. Such as Uranium One and we should never forget until justice is served. Then for all the good and obvious reasons with less than two days to go, before his planned strike, Obama announced that he would seek Congressional approval for this intervention. A literal intervention on Obama’s so called intervention. He was ill equipped and too corrupted to come to a very serious decision involving war and foreign policy experience. Everyone in his administration were too busy getting rich and violating numerous federal laws behind the American people’s backs.
The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings and was subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Sounds suspicious; it probably is. Could Uranium One have been part of the deal? You never know with these kinds of people! What did Russia get out of this intervention and Assad? Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in his administration who were committed to enforcing the red line and who wanted to make a name for themselves and not necessarily a formidable reputation that would probably not have ended well. This time his military leaders who knew better realized that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous inviting Russia, Iranian infidels across Syria’s landscape combined with Syrian rebels and European help. Much too complicated and unnecessary leading to a disastrous outcome.
Critical news came after Porton Down, the defense laboratory in Wiltshire, UK confirmed British intelligence had obtained a sample of the Sarin used in the August 21, attack. Analysis proved the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. Clue number one. Pay attention!
This did not confirm nor did it make the case to go to war with Syria and was immediately relayed to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even now, I’m relieved. The British findings heightened the doubts of those inside the Pentagon; the Joint Chiefs had already prepared to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a bigger war in the Middle East. As a consequence, the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the President. Finally, somebody to stop this fool, which in their view and analysis eventually led to his cancelling the attack. Boy, would I have liked to have been a fly on the wall. I wonder if Hillary was present with her fifteen Blackberries sending foreign signals off. Since she proved to be much more agreeable to adversarial countries who made a handsome money donation into the Clinton Foundation; like donating at church on Sunday but none of these people were GOD fearing.
Then there was Syria’s neighbor, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan who was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the Syrian rebel opposition and Islamist rebel groups. According to a former senior US intelligence official, who had access to current intelligence said, “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 then forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.” Not good, a terrible reaction under false pretenses. But you can see how complicated the Middle Eastern region is with all the different radical Jihadist terrorists and dictators adding to the chaos and not Democracy.
Since the spring of 2013, the American and British intelligence were aware that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. The Joint Chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army had access to Sarin were wrong. On June 20th, analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd.
The classified document reported that al-Nusra maintained a Sarin production cell and was the most advanced Sarin threat since al-Qaida’s pre 9/11 effort. The DIA paper went on to say that previously the intelligence community had focused almost entirely on Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles; now al-Nusra fronts were attempting to make its own chemical weapons within Syria which could lead to difficulty to assess and disrupt the group’s chemical weapons in the future. It went on to add that Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators were attempting to obtain Sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for an anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.
Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence said, “no such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts.” Well, yes of course, who in the National Intelligence Agency is going to admit that such a classified document ever existed and might be part of the 30,000 classified emails Hillary destroyed; momentarily. There are copies probably in the 650,000 emails discovered on Hillary’s Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin’s husband’s laptop; Congressman Weiner! I never liked that name especially with Mr. Weiner’s infamous public scandal.
In May 2013, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of Sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for Sarin. Five of those arrested were freed after a brief detention. That was unfortunate. The others, including the ringleader, Haytham Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence of 25 years, were released pending trial. Of course another miscalculated decision, not to see that these people could disappear within the chaos of Syria. In the meantime, the Turkish press has been rife with speculation that Erdoğan’s administration has been covering up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘Sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’. Anti-freeze? Hmm.
The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the “al-Nusra front emir for military manufacturing”. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided ‘price quotes for bulk quantities of Sarin precursors’. Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was for two associates to ‘perfect a process for making Sarin, then go to Syria to train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified lab in Syria’. The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had purchased a precursor on the “Baghdad chemical market”, which “has supported at least seven chemical weapons efforts since 2004”.
Of course all the new laboratories and training staff may already be blown to bits with United States President Trump meaning exactly what he shares with the media and Americans. And now Asaad, Erdoğan, al-Nusra Front, Iranian rebels and Obama know President Trump means business and isn’t involved with the Deep State. Thank God and Allah and all the angels and saints in heaven.
A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria said that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on March 19th in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said, “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.” Now that’s a little far fetched. No one wanted to know or no one wanted to tell or confirm!
In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official said the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. Something was in there that triggered a major shift by McDonough, a former Defense Department official said. One day it was critical, and then after the March and April Sarin attacks, McDonough made it very clear in no uncertain terms it was no longer a threat. The decision to restrict distribution was made as the Joint Chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons. Well, President Trump took care of that; didn’t he. I might add that President Trump takes the experienced advice of General Mattis and all those with extensive military defense and foreign policy experience and not Hillary Clinton or much less Sidney Blumenthal.
One former intelligence official did say that many in the US national security establishment had long been troubled by Obama’s red line. The Joint Chiefs asked the White House, “What does red line mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?” They tasked military intelligence to study how they could carry out the threat. They learned nothing more about the President’s reasoning.
By now, you start to understand the absolute importance to address this country’s miasma of corruption. It shouldn’t surprise us that former President Obama’s abhorrent behavior was never to adhere to the Constitution’s most important dictation, “the President of the United States first responsibility is to protect the national security of the American people.” Selling US uranium to Russia is treason. Mainstream media CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS is doing a great disservice to this country by not covering and exposing these immense criminal scandals to the American people. Repeatedly, violations against federal laws. Most on social media are deeply concerned for the well being of this country, today, tomorrow and for the future. Most of us in this country are responsively questioning mainstream media’s lack of concern for not reporting and exposing the truth.
“In the aftermath of the August 21st attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ 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.”
“Britain and France were both to play a part. On August 29th, the day Parliament voted against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian reported that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter jets to be deployed to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. The French air force, a crucial player in the 2011 strikes on Libya, was deeply committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur; François Hollande had ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their targets were reported to be in western Syria.”
“By the last days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline for the launch. H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning September 2, a massive assault to neutralize Assad. So it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden on August 31st Obama said that the attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to a vote.”
“At this stage, Obama’s premise, that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying Sarin was unraveling. Within a few days of the August 21 attack, the former intelligence official said, Russian military intelligence operatives had recovered samples of the chemical agent from Ghouta. They analysed it and passed it on to British military intelligence; this was the material sent to Porton Down. A spokesperson for Porton Down said, ‘Many of the samples analysed in the UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.’ MI6 said that it doesn’t comment on intelligence matters.”
“The former intelligence official said the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was a good source. Someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy. After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria last year, American and allied intelligence agencies made an effort to find the answer as to what if anything, was used and its source. Data is exchanged as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing the composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But we didn’t know which batches the Assad government currently had in its arsenal. Within days of the Damascus incident we asked a source in the Syrian government to give us a list of the batches the government currently had. This is why they could confirm the difference so quickly.”
“The process hadn’t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former intelligence official said, because the studies done by Western intelligence were inconclusive as to the type of gas it was. The word “Sarin” didn’t come up. There was a great deal of discussion about this, but since no one could conclude what gas it was, you could not say that Assad had crossed Obama’s red line. By August 21st, the former intelligence official went on, ‘the Syrian opposition clearly had learned from this and announced that “Sarin” from the Syrian army had been used, before any analysis could be made, and the press and White House jumped at it. Since it now was Sarin, “It had to be Assad.”
“The UK defence staff who relayed the Porton Down findings to the Joint Chiefs were sending the Americans a message. They knew they were being set up here. This account made sense of a terse message a senior official in the CIA sent in late August, it was not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this. By then the attack was a few days away and American, British and French planes, ships and submarines were at the ready beginning point.”
“The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of the attack was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the Joint Chiefs had been skeptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war. The former intelligence official said, Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria. In April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the Secretary of State, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.”
“Dempsey’s initial view after August 21 was that a US strike on Syria under the assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the Sarin attack would be a military blunder. Well no doubt as we can see how far fetched this evidence presented itself from a very good reliable resource from RUSSIA! The Porton Down report caused the Joint Chiefs to go to the President with a more serious worry, that the attack sought by the White House would be an unjustified act of aggression. It was the Joint Chiefs who led Obama to change course. The official White House explanation for the turnaround, the story the press corps told was that President Obama, during a walk in the Rose Garden with Denis McDonough, his Chief of Staff, suddenly decided to seek approval for the strike from a bitterly divided Congress with which he’d been in conflict for years.”
Congress never supported Obama. They knew so much more than the American people. We were all led to believe that part of Congress was prejudiced against President Obama. At least that’s what some Americans thought and maybe some were, but the fact remains that Obama let down this country and the American people in the most treasonous horrible scandalous ways; a part of his pathological greed in pursuit of power; like Hillary Clinton. Put these two together with Soros adding to the fire of corruption and it’s a wonder we survived with these people who didn’t give a damn about this country and the people.
Congress needs to get on the ball and go for the choke hold and ask to see the 650,000 emails at the NYPD and the FBI HQ and please impeach Rosenstein and Sessions. We don’t want to live in a two-tiered system; a double standard. Why should these criminals get away with such horrific federal crimes against the Constitution and out national security. Every former President who isn’t alive is turning in their graves and notice Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George H W Bush and George W Bush are still alive.
“The former Defense Department official stated that the White House provided a different explanation to members of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon. The bombing had been called off because there was intelligence ‘that the Middle East would go up in smoke’ if it was carried out.”
The President’s decision to go to Congress was initially seen by senior aides in the White House as a replay of George W. Bush’s gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq.
When it became clear, very clear there were no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq. Many of us questioned, “Why Iraq?” Congress, which had endorsed the Iraqi war and the White House both shared the blame and repeatedly cited faulty intelligence.
This wasn’t faulty intelligence this was a direct calculated move by 15 out of the 19 terrorists from Saudi Arabia who came to America to commit the worst horrific act in American history. The Bush administration ignored the warnings from the CIA weeks, months before 9/11, along with other warnings that were far more detailed than previously revealed. President George W Bush failed to protect the national security of 3,000 people who died on 9/11.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller then as FBI Director helped two Saudi’s who were in communication with the 9/11 terrorists escape from America two weeks before 9/11.
Bandar-Bush was the Saudi Ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005, during the Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He later served as Secretary General of Saudi Arabia’s National Security Council and head of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency, the equivalent of the CIA.
After the 9/11 terrorists attacks Bandar-Bush and George W Bush had to address what had happened on 9/11 and Bandar-Bush thought carefully about the Saudi Arabia regime’s reputation, himself and the President of the United States.
More than likely these were the options: 1) Bandar-Bush told George W Bush a war in Iraq would distract from Saudi Arabia being blamed for the 3,000 deaths on 9/11 considering 15 out of the 19 terrorists were Saudi Arabia nationals and there were definite links that connected Bandar-Bush directly to the nineteen 9/11 terrorists; 2) this would prevent families from suing the Saudi Arabian monarchy; 3) this would distract the news media and Americans from George W Bush himself, knowing what happened and could temporary postpone a thorough investigation of 9/11 implicating President George W Bush and other officials; 4) the President starting a war in Iraq on behalf of 9/11 and the so called “weapons of mass destruction” would make the President a hero and not the culprit and last but not least 5) the war would topple the Iraq regime for Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia always preferred for American military soldiers to defend them. Osama bin Laden had built a military force in Afghanistan and he asked the Saudi Arabian Monarchy/Regime to let him lead Saudi Arabia’s military force. They responded with a modicum of common sense and irreverence and they said no. The pejorative effect affected Osama bin Laden’s immense ego. Was he the only one who planned the absolute worst for Americans? To Osama, it was probably a direct slap on the face and I’m sure he was infuriated.
Going back to Obama, feeling quite disparate, telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House of Democrats, to talk through the options. She later told colleagues, that she hadn’t asked the President to put the bombing to a congressional vote. If current Congress were to vote to endorse the strike, the White House could again have it both ways, stop Syria with a massive attack and validate the President’s red line commitment, while also being able to share the blame with Congress, if it came out that the Syrian military wasn’t behind the attack. The turnabout came as a surprise even to the Democratic leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that three days before his Rose Garden speech, Obama’s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end.
Congress was not going to let this go by. Congress made it known that, unlike the authorization for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings. At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said, “and so out comes Plan B. Call off the bombing strike and Assad would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical warfare treaty and agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN supervision.” At a press conference in London on September 9th, Kerry was still talking about intervention, saying “The risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting.” But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said, “Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.” As the New York Times reported the next day, the Russian-brokered deal that emerged shortly afterwards had first been discussed by Obama and Putin in the summer of 2012. Although the strike plans were shelved, the administration didn’t change its public assessment of the justification for going to war. The former intelligence official said of the senior officials in the White House “There is zero tolerance at that level for the existence of error”. They could not afford to say, we were wrong. The DNI spokesperson said, “The Assad regime, and only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack that took place on August 21, 2013.”
The full extent of US cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorized in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. The Department of National Intelligence spokesperson said, “The idea that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.” Well, I’m sure former fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe knows the very truth and is wiling to give state’s evidence and his testimony to save himself from an endless prison sentence.
In January 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local militia in September 9, 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received front-page coverage and revived animosities in Washington, with Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a cover-up. And it was a cover-up among many federal crimes that were committed by the former President, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the former President’s administration.
A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between Obama and Erdoğan. It pertained to the rat line. 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 because it was exposed General Petraeus was having an affair with his biographer. A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.
The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for years there has been a recognized exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be critical to Congress and Americans knowing the very truth. All proposed CIA covert operations must be described in a written document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to the senior leadership of Congress for approval. Distribution of the annex was limited to the staff aides who wrote the report and to the eight ranking members of Congress. The Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans leaders on the House and Senate intelligence committees. This hardly constituted a genuine attempt at oversight. The eight leaders are not known to gather together to raise questions or discuss the secret information they receive.
The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms according to the former intelligence official, who has read the annex and said, “It had no real political role.”
Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. The former intelligence official said, “The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists.” Within weeks, as many as forty portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On November 28, 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. Warrick wrote, “The Obama administration has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.” Two Middle Eastern intelligence officials fingered Qatar as the source, and a former US intelligence analyst speculated that the manpads could have been obtained from Syrian military outposts overrun by the rebels. There was no indication that the rebels’ possession of manpads was likely the unintended consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer under US control.
By the end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war. “Erdoğan was pissed,” the former intelligence official said, ‘and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.’ In Spring of 2013, US intelligence learned that the Turkish government through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarized law-enforcement organisation was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘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. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war because of logistics. The distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’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.
There was no public sign of discord when Erdoğan and Obama met on May 16, 2013 at the White House. At a later press conference Obama said that they had agreed that Assad needed to go. Asked whether he thought Syria had crossed the red line, Obama acknowledged that there was evidence such weapons had been used, but added, “it is important for us to make sure that we’re able to get more specific information about what exactly is happening there.” The red line and Obama’s reputation was still intact for the moment.
An American foreign policy expert who speaks regularly with officials in Washington and Ankara told me about a working dinner Obama held for Erdoğan during his May visit. The meal was dominated by the Turks’ insistence that Syria had crossed the red line and their complaints that Obama was reluctant to do anything about it. Obama was accompanied by John Kerry and Tom Donilon, the National Security Adviser who would soon leave the job. Erdoğan was joined by Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister, and Hakan Fidan, the head of the MIT. Fidan is known to be fiercely loyal to Erdoğan, and has been seen as a consistent backer of the radical rebel opposition in Syria.
The foreign policy expert told me that the account he heard originated with Donilon and it was later corroborated by a former US official, who learned of it from a senior Turkish diplomat. According to the expert, Erdoğan had sought the meeting to demonstrate to Obama that the red line had been crossed, and had brought Fidan along to state the case. When Erdoğan tried to draw Fidan into the conversation, and Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off and said, “We know.” Erdoğan tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and Obama again cut him off and said, “We know.” At that point, an exasperated Erdoğan said, “But your red line has been crossed!” Donilon said Erdoğan “fucking waved his finger at the President inside the White House”. Obama then pointed at Fidan and said, “We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria.” (Donilon, who joined the Council on Foreign Relations last July, didn’t respond to questions about this story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to questions about the dinner. A spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed that the dinner took place and provided a photograph showing Obama, Kerry, Donilon, Erdoğan, Fidan and Davutoğlu sitting at a table. ‘Beyond that,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to read out the details of their discussions.’
But Erdoğan did not leave empty handed. Obama was still permitting Turkey to continue to exploit a loophole in a Presidential Executive Order prohibiting the export of gold to Iran, part of the US sanctions regime against the country. In March 2012, responding to sanctions of Iranian banks by the EU, the SWIFT electronic payment system, which facilitates cross-border payments, expelled dozens of Iranian financial institutions, severely restricting the country’s ability to conduct international trade. The US followed with the executive order in July, but left what came to be known as a “golden loophole”, gold shipments to private Iranian entities could continue. Turkey is a major purchaser of Iranian oil and gas and it took advantage of the loophole by depositing its energy payments in Turkish lira in an Iranian account in Turkey; these funds were then used to purchase Turkish gold for export to confederates in Iran. Gold to the value of $13 billion reportedly entered Iran in this way between March 2012 and July 2013.
This quickly became a cash cow for corrupt politicians and traders in Turkey, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. ‘The middlemen did what they always do,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Take 15 per cent’. The CIA had estimated that there was as much as two billion dollars in skim. Gold and Turkish lira were sticking to fingers.’ The illicit skimming flared into a public ‘gas for gold’ scandal in Turkey in December and resulted in charges against two dozen people, including prominent businessmen and relatives of government officials, as well as the resignations of three ministers, one of whom called for Erdoğan to resign. The chief executive of a Turkish state-controlled bank that was in the middle of the scandal insisted that more than $4.5 million in cash found by police in shoe boxes during a search of his home was for charitable donations.
Late last year Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz reported in Foreign Policy that the Obama administration closed the golden loophole in January 2013, but lobbied to make sure the legislation did not take effect for six months. They speculated that the administration wanted to use the delay as an incentive to bring Iran to the bargaining table over its nuclear program or to placate its Turkish ally in the Syrian civil war. The delay permitted Iran to accrue billions of dollars more in gold, further undermining the sanctions regime.
The American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left Erdoğan exposed politically and militarily. One of the issues at that May summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to supply the rebels in Syria, the former intelligence official said. ‘It can’t come through Jordan because the terrain in the south is wide open and the Syrians are all over it. And it can’t come through the valleys and hills of Lebanon you can’t be sure who you would meet on the other side. Without US military support for the rebels, the former intelligence official said, Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating and he thinks the US is 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.
A US intelligence consultant told me that a few weeks before August 21, he saw a highly classified briefing prepared for Dempsey and the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, which described ‘the acute anxiety’ of the Erdoğan administration about the rebels’ dwindling prospects. The analysis warned that the Turkish leadership had expressed the need to do something that would precipitate a US military response. By late summer, the Syrian army still had the advantage over the rebels, the former intelligence and only American air power could turn the tide. In the autumn, the former intelligence official went on, the US intelligence analysts who kept working on the events of August 21, sensed that Syria had not done the gas attack. But the 500 pound gorilla was, how did it happen? The immediate suspect was the Turks, because they had all the pieces to make it happen.
As intercepts and other data related to the August 21 attack were gathered, the intelligence community saw evidence to support its suspicions. We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red line. They had to escalate to a gas attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors who arrived in Damascus on August 18, 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 and that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training in producing the Sarin and handling of it. Much of the support for that assessment came from the Turks themselves, via intercepted conversations in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Principal evidence came from the Turkish post-attack joy and back-slapping in numerous intercepts. Operations are always so super-secret in the planning but that all flies out the window when it comes to crowing afterwards. There is no greater vulnerability than in the perpetrators claiming credit for success. Erdoğan’s problems in Syria would soon be over: Off goes the gas and Obama will say red line and America is going to attack Syria, or at least that was the idea. But it did not work out that way.
The post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the White House. Nobody wants to talk about all this. There is great reluctance to contradict the President, although no all-source intelligence community analysis supported his leap to convict. There has not been one single piece of additional evidence of Syrian involvement in the Sarin attack produced by the White House since the bombing raid was called off. My government can’t say anything because we have acted so irresponsibly. And since we blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame Erdoğan.
Turkey’s willingness to manipulate events in Syria to its own purposes seemed to be demonstrated late last month, a few days before a round of local elections, when a recording, allegedly of a government national security meeting, was posted to YouTube. It included discussion of a false-flag operation that would justify an incursion by the Turkish military in Syria. The operation centred on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the revered Osman I, founder of the Ottoman Empire, which is near Aleppo and was ceded to Turkey in 1921, when Syria was under French rule. One of the Islamist rebel factions was threatening to destroy the tomb as a site of idolatry, and the Erdoğan administration was publicly threatening retaliation if harm came to it. According to a Reuters report of the leaked conversation, a voice alleged to be Fidan’s spoke of creating a provocation. “Now look, my commander, if there is to be justification, the justification is I send four men to the other side. I get them to fire eight missiles into empty land in the vicinity of the tomb. That’s not a problem. Justification can be created.” The Turkish government acknowledged that there had been a national security meeting about threats emanating from Syria, but said the recording had been manipulated. The government subsequently blocked public access to YouTube.
Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s continued support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special case. They’re 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 Erdoğan’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.” April 4, 2014, Seymour M. Hersh first wrote about the sarin attack in the London Review of Books LRB of 19 December 2013