“Exclusive: Amid Official Washington’s desire to censor non-official news on the Internet, it’s worth remembering how the lack of mainstream skepticism almost led the U.S. into a war on Syria, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.”
“A review of events leading to the very edge of full-blown U.S. shock-and-awe on Syria three years ago [2013] provides a case study with important lessons for new policymakers as they begin to arrive in Washington.
It is high time to expose the whys and wherefores of the almost-successful attempt to mousetrap President Barack Obama into an open attack on Syria [in 2013] three years ago. Little-known and still less appreciated is the last-minute intervention of Russian President Vladimir Putin as deus ex machina
rescuing Obama from the corner into which he had let himself be painted.
Image, 9/5/2013, “President Vladimir Putin of Russia welcomed President Barack Obama to the G20 Summit at Konstantinovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 5, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)”
Accumulating evidence offers persuasive proof that
Syrian [jihadists] rebels supported by Turkish intelligence – not Syrian Army troops –
bear responsibility for the infamous sarin nerve-gas attack killing
hundreds of people on Aug. 21, 2013 in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus.
The incident bears all the earmarks of a false-flag attack.
But U.S. and other [jihadist] “rebel-friendly” media outlets
wasted no time in offering “compelling” evidence from “social media” – which Secretary of State John Kerry described as an “extraordinary tool” – to place the onus on the Syrian government.
However, as the war juggernaut started rolling toward war,
enter Putin from stage right with an offer difficult for Obama to refuse –
guaranteed destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons on a U.S. ship outfitted for such purpose.
This cheated Washington’s neocon mousetrap-setters out of their war on Syria.
They would get back at Putin six months later by orchestrating an anti-Russian coup in Kiev.
But the play-by-play in U.S.-Russian relations in summer 2013 arguably surpasses in importance even the avoidance of an overt U.S. assault on Syria. Thus, it is important to appreciate the lessons drawn by Russian leaders from the entire experience.
Putting Cheese in the Mousetrap
So, let us recall that on Dec. 10, 2015, just over one year ago, Turkish Member of Parliament Eren Erdem testified about how
Turkey’s intelligence service helped deliver sarin precursors to [terrorists] in Syria.
The Official Story blaming Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was already collapsing – largely discredited by reports in independent media and by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – though it
remained widely accepted in the U.S. mainstream media which repeatedly cited the case as the moment when Assad
crossed Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons
and Obama had failed to back up his threat.
But Erdem took the debunking of the “official” tale to a
public and official level. Based on government documents from a Turkish
court, which he waved before his MP colleagues, Erdem
poured ice water on the West’s long-running
excited belief
that Assad had “gassed his own people.”
But, alas, if you do not understand Turkish,
or if you missed this story in the Belfast Telegraph of Dec. 14
or if you don’t read some independent Web sites
or if you believe that RT publishes only Russian “propaganda,”
this development may still come as a huge surprise,
for Erdem’s revelations
appeared in no other English-language newspaper.
So, those malnourished by “mainstream media” may be clueless about
the scary reality that Obama came within inches of letting himself be
mousetrapped into ordering U.S. armed forces mount a shock-and-awe-type attack on Syria in late summer 2013.
Turkish MP Testimony
Addressing fellow members of the Turkish Parliament, Turkish MP Erdem from the opposition Republican People’s Party directly confronted his government on this key issue. Waving a copy of “Criminal Case Number 2013/120,” Erdem described official Turkish reports and electronic evidence documenting a smuggling operation with Turkish government complicity.
In an interview with RT four days later, Erdem said Turkish authorities
had evidence of sarin gas-related shipments to [US funded terrorist] anti-government rebels in Syria,
and did nothing to stop them.
The General Prosecutor in the Turkish city of Adana opened a criminal case and an indictment stated “chemical weapons components” from Europe “were to be seamlessly shipped via a designated route
through Turkey to militant labs in Syria.”
Erdem cited evidence implicating the Turkish
Minister of Justice and the Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry
Corporation in the smuggling of sarin. Small wonder that Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately accused Erdem of “treason.”
Erdem testified that the 13 suspects, who had been arrested in police raids on the plotters, were released just a week after they were indicted. The case was shut down abruptly by higher authority.
Erdem told RT that the sarin attack at Ghouta took place shortly after the criminal case was closed and that the attack probably was carried out by jihadists with sarin gas smuggled through Turkey.
Erdem’s disclosures were not entirely new. More than two years before Erdem’s brave actions, in a Memorandum for the President by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity of Sept. 6, 2013, we had reported that
coordination meetings had taken place just weeks before the sarin attack
at a Turkish military garrison in Antakya, some
15 miles from the border with Syria.
In Antakya, senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials
were said to be coordinating plans with Western-sponsored [jihadist] rebels who were told to expect an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development.” This, in turn,
would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria,
and [jihadist] rebel commanders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the bombing,
march into Damascus,
and remove the Assad government.
A year earlier, The New York Times reported that the Antakya area had become a “magnet for foreign jihadis, who are flocking into Turkey to fight holy war in Syria.”
The Times quoted a Syrian opposition member based in Antakya, saying
the Turkish police were patrolling this border area “with their eyes
closed.”
Kerry Dancing
It is a safe bet that Secretary of State John Kerry’s aides briefed
him in timely fashion on Erdem’s revelations. This may account for why, on a visit to Moscow on Dec. 15, 2015 (four days after Erdem’s testimony), Kerry chose to repeat the meme that Assad “gassed his people; I mean, gas hasn’t been used in warfare formally for years and gas is outlawed, but Assad used it.”
[Below, 2009, John Kerry and his wife dine with Mr. Assad and his wife at a Damascus, Syria restaurant. At the time Kerry was a US Senator.]
Three days later, The Washington Post dutifully echoed Kerry, charging
that Assad had killed “his own people with chemical weapons.”
And this charge remains a staple in U.S. corporate media,
where Erdem’s testimony is still nowhere to be found.
Kerry also didn’t want to admit that he had
grossly misled the American people on an issue of war and peace.
Just days after the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin attack at Ghouta, Kerry and his neocon allies displayed their acumen in following George W. Bush’s dictum:
“You got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in,
to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
On Aug. 30, [2013] Kerry solemnly claimed, no fewer than 35 times, “We know” the Assad government was responsible for the sarin deaths,
finally giving Kerry and the neocons their casus belli.
But on Aug. 31, [2013] with U.S. intelligence analysts
expressing their own doubts that Assad’s forces were responsible,
Obama put the brakes on the juggernaut toward war,
saying he would first seek approval from Congress.
Kerry, undaunted, wasted no time in lobbying Congress for war.
On Sept. 1, [2013] Kerry told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that
briefings in Congress had already begun
and that “we are not going to lose this vote.”
On Sept. 3, [2013] Kerry was back at it with a bravura performance before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, whose leaders showed in their own remarks the degree to which
they were lusting for an attack on Syria.
The following offers a taste for Kerry’s “protest-too-much” testimony:
the Assad regime,
and only, undeniably, the Assad regime,
unleashed an outrageous chemical attack against its own citizens. … In their lust to hold on to power, [they] were willing to infect the air of Damascus with a poison that killed innocent mothers and fathers
and hundreds of their children,
their lives all snuffed out by gas in the early morning of August 21st [2013].
“Now, some people here and there,
amazingly,
have questioned the evidence of this assault on conscience.
I repeat here again today that
only the most willful desire to avoid reality can assert
that this did not occur as described or that the regime did not do it. It did happen,
and the Assad regime did it.
“Within minutes of the attack, the social media exploded with horrific images of men and women, the elderly, and children sprawled on a hospital floor with no wounds, no blood, but all dead. Those scenes of human chaos and desperation
were not contrived. They were real.
No one could contrive such a scene. …
“And as we debate, the world wonders, not whether Assad’s regime executed the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21st century — that fact I think is now beyond question —
the world wonders
whether the United States of America will consent
through silence to standing aside
while this kind of brutality is allowed to happen without consequence.”
Kerry added a credulity-stretching
attempt to play down
the role and effectiveness of Al Qaeda in Syria,
[“Idlib province is largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11″ – US official Brett McGurk, July 2017:
“In Idlib province, look, Idlib province is the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11 tied directly to Ayman Al Zawahiri. This is a huge problem. Its been a problem for some time.…We
have been very focused on Al Qaeda in Idlib province, leaders of Al
Qaeda that make their way to Idlib province often do not make their way
out of there. We have to ask a question – why and how is Ayman Al Zawahiri’s deputy finding his way to Idlib province? Why is this happening? How are they getting there? They
are not paratroopers. And the approach – I will not talk about anything
the U.S Government has done in certain parts of Syria on this problem –
but the approach by some of our partners to send in tens of thousands of tonnes of weapons and looking the other way as these foreign fighters come into Syria may not have been the best approach – and Al Qaeda has taken full advantage of it and Idlib now is a huge problem. It is an Al Qaeda safe haven right on the border with Turkey.“…]
(continuing): “and exaggerated the strength of the “moderate” [US backed terrorist] rebels there.
This drew unusually prompt and personal criticism from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin: “Kerry Lies”
Rarely does it happen that a president of a major country
calls the head diplomat of a rival state a “liar,” but that is the label
Russian President Putin chose for Kerry on the day after his
congressional testimony. Referring to Kerry during a televised meeting of the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council
on Sept. 4, [2013] Putin addressed the sarin issue in these words:
[Mr. Putin:] “It is simply absurd to imagine that Assad used chemical weapons, given that he is gaining ground. After all, this is a weapon of last resort.” Putin claimed, correctly, that Assad had “encircled his [terrorist] adversaries in some places and was finishing them off.”
Putin continued: “I watched the congressional debates.
A congressman
asked Mr. Kerry, ‘Is Al Qaeda present there? I’ve heard they have gained momentum.’
He replied, ‘No. I can tell you earnestly, they are not.’”
[“Idlib province is largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11″]
Putin continued, “The main combat unit, the so-called Al-Nusra, is an Al-Qaeda subdivision. They [Americans] know about this.
This was very unpleasant and surprising for me. After all … we talk with them,
and we assume they are decent people.
But he is lying, and he knows he is lying. That is sad. …
“We are currently focused on the fact that the U.S. Congress and Senate are discussing authorization for use of force. …
As you know,
Syria is not attacking the U.S.,
so there is no question of self-defense;
and anything else, lacking U.N. authorization, is an act of aggression. …
we are all glued to our televisions, waiting to see if they will get the approval of Congress.”
On the following day, Sept. 5, [2013] Obama arrived in St. Petersburg for a G-20 summit, with ample reason to suspect that Putin was right about Kerry lying about the sarin attack – the President having been warned the previous week by National Intelligence Director James Clapper that
there was no “slam-dunk” evidence against the Assad regime.
So, Obama agreed to Putin’s offer to get Syria to surrender its chemical weapons for destruction,
and the war fever began to abate.
Curiously, Kerry himself was kept in the dark about the Putin-Obama agreement and was still making the case for war on Sept. 9 [2013]. At the very end of a press conference that day in London, Kerry was asked whether there was anything Assad could do to prevent a U.S. attack. Kerry answered that Assad could give up every one of his chemical weapons, but “he isn’t about to do that; it can’t be done.”
Still later on Sept. 9, [2013] Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Syrian counterpart announced that Syria had agreed to allow all its chemical weapons to be removed and destroyed. As soon as Kerry arrived back in Washington, he was sent off to Geneva to sign
the deal that Obama had cut directly with Putin. (All Syria’s chemical weapons have now been destroyed.)
Yet, two weeks later, Obama was still reading from the neocon teleprompter. In his formal address to the UN General Assembly
on Sept. 24, 2013, [On Sept. 11, 2013, NY Times had published “A Plea for Caution From Russia,” op-ed By Vladimir V Putin]
he declared, “It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution
to suggest that anyone other than
the [Syrian] regime carried out this [sarin] attack.”
[Explaining Obama’s whiplash: “But the neocons were apoplectic that they failed to convince Obama to order a massive bombing campaign and escalate his covert proxy war in Syria and at the receding prospect of a war with Iran. Fearing their control of U.S. foreign policy was slipping, the neocons launched a campaign to brand Obama as “weak” on foreign policy and remind him of their power….Obama invited [Robert] Kagan to a private lunch at the White House, and the neocons’ muscle-flexing pressured him to scale back his diplomacy with Russia, even as he quietly pushed ahead on Iran.”…1/19/2021, “Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden’s foreign policy team,” salon.com, Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Marcy Winograd]
(continuing): “More Candor With Goldberg
Earlier this year [2016], though, Obama was bragging to his informal biographer, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, about having thwarted planning for open war on Syria, even though that required disregarding the advice of virtually all his foreign-policy advisers.
One gem fished out by Goldberg was Obama’s admission that DNI Clapper had warned him in late August (a week before he went to St. Petersburg and a month before his U.N. speech) that the evidence pinning blame on Damascus for the sarin attack was hardly airtight.
Goldberg wrote that Clapper interrupted the President’s morning intelligence briefing “to make clear that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a ‘slam dunk.’” Clapper
chose his words carefully, echoing the language that CIA Director
George Tenet used to falsely assure President George W. Bush that the
case could be made to convince the American people that Iraq was hiding
WMDs.
Even though Obama continued to dissemble and the mainstream U.S. news media has continued to treat Syria’s “guilt” in the sarin attack as “flat fact,” the neocons did not get their war on Syria.
I describe an unusually up-front-and-personal experience of their chagrin under the subtitle “Morose at CNN” in “How War on Syria Lost Its Way.”
Nor did neocon disappointment subside in subsequent years.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has remained among the most outspoken critics of Obama’s decision to cancel the attack on Syria in 2013.
On Dec. 3, 2014, Corker complained that, while the U.S. military was poised to launch a “very targeted, very brief” operation against the Syrian government for [supposedly] using chemical weapons,
Obama called off the attack at the last minute.
Corker’s criticism was scathing: “I think the worst moment in U.S. foreign policy since I’ve been here, as far as signaling to the world where we were as a nation, was August a year ago when
we had a 10-hour operation that was getting ready to take place in Syria but it didn’t happen. …
In essence and – I’m sorry to be slightly rhetorical — we jumped in Putin’s lap.””
………………………………
“Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington. A CIA analyst for 27 years, he has experience recognizing false-flag attacks when he sees them. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which he co-founded, has published several memoranda on the sarin attack.”
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Comment: Always evidence-free US opinions/accusations of “chemical weapons” or “chemical attacks” in Syria have one target: US taxpayers.
******************************
Added: Below, Sept. 2013 Gallup poll, 72% of Americans approve of working with Russia to remove chemical weapons from Syria
………………………………………
Added: 9/11/2013, NY Times op-ed by Vladimir V. Putin in which Pres. Putin describes current Syria problems and his positive experience working with Pres. Obama to solve them:
9/11/2013, “A Plea for Caution From Russia,” By Vladimir V Putin, NY Times op-ed, Moscow. “Op-Ed Contributor”
The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike
would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It
could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear
problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the
Middle East and North Africa.
It could throw the entire
system of international law and order
out of balance.
Syria is not witnessing
a battle for democracy,
but an armed conflict between government and [jihad] opposition
in a multireligious country.
There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are
more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes
[Syria’s “Idlib province is largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11″].
battling the government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal conflict,
fueled by foreign weapons
supplied to the [jihadist] opposition,
is one of the bloodiest in the world.
Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there,
and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are
an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries
with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.
From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future.
We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law.
We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not.
Under current international law,
force is permitted
only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council.
Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe
it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces,
to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, [eg, US taxpayers]
who would be siding with the [terrorist] fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.
It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries
has become commonplace for the United States.
Is it in America’s long-term interest? [No large “English speaking” population exists there] I doubt it.
Millions around the world increasingly see America
not as a model of democracy but as
relying solely on brute force,
cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”
But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw.
Libya is divided into tribes and clans.
In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day.
In the United States, many draw an
analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want
to repeat recent mistakes.
No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons,
civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.
The world reacts by asking:
if you cannot count on international law,
then you must find other ways to ensure
your security. Thus a growing number of countries seek to acquire
weapons of mass destruction. This is logical: if you have the bomb, no
one will touch you. We are left with talk of the need to strengthen nonproliferation, when in reality this is being eroded.
We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of
civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
A new opportunity to avoid military action has emerged in the past few days. The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction.
Judging by the statements of President Obama,
the United States sees this as
an alternative to military action.
I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive,
as we agreed to at the Group of 8 meeting in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in June [2013],
and steer the discussion back toward negotiations.
If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success
and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this.”…
[“But the neocons were apoplectic that they failed to convince Obama to order a massive bombing campaign and escalate his covert proxy war in Syria and at the receding prospect of a war with Iran. Fearing their control of U.S. foreign policy was slipping, the neocons launched a campaign to brand Obama as “weak” on foreign policy and remind him of their power….Obama invited [Robert] Kagan to a private lunch at the White House, and the neocons’ muscle-flexing pressured him to scale back his diplomacy with Russia, even as he quietly pushed ahead on Iran.”…1/19/2021, “Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden’s foreign policy team,” salon.com, Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Marcy Winograd]
(continuing): “I carefully studied his [Pres. Obama] address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy
is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It
is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as
exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor,
those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way
to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”
………………………………..
Among comments to Putin’s 2013 NY Times op-ed:
“Ana Campos. Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Sept. 13, 2013:
THANK YOU MR. PUTIN.. I agree with every point made in this article. It is time to use the much wiser, cutting-edge technology of diplomacy, mediation and communication
and stop patting ourselves on the back
for dropping bombs.”
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Added: US elites are free to commit global genocide:
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