04/07/14 – Seymour Hersh – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And up next is Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter, normally for the New Yorker magazine.
The last couple have been in the London review of books.
Welcome back to the show.
Cy, how are you doing?
Okay, good, good.
I'm very happy to have you on the show here.
Lots of cover in very little time.
I guess if you could, well, first of all, pardon me, let me go ahead and tell the people the latest article here at the London review of books is the red line and the rat line.
You're second on the sarin attack in Syria last August, and it's on Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian rebels.
So I guess first and foremost, can you tell us about this all important DIA report that you have apparently seen?
Well, the thing that that thing that's interesting about, I did do an article for the London review last, about three months ago, writing about the fact, the critical fact that when the incident took place, when the, I shouldn't say incident, when the terrible massacre took place with sarin in the east, the Gouda suburb of Damascus, right away, the American government immediately said the only possible person that could use sarin country would be Syria and because nobody else has sarin.
And the story I wrote three or four months ago said, no, there's been a bunch of reports that the government did not tell us about from the American intelligence community saying that many of the opposition, most notably Al Nusra Front, which is, I think perhaps the most together radical, if you will, Sunni jihadist group there.
They were the most largest number of soldiers, the most aggressive, at least one of the most aggressive they had sarin.
And at that time, everybody, the white house denied it.
And I said, there was a paper to that effect and they said, no.
So this time around, I actually had the paper and the first sentence of this particular document, it was highly classified, like everything's highly classified.
It was a brief to the talking point brief to a very senior official in the defense intelligence agency by DA people.
The first sentence that begins with this line, the Al Nusra Front associated sarin production cell.
That's a production cell for sarin.
It's the most advanced sarin plus since the Al Qaeda's pre 9-11 efforts.
We knew that bin Laden was dabbling with nerve agent in the late 1990s.
And we did some stuff to stop it.
But anyway, there we are.
So it goes on for five pages like that.
Talking a lot about Turkey's role in this, too.
So it doesn't matter.
I mean, the fact that I have a document and I guess unless I publish it and and expose my source to all sorts of trouble, the White House won't accept it.
But that's that's troubling to me that in a world where, you know, right now, the reality is that we are unilaterally the Syrian government has agreed to unilaterally get rid of its sarin stocks.
It's a chemical warfare, warfare and sarin stocks.
And if if the intelligence is right, that will leave the only strategic weapon.
You know, nerve agent can be a strategic weapon if it's used right in the hands of the opposition.
And God knows what they'll do when they get, you know, into a corner.
You know, they're losing that war anyway.
It's just an amazing sort of head in the sand approach my government has right now on on the case against the case that they have put forward, that it could only have been the Assad government, the Baathist government that did it.
What do you really have on that, aside from this DIA report saying that Nusra, I guess, you know, that predates the attack that says that they had been messing around with sarin?
Well, I mean, the other thing that I'm writing about a great deal in this article is that within about six, eight, 10 days of the incident took place, August 21st, certainly by August 30th or 29th, our Joint Chiefs of Staff were made aware by the Brits, their counterpart, the British General Staff, senior commanding officers of the British Army, of all armies, that the Brits had gotten a sample of sarin.
They put it through their labs.
They have an amazing lab at Porton Down.
The Brits have been interested in chemical warfare like we have for years.
And right now their laboratories at Porton Down, it's near, it's in Wilshire, is a lab that we also share, America and Brits share that lab for terrorist related chemical and biological warfare threats.
So we rely on it.
So we know the lab is good.
Their lab looked at the sarin right away when we got a sample.
And we do know what the Syrian Army sarin looks like because sarin is a very easily made nerve agent.
It's composed basically of two inert chemicals.
One of them is an alcohol.
And when you meld the two, when you put them together, you produce this terrible poison.
And the problem is that amateurs doing it produce what they call a kitchen sarin.
It's not nearly as powerful as it could be.
It's also very volatile.
It's like water.
It's very light and easily evaporates and could be dangerous to work with.
In the advanced armies, our chemical corps and the Russian chemical corps and most countries' chemical corps that are with the Syrian Army, you produce additives, specially designed additives that you add to the mix for toxicity, for persistence, for safety and handling.
And the sarin that was used in Ghouta, in the suburb of Damascus, did not have those additives.
And therefore, it did not come from the Syrian Army.
This doesn't mean that something, you know, all we could say is that the sarin that was recovered was not from the Syrian Army.
It doesn't mean something strange could have happened.
Some rogue Syrian Army element could have broken away and made their own sarin.
It doesn't mean the man on the moon could have done it.
But it does raise a question about, at this point, Obama had finally determined that the use of sarin, all those hundreds of deaths, crossed a red line.
He said there was a, a year before he announced there was a red line that he would, if they crossed it with their use of chemical weapons, that is, the Syrian Army, he would act.
And he decided that was it.
And what I write about is the Joint Chiefs of Staff coming to Bashar and saying to him, A, the sarin doesn't work, it's not dispositive, and also, you have escalated the target package dramatically.
And I write about this in some detail.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold on one second.
First of all, I think you just accidentally called Obama a sod, so I want to make sure that we get that straight.
If I can go back to the Russian sample for just a second.
I think, well, it's all over Twitter anyway, that like, well, you know, yeah, right, it's a Russian sample, so how can you believe it?
But it seems from your reporting here that the UK and the US governments didn't have a problem with the Russian origin of the samples.
Oh my God.
Don't forget, we and the Russians were pretty good allies in the 1990s.
And when the chemical warfare treaty went into effect in 1997, we pooled information with the Russians.
And I can also tell you, I write about this in my article, it certainly did come from a Russian, it was delivered by a Russian source who was described to me by an American as somebody really solid.
Somebody we all knew, somebody we all trusted, this is not a game.
We also had our own information about what was going on inside the Syrian arsenal.
Believe me, the Syrian government would be more than happy to give a sample of any, because they were eager to have this looked at.
So that's just, you know, only in America, it's so funny, Scott, only in America would you read, oh my God, Russia, the Cold War is still on, it's really very strange.
Yes, the Russians supplied the sample, they picked up a sample right away, a lot of samples.
The British had absolutely no trouble with the provenance.
They knew it came from Damascus, the British analyzed it, it was the British finding out a port in down that convinced our army that we had to tell the president he doesn't have a case.
And I think if you want to run on with the Russians, go ahead.
Oh, no.
Well, no, I want to get to the military explaining to the president that he didn't have a case because I think you were about to go there also talking about the expansive war plan that was almost sounds like a poison pill, like the military was saying, if you want us to do this, we're going to have to do it so big that you're going to want to not do it.
But also, if you could answer about, I think you say in here that they may be not the military, but the CIA or someone else kept their findings from Obama.
They didn't want to tell him he was wrong.
No, no, no.
He was blaming us.
In general, what the article said is in general, the intelligence community is often reluctant to go to the president and say, sir, you're dead wrong about this.
I mean, we saw that with the WMD.
I'll give you a better example.
Did anybody tell Obama until the day it happened that he was in trouble with his computers on Obamacare?
You know, on the Affordable Act, Health Care Act, they actually they were so obviously so reluctant to go to the boss with the problem that they actually had the problem explode in their face.
And so you're saying in this case, finally, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, well, I'll take it that it was a poison pill.
It was at the White House that rejected the first package of thirty five targets that were, you know, they were targets, but they weren't devastating target bomb a runway.
So you had to take the trouble to fix it, punish him.
But they wanted something, as I read, with more pain.
And then they escalated.
The next thing you know, the B-52s are coming into the act and we're going to do we're going to hit the power node.
We're going to go after the Air Force.
We're going to go after airfield.
In other words, we're going to by the time we were done, we were going to be flying with somebody said to me, a wonderful line, it's going to be the equivalent of flying close their support for Al-Nusra.
You know, bomb and make it possible for a jihadist or Salafist group, Wahhabi, to get in into power.
Are you kidding me?
The Israelis would go nuts.
So would the Iranians.
My own guess is Obama was just as happy to hear it.
I don't know that.
He talked big.
So did Kerry.
But they certainly took the deal that was always on the table with the Russians.
That deal was always on the table for unilateral disarmament.
The Russians, the Russians or the Americans, I don't know which one.
Maybe both.
We talked about this a year earlier, the unilateral disarmament.
We didn't do it.
We weren't interested then.
But we sure were interested after the visit by the Joint Chiefs.
So I, you know, I don't look at Twitter, Scott, so I don't know what, you know, my kids forbid me to tweet.
Now, now, I think it's already pretty widely reported in The Telegraph and in the London Sunday Times and other places about this rat line of weapons from Libya to Syria.
Well, not the fact that it was in there was an annex report to the not for the fact that it was a covert CIA operation that has not been reported.
Right.
Oh, well, and the secret annex report to the you're talking about to the Senate report that that correct.
I don't believe has been reported.
And also that it was not briefed to Congress.
Those are all things.
Right.
But go ahead.
Liaison.
Yeah.
Now, what I'm wondering is you're saying the New York Times also reported two years ago that the CIA was in Turkey moving arms again, not in the context that I had, but certainly could be 40.
Right.
Yeah.
And the Sunday Times had a thing about a ship that they were fighting over the weapons in it and all that.
Right.
So what you're saying here is that after Ambassador Stevens was killed on September 11, 2012, that the CIA called off their part of the gun running scam.
And at that point, that was when Erdogan decided that he had to do something to to ramp this thing up to because he was basically being left high and dry.
Obama had said Assad must go.
And I guess had at least implicitly promised the Turks he was going to see that through.
And then he was changing his mind about that.
So that was, I think you're saying why Turkey decided to do this.
Scott, what you say is right, but I don't have Erdogan in there.
I just know that after it happened.
And I think the red line kept on going for reasons I don't know that Erdogan wanted to keep on going.
It included money from Erdogan and the Saudis and the Qataris.
We were we were basically nominally running it with the cover was it was covered by a British Australian group of our companies.
So we could call it liaison.
We didn't have to tell Congress about it.
No, we didn't brief Congress on this operation, although you could you could argue we should have.
And so it's perfectly logical that the Turkish government was very upset and Erdogan was upset.
But I just don't know it in terms of the red line.
Well, I mean, but you're saying that this is when the Americans kind of quit.
This is what motivated Erdogan to go ahead and, you know, cooperate, work with the Al-Nusra Front in waging this false flag attack.
There's a lot of reason to think he was much more involved with them than we thought all along, because he is a little more fundamental than most people realize.
He's gone quite a bit to the fundamental side in the last 10 years he's been in office and which has been a source of enormous problem there inside.
You know, he's arrested many officers and he's in a fight with his arch rival, Gulen, who lives here over the fact that he's moved the country more towards away from being secular.
Turkey always was a wonderfully religious state that was secular, was privately Muslim, always Muslim, but secular.
And he's moving it away, getting more religious.
And so I think there's a wonderful couple of articles in The Wall Street Journal about the head of intelligence and a guy named Fidan Hakeem, who is pretty very close to the jihadists there in Syria.
And so it's certainly a complicated relationship.
I can only do one more, Scott, because I got to be somewhere at four o'clock.
OK, right.
Yeah.
I'm sorry for keeping you over here.
No, no.
Don't be silly.
I enjoy talking to you, always.
OK, great.
Well, I guess if you could, just nail down for us your best evidence that it was really the Turks who were behind this attack.
Well, I don't think I, you know, all I can tell you is that there are elements in the American intelligence community who all along worried about what was going on, all along didn't think the White House had a good case, all along were worried that they knew Syria, Turkey was deeply involved in supplying.
The best guess you have is precisely what Turkey did.
Nobody's saying we know Turkey.
Turkey wasn't involved in throwing gas on the 21st of August.
But Turkey and its army, not its army, its MIT, its intelligence service, its paramilitary group, the police unit with some sort of paramilitary powers known as Denamiri, they were involved in trucking some of the supplies and chemicals out of Turkey into Aleppo, where the jihadists have their base, and generally helped train and look the other way as various al-Nusra groups were in Turkey trying to buy more of this stuff in large quantities of the precursor chemicals.
And so there was a direct Turkey role.
And we suspected as such, we don't think a Turkish soldier was there directing traffic or saying fire here.
That was done by the rebels.
But after the fact, as I write, we picked up an awful lot of noise, chatter out of Syria with a lot of breath-breathing, and we did it, we did it.
We finally did.
But the whole world believes, you know, they're enraged at Bashar Assad for doing this, and Obama's going to have to bomb now.
And it didn't happen.
But they wanted it to happen.
That's what I'm saying in the end, that they believe, many elements of the community believe that Turkey was deeply involved, even in the planning for this, but not necessarily involved in the actual operation.
All right, well, thank you so much for your time.
No problem, Scott.
Sure, appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
All right, everybody, that is the great Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, broke the story on the My Lai Massacre, of course, and author of Chain of Command, all about the Bush torture regime, and many more.
Here he is at the London Review of Books, the red line and the rat line.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
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Their latest project is offnow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to offnow.org, print out that model legislation, and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snowden has risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it.offnow.org.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
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