12/22/15 – Seymour Hersh – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Introducing Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, author of Chain of Command about the torture regime in the Bush Jr. administration.
And this one is in the London Review of Books, Military to Military, Seymour Hersh on intelligence sharing in the Syrian war.
So there's been a DIA report that came out from Judicial Watch, and it's been written up by Brad Hoff, and it's been talked about by Michael Flynn.
But I wasn't sure in reading your article whether the DIA report that you're referring to is an entire new report.
It's certainly a less redacted one than the one we've all seen.
Is that right?
You know, one doesn't want to chat too much about, you know, this is the government that prosecutes people.
But no, actually, the DIA report is the one that everybody has seen, actually was, without trying to diminish it, it was a lesser animal.
It wasn't, I asked about that when it first became known, and it was, although it said a lot of good things, it didn't have the gravamen of the kind of information I'm talking about now.
What I was writing about was basically a, you know, sort of where are we now assessment in this whole operation against Syria.
That was all sources, and it involved human intelligence, and satellite intelligence, and intercept intelligence.
And it also was done in conjunction with a study done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff have their own personal private staff that, you know, this is a high level bunch of guys who work directly for the Joint Chiefs.
And this is a study done, just, you know, that the study you're referring to was dealt quite a bit with the moderates versus other issues.
This was a broader study.
And I'm not suggesting I have it, I don't even begin to suggest that, I just know about it.
And what I did write in the article was that it said the assessment had three major findings, one of which was that you're not going to get anywhere if you depose Assad, that can't happen before, you know, certainly after the Islamic State is defeated, which it could be.
Once it's defeated, then, and the country is stabilized, then most certainly Sadat has, Assad has agreed to this, that there will be a a national election monitored and etc, etc.
And I think it's safe to say he probably is going to be convinced he could win it, you know, who knows what's going to happen afterwards.
But the idea that you're going to depose him now before you reach a settlement, while this war is still going on, it's going to lead to another, you know, another Libya.
When we got rid of Gaddafi, look what happened.
So the assessment that the idea of getting rid of him, that he must go regime change, the government, the White House, and John Kerry, the Secretary of State have come off that a little bit.
But if you really read them carefully, even now they say, well, we're not demanding, just last week, Kerry said, we're not demanding regime change.
But we don't think he can preside over any negotiations that are serious to end the crisis, or to get a ceasefire, which is basically saying the same thing, that he's got to go.
The second major thing that this study said, was that Turkey, the government of Erdogan, is a big problem, a major problem, because he's funneling arms, and he's funneling men, some come from Qatar, some are even Uyghurs, the Chinese dissidents that roll from that western province, where the Uyghurs are in dominant, and under great pressure, too, from the Russians, or the Chinese, rather, who are quite brutal in their repression.
But they come and they leave China, and they get to Kazakhstan, and they get into Turkey, and from Turkey, they get into Syria.
That's a mess.
The open border is a mess.
And the third component is the whole question of, you know, are there moderates, or are there not moderates?
And, you know, the assessment was very clear, that this is an illusion, that whatever groups that aren't as radical, as extreme, as the Islamic State or al-Nusra, have no alternative but to trade arms, either trade or sell, or have them forced to be taken from them.
So whatever arms we give to the alleged moderate, they become, it becomes irrelevant.
And by the way, yesterday in the New York Times, J.C. Chivas, a very good journalist there, wrote a long, long piece on one Islamic State leader, a pretty hardline guy, who's, as you saw, if you read the piece, it ran three pages, two full pages, or almost two pages.
It was clear that, you know, his motivation is, besides a lust for killing, is money.
The Islamic State gave him money.
He's not a dyed-in-the-wool religious ideologue.
So, you know, there's a lot that we don't understand about the Islamic State.
But one thing is clear, they basically control the opposition.
All right.
Now, what you wrote in here was that the Joint Chiefs, they decided that they could be subtly insubordinate here by sort of sticking with the previous policy that, hey, al-Nusra, that's al-Qaeda, they're the enemy, right?
So let's just continue on our policy of working with other countries in the region against them.
And we'll sort of pretend to not recognize, I guess, that we're directly contravening Obama's policy, which is apparently to deliberately support or at least make the space for the rise of al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Syria.
Oh, I'm not sure that's their policy.
I know a lot of people think so.
But I don't buy that at all.
I think the administration just blunders.
I think there's no question early on, in 2012, when the CIA began the supplying of arms, yes, they were supplying arms to the more radical groups.
I think there was a tremendous amount of stupidity, negative thought.
But I think at this point, the notion that we're directly supporting ISIS, I know people have written this, and people I respect have written it, but I just disagree.
Well, I didn't exactly say that.
But anyway, well, but that's it.
That's the gist.
You get that there's still some this idea that there's no question that at some point in our career, the United States, are you kidding?
Certainly supported, but people who became the extreme fundamentalists, beginning with the war in Afghanistan in 1979, and all during the 80s.
Well, and this is your article from 2007.
It's called The Redirection, where they said, oops, we fought for Iran in Iraq War Two.
So now we need to redirect toward the Saudis and their allies, specifically in Syria, right?
I think that's absolutely true.
There's no question that we were Muslim Brotherhood, for example, we supported that was in 07, 08.
I did write that article.
And that's one of those articles that's been reprinted.
I don't know how many 10s of 1000s of times, because it did say something significant of the Sunni Shia war.
Yes.
But that was then and this is now I don't think in the last year, there's been, you know, I even though God knows, there's still arms that we give to what we call the moderates.
And we now know, we should know that the moderates are under tremendous cold, under tremendous pressure to either sell or forcibly have them taken away by the more extreme groups.
I don't think the idea of a moderate existing is very viable.
But you know, the other thing you said is, when you describe what the CIA, what the Joint Chiefs are thinking, I don't know what they were thinking, I can just tell you, the reasoning was, in terms of deciding the supply information to is that we weren't going to talk to Bashar Assad, but the Germans were there.
We knew the Germans were working with Assad.
They believe that was very important for a lot of reasons.
One reason Germany has 6 million Muslims in their country, they didn't want Syria to suddenly become a home, a beacon for, you know, medical Islam, they didn't know how that would impact on their country, on their the Muslims in their country, whether that would make them more extreme or more dangerous.
You know, the sort of the internal problem we have here with our the over, you know, the exaggerated fear of terrorism.
So that was an issue.
We also know that the Russians with whom we've had a very good military to military relationship.
Since the end of the Russian Federation, the end of the the Soviet Union, we maintain close ties, the Russians were talking to the Israelis who were talking to Assad.
So the Germany wanted some intelligence.
So the Joint Chiefs just began to give Germany military to military, answer their questions.
And that's the way they looked at it.
That's the way they looked at it, they were simply helping an ally, military to military.
That's why the title of the piece is the same.
And they weren't necessarily directly contravening the President's policy.
I don't dispute what you said as being a practical sentence.
I'm just telling you how it was phrased in the article I wrote.
Right.
All right.
And now, so it's interesting to that, you say that they're trying to build some confidence with Assad.
And he said, well, get rid of Bandar for me.
They said, well, we can't do that.
But how about this?
They shut down the Libya arms rat line.
Is that right?
Well, there are a couple of things.
I just just to make it clear, what happened is, their question was, you know, the question that that was that was posed is Assad clearly knew, obviously, the Germans knew because he was suddenly getting very good intelligence on where Al Nusra and where the what was now ISIS were staging and what they plan to do, even in anticipation of some of the moves, we have some interesting intelligence we can get.
And obviously, the question he had is, as I was told, was, do I trust the Americans?
And one way that it was determined, the rhetorical question was, what can we do to show you show you love?
And the answer was, this is all done indirectly was to bring me the head of Bandar.
Prince Bandar was the Saudi, a longtime Saudi ambassador here, longtime supporter of Wahhabism and Salafism, the more radical sects of the Muslim sects.
And certainly, even before the insurgency began in Syria, in March of 2011, the Syrians knew that the Saudis were financing of pouring guns and arms into Homs, which is a city always known for its closeness to the Muslim Brotherhood, who are the big opposition to the Assad regime, Assad government.
So it's not as if it was directly as that direct.
And what was the other thing you said about?
Oh, that.
So they decided that what they would do instead would be as a show of good faith, they would shut down the arms coming in from Libya.
You know, that's interesting.
It's not shut down.
What happened is the arms were coming in.
It was the rat line that I actually I wrote about in the London Review a year ago, more than a year ago, the rat line from, you know, we, here we are, what a lesson.
You think we'd learn from history, we knock out Qaddafi and the country goes crazy.
It's completely chaotic.
And the Islamic State, etc, has much more of a of a perch than it ever did before.
While Qaddafi was alive, he was, in the end, he was working with us and very, of trying to be secular.
You know, don't ask me why we always manage to overthrow secular people, you know, Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi and and now going after Assad.
These are three guys that we don't like very much, but they happen to have one thing in common with us is that they they don't like they they don't like religious fanaticism.
Anyway, what they did is, is they simply you couldn't stop the flow of the rat line going because they were, it was a systematic flow from Benghazi.
And that's what Ambassador Stevens, the one who was killed was involved in that I read a little bit about that.
And what you could do is, is instead of sending high quality weapons, you could perhaps divert some of the shipments and begin to ship junk, you know, Korean war vintage stuff.
And that's what we did.
That's what the army, the Joint Chiefs arranged to have some shipments and not be first rate stuff.
They didn't sabotage it, they didn't end it, but the shipments were of lesser quality.
All right.
And now you say one of the conditions that the chiefs had, there are a few conditions, including talk with Israel about Golan, if you want to get into that.
But I was really curious about the thing where they said, we want you to bring in Russian military advisors.
What was the thinking behind that?
Well, the Russians have always been very close to the Syrians.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But why would the chiefs want Assad to rely on them more?
What I said was the it was the policy they were against was that Russia shouldn't have no contact.
That didn't mean we were necessarily egging on Russia to do it.
It just mean that the notion that Russia can't play a role struck us as silly.
I probably could have, you know, the fact that he's had Russian advisors forever.
The Russians, that's probably an inartful sentence.
It's less than complete.
But I will tell you, he's had Russian advisors for decades.
Sure.
He's loaned them money, sold them arms.
I think the way to put it is that the administration was saying, you know, we don't like you to have Russians around.
We were saying that's an impossible situation.
You know, it was just saying that there's no way you're going to stop Syria from having Russian advisors.
And the Russians were very strong, for example, in Syria's chemical warfare program.
That's why they if you remember, I wrote a story saying that the Russians were among the first people to tell us we had it wrong about this, this era, because there's a long standing relationship.
Actually, at one point, it was the Russian chief of staff and General Dempsey, our chairman, we're friends.
At the same time, Peter, Peter Wall, who was the head of the British Defense Services, Peter Wall and the Russian, the Russian advisor, Jerem, I mangled the pronunciation, Jerem Simov, who was the chief Russian guy and Dempsey all knew each other, and had served, I guess, at various times together or in close proximity.
And so there was a relationship.
And it's hard for Americans sometimes.
You know, if you think about it, and in at one point, at the critical point in World War Two, we overlooked the fact that Stalin had been working with Hitler and Stalin signed a pact, an infamous pact with Hitler.
And we we joined Hitler, we joined Stalin, we supported Stalin when he fought Hitler.
I mean, we can't overlook, you know, there's things that Putin does and Russians do and Ukraine, which we deplore, etc.
But that doesn't mean you can't work elsewhere.
Anyway, well, and speaking of aligning with our enemies, I wanted to ask you about this meeting in Washington, where it's John Brennan called in, you say the intelligence chiefs from around the Middle East, and I guess, specifically, he's talking to the Saudis and the Qataris and so forth, and saying, please, just back, I don't know which mythical moderates, maybe Ahrar al-Sham, and not ISIS and Nusra.
And they completely ignored him and did whatever they wanted.
Anyway, it looks like they did.
Yes, that seemed to be what happened.
The problem is the meeting's ever been made public.
And, you know, but even the Shahrar al-Sham, you know, it's funny you mentioned that because there's a, I didn't put this in the story, because it's not so significant.
But if you remember, Ambassador Ford, the Robert Ford, who was the American ambassador to Syria, but you know, when the insurgency started in Syria, and how he became sort of notorious, I would say, certainly a little bit unprofessional with his open support for the opposition.
I remember he was, and then he left the Diplomatic Affairs in 2014, then became a leading critic of Obama's refusal to send more lethal weapons to the so-called moderates.
And among the people he thought that should be supported was Shahrar al-Sham.
And it's, I guess we call it in English, the Islamic Movement of Syria Free Men.
And that was an allegedly sort of a secular moderate group that we were pushing, Brendan was pushing then, as sort of a model group.
Well, it's so funny, but Ford was interviewed in October, on BBC Hard Talk, you know, that show, and he actually ran into an interviewer who knew a lot.
And when he started talking about, this is, you know, a radio, 25 minute radio show, when he started talking about the Shahrar al-Sham as the kind of group that would be welcome pluralism, the moderator, a guy named, a presenter, they call it, Steve Sacker, Stephen Sacker, I don't know him.
But he actually knew something.
He said, well, how could it be considered moderate?
Since that group has publicly endorsed Sharia law, Sharia law, it made clear that Christians and Alawites would not be welcome in the new Syria.
And Ford's answer was, well, I don't agree with all their policies.
There is Sharia law, and Sharia law, they don't have to be so firm.
And, but, you know, and then there was a long pause, and I kid you not, there's no, there's no transcript.
You had to go listen to the show to get it, the podcast.
He said, well, it's not a group I would ever want my daughter to marry into.
I love that line.
It's okay for everybody else in the world, but not his daughter.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and Andrew Coburn was just on the show about his new piece in Harper's and explained how Shahrar al-Sham is directly descendant from the Azzam group that really became Al Qaeda.
It's just another branch of Osama bin Laden's movement.
Coburn wrote a great piece.
I read it, although I, you know, I would take issue that we're still openly supporting ISIS.
I think indirectly you could argue we did.
I can see the argument for it, but I don't think we...
Well, I think he's talking more about Nusra there because the support for the army of conquest and Shahrar al-Sham when they fight side by side with Nusra all day, every day for the last four and a half years anyway.
Anyway, look, I gave you work to do.
You have to cut this, but you'll do it.
You'll figure it out.
All right.
Well, thanks a lot for coming back on the show.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, bye-bye.
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