Seymour M.
Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
In 2011
Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US
Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta,
he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian
government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use
of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he
announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The
strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently
cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal
in a deal brokered by Russia .
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 the administration who were committed to enforcing the red
line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified
and potentially disastrous.
Obama’s
change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in
Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the
21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the
batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The
message that the case against Syria
wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The
British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were
already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and
missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the
Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute
caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his
cancelling the attack.
For months
there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence
community about the role in the war of Syria ’s
neighbours, especially Turkey .
Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a
jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel
groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US
intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who
believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack
inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’
The joint
chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the
Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British
intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some
rebel units in Syria
were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense
Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’
briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra
maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the
most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a
Defense Department consultant, US
intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons,
and has a video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.) The DIA paper went
on: ‘Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on
Syrian CW [chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its
own CW … Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us
to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the
future.’ The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’
it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of
kilograms, likely for the 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.’)
Last May,
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. The others, including the
ringleader, Haytham Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence
of 25 years, were released pending trial. In the meantime the Turkish press has
been rife with speculation that the Erdoğan administration has been covering up
the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last
summer, Aydin Sezgin , Turkey ’s
ambassador to Moscow ,
dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was
merely ‘anti-freeze’.
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 ‘ANF 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 CW efforts since 2004’.
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
told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas
attack, on 19 March 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.’
In the
months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official
told me, 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 shit fit
by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a
huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his
fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ 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.
The former
intelligence official said that many in the US national security establishment
had long been troubled by the president’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 we could carry out the threat. They
learned nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’
In the
aftermath of the 21 August 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 former intelligence
official told me. ‘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.
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 [2 September], a
massive assault to neutralise Assad,’ the former intelligence official said. So
it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden
on 31 August 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 unravelling. Within a few days of the 21 August attack, the former
intelligence official told me, 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’, the former intelligence official said.
‘We use data 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 we 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 the president’s red line.’ By 21 August,
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, the former intelligence official said: ‘We’re 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.
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 sceptical 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 .
Last 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 that ‘there’s a risk that this
conflict has become stalemated.’
Dempsey’s
initial view after 21 August 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, the former intelligence official said.
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 turnabout – the story the
press corps told – was that the president, 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. The former Defense Department official told me 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, the former intelligence official said, as a replay of George
W. Bush’s gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When it
became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, Congress, which had endorsed the
Iraqi war, and the White House both shared the blame and repeatedly cited
faulty intelligence. If the current Congress were to vote to endorse the
strike, the White House could again have it both ways – wallop 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 had telephoned
Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, ‘to talk through the options’. She
later told colleagues, according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the
president to put the bombing to a congressional vote.
Obama’s
move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not
going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made
it known that, unlike the authorisation 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 9 September, Kerry was still
talking about intervention: ‘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. ‘There is zero
tolerance at that level for the existence of error,’ the former intelligence
official said of the senior officials in the White House. ‘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 21 August.’)
*
The full
extent of US co-operation
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, authorised 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 DNI
spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United
States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone
is false.’)
In January,
the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local
militia in September 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. A highly
classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement
reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. 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
when it became known he 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 recognised exception in the law that
permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would
otherwise be owed a finding. (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,’ the former intelligence official,
who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’
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 2013 US intelligence learned that the
Turkish government – through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence
agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised 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 16 May 2013 at the
White House. At a later press conference Obama said that they had agreed that
Assad ‘needs 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 was still intact.
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. (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!’ and, the expert told me, ‘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.
The
programme 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 shoeboxes 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 programme, 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’d 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 we’re 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 21 August 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 official said, 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 21 August ‘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 21 August attacks 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,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas
attack in or near Damascus when the UN
inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus
on 18 August 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 – that
it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided
the training in producing the sarin and handling 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,’
the former intelligence official told me. ‘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.’
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.”’
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Don't go house with a nicely patient and a harmed relationship
simply because you didn't control your self.
Friday evening we had been guests at a banquet sponsored by the USO at the Resort Grand
Hyatt. There were long banners draped around the Corridor
that shown the patch of each army device that fought in Korea.
Doyle served with the 2nd Indianhead Division, which still
maintains troops at Camp Red Cloud, Korea.
Drink Mix - Money saver!! Toss in some solitary pack drink mixes and
conserve big. Beverages cost as much as food at the parks.
If you bring juice or lemonade solitary mixes, all you require
to do is get a cup of ice drinking water (free) and combine your
personal drink.
You can choose whichever answer makes the most sense
to you. But I hope these business classes I've discovered from wearing
a nametag will assist you make your mark and do some thing unforgettable!