Seymour Hersh talking:
Gaddafi was a tame cat. We got to him in the Bush-Cheney years. If you remember the history, we had a lot of bad trouble. Bush and Cheney were—I think normally would be embarrassed, should have been embarrassed, by the lies they told and the mistakes they made—let’s put it that way—about the WMDs that the—Saddam did not have an ongoing nuclear weapons system, which was known to an awful lot of people before—before we took over Baghdad and discovered nothing. At that point—I think it was a year later, in 2004—suddenly, Gaddafi, after allegedly having caught—we caught a ship full of some dual-use goods, and we stopped a ship that was going to Tripoli with it. He suddenly announced that he was giving up—unilaterally going to give up all his chemical arsenal and his WMD, his nuclear plans or options. And it was a big victory at a very much needed time by the Bush and Cheney crowd, that was a victory that showed our policy is working right. Money was involved, the CIA, covert money. A lot of stuff was going on. As you know, I’ve been doing a book about Cheney for a long time. And I can tell you that it was a considerable amount of CIA activity involved to turn him around.
I don’t think—which is amazing—it’s clear to me that the president and Hillary, the secretary of state, did not know about this secret agreement made. It’s just amazing to me that one administration will leave—it’s one of the things I first learned from a friend who went to work—I think it was way back—maybe it was for Clinton. This friend got a job, a high-ranking job, in the government. The first thing he discovered, that all the files related to everything significant that had happened, all the agreements that had been made in his area—it was in the State Department—had been gone, had been cleaned out. Nothing was left. So, they were—you know, as I said, they were going after a guy that had been doing a lot of good work for us, believe it or not, horrible as he was. He was a horrible human being. Bad things happened inside that country to the people. But he was actively working with us on the al-Qaeda issue, and, you know, if the—I don’t believe al-Qaeda exists there. I think the al-Qaeda we talked about disappeared with bin Laden. There’s just copycats, and we like to call it al-Qaeda. But Sunni jihadists, Sunni Salafist and Wahhabi extremists are spreading all over, in part in response to what we did after 9/11. But that’s the story we all know. So, they didn’t really know what the hell had happened with Gaddafi. They took out a guy that didn’t need to go. And the French were pushing for it, and we went along. It looked good.
It’s a little bit like putting a couple hundred guys, and maybe a lot more that we don’t know about, into Syria now, and many more than that into Iraq, where the—God knows what’s going to happen in both places. It’s just—it’s done without consulting the Congress, which probably this Congress probably doesn’t want to be consulted, but that’s the—you know, the Constitution is not a nuisance, as many in the Republican Party, as Bush and Cheney, and now, in many areas, even Obama believes, it seems to be a nuisance. We don’t tell Congress anything. We don’t go and—we don’t tell the people anything. And the control—the control of the media that goes on now, the major media, is, I think, much more acute now. I can go days wondering, you know, why we don’t do more aggressive reporting on certain things.
it’s not about whether Bashar al-Assad is a good guy or a bad guy, but this whole business that goes on with “We know he used sarin.” The fact of the matter is, the president did not go to war because he was told not only—as I wrote about in the London Review, not only by the chairman, Dempsey, and—who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs—and, by the way, Dempsey, who retired last fall, would never—was always fighting the idea of putting special forces in. He was always against it. A very interesting chairman, very low-key, very bright. He left—the day after he left his job, he went to teach. He’s got a chair or something—an appointment at Duke University, where he got a master’s degree in fine arts. He’s actually a Yeats scholar. It’s hard to think of a general like that. He’s a pretty interesting guy. The new guy is in a different league, you know, and we’ve got a new secretary of defense, too. So it’s just, you know, “Katy, bar the door,” let’s just go do it.
I think the story that—I think what the president did with Bashar al-Assad on the sarin is almost like a blood lie, because we know now from the Jeff Goldberg long, long, long, long essay in The Atlantic magazine, that created so much news, Obama just talked openly to him—in some ways, very remarkably. But he also, in the middle of the article, which a lot of people did not read, so I’ve discovered, the president clearly—he was talking to nobody else, Goldberg was. All of a sudden, Goldberg writes that the—that General Clapper, the chief of—the head general in charge of all intelligence, the Office of National Intelligence, told the president very early after the sarin attack that it was not a slam dunk—a “slam dunk” being that famous phrase that George Tenet, the CIA director, used to tell President Bush that there were nuclear bombs there. And it’s a big significant word. It means you don’t have a case.
And as you know, as many know, I also wrote that Chairman Dempsey, on the day before the president decided not to bomb, also told the president that, based on information he had from his friends and his fellow—his colleague in—Sir Peter Wall, who was his—Peter, the chief general of England, had relayed that information to him, the samples we had. And so, what the president did is he said, well—what he’s told the American people is, “We got a good deal on this, because the Syrians suddenly agreed to give up their arsenal.” And that’s why it was—it wasn’t that we didn’t have the case. It’s that there was a concession made, and he’s glad he didn’t bomb, because look what happened: We got a good concession.
In fact, I don’t know why—you know, I give a lot of lectures to journalism schools and speak to groups all over the world every year, even in the Middle East, where there are a lot of people interested in investigative journalism. Anyway, the first thing I say to everybody is, you know, before you write, read. There’s a tremendous amount of information, A, that the Syrians were unhappy with the chemical arsenal. It was—Bashar al-Assad inherited from his father. It was considered useless. It was under constant attack by the rebels. There’s more than 20 nuclear depots—chemical depots, mostly with mustard gas, etc., and also nerve gas, the chemicals that make up nerve gas. One of them was taken in—above, in the province above Aleppo, Idlib, shortly after the rebel war, the civil war against him, began in 2011. He lost one of his arsenals. And the Russians were helping him.
And so, the issue for—with us, there was talks between Lavrov and Kerry, the two foreign ministers. And it was raised—it’s absolutely clear that a lot of discussion was raised about this when the president, two months before the sarin attack, which was in August of 2013—in June, there was a G20 conference, and Putin and—Putin and President Obama had a two-hour meeting, at which they discussed Syria a lot, nonproliferation, nuclear weapons, other weapons. And clearly, it came up then.
What was the problem? The problem was, Syria said, “We want to get rid of this junk. We don’t have the $1.2 billion,” which is the actual cost it took to get rid of it. The Russians kept on saying to us before this incident, before the sarin attack, the alleged sarin attack—they kept on saying, “Look, we’re losing—we’re not as rich as we used to be, because the oil prices are going down, in part because of American shale oil production around the world. And you share it with us.” And we said no. And that changed. On the night of the 30th or the 31st, the day before the raid, the president acceded to paying a great chunk of the cost of getting rid of the weapons. And that’s what happened.
He had other problems with bombing. The British Parliament voted down any participation. The French were ready to go. They were online, ready to take off. Their bombing was to take—when he said no, it was the next day that the bombing was supposed to begin. Congress also had told him. Nancy—we know this from something Nancy Pelosi said, then the House speaker. They were going to have hearings on this whole issue, after the bombing began. And General Dempsey, the one that I wrote about, who told them there was no there there when it came to proving it was—the sarin we found had no relationship to the sarin known to be in the arsenal. Dempsey told him he would testify honestly to Congress, too. He would say—he would raise the questions.
Now, you have to understand, I’m not saying I know what happened. I’m just saying, in the article I wrote then and saying now, we had a crime. Sarin was used. People died—not as many as we said, 1,400. That was just the number we estimated. Most of the medical—up to 350, 380 was the number. One is more than enough. But as—what we—the only villain we looked at, the only person we looked at, was the Syrian government, when the United States had had internal high-level CIA reports that al-Nusra and other—ISIS wasn’t there, but other extremist groups were getting the precursor chemicals needed to make sarin from the Turks and also from the Saudis.
Look, right now, 250 French tanks, I’ve been told, are headed for the war in Yemen, financed by the Saudis and by the UAE. And who’s delivering them? We are. We do. You know, it’s really strange. In any case, what happened, what I now know, is that we did supply a ship, a major Merchant Marine ship, that was parked out in the Mediterranean, that was involved—and we paid for this. Thirteen hundred and eight tons of stuff were trucked by the Syrians to the coast, moved to the ship, where they—it was a Merchant Marine ship called the Cape May, an American ship, that was—had two large containers that had been put into it, at great cost. It was done quickly. They decontaminated the stuff. And guess what happened when we had all of that stuff coming in, all of his sarin and all of his weapons, all of the rockets used to deliver weapons. They gave up their whole arsenal. We had a forensic analysis team there that concluded—this isn’t what you’re going to hear from the government, but it concluded then—this is almost six months later—that the DNA and the—of the material they got rid of did not match anything we know to be in the Syrian arsenal. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a rogue operation somewhere, but it sure changes the story for me.
The quick announcement that Bashar al-Assad did it is simply not true. And the president did not go forward, not because of an agreement; he went forward because he knew it was the wrong thing to do, and he also wouldn’t get backing necessarily from Congress. And he’s permitted that lie, this blood lie, to be kept on told. We keep on saying—he’s never stopped from saying that Bashar—that there’s—he’s never suggested there was a question about it. And this isn’t a brief for Bashar. It’s about what I—what we pay our presidents to do. We don’t tell them to spread, you know—or to not make it clear what the caveats are. That isn’t what we do, not in this kind of a world, when it’s so tense and there’s so much trouble in the Middle East anyway. And so, we’re driven by—we’re driven by instinctive Cold War hatred of Russia in much of our policy, and from a belief that Syria—Bashar has to go. I’ll tell you something. The talks in Geneva failed because the opposition there—and Bashar did go to the talks—they failed because the opposition said, whatever happens, he can’t run for election. And the reality is, and I know this—I know this—I know a lot of people in the international world who are not pro-Assad—it’s not about anybody being pro-Assad. The reality on the ground is, he would win an election, because most of the Sunnis see him as a much better alternative to the chaos that would exist if something like ISIS or al-Nusra or one of those crazy groups got in. And so, we have this story wrong.
There’s been a couple of studies done, in which they don’t—you know, everything that’s been said—you know, there’s something called the chemical warfare treaty. And there’s something called the—what is it? I wrote it down, because it’s the prohibition—it’s the prohibition of chemical weapons. There’s all these international groups, organization for the prohibition of weapons. And none of them have ever accused—all these great groups that have done all the investigations, they always said that the chemicals are there.
And I will tell you, I don’t like to write about highly classified stuff I’ve seen, but I have seen—I have seen documents, from the highest level, all sorts of documents, involving overhead, agent reports, Israeli intelligence, all of our friends, beginning in April and May of 2013, four months, three months before the accident—the incident in the use of—the alleged—the use of sarin—the actual use of sarin in—near Damascus, that was—caused so much trouble, where 1,400 were allegedly killed. We’ve been reporting for four months before that, and it went to the president. It went to the White House; I can’t say what the president reads. It certainly went to the—went to the DIA, to the CIA. And it said clearly, great concern about the fact that the Turks, the Turkish Gendarmerie, which is a sort of a special branch, sort of a paramilitary police force—this Gendarmerie, who are right now killing PKK like crazy in Turkey. Like crazy. It’s real massacres this guy Erdogan is doing, who’s one of the big problems of the area. He’s always supported the crazies—ISIS, etc. And we look the other way. I don’t know why we do, but we do. And also the Saudis were supplying.
Sarin is made by taking two chemicals and melding them. It’s really high dangerous. And what the Syrians do in their arsenal is they add—they put additives in it that make the whole—make the stuff less toxic and more reliable, easier to handle. But in the field, they just mix the stuff in, you know, a witch’s brew, like in Macbeth, I guess, the first scene. And they have the stuff. And we’ve known that. We’ve known that for four months before the incident in August of 2013.
And so, I don’t know who Higgins is. And all I know is that a group at MIT, headed by Ted Postol, who at one time he was a professor there for many years at MIT and also served years as the chief adviser on missilery and other stuff to the chairman—the head of the Navy—head of the Navy, the chief admiral running the Navy. He was an adviser there for many years. He knows what he’s doing. He’s written report after report rebuking what Mr. Higgins said. I haven’t actually looked at much of his stuff, Higgins.
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Seymour Hersh
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist in Washington, D.C. His new book is titled The Killing of Osama bin Laden.
— source democracynow.org