Sy Hersh on Joint Chiefs intelligence sharing with Russia to aid Assad

As we struggle with the dissonance of our war policy in Syria, I think this 2016 article by Seymour Hersh is clarifying. He states that in 2013 the Joint Chiefs shared intelligence with Germany and Russia with the direct purpose of assisting Assad's government to destroy extremist opposition and ISIS. Hersh clarifies the CIA arming of jihadists, the DIA efforts to speak truth to power, the role of Russia, and he quotes Michael Flynn and Tulsi Gabbard.

At the link, you must scroll down to the title of Hersh's article to begin reading it. Here are some excerpts:

https://geopolitics.co/2015/12/22/dempseys-pentagon-aided-assad-with-mil...

London Review of Books Vol. 38 No. 1 · 7 January 2016
Military to Military: US intelligence sharing in the Syrian war
Seymour M. Hersh

Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.

… The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria… The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

… ‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists… So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared.

… General Dempsey and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out. He wouldn’t shut up.’ Flynn told me his problems went beyond Syria. ‘I was shaking things up at the DIA – and not just moving deckchairs on the Titanic. It was radical reform. I felt that the civilian leadership did not want to hear the truth. I suffered for it, but I’m OK with that.’ In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Flynn was blunt about Russia’s entry into the Syrian war: ‘We have to work constructively with Russia. Whether we like it or not, Russia made a decision to be there and to act militarily. They are there, and this has dramatically changed the dynamic. So you can’t say Russia is bad; they have to go home. It’s not going to happen. Get real.’

Few in the US Congress share this view. One exception is Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii and member of the House Armed Services Committee who, as a major in the Army National Guard, served two tours in the Middle East. In an interview on CNN in October she said: ‘The US and the CIA should stop this illegal and counterproductive war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad and should stay focused on fighting against … the Islamic extremist groups.’...

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Amanda Matthews's picture

single dream and it's hard to figure out whether Obama believes this dangerous bullshit or if, as with most everything else (like letting Wall Street bankers walk), he was simply willing to go along with (and front for anyone) who could feather his nest and make him a very very rich man.

Wes Clark and the neocon dream

In October, 2007, Gen. Wesley Clark gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco (seven-minute excerpt in the video below) in which he denounced what he called “a policy coup” engineered by neocons in the wake of 9/11. After recounting how a Pentagon source had told him weeks after 9/11 of the Pentagon’s plan to attack Iraq notwithstanding its non-involvement in 9/11, this is how Clark described the aspirations of the “coup” being plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and what he called “a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century”:

Six weeks later, I saw the same officer, and asked: “Why haven’t we attacked Iraq? Are we still going to attack Iraq?”

He said: “Sir, it’s worse than that. He said – he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk – he said: “I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran."t

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/26/wes_clark_and_the_neocon_dream/

Looking back over his 'illustrious' career IMO he was picked because 1) he was willing to do anything to further himself (see his history with the Pritzker family); and, 2) he was uniquely qualified to play a part that would be irresistible to all us idiot lefties who desperately wanted social chamge and the opposite of the vicious bastids in the bush** administration. But we got played. The first 'black' president was actually a guy who also had a white mother and was raised in his white BANKER grandmother's house. He never had to do without a fucking thing in his life. But he was MARKETED as the guy who was going to help the black community because he could relate to its suffering. He was going to help those dispossessed by Wall Street. He was going to end our wars. He was a progressive wet dream. That was a brilliant, albeit remarkably cynical, marketing campaign and it worked perfectly. But this guy was really chosen by TPTB because like the Clintons the only people he really cared about were the ones who could guarantee him and his a life of luxury after he was done playing his part.

He was the perfect 'ringer' to lead us to disaster for everyone but his patrons and himself.

-

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

@Amanda Matthews

How the hell did he pay for his Harvard education, and isn't it funny how all politicians retire rich.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Amanda Matthews's picture

@dkmich
with the ability to convince the public that they give a fuck about the Great Unwashed.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

Pluto's Republic's picture

@Amanda Matthews

That one civic action results in a complete psychological capitulation to the fake democracy. The more they have voted, the worse it has become.

“What better way to enslave a man than to give the vote and tell him he's free.” —Albert Camus

Who are the bad actors? The manipulators or the manipulated.

I propose that it is the people who vote that are the problem, because their surrender to the status quo of corruption puts tremendous power in the hands of the corruptors.

^^^^ Note: This is a topic that has never been discussed in the United States. Is that because it is unthinkable or because it is forbidden?

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out what you are not allowed to criticize." — Voltaire

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
k9disc's picture

Punahou and Kamehameha have some ridiculous Ivy League placement percentage. Like 95-98%, IIRC.

And Obama looks very local, not at all out of place for Hawaii. Haole kids have it much worse in the Islands than someone who looks like Obama.

@dkmich

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

gulfgal98's picture

@dkmich Obama is in this to get rich. He is the epitome of the revolving door.

He does not really care about the damage he does by being the front man for the neoiberal con job foisted upon the American people. While I originally did not see him as bloodthirsty as Hillary, he had no compunction about killing people once he started doing it. When he said he was good at killing people, I got a cold chill down my spine.

And yes, neoliberals and neoconservatives are two sides of the very same coin.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

OzoneTom's picture

@gulfgal98
"Neo-feudalist" covers them both.

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gulfgal98's picture

Glenn Greewald posted a link to an interview with Sy Hersh on Twitter this morning.

The link to the Alternet interview is at the bottom of the embed.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

@gulfgal98
Thank you for posting it. This part reinforces the point of Hersh's reporting on our military working with Russia to assist Assad to destroy the jihadist opposition:

http://www.alternet.org/media/seymour-hersh-syria-bombshell

... there was a very special mission. It was a secret mission, it was a mission to bomb a meeting of the jihadist headquarters in this town Khan Shaykhun... and the Russians told us about a serious meeting of the leadership there on the fourth and we had it early. It was a command-and-control for the region.

... Russia and Syria do a lot of bombing in that area. It has propane gas tanks, it has plastic canisters of cooking oil, it has fertilizer, it has insecticides—it’s a big farming area. We also assumed some weapons were stored there because it’s a big operational base for al-Nusra [Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate], so they expected some secondary explosion; they weren’t surprised to see a cloud arise.

It was a laser-guided bomb that the Russians supplied to Syria. We had the intelligence of a meeting and we planned for it, we planned for it days in advance. It was coordinated very carefully. Everybody: us, the UK, the NSA, the CIA—everybody knew there was going to be a meeting there. In fact Russia even contacted our intelligence people, our CIA through a liaison I guess (I don’t know how) that there was going to be a secret meeting and if we had an asset there, if there was somebody we owned at that meeting, get him out of there because it’s going to be hit.

So, not only is our military coordinating with the Russians against extremist forces, but Russia knows our CIA may have assets within the leadership of extremist forces. And CIA knows Russia knows.

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gulfgal98's picture

@Linda Wood of so many things in regard to our military adventures in the Middle East as well as the Russia narrative. This is probably why no mainstream US newspaper would print his latest piece. He had to publish it in a German paper instead.

This excerpt is from the Intercept interview by Jeremy Scahill of Sy Hersh in January of this year.

“The way they behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated. “They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done,” they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: “the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment.”

Hersh said many media outlets failed to provide context when reporting on the intelligence assessment made public in the waning days of the Obama administration that was purported to put to rest any doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Pluto's Republic's picture

@gulfgal98

…it abruptly transformed from an allegation to a foundational reality. Five days!

Interestingly, there was one profound moment in the rollout of this murderous plot against humanity and the American people, when everyone was caught with their pants down. For a few riveting weeks, it was on the verge of blowing sky high and exposing the lot of them. Due to the oddest circumstances, my attention was tightly focused on that very spot when it happened. It forever changed me.

More important, Sy Hersh saw it and he immersed himself to the point that he was exiled. Everything he has written since was born in that moment. It was the attack on Benghazi. Every single player was completely exposed, even the media. Think back on the agencies, the names, the time, the things that could not be said, the narratives, the 2012 election, the SoS Harpies, the incomprehensible investigations, the elected stooges and tools, the sex, the lies, the videotapes, and the aftermath.

If you were at Daily Kos, you were very nearly suffocated by psyops, polarization, and omission but you can deconstruct it. There is so much to see when you examine what was actually occurring in plain sight. There were things you were not supposed to see. It's so clear and surprising who was in the know at the time. At this point, they have become active collaborators. The current reality starts to make more sense.

It was a salient turning point in US political history and we are still being bombarded by such shrapnel as Hillary's email server and secondary explosions like the DNC hack.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
lotlizard's picture

@Pluto's Republic  
Including the makings for poison gas? Ultimately destined for Islamist fighters in Syria?

That was indeed a huge thing, very probably the number one thing, that press and public weren’t supposed to notice. Hence the hoopla and cacophony about all sorts of meaningless and irrelevant aspects of the events in Benghazi.

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Steven D's picture

Didn't you get the memo?

From the Nation:

Max Fisher, now at Vox, learned well during his apprenticeship under Marty Peretz at The New Republic. This week, he was among the first to try to smear Seymour Hersh’s piece in the London Review of Books, which argued that pretty much everything we were told about the killing of Osama bin Laden was a lie. Most importantly, Hersh’s report questions the claim that Washington learned of OBL’s whereabouts thanks to torture—a claim popularized in the film Zero Dark Thirty.

There’s a standard boiler plate now when it comes to going after Hersh, and all Fisher, in “The Many Problems with Seymour Hersh’s Osama bin Laden Conspiracy Theory,” did was fill out the form: establish Hersh’s “legendary” status (which Fisher does in the first sentence); invoke his reporting in My Lai and Abu Ghraib; then say that a number of Hersh’s recent stories—such as his 2012 New Yorker piece that the United States was training Iranian terrorists in Nevada—have been “unsubstantiated” (of course, other reporters never “substantiated” Hersh’s claim that Henry Kissinger was directly involved in organizing the cover-up of the fire-bombing of Cambodia for years—but that claim was true); question Hersh’s sources; and then, finally, suggest that Hersh has gone “off the rails” to embrace “conspiracy theories.”

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

detroitmechworks's picture

@Steven D in an ascent the air force would find incredible.

Being branded as a conspiracy theorist by the msm is like getting a on the record confession these days. With notarized documents.

To paraphrase George carlin, I don't believe any thing the government or media tell me.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

gulfgal98's picture

@Steven D If any investigative reporter has credibility, it is Sy Hersh. I am assuming you are snarking, Steven D. Smile

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Steven D's picture

@gulfgal98 @gulfgal98 The American msm won't touch Sy Hersh now because he is criticizing a Democrat. Remember when Bush was in office? The New Yorker published everything he wrote.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

gulfgal98's picture

@Steven D Truth tellers do not have an allegiance to the duopoly, but only to the truth. Truth tellers should be held in the highest regard, but usually they are the ones who are smeared. It is difficult to smear someone who has been proven to be right over the years like Sy Hersh, so they just ignore him instead.

I think many of us here are truth tellers, like you, Steven D. One of my hopes for this site has been to adhere first to the truth. We may not always know what is the truth in real time, but we continue to search for it.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

@gulfgal98

all we got.

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CB's picture

The only thing that allows the US to spend trillions of dollars on its war machine is the fact that the US$ is the world's reserve currency. Up to now, the US can simply print whatever money it requires on its massive military to ensure it remains the world hegemon. These days are coming to an end.

The questions is, will be with a whimper or with a bang.

America's Death Throes

China and Russia have already ditched the US dollar in their vast energy trade. Now China is leveraging Saudi Arabia to also abandon the greenback for oil sales. No wonder, it seems, that US policies are increasingly lashing out.

US global power depends on its presumed economic prowess and military force. With its economy in long-term decline, precipitated by the teetering dollar, the US rulers are relying increasingly on militarism to project power. That tendency is pushing the world to war.

The challenge is to somehow steer the American military monster into a safe berth without eliciting a world war.

The US decline is of historic proportions – on par with the demise of other past empires – and it stems from the looming collapse of the petrodollar system, which has given the US unprecedented privileges over the past decades since the Second World War
...
The emergence of a multipolar world seems not only inevitable. It is desirable in terms of establishing a more democratic global order. A unipolar world as seen under US hegemony is a formula for tyranny and lawlessness.

The good news is that US hegemony is crumbling. The demise of the petrodollar is the telltale sign of another empire sunsetting. But that transition to a more reasonable and sustainable world order is akin to negotiating a way out of a minefield.

Fortunately, Russia and China may have sufficient military power to deter the desperate, waning American empire from trying to incite catastrophic war. However, death throes are seldom rational events.

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