{"id":80114,"date":"2014-04-16T08:21:55","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T04:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/?p=80114"},"modified":"2014-04-16T08:21:55","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T04:21:55","slug":"erdogan-waves-finger-at-obama-during-heated-white-house-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/en\/?p=80114","title":{"rendered":"Erdogan Waves Finger at Obama During Heated White House Talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\u0540\u0561\u0580\u0578\u0582\u0569<\/a><\/p>\n

By Harut Sassounian<\/p>\n

Publisher, The California Courier<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pulitzer-prize winning American journalist Seymour Hersh, in a sensational article \u201cThe Red Line and the Rat Line,\u201d published in the London Review of Books, discloses that the Turkish government had secretly orchestrated the August 21, 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria, killing hundreds of civilians. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan had hoped that the Syrian regime would be blamed for that chemical attack, leading to a retaliatory US strike on Syria, since Pres. Obama had warned Syrian leaders that using chemical weapons against rebel fighters would cross a \u2018red line.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Erdogan\u2019s plot almost worked! In the aftermath of the sarin attack, Pres. Obama began planning a massive US strike on dozens of Syrian targets, even though British intelligence had informed the US joint chiefs of staff that samples of the sarin gas obtained from the site of the attack did not match the chemical weapons in Syria\u2019s possession. A former US intelligence official told Hersh that \u201cErdogan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups.\u201d Hersh revealed that the US Defense Intelligence Agency had issued \u201ca highly classified\u201d document on June 20, 2013, confirming that \u201cTurkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last May, several members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in Turkey with two kilograms of sarin. A Turkish court accused the group of planning to acquire other related materials to launch a chemical attack in Syria. Five of the arrestees were freed shortly, while the rest were released pending trial. They were not seen again!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After a special UN mission went to Syria to investigate two earlier chemical attacks in Spring 2013, a person with close knowledge of UN\u2019s activity told Hersh that \u201cthere was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on March 19 in Khan al-Assal, a village near Aleppo\u2026. It was clear that the rebels used the gas.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Just before launching the joint US, British, and French attack on Syria in September 2013, Pres. Obama suddenly decided to postpone the strike, using the excuse that he needed congressional approval. The real reason for the delay was the President\u2019s discovery that he was being set up by Turkey for an \u2018unjustified\u2019 attack on Syria, but did not want to publicly acknowledge his near blunder with potentially catastrophic consequences for the entire Middle East. Ironically, Russia\u2019s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was the one who rescued Pres. Obama from embarrassment by securing Syria\u2019s agreement to hand over its chemical stockpile, thus providing the President a cover for canceling his threatened attack.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Investigative journalist Hersh further revealed that the chemical weapons had reached the Syrian rebels through a CIA operation code named \u2018rat line\u2019 — a secret Turkish-US agreement in 2012 to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya to Syria through Turkey. After the terrorist attack on its consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the hub of this clandestine activity, the US pulled out of this covert arrangement, yet Turkey continued to supply Libyan weapons to the Syrian rebels.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By the end of 2012, as the rebels were losing the battle against the Assad regime, a former US intelligence official told Hersh that \u201cErdogan was pissed,\u201d leading him to concoct a scheme to have the rebels use sarin gas and falsely blame the Syrian government, thus instigating an attack by the United States on Syria.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To personally plead his case for a US attack on Syria to save the rebels from defeat, Turkey\u2019s Prime Minister flew to Washington. On May 16, 2013, Erdogan, along with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and head of intelligence Hakan Fidan, had a working dinner at the White House, with Pres. Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. Infuriated by Obama\u2019s unwillingness to take military action against Syria, Erdogan \u201cfucking waved his finger at the president inside the White House,\u201d Donilon recounted the shocking episode to a foreign policy expert who reported it to Hersh. \u201cThe American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left Erdogan exposed politically and militarily,\u201d Hersh explained. \u201cWithout US military support for the rebels, the former intelligence official said, \u2018Erdogan\u2019s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating and he thinks we\u2019re 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.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After the August \u00a02013 sarin attack near Damascus, a former intelligence official told Hersh: \u201cWe now know it was a covert action planned by Erdogan\u2019s people to push Obama over the red line\u2026. The deal was to do something spectacular\u2026. The sarin was supplied through Turkey.\u201d Another indication of Turkish officials\u2019 complicity was Hersh\u2019s report that phone calls intercepted by the US revealed their joy with the success of their orchestrated chemical attack!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hersh concludes his expos\u00e9 by relaying a most worrisome observation from a former US intelligence official: \u201cI asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdogan\u2019s continued support for the rebels, especially now that it\u2019s going so wrong, the answer was: \u2018We\u2019re screwed.\u2019 We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdogan, but Turkey is a special case. They are a NATO ally. The Turks don\u2019t trust the West. They can\u2019t live with us if we take any active role against Turkish interests. If we went public with what we know about Erdogan\u2019s role with the gas, it\u2019d be disastrous. The Turks would say: \u2018We hate you for telling us what we can and can\u2019t do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For almost a century, successive US governments have failed to understand a fundamental geostrategic truth — Turkey needs the US much more than the United States will ever need Turkey. There is indeed something terribly wrong when the tail wags the dog!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[Part 2 of last week\u2019s article on the Turkish deportation of Jewish settlers from Palestine will be published at a later date]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u0531\u0576\u056f\u0561\u056d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Harut Sassounian Publisher, The California Courier   Pulitzer-prize winning American journalist Seymour Hersh, in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":29295,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[221,224,140,143,212,137],"tags":[1929,5309],"class_list":["post-80114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editors-choice","category-news","category-region","category-usa","category-weekly-news","category-world","tag-erdogan","tag-obama","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}