When Seymour Hersh asked the question that no-one else seemed to think necessary – ‘Whose Sarin’ was it that killed people in a Damascus suburb last August? – he didn’t, or couldn’t provide a definitive answer.   Even though his elimination of the main – or only suspect – the Syrian government, should have caused a major rethink by all those in the West who had already judged and sentenced President Assad and the Syrian people to a massive military strike, it failed to have this effect on the journalists or their readers.  Although this was partly thanks to an apparent ‘blacklisting’ of his article, published in the London Review of Books, (which ironically even seemed to include the LRB letters pages), it is worth noting that considering the logical consequences of what Hersh had revealed was simply too challenging to the narrative of most Western corporate media and their indoctrinated audiences.

Now Hersh has finished his job, in a second article in the LRB, by answering the question he posed in the first; the answer is simple – ‘the sarin was ours’!  While ‘we’ might duck and weave and claim that we have no control over the behaviour of our allies in the confrontation with the ‘axis of Resistance’, and those allies will claim that they have no control over the jihadi groups who were ‘on the front line’, this defence will no longer pass, and Hersh presents plenty of evidence why.  The fact is that there are two sides in this conflict, and all of us on the Western side, whether governments, media or NGOs have been complicit in a war crime and a conspiracy to commit a massive and illegitimate assault on a sovereign nation. The fact that the Turkish government apparently played a central role in assisting and supplying the ‘rebel’ groups who carried out ‘the attack’ in Ghouta is no cause for comfort; the US and EU have long been aware of, and assisted Turkey in its coordinating role, particularly of hosting the ‘Syrian National Council’ which lives in Istanbul.

The main elements of Hersh’s second assault on Obama’s White House have been well detailed by several commentators already, but I’ll reiterate them here:

1. Samples obtained from Ghouta by Russian agents were analysed at Porton Down in the UK, and found to show Sarin contamination of a type not characteristic of Syrian government stocks. This evidence was communicated to the White House, and contributed to Obama’s sudden change of plan on the military strike on Syria.

2. Reliable intercepts of Turkish communications following the Ghouta attack reported celebration and ‘back-slapping’ at the success of the false-flag operation.

3. Repeated attempts had been made by Turkey to pull the US military into the conflict, and focussed on a Chemical Weapons strike following Obama’s declaration of a ‘red line’.

4. The history of CIA/MI6/Turkish collaboration in assisting the armed insurgency in Syria through SE Turkey was significant, and involved a ‘Rat-line’ operating through the US consulate in Benghazi which smuggled ex-Qadhafi weapons into Syria.

5. The ‘limited’ or ‘punitive’ strike which was mooted by Obama and Kerry was actually a serious deception. What was actually intended – and cautioned against by the Pentagon, was something like ‘Shock and Awe’ – a strike by multiple forces which would completely destroy Syria’s defences, as well as disrupt power and communications. Allegedly an initial list of targets drawn up by the Pentagon was rejected by the White House as ‘too soft’ – it was necessary to kill significant numbers of people to make an impact.

From early indications, and despite its almost unarguable case that the US was set to launch a devastating and lethal assault on an ‘innocent party’, based on alleged intelligence that it knew was false, Hersh’s second volley looks set to get no more publicity than the first. Yet the criminality of the Western and Gulf governments who cooked this up only continues to worsen. Not only is the US with its NATO allies engaged in a dangerous game of provocation over Ukraine which it has engineered to ‘get’ Russia, but it is doing so just as Turkey steps up its subversive drive against Syria – it looks a lot like collaboration to this conspiracy analyst.

The dramatic gains that the Syrian army has made against the insurgency, particularly on the Lebanese border, are now being partly countered by a big rush of fighters and new weapons over the Turkish border north of Lattakia, – a push which has been assisted with Turkish air support and collusion at the border crossing.  That the groups involved, Ahrar al Sham, and Al Nusra primarily, are also the groups chiefly responsible for massacres of Alawite villages in the same area just before last August’s chemical attack is no coiincidence – it appears that this ‘support’ has been going on for some time.  And the sources of the weapons are the same – Saudi Arabia and the US.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line