Tang's DW

Turkey, Russia strike strategic Turkish Stream gas pipeline deal

Aren't they in a shooting war with each other? They're using proxies, but still.

Seymour Hersh has a new article on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Summary of key points:

• The Muslim Brotherhood's Al-Nusra group has had a sarin production program supported by Saudi and Turkish suppliers.
  • By the spring of 2013, Turkey's military intelligence and state police were directly involved in the Muslim Brotherhood's sarin production program.
  • The US Defense Intelligence Agency produced a report on al-Nusra's sarin production on June 20, 2013. An earlier Hersh report names DIA deputy director David R. Shedd as a recipient of the report.
    • The DIA firmly and clearly denies that this report exists.
      • Hersh quotes from the report.
  • The DIA produced a daily situational report on Syria titled "SYRUP" that used to include information on activities related to chemical weapons production.
    • According to "a former senior Defense Department official" White House chief of staff Denis McDonough "severely curtailed" the distribution of information on chemical warfare after reading a SYRUP report on the use of chemical weapons in March and April 2013.
• A "person with knowledge of the UN’s activities" reported that United Nations investigators found that Muslim Brotherhood forces were responsible for the the March 19 sarin attack near Aleppo (mentioned earlier), but were under a mandate not to assign blame and the news did not get out because it was not what their sponsors wanted to hear.
  • Two sources report that by the time of a May 2013 meeting with President Erdogan and Hakim Fidan, President Obama knew that a chemical weapons attack was a false flag and that Turkish intelligence was involved.
• British analysts at Porton Down found that the sarin used in the August 21 attack on al-Ghutah (mentioned earlier and earlier) did not match any sarin in Syrian stores.
  • President Obama had ordered a large-scale airstrike on Syria in retaliation for the attack, and he cancelled the order when the information came in from Porton Down. Britain and France had planned to participate in the airstrike.
  • "a former senior US intelligence official" claims to "know" that "some in the Turkish government" called for a false flag chemical weapons attack to push the US further into war against Syria.
  • A US intelligence report in late July or early August predicted that Turkey was likely to do something to instigate a US attack on Syria.
  • According to "the former intelligence official", "intercepts and other data related to the 21 August attacks" confirmed that Turkey was responsible for the attack.
    • These intercepts were blocked from reaching the White House.
• The US funneled arms to Muslim Brotherhood / al-Qaeda forces through Libya.
  • The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi includes a "highly classified" annex mentioning an agreement between Presidents Obama and Erdogan to arm MB/AQ forces in Syria.
  • Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar provided the funding.
  • "The operation was run by David Petraeus."
  • "The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation."
  • "The [Benghazi] consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms".
  • The same "former intelligence official" is the source of all of this information.

In my opinion, there is way too much reliance on one anonymous "former senior US intelligence official" but it all has an air of believability. There are also signs of counterintelligence problems with apparently multiple people shutting off the flow of information about Muslim Brotherhood sarin production.

I wonder if this guy from a few days ago got an advance copy of the Hersh report.

Edit: The National Security Council denies the story, calling the former intelligence official's claims "completely fabricated".

The Washington Free Beacon obtained emails showing media figures conspiring to smear Elliot Abrams for publicly opposing Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense. Members of the private mailing list included Atlantic magazine writer James Fallows; American Conservative magazine editor Scott McConnell; probable Saudi agent Chas Freeman, who is in good standing in this crowd; TruthOut board president Robert Naiman; and David Fenton, founder of the Fenton Communications public relations group.

Fenton worked for the Muslim Brotherhood's campaign to open an arms route to Gaza by pressuring the international community into forbidding anyone from inspecting the shipments; this was also known as the "Free Gaza flotilla". The Turkish group IHH was heavily involved in that campaign. From the book Alms for Jihad, authors J. Millard Burr and Robert Collins describe IHH as:

... founded in Istanbul in 1995 specifically to provide support for the Bosniaks [Izetbegovic's forces]. IHH raised immediate suspicions with Turkish authorities, and was eventually closed for a time in 1998 after investigators found bombs in its Turkish office.

Burr and Collins source this information to the US allegations in the case against Aldurahman Alamoudi, who appears to be the same person as Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who incidentally is the link between al-Qaeda and the Republican party (he shared an office with Grover Norquist). Burr and Collins also write about Al-Fatih Ali Hassanein, "a stalwart follower of Hasan al-Turabi" who "was able to maintain contact from Europe with Turabi, Bin Laden, and Shaykh Omar Abd al-Rahman in New York." On Izetbegovic's behalf, Hassanein founded the Third World Relief Agency which became "the principal humanitarian front for moving arms to Bosnia" [emphasis in Burr/Collins], and he was IHH's contact in Bosnia. In other words, al-Qaeda provided the guns, money, and men for Izetbegovic's war; IHH was founded to provide additional support for the war from Turkish sources; and Fenton provided propaganda support to an IHH project.

Fenton is also a big influence in the Democratic Party and has done work for the Huffington Post, MoveOn, People for the American Way, and other Democratic groups. It is a quite loose connection that demands further knowledge before any conclusion can be made on whether Fenton is guilty of anything. Fenton loudly quit the job after it was reported in the press, but it still is interesting that as one walks closer to the social circles Fenton inhabits, one is more likely to bump into fake peace activists who support terrorism and other wars of aggression. For example, J[ihad] Street was founded by a Fenton executive, and we see David Fenton on the same mailing list as the likes of Chas Freeman and Robert Naiman.

An additional matter of interest is that Fenton's involvement with IHH came on a contract with the state of Qatar, suggesting terrorist funding by a state that is supposed to be a US ally.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole in the sense that ingesting certain substances might help, some right-wing sources commenting on Fenton include World Net Daily, Discover the Networks, and the Capital Research Center.