Wednesday, December 16, 2015
A Blind
Eye Toward Turkey’s Crimes
The alleged ties between Turkish President
Erdogan and Islamist terrorists in Syria is an embarrassment for the Obama
administration and the U.S. news media, which would prefer to look the other
way rather than face up to the danger created by an out-of-control NATO
"ally"
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
(File photo)
Theoretically, it would be a great story for
the American press: an autocrat so obsessed with overthrowing the leader of a
neighboring country that he authorizes his intelligence services to collaborate
with terrorists in staging a lethal sarin attack to be blamed on his enemy and
thus trick major powers to launch punishing bombing raids against the enemy’s
military.
And, after that scheme failed to achieve the
desired intervention, the autocrat continues to have his intelligence services
aid terrorists inside the neighboring country by providing weapons
and safe transit for truck convoys carrying the terrorists’ oil to market.
The story gets juicier because the autocrat’s son allegedly shares in the oil
profits.
To make the story even more compelling, an
opposition leader braves the wrath of the autocrat by seeking to expose these
intelligence schemes, including the cover-up of key evidence. The autocrat’s
government then seeks to prosecute the critic for “treason.”
But the problem with this story, as far as
the American government and press are concerned, is that the autocratic
leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in charge of Turkey, a NATO
ally and his hated neighbor is the much demonized Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad. Major U.S. news outlets and political leaders also bought into the
sarin deception and simply can’t afford to admit that they once again misled
the American people on a matter of war.
The Official Story of the sarin attack – as
presented by Secretary of State John Kerry, Human Rights Watch and other
“respectable” sources – firmly laid the blame for the Aug. 21,
2013 atrocity killing hundreds of civilians outside Damascus on
Assad. That became a powerful “group think” across Official Washington.
Though a few independent media outlets,
including Consortiumnews.com, challenged the rush to judgment and noted the
lack of evidence regarding Assad’s guilt, those doubts were brushed aside. (In
an article on Aug. 30, 2013, I described the administration’s
“Government Assessment” blaming Assad as a “dodgy dossier,” which offered not a
single piece of verifiable proof.)
However, as with the “certainty” about Iraq’s
WMD a decade earlier, Every Important Person shared the Assad-did-it “group
think.” That meant — as far as Official Washington was concerned — that Assad
had crossed President Barack Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons.
A massive U.S. retaliatory bombing strike was considered just days away.
But Obama – at the last minute – veered away
from launching those military attacks, with Official Washington concluding that
Obama had shown “weakness” by not following through. What was virtually
unreported was that U.S. intelligence analysts had doubts about Assad’s guilt
and suspected a trap being laid by extremists.
Despite those internal questions, the U.S.
government and the compliant mainstream media publicly continued to push the
Assad-did-it propaganda line. In a formal address to the United Nations General
Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013, Obama declared, “It’s an insult to human reason and
to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the
regime carried out this attack.”
Later, a senior State Department official
tried to steer me toward the Assad-is-guilty assessment of a British blogger
then known as Moses Brown, a pseudonym for Eliot Higgins, who now runs an
outfit called Bellingcat which follows an effective business model by
reinforcing whatever the U.S. propaganda machine is churning out on a topic,
except having greater credibility by posing as a “citizen blogger.” [For
more on Higgins, see Consortiumnews.com’s “
The supposedly conclusive proof against Assad
came in a “vector analysis” developed by Human Rights Watch and The New York
Times – tracing the flight paths of two rockets back to a Syrian military base
northwest of Damascus. But that analysis collapsed when it became clear that only
one of the rockets carried sarin and its range was less than one-third the
distance between the army base and the point of impact. That meant the rocket
carrying the sarin appeared to have originated in rebel territory.
But the “group think” was resistant to all
empirical evidence. It was so powerful that even when the Turkish plot was
uncovered by legendary investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, his usual
publication, The New Yorker, refused to print it. Rebuffed in the United States
– the land of freedom of the press – Hersh had to take the story to the London
Review of Books to get it out in April 2014. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Was Turkey Behind Syria Sarin Attack?”]
The Easier Route
It remained easier for The New York Times,
The Washington Post and other premier news outlets to simply ignore the
compelling tale of possible Turkish complicity in a serious war crime. After
all, what would the American people think if – after the mainstream media had
failed to protect the country against the lies that led to the disastrous Iraq
War – the same star news sources had done something similar on Syria by failing
to ask tough questions?
It’s also now obvious that if Obama had
ordered a retaliatory bombing campaign against Assad in 2013, the likely
winners would have been the Islamic State and Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which
would have had the path cleared for their conquest of Damascus, creating a
humanitarian catastrophe even worse than the current one.
To confess to such incompetence or dishonesty
clearly had a big down-side. So, the “smart” play was to simply let the old
Assad-did-it narrative sit there as something that could still be cited
obliquely from time to time under the phrase “Assad gassed his own people” and
thus continue to justify the slogan: “Assad must go!”
But that imperative – not to admit another
major mistake – means that the major U.S. news media also must ignore the
courageous statements from Eren Erdem, a deputy of Turkey’s main opposition
Republican People’s Party (CHP), who has publicly accused the Erdogan
government of blocking an investigation into Turkey’s role in procuring the
sarin allegedly delivered to Al Qaeda-connected terrorists for use inside
Syria.
In statements before parliament and to
journalists, Erdem cited a derailed indictment that was begun by the General
Prosecutor’s Office in the southern Turkish city of Adana, with the criminal
case number 2013/120.
Erdem said the prosecutor’s office, using
technical surveillance, discovered that an Al Qaeda jihadist named Hayyam Kasap
acquired the sarin.
At the press conference, Erdem said, “Wiretapped phone conversations reveal
the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process
of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas.
However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case.
Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation
but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting
terrorism.”
Erdem said the released operatives were
allowed to cross the border into Syria and the criminal investigation was
halted.
Another CHP deputy, Ali Şeker, added that the
Turkish government misled the public by claiming Russia provided the sarin and
that “Assad killed his people with sarin and that requires a U.S. military intervention
in Syria.”
Erdem’s disclosures, which he repeated in a
recent interview with RT, the Russian network, prompted the Ankara Prosecutor’s Office
to open an investigation into Erdem for treason. Erdem defended himself, saying
the government’s actions regarding the sarin case besmirched Turkey’s
international reputation. He added that he also has been receiving death
threats.
“The paramilitary organization Ottoman
Hearths is sharing my address [on Twitter] and plans a raid [on my house]. I am
being targeted with death threats because I am patriotically opposed to
something that tramples on my country’s prestige,” Erdem said.
ISIS Oil Smuggling
Meanwhile, President Erdogan faces growing
allegations that he tolerated the Islamic State’s lucrative smuggling of oil
from wells in Syria through border crossings in Turkey. Those oil convoys were
bombed only last month when Russian President Vladimir Putin essentially
shamed President Obama into taking action against this important source of
Islamic State revenues.
Though Obama began his bombing campaign
against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria in summer 2014, the illicit oil
smuggling was spared interdiction for over a year as the U.S. government sought
cooperation from Erdogan, who recently acknowledged that the Islamic State and
other jihadist groups are using nearly 100 kilometers of Turkey’s border to
bring in recruits and supplies.
Earlier this month, Obama said he has had
“repeated conversations with President Erdogan about the need to close the
border between Turkey and Syria,” adding that “there’s about 98 kilometers that
are still used as a transit point for foreign fighters, ISIL [Islamic State]
shipping out fuel for sale that helps finance their terrorist activities.”
Russian officials expressed shock that
the Islamic State was allowed to continue operating an industrial-style
delivery system involving hundreds of trucks carrying oil into Turkey. Moscow
also accused Erdogan’s 34-year-old son, Bilal Erdogan, of profiting off the
Islamic State’s oil trade, an allegation that he denied.
The Russians say Bilal Erdogan is one of
three partners in the BMZ Group, a Turkish oil and shipping company that has
purchased oil from the Islamic State. The Malta Independent reported that BMZ purchased two oil
tanker ships from the Malta-based Oil Transportation & Shipping Services Co
Ltd, which is owned by Azerbaijani billionaire Mubariz Mansimov.
Another three oil tankers purchased by BMZ
were acquired from Palmali Shipping and Transportation Agency, which is also
owned by Mansimov and which shares the same Istanbul
address with Oil Transportation & Shipping Services, which is owned by
Mansimov’s Palmali Group, along with dozens of other companies set up in Malta.
The Russians further assert that Turkey’s
shoot-down of a Russian Su-24 bomber along the Syrian-Turkish border on Nov. 24
– which led to the murder of the pilot, by Turkish-backed rebels, as he
parachuted to the ground and to the death of a Russian marine on a rescue
operation – was motivated by Erdogan’s fury over the destruction of his son’s
Islamic State oil operation.
Erdogan has denied that charge, claiming the
shoot-down was simply a case of defending Turkish territory, although,
according to the Turkish account, the Russian plane strayed over a slice of
Turkish territory for only 17 seconds. The Russians dispute even that, calling
the attack a premeditated ambush.
President Obama and the mainstream U.S. press
sided with Turkey, displaying almost relish at the deaths of Russians in Syria
and also showing no sympathy for the Russian victims of an earlier terrorist
bombing of a tourist flight over Sinai in Egypt. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman
expressed the prevailing attitude of Official Washington by ridiculing anyone
who had praised Putin’s military intervention in Syria or who thought the
Russian president was “crazy like a fox,” Friedman wrote: “Some of us thought
he was just crazy.
“Well, two months later, let’s do the math:
So far, Putin’s Syrian adventure has resulted in a Russian civilian airliner
carrying 224 people being blown up, apparently by pro-ISIS militants in Sinai.
Turkey shot down a Russian bomber after it strayed into Turkish territory. And
then Syrian rebels killed one of the pilots as he parachuted to earth and one
of the Russian marines sent to rescue him.”
Taking Sides
The smug contempt that the mainstream U.S.
media routinely shows toward anything involving Russia or Putin may help
explain the cavalier disinterest in NATO member Turkey’s reckless behavior.
Though Turkey’s willful shoot-down of a Russian plane that was not threatening
Turkey could have precipitated a nuclear showdown between Russia and NATO,
criticism of Erdogan was muted at most.
Similarly, neither the Obama administration
nor the mainstream media wants to address the overwhelming evidence that Turkey
– along with other U.S. “allies” such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have been
aiding and abetting Sunni jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda and Islamic
State, for years. Instead, Official Washington plays along with the fiction
that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others are getting serious about combating
terrorism.
The contrary reality is occasionally blurted
out by a U.S. official or revealed when a U.S. intelligence report gets
leaked or declassified. For instance, in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton noted in a confidential diplomatic memo,
disclosed by Wikileaks, that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most
significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”
According to a Defense Intelligence
Agency report from August 2012, “AQI [Al Qaeda
in Iraq, which later morphed into the Islamic State] supported the Syrian
opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media. … AQI
declared its opposition of Assad’s government because it considered it a
sectarian regime targeting Sunnis.”
The DIA report added, “The salafist, the
Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in
Syria. … The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition.”
The DIA analysts already understood the risks
that AQI presented both to Syria and Iraq. The report included a stark warning
about the expansion of AQI, which was changing into the Islamic State. The
brutal armed movement was seeing its ranks swelled by the arrival of global
jihadists rallying to the black banner of Sunni militancy, intolerant of both
Westerners and “heretics” from Shiite and other non-Sunni branches of Islam.
The goal was to establish a “Salafist
principality in eastern Syria” where Islamic State’s caliphate is now located,
and that this is “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition” – i.e.
the West, Gulf states, and Turkey – “want in order to isolate the Syrian
regime,” the DIA report said.
In October 2014, Vice President Joe
Biden told students at Harvard’s Kennedy School
that “the Saudis, the emirates, etc. … were so determined to take down Assad
and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … [that] they poured hundreds of
millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into
anyone who would fight against Assad except the people who were being supplied
were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda.”
Despite these occasional bursts of honesty,
the U.S. government and the mainstream media have put their goal of having
another “regime change” – this time in Syria – and their contempt for Putin
ahead of any meaningful cooperation toward defeating the Islamic State and Al
Qaeda.
This ordering of priorities
further means there is no practical reason to revisit who was responsible for
the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack. If Assad’s government was innocent and
Ergogan’s government shared in the guilt, that would present a problem for
NATO, which would have to decide if Turkey had crossed a “red line” and
deserved being expelled from the military alliance.
But perhaps even more so, an admission that
the U.S. government and the U.S. news media had rushed to another incorrect
judgment in the Middle East – and that another war policy was driven by
propaganda rather than facts – could destroy what trust the American people
have left in those institutions. On a personal level, it might mean that the
pundits and the politicians who were wrong about Iraq’s WMD would have to
acknowledge that they had learned nothing from that disaster.
It might even renew calls for some of them –
the likes of The New York Times’ Friedman and The Washington Post’s editorial
page editor Fred Hiatt – to finally be held accountable for consistently
misinforming and misleading the American people.
So, at least for now — from a perspective of
self-interest — it makes more sense for the Obama administration
and major news outlets to ignore the developing story of a NATO ally’s
ties to terrorism, including an alleged connection to a grave war crime, the
sarin attack outside Damascus.
© 2015 Consortium News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email:
mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment