Didn't see a thread on it, the story broke about a week ago. It is Seymor Hersh, but some astounding claims nonetheless and I personally think the shoe seems to fit with the events as they've transpired in the Syria crisis. The source so far is only an anonymous ex-Joint Chief Of Staffs adviser.
Here's his writeup:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military
I'll do my best to summarize:
Hersh then talks on length on how the JCS passed on intelligence to Germany, Israel and Russia with the passive understanding the intelligence would be leaked to Assad's armed forces. Moving on:
Article then talks about how JCS underminded the CIA's efforts to ship arms to rebels knowing they were extremists. JCS apparently took control of the shipment and routed old, obsolete weapons instead:
On CIA's failed campaign to train moderate rebels:
Going to skip the whole writeup about US-Russia's alliance being tested by Assad, and Putin being at odds with Obama while heavily backing Assad. Moving on:
Kremlin and Putin on the fighters that America says are moderates:
On accusations of American MSM scrambling for anti-Putin hit pieces:
Hersh in the following paragraphs talks about China investing in rebuilding Syria and fighting extremists trying to establish the Islamist Uighur in Xinjiang and taking a generally pro-Assad stance in cooperating with Russia.
More in radicalism within JCS:
Cleaning the unit up, Obama now has more cooperative units:
Here's his writeup:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military
I'll do my best to summarize:
Barack Obamas 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 Pentagons Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administrations fixation on Assads primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasnt adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washingtons anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.
The militarys 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 Syrias 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 administrations 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 new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obamas Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. 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.
Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasnt doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic, Flynn told me. We understood Isiss long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria. The DIAs reporting, he said, got enormous pushback from the Obama administration. I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.
The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administrations policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assads got to go is fine, but if you follow that through therefore anyone is better. Its the anybody else is better issue that the JCS had with Obamas policy. The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obamas policy would have had a zero chance of success. 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.
Hersh then talks on length on how the JCS passed on intelligence to Germany, Israel and Russia with the passive understanding the intelligence would be leaked to Assad's armed forces. Moving on:
State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks show that the Bush administration tried to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an analysis of the vulnerabilities of the Assad government and listed methods that will improve the likelihood of opportunities for destabilisation. He recommended that Washington work with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to increase sectarian tension and focus on publicising Syrian efforts against extremist groups dissident Kurds and radical Sunni factions in a way that suggests weakness, signs of instability, and uncontrolled blowback; and that the isolation of Syria should be encouraged through US support of the National Salvation Front, led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president whose government-in-exile in Riyadh was sponsored by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood. Another 2006 cable showed that the embassy had spent $5 million financing dissidents who ran as independent candidates for the Peoples Assembly; the payments were kept up even after it became clear that Syrian intelligence knew what was going on. A 2010 cable warned that funding for a London-based television network run by a Syrian opposition group would be viewed by the Syrian government as a covert and hostile gesture toward the regime.
But there is also a parallel history of shadowy co-operation between Syria and the US during the same period. The two countries collaborated against al-Qaida, their common enemy. A longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command said that, after 9/11, Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while, in my view, we were churlish in return, and clumsy in our use of the gold he gave us. That quiet co-operation continued among some elements, even after the [Bush administrations] decision to vilify him. In 2002 Assad authorised Syrian intelligence to turn over hundreds of internal files on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year, Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the US Navys Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital al-Qaida informant.
It was this history of co-operation that made it seem possible in 2013 that Damascus would agree to the new indirect intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US. The Joint Chiefs let it be known that in return the US would require four things: Assad must restrain Hizbullah from attacking Israel; he must renew the stalled negotiations with Israel to reach a settlement on the Golan Heights; he must agree to accept Russian and other outside military advisers; and he must commit to holding open elections after the war with a wide range of factions included.
The Syrians told us that Assad would not make a decision unilaterally he needed to have support from his military and Alawite allies. Assads worry was that Israel would say yes and then not uphold its end of the bargain. A senior adviser to the Kremlin on Middle East affairs told me that in late 2012, after suffering a series of battlefield setbacks and military defections, Assad had approached Israel via a contact in Moscow and offered to reopen the talks on the Golan Heights. The Israelis had rejected the offer. They said, Assad is finished, the Russian official told me. Hes close to the end. He said the Turks had told Moscow the same thing.
Article then talks about how JCS underminded the CIA's efforts to ship arms to rebels knowing they were extremists. JCS apparently took control of the shipment and routed old, obsolete weapons instead:
We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to Erdoğan, the adviser said, and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadnt been seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could understand: We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.
On CIA's failed campaign to train moderate rebels:
The CIAs training camp was in Jordan and was controlled by a Syrian tribal group, the JCS adviser said. There was a suspicion that some of those who signed up for training were actually Syrian army regulars minus their uniforms. This had happened before, at the height of the Iraqi war, when hundreds of Shia militia members showed up at American training camps for new uniforms, weapons and a few days of training, and then disappeared into the desert. A separate training programme, set up by the Pentagon in Turkey, fared no better. The Pentagon acknowledged in September that only four or five of its recruits were still battling Islamic State; a few days later 70 of them defected to Jabhat al-Nusra immediately after crossing the border into Syria.
In January 2014, despairing at the lack of progress, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, summoned American and Sunni Arab intelligence chiefs from throughout the Middle East to a secret meeting in Washington, with the aim of persuading Saudi Arabia to stop supporting extremist fighters in Syria. The Saudis told us they were happy to listen, the JCS adviser said, so everyone sat around in Washington to hear Brennan tell them that they had to get on board with the so-called moderates. His message was that if everyone in the region stopped supporting al-Nusra and Isis their ammunition and weapons would dry up, and the moderates would win out. Brennans message was ignored by the Saudis, the adviser said, who went back home and increased their efforts with the extremists and asked us for more technical support. And we say OK, and so it turns out that we end up reinforcing the extremists.
Going to skip the whole writeup about US-Russia's alliance being tested by Assad, and Putin being at odds with Obama while heavily backing Assad. Moving on:
In a speech on 22 November, Obama declared that the principal targets of the Russian airstrikes have been the moderate opposition. Its a line that the administration along with most of the mainstream American media has rarely strayed from. The Russians insist that they are targeting all rebel groups that threaten Syrias stability including Islamic State. The Kremlin adviser on the Middle East explained in an interview that the first round of Russian airstrikes was aimed at bolstering security around a Russian airbase in Latakia, an Alawite stronghold. The strategic goal, he said, has been to establish a jihadist-free corridor from Damascus to Latakia and the Russian naval base at Tartus and then to shift the focus of bombing gradually to the south and east, with a greater concentration of bombing missions over IS-held territory. Russian strikes on IS targets in and near Raqqa were reported as early as the beginning of October; in November there were further strikes on IS positions near the historic city of Palmyra and in Idlib province, a bitterly contested stronghold on the Turkish border.
Russian incursions into Turkish airspace began soon after Putin authorised the bombings, and the Russian air force deployed electronic jamming systems that interfered with Turkish radar. The message being sent to the Turkish air force, the JCS adviser said, was: Were going to fly our fighter planes where we want and when we want and jam your radar. Do not fuck with us. Putin was letting the Turks know what they were up against. Russias aggression led to Turkish complaints and Russian denials, along with more aggressive border patrolling by the Turkish air force. There were no significant incidents until 24 November, when two Turkish F-16 fighters, apparently acting under more aggressive rules of engagement, shot down a Russian Su-24M jet that had crossed into Turkish airspace for no more than 17 seconds.
Kremlin and Putin on the fighters that America says are moderates:
The Kremlin adviser on the Middle East, like the Joint Chiefs and the DIA, dismisses the moderates who have Obamas support, seeing them as extremist Islamist groups that fight alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and IS (Theres no need to play with words and split terrorists into moderate and not moderate, Putin said in a speech on 22 October). The American generals see them as exhausted militias that have been forced to make an accommodation with Jabhat al-Nusra or IS in order to survive. At the end of 2014, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German journalist who was allowed to spend ten days touring IS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, told CNN that the IS leadership are all laughing about the Free Syrian Army. They dont take them for serious. They say: The best arms sellers we have are the FSA. If they get a good weapon, they sell it to us. They didnt take them for serious. They take for serious Assad. They take for serious, of course, the bombs. But they fear nothing, and FSA doesnt play a role.
On accusations of American MSM scrambling for anti-Putin hit pieces:
Putins bombing campaign provoked a series of anti-Russia articles in the American press. On 25 October, the New York Times reported, citing Obama administration officials, that Russian submarines and spy ships were aggressively operating near the undersea cables that carry much of the worlds internet traffic although, as the article went on to acknowledge, there was no evidence yet of any Russian attempt actually to interfere with that traffic. Ten days earlier the Times published a summary of Russian intrusions into its former Soviet satellite republics, and described the Russian bombing in Syria as being in some respects a return to the ambitious military moves of the Soviet past. The report did not note that the Assad administration had invited Russia to intervene, nor did it mention the US bombing raids inside Syria that had been underway since the previous September, without Syrias approval.
The four core elements of Obamas Syria policy remain intact today: an insistence that Assad must go; that no anti-IS coalition with Russia is possible; that Turkey is a steadfast ally in the war against terrorism; and that there really are significant moderate opposition forces for the US to support.
Hersh in the following paragraphs talks about China investing in rebuilding Syria and fighting extremists trying to establish the Islamist Uighur in Xinjiang and taking a generally pro-Assad stance in cooperating with Russia.
More in radicalism within JCS:
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 wouldnt 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 Im OK with that. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Flynn was blunt about Russias 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 cant say Russia is bad; they have to go home. Its not going to happen. Get real.
Cleaning the unit up, Obama now has more cooperative units:
The militarys indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempseys retirement in September. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, two months before assuming office. If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, Id have to point to Russia, Dunford said. If you look at their behaviour, its nothing short of alarming. In October, as chairman, Dunford dismissed the Russian bombing efforts in Syria, telling the same committee that Russia is not fighting IS. He added that America must work with Turkish partners to secure the northern border of Syria and do all we can to enable vetted Syrian opposition forces i.e. the moderates to fight the extremists.
Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdoğan.
