SPECIAL REPORT. Turkish sources: Erdogan behind "false flag" coup by Wayne Madsen Report

SPECIAL REPORT. Turkish sources: Erdogan behind "false flag" coup

by Wayne Madsen Report
WMR has been informed by Turkish and foreign intelligence sources inside Turkey that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan staged the July 15 military coup in order to determine what sections of the military would support it. Erdogan, who was never in any real danger of being overthrown by the small group of mid- and lower-ranking military officers who rallied to support the coup, will use the incident as a way to flush out supporters of exiled Turkish charismatic Islamic leader Fethulleh Gulen.

Turkish sources report that the coup was limited by Erdogan's design from the very start. Although the coup began as a classic military overthrow of a civilian government, with strategic points -- the two cross-Bosporus bridges, the Istanbul international airport, the state broadcast network TRT, and the General Staff headquarters in Ankara -- all being taken by the coup leaders, it was doomed to failure.

It is still a mystery how the coup leaders, who limited their actions to seizing a few but not all strategic centers, could shut down all social media in Turkey, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In fact, after Erdogan left his holiday hotel in Marmaris on the Aegean Sea, his plane was reportedly refused landing at Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport, which was in rebel hands. Erdogan's propaganda operation then began to put out false information that Erdogan, who was in the air on his presidential plane, was seeking asylum in Germany. WMR's sources report that Erdogan's plane never strayed far from Turkish airspace. Although major social media was shut down, Erdogan appeared on FaceTime from his iPhone on CNN Turk, which had not yet been seized by the rebel military forces.

If the coup had been a serious attempt, FaceTime would have been cut off and CNN Turk would have been seized at the same time that TRT was taken over. Also, the state-run Anadolu news agency continued to issue statements from Prime Minister Binali Yildirim claiming that the coup had been put down just after it started. An actual coup would have seen the news agency also shut down.

Erdogan instructed his supporters to take to the streets, in addition to seizing Ataturk airport from the pro-coup military forces. After Erdogan supporters took over the airport, Erdogan landed at the airport during the early morning hours of July 16 to be met by cheering crowds. Generating even more sympathy for himself, Erdogan claimed that his hotel in Marmaris was bombed after he left it for his plane. It would also be in Erdogan's interest to order the bombing of his massive presidential palace in Ankara, again, as a way to garner popular sympathy and support.

Erdogan also held a news conference in which he not only threatened Gulen but his host state of Pennsylvania: "I have a message for Pennsylvania: You have engaged in enough treason against this nation. If you dare, come back to your country." Erdogan substituted Pennsylvania for the name Gulen. However, it is clear that Erdogan, who is used to threatening political leaders in his own country, was referring to Pennsylvania politicians who support Gulen, including senators Bob Casey, a Democrat, and Pat Toomey, a Republican.

Gulen denied any involvement in the coup. Erdogan has issued an arrest warrant for Gulen and a request to the Obama administration to extradite the cleric to Turkey. An attempt by the U.S. Justice Department to pull Gulen's permanent residency status was forcibly opposed in the U.S. appellate court in Philadelphia by the Central Intelligence Agency. As WMR reported in 2008, "the appeals court ruled that Gulen was 'an alien of extraordinary ability,' a decision that saw approval of Gulen's residency status. Observers of the case suspect the CIA intervened with the court on Gulen's behalf."

Erdogan has already begun a purge of the military and intelligence services. Apparently, the police opted to side with Erdogan. Almost 2000 military officers and conscripts have been arrested by Erdogan's government and the president and Prime Minister Yildirim both stated that the coup participants will be dealt with harshly. Most of the coup participants were from the air force, Army armored units, and military police. It appears that in rounding up coup participants, Erdogan's government is involved in a fish net operation, using the coup as an excuse to also arrest Erdogan critics. The coup attempt was a standard "fly paper" operation, with Erdogan and his allies now seeing which officers attached themselves to the coup.


An actual professional coup would have shut down all social media, including Instagram and FaceTime.

Our sources in Turkey claim that the coup attempt was a false flag operation for a number of reasons:

• The coup attempt started out as a textbook overthrow but rapidly fell apart. Many in Turkey believe that if such a coup was a serious operation, it would not have dissipated so rapidly.
• After first claiming they had total control of Turkey, the coup leaders gave up with only token resistance.
• By closing all lanes on the cross-Bosporus bridges and not keeping one lane open so people could get home from work, the population grew angry at the "coup" and its "leaders."
• Erdogan's plane landed without incident. In an actual coup, his plane would have been surrounded by the military and he would have been placed under arrest. Or, if the presidential plane insisted on landing against the military's orders, it could have been shot down.
• Erdogan was met at the airport by a crowd waving brand new Turkish flags, the folds still visible. This is always a sign of George Soros's involvement in themed revolutions, with protesters always waving factory-fresh flags. Some Erdogan supporters were also seen waving brand new flags representing the Muslim separatist group of East Turkestan in western China, a group supported by Soros. Soros's Open Society Institute operates freely in Istanbul and Soros is on friendly terms with Erdogan.
• Erdogan's government ordered the imams to begin using the minarets to urge people into the streets. In an actual military coup, the minaret speaker systems would have been ordered to remain silent or power would have been cut off to the mosques. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) supporters were marching in the streets hand-in-hand with imams and other Muslim officials shouting "Allahu Akbar."
• The Pentagon claims it was surprised by the coup. However, U.S. military officers are attached as NATO liaison officers to the Turkish Defense Ministry and Turkish officers work inside the Pentagon. It is doubtful that such a coup could have been planned by a small group of Turkish officers without the Turkish General Staff and U.S. liaison officers knowing about it.
• Erdogan's government, on the morning after the coup attempt, ordered the sacking of 2,745 judges.

There were also three military attacks on the Turkish parliament in Ankara. It is very possible that these were carried out by pro-Erdogan military units. Erdogan has been trying to force through a new Constitution for Turkey that would confer even more powers on the president. Erdogan has also seized control of Gulen-owned media, including the newspaper Zaman and he recently suggested that Syrian refugees in Turkey, including a number of jihadists, be granted Turkish citizenship. These moves were met with hostility by Turkey's opposition parties in parliament. By ordering an attack on parliament, Erdogan was sending a not-so-subtle message to the opposition. In the wake of the coup, Erdogan has silenced the political opposition while having messages of support from U.S. president Barack Obama, German chancellor Angela Merkel, British prime minister Theresa May, and EU President Donald Tusk, among others.

In orchestrating the coup, Erdogan combined a bit of Adolf Hitler's strategy. Hitler ordered the burning of the Reichstag, blaming it on "Communists," in order to abrogate the German Weimar constitution and grant more powers to himself. By waiting to see who joined the false flag coup, Erdogan also borrowed a page from Hitler after the Operation Valkyrie attempt to kill the fuehrer in a remote control bombing. Hitler waited to address the nation until all the supporters of Valkyrie made themselves known. It was then that Hitler ordered their arrests and executions. Erdogan is now operating as Hitler did in 1944 from East Prussia. Erdogan is ordering the arrests of all those involved in or suspected to have been involved in the coup that was destined to fail. And that makes Erdogan infinitely more dangerous than any actual military junta that would have taken over Turkey to restore secular rule and steer the country away from Erdogan's delusion of Ottoman grandeur.

U.S. tries to drive wedge between Putin and Assad by Wayne Madsen

U.S. tries to drive wedge between Putin and Assad by Wayne Madsen
President Obama's policy of initiating "constructive engagement" with Russian President Vladimir Putin was prompted by advice given to the American president by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan. Obama has relied on the two for most of his guidance on Middle Eastern affairs. However, both Erdogan and Brennan are fierce critics of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Assad's government is highly skeptical of the actual reasons behind the Obama-Putin rapprochement, fearing that it is a ploy to convince Moscow to abandon its long time ally in Damascus.

Last November, Putin was virtually isolated at the G20 Summit in Brisbane and attendees lined up, one after another, to lambaste Putin over the retro-cession of Crimea back to Russia from Ukraine and Putin's support for eastern Ukrainian Russian-speaking rebels. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott even threatened to "shirt front" Putin, which is an Australian football term meaning chest bump, at the summit. One iconic photo from the summit showed Putin eating lunch alone at a table. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he told Putin, "l'll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: Get out of Ukraine!" Putin, disgusted with the childish behavior from the G20 leaders, including Obama, left Australia early to return home to Moscow.

However, at this year's G20 summit in Antalya, in Islamic State-friendly Turkey and not far from Syria, G20 leaders could not wait to sidle up to Putin. Gone were Abbott, who was ousted in an political party back benchers' coup by Malcolm Turnbull, and Harper, who was roundly defeated by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. Turnbull and Trudeau are friendlier to Russia than their predecessors.


Putin dining alone at the G20 Summit in Brisbane in November 2014.

Putin in negotiations with Obama at G20 in Antalya, Turkey. Obama national security adviser Susan Rice [back turned toward camera] and interpreter join discussion. Assad fears that Obama is trying to convince Putin to abandon Assad in favor of Turkish- and Saudi-controlled opposition forces.
There is solid evidence that there is a propaganda campaign designed to split Moscow from Damascus. Although it has been proven by Syrian Catholic Mother Superior Agnes Mariam and others that the CIA- and Saudi-backed Free Syrian Army launched the sarin gas attack against civilians in Ghouta in a "false flag" operation designed to pin blame on Assad, the same neoconservative and Israel Lobby meme of Assad "gassing his own people" is making its rounds again on the Zionist-controlled MSNBC and The Daily Beast. In addition, the neocons, upset with the G20's decision to work with Putin and Assad, has put forward a conspiracy theory making its rounds in the Zionist-owned media that Putin and Assad jointly created the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Consequently, as a result of the negotiations between Putin and Obama, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's recent Oval Office talks in Washington with Obama, Syria's government is concerned that there is a plan afoot by Washington, Moscow, and Jerusalem to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence, with Moscow being guaranteed port and pipeline access in Syria, Iraq, and a planned independent Kurdistan comprising Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria. Syria has activated its public relations resources in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, to advance the story that Putin has opted to work with Obama, Erdogan, and Netanyahu to redraw the borders of the Middle East, with Assad being the chief casualty.

Damascus is playing a trick of its own in putting forth the Russ-American secret "new Middle East" plan. Syria's interpretation of the plans for the redrawing of the Middle East map includes having Saudi Arabia split into three different nations: a Shi'a-dominated oil-rich Nejd in the east, an insulated Saudi rump state around Riyadh, and a Turkish-influenced Hejaz in the west, which would include the two Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The Syrian interpretation has resulted in the Saudis becoming alarmed at being shut out entirely from the Syrian and Kurdish negotiations and the specter of thousands of jihadis it has supported in Syria and Iraq heading to Saudi Arabia looking for revenge after their defeat on the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.

Assad and his government, however, should rest a bit easier, according to WMR's sources in Europe. Putin has no plans to abandon Assad, even though Moscow supports the plan for United Nations-brokered peace talks between Assad and the Syrian rebels, not including the Islamic State and its allies.

Russia remains suspicious of Obama's and CIA director Brennan's lack of enthusiasm for combating ISIL. The day before the Friday 13th ISIL attacks in Paris, Obama said that he favored merely "containing" ISIL in Syria and Iraq, not wiping it out. It is known that ISIL has received recruiting, financial, military, and intelligence support from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. In addition, the CIA, Mossad, the Israel Defense Force, and Turkish MIT intelligence has provided ISIL and its allies with weapons, ammunition, and logistics support in Syria and Iraq. Only after the Paris terrorist attacks did the U.S., belatedly, order its A10 attack planes to strike a convoy of 116 ISIL oil tanker trucks smuggling oil out of Syria. The U.S. had previously chose not to attack ISIL oil trucks. ISIL received much of its financial support from the sale of smuggled oil on the world's petroleum spot market.

Putin is acutely aware that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his government is quietly assuring, through Ukrainian nationalist leaders like Dmitry Korchinsky, that top ISIL commanders will be given asylum in Ukraine as long as they carry their war on against Russia in the Donbas region and Chechnya. Korchinsky, the leader of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian "Brotherhood," actively participated in the Maidan Square uprising against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych Korchinsky and his nationalist activists received support from the George Soros network, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt (both of whom are Jewish), the CIA, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Obama and the other members of the "Quint," Britain, the U.S., France, Germany, and Italy, said they had no plans to relax Western sanctions imposed against Russia over Ukraine. As long as Ukraine is prepared to welcome ISIL guerrillas to its soil to fight against Russia, Assad can rest easy that Putin will never sacrifice him in favor of the duplicitous interests of the United States and European Union.

THE ROVING EYE - A Caliph in a wilderness of mirrors By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE A Caliph in a wilderness of mirrors By Pepe Escobar I'm aiming at you, lover Cause killing you is killing myself  - Orson Welles (director), The Lady from Shanghai,1947 He's invincible. He beheads. He smuggles. He conquers. He's the ultimate jack-of-all-trades. No Tomahawk or Hellfire can touch him. He always gets what he wants; in Kobani; in Anbar province; with the House of Saud (which he wants to replace) trying to make Putin (who he wants to behead) suffer because of low oil prices. If this was a remake of Orson Welles's noir classic The Lady from Shanghai, in the mirror sequence the lawyer (American?) and the femme fatale (Shi'ite?) would also get killed; but The Caliph of Islamic State would survive as a larger than life Welles, free to roam, plunder and "give my love to the sunrise" - as in a Brave Caliphate World shining in "Syraq" over the ashes of the Sykes-Picot agreement. He's winning big in Iraq's Anbar province. The Caliph's goons are now closing in on - of all places - Abu Ghraib; Dubya, Dick and Rummy's former Torture Central. They are at a mere 12 kilometers away from Baghdad International. A shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile (or MANPAD) away from downing a passenger jet. Certainly not an Emirates flight - after all these are trusted sponsors. Hit, in Anbar province, is now Caliph territory. The police forces and the province's operational command have lost almost complete control of Ramadi. The Caliph now controls the crucial axis formed by Hit, Ramadi, Fallujah; Highway 1 between Baghdad and the Jordanian border; and Highway 12 between Baghdad and the Syrian border. The Caliph's goons are no less than taking over the whole, notorious Baghdad belt, the previous "triangle of death" in those hardcore days of American occupation circa 2004. Message to Donald Rumsfeld: remember your "remnants"? They're back. And they're in charge. Both Ramadi and Fallujah have been reduced to an accumulation of bombed-out schools, hospitals, homes, mosques and bridges. Residential streets are virtually deserted. According to the United Nations, there are a least 360,803 internally displaced persons in Anbar, as well as 115,000 others in areas under The Caliph's control. At least 63% of the 1.6 million people living in the province are classified as "in need" - with hair-raising minimal access to water, food and health care, and receiving little to absolutely zero humanitarian support from that fiction, the "international community." US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power is not screaming her lungs out for R2P ("responsibility to protect"). How could the Pentagon's spectacular Full Spectrum Dominance possibly not see any of this happening? Of course they see it. But they don't give a damn. The Pentagon occasionally uses AH-64 Apache helicopters to attack some of The Caliph's goons in Ramadi and Hit. But Apaches can be easily hit with MANPADS. They are stationed at Baghdad International and their only mission is to protect the airport. Who cares about local, civilian "collateral damage"? Married to the Mob In Kobani, the former third-biggest town in Syrian Kurdistan, in the far northeast, The Caliph also wins big. Another biblical exodus has reached 300,000 refugees - and counting, with over 180,000 headed to Turkey. The Caliph counts on indirect help from The Sultan (or alternate Caliph), aka Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. Tehran is - rightfully - furious, as it sees the "West" - and Turkey - betraying the Kurds all over again. It's no secret Sultan Erdogan is doing nothing because he wants to screw the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD); let them die instead of repelling The Caliph and then be strong enough to threaten Turkish domination of those huge, essentially Kurdish patches of Anatolia. Thus the only thing Sultan Erdogan does support is aimless bombing by the Pentagon cum coalition of the clueless-cowards. Anybody who believes the US Central Command's spin that House of Saud and United Arab Emirates fighter jets conduct "bombing raids" on the outskirts of Kobani gets a one-way ticket to Oz. Imagine these clowns being able to deploy precision-guided bombs or trained laser spotters. To start with, the Pentagon has zero local intel - as in zero operatives able to paint lasers on targets. Thus the "coalition" can barely hit the odd tank (out of 25 around Kobani) or Humvee out of 2,000 crammed in a valley for almost two weeks now. But the "coalition" certainly is able - miraculously! - to hit Syrian state infrastructure, as in energy installations. In June, the official Pentagon excuse was, "We don't have any drone assets in Iraq." Now there's no excuse for drones which can read a "Smoking Kills!" warning in a packet of Marlboros not hitting The Caliph's assets in Kobani - or in Anbar province for that matter. So it's down to a mix of incompetence and neglect. It was so much easier to hit Pashtun wedding parties in the Waziristans. Especially because no one was paying attention. Erdogan's own goons, meanwhile, have instituted a curfew on all major towns and cities in southeast Anatolia, and are even gunning down peaceful Kurdish protesters. Fifteen million Kurds in Anatolia cannot be wrong; Erdogan wants Kobani to fall. Ankara remains for all practical purposes the top logistical hub for The Caliph's goons. The Sultan is using The Caliph as a proxy army to smash the Kurds. Terminal evidence has been offered by the leader of the Kurdish PYD, Salih Muslim, meeting Turkish military intel and asking for help. Conditions: abandon any hope of self-determination for Syrian Kurds; give up all your self-governing towns and regions; and watch as we install a Turkish "buffer"/no-fly zone inside Syrian territory. Don't expect the Obama "Don't Do Stupid Stuff/We Have No Strategy" administration to sentence, "Erdogan must go". Besides, the pathetic club of National Security Advisor Susan Rice and her deputy Ben Rhodes has no clue about what's goin' on. To the Green Zone! Tehran, for its part, has clearly identified Erdogan's nasty game. The Sultan knows monster B1-B bombers flying over Kobani are absolutely useless - while The Caliph's goons deploy massive car bombs and keep advancing. "Boots on the ground" will be needed. Enter NATO asset Turkey. But with one condition: regime change in Damascus, or at least a prelude, via that "buffer"/no-fly zone over Syria. The Big Picture remains the same. Sultan Erdogan and the House of Saud want regime change in Damascus (Erdogan dreams of a Sunni puppet as a vassal of Ankara; the Saudis want their own Wahhabi schemer). Israel merrily agrees. And if that comes with a bonus - attacking the new Iraqi government, still supported by Iran, in the American-made Green Zone - even better. The lowdown: "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" translates as the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey and Israel using Washington to advance their quite explicit agenda. Sultan Erdogan, as a Mob boss, does seem to heave learned a thing or two from watching Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. He's extracting the maximum pound of flesh from the bewildered "Don't do Stupid Stuff" team. The Sultan is boldly aiming at Turkish boots on the ground gloriously invading Syria in NATO "humanitarian intervention" mode. And all this sold as NATO offering "protection" to a member-nation. NATO's new secretary-general, former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, has just been to Ankara. Saudi Arabia has already "voted" out loud for the "buffer"/no-fly zone. Same for General Francois Hollande, that pitiful excuse for President of France. Once again, it's Tehran to the rescue. The Foreign Ministry has duly announced Iran is ready to liberate Kobani from The Caliph's goons (and they can do it) if Bashar Al-Assad says the word. Now that's how you work the chessboard; NATO is left with zero excuses to mount an invasion of Syria, whatever Mob Boss Erdogan comes up with. Operation Hands Off My Toyota The Caliph also wins big in the "bleeding the Pentagon" department. A single US "strike" against his goons - involving F-15s, F-16s or F-22s - costs up to US$500,000. The Pentagon has just revealed it has spent no less than $1.1 billion against The Caliph since June. What for? Virtually all the assets being destroyed by American bombing are made in the USA, deployed to the Iraqi army and then duly captured during The Caliph's offensive. So here we have the Empire of Chaos spending a fortune from the US Treasury to smash tanks, Humvees and other gear already paid for by American taxpayers. No wonder taxpayers are fuming. Thus Operation Hands off My Toyota. Additionally, the Pentagon does not have a clue on how to build its Obama-designed proxy "rebel" force to fight The Caliph (with no US soldiers or marines; only fanatic Wahhabis and assorted mercenaries). To start with, they have no clue who the hell qualifies as a "moderate rebel". The rabble must be "vetted" - and then sent to, of all places, Saudi Arabia for training. There the guy in charge will be - who else - a Special Ops honcho, Major General Michael Nagata. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the Pentagon won't have its proxy "moderate rebel" army on the ground in Syria before the summer of 2015. Hefty bottles of Chateau Margaux can be bet that all this prime US weaponized know how will ultimately end up captured by The Caliph's goons. Same applies to reliable "rebel" intel on the ground. But the real Dadaist masterpiece is that first these "rebels" will be politely asked by the Pentagon to forget about getting rid of Assad to fight The Caliph. At least for a while. Re-enter Stoltenberg, the new NATO head: "Next year, at the ministerial meeting, we will take decisions regarding the so-called spearhead but, even before it is established, NATO has a strong army after all. We can deploy it wherever we want to." OK, tough guy; why not "Syraq"? If this all sounds like a plot straight out of hit series Blacklist, that's because it is. Why not get Red (James Spader) to fight The Caliph? And then again, what if Red is The Caliph? He pretends to fight himself - and he wins, handsomely. Back to Welles' The Lady from Shanghai: "Killing you is killing myself". Yet nobody could possibly want The Caliph dead when he's such a smashing, undisputed box-office success. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Seymour Hersh Unearths More Lies on Syria By Jonathan Cook

Seymour Hersh Unearths More Lies on Syria By Jonathan Cook April 07, 2014 "ICH" - Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has a second fascinating essay that rewrites the official record of the sarin gas attack on Ghouta, near Damascus, in August last year. As usual, Hersh uses his sources in the US security establishment to throw light on what really took place. The bottom line: Turkey was almost certainly the party responsible for the attack, hoping it would force Obama to honour his threatened “red line” if Assad used chemical weapons. Was the Assad regime to be brought down by a US military campaign, Turkey assumed it would be able to turn Syria into a client state. Like the earlier article, this one will probably gain very little attention. It is published in the obscure UK literary publication the London Review of Books. Presumably like last time, Hersh could not find a mainstream publication willing to take it – and I’m guessing that, like last time, these stunningly important revelations will be shunned by the liberal media. Instead, it will be consigned to the memory hole, along with so much other evidence of western crimes against humanity. Pundits and analysts will continue to tell us confidently that Assad carried out the Ghouta attack, oblivious to Hersh’s findings. The reason the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian have been studiously ignoring Hersh’s investigations on this, it seems to me, is that they show the Obama administration’s foreign policy is just as criminal as the previous Bush White House’s. Here is a summary of Hersh’s main findings: * Obama’s sudden climbdown on his threatened military strike against Assad was in part forced on him by a chemical analysis of samples of the sarin used in Ghouta, which showed that its signature did not match that of the stockpiles held by the Assad regime. * Despite US claims, the White House knew that the Syrian rebels had developed chemical weapons production facilities. UN investigators thought the Syrian opposition were the most likely culprits behind earlier chemical weapons attacks, in April and May 2013. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell. * The military strike being prepared by the White House after the Ghouta attack was, far from small-scale, as secretary of state John Kerry intimated, modelled on the shock and awe campaign against Saddam Hussein. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. … The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings. * The US developed a back channel of weapons-smuggling to the Syrian rebels, known as the rat line, in cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, using the “liberated” arsenals from Libya following the west’s ousting of Gaddafi. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. … By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. … The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. * The job of the US consulate in Libya – the one where ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed – was to provide logistical assistance with the rat line. That was the reason the consulate was attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’ … Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ the former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.’ * By late 2012 the US had assessed that the rebels were losing the civil war, and started to downgrade their involvement in the rat line. That left Turkey’s Recep Erdogan the main loser. The American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left Erdoğan exposed politically and militarily. ‘One of the issues at that May summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to supply the rebels in Syria,’ the former intelligence official said. … Without US military support for the rebels, the former intelligence official said, ‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating and he thinks we’re 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.’ * Erdogan therefore became focused on exploiting the “red line” Obama had set on Assad’s use of chemical weapons to force the US to attack Syria. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war because of logistics – the distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond [to the previous chemical weapons attacks] in March and April.’ … We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red line,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus on 18 August to investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were there. The deal was to do something spectacular. … Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.http://www.jonathan-cook.net