Seymour Hersh, Aaron Maté and Iraqi WMDs 2.0 - a thread.
10 years ago, US journalist Seymour Hersh published 2 articles attempting to blame opposition groups, instead of the Syrian government, for the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack. His claims were based largely on anon sources.
10 years ago, US journalist Seymour Hersh published 2 articles attempting to blame opposition groups, instead of the Syrian government, for the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack. His claims were based largely on anon sources.
Back then, he also claimed that a memo from the US’ Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) backed up these allegations. Today, after 10 years, he finally published this memo, along with his fan, US-based Canadian activist Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate).
This is done in an attempt to finally, after 10 years, substantiate the notion that Syrian rebel groups ever possessed Sarin since, much like the Bush administration in 2003, Maté and Hersh have never provided any evidence for this claim.
The document can be accessed here:
de.scribd.com
What (little) it tells us about the allegation of al-Nusra culpability for the 2013 attack will be the subject of this thread.
de.scribd.com
What (little) it tells us about the allegation of al-Nusra culpability for the 2013 attack will be the subject of this thread.
The first piece of supposed evidence for the al-Nusra WMDs cited by Maté and Hersh I will examine here is an alleged “Iraq based sarin production plan” - literal Iraqi WMDs all over again.
Both Hersh and Maté have omitted from their narratives that, according to the leaked alleged DIA report, the entire “Iraq based sarin production plan” culminated in both chemists responsible for the operation being arrested 3 months before the Ghouta attack.
Also omitted by both of them is that, according to their own source, this plan resulted in “incomplete formulas” at most and never produced any Sarin, let alone the ~500 kilograms needed for the Ghouta attack.
The other piece of evidence for this “advanced” al-Nusra program are arrests made by Turkey in May 2013. The alleged DIA-memo links these arrests to al-Nusra and a plot to procure precursors for Sarin. Indeed, Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet released a transcript showing…
…discussions about how to make Sarin, using a specific set of chemicals, which pertains to these May 2013 arrests. The article, in Turkish, can be found here:
cumhuriyet.com.tr
cumhuriyet.com.tr
However, the Sarin production pathway described in this alleged transcript does not at all match the Sarin that was used in the large-scale Ghouta chemical attack. Specifically, the transcript mentions the use of potassium fluoride as a fluorinating agent.
This is significant because, as became public knowledge in 2017, the Sarin used in the 2013 Ghouta attack was made using a different chemical in this step - hydrogen fluoride (HF). Hydrogen fluoride is an extremely corrosive gas, while potassium fluoride is a solid and a salt.
Obviously, handling a solid salt is much safer than handling an extremely corrosive, gaseous acid like HF. This clearly shows that, 3 months before the 08/2013 Ghouta attack, any alleged al-Nusra plot to develop Sarin was much less advanced than necessary for the attack.
The Syrian govt, though, did use HF, as confirmed by the 2017 UN-OPCW JIM report, which can be read here and explains how the conclusion of the HF production pathway was reached.
securitycouncilreport.org
securitycouncilreport.org
This is concluded from the presence of the anion PF6 (hexafluorophosphate) in samples taken from the site, This anion was also found in Ghouta.
unoda-web.s3.amazonaws.com
unoda-web.s3.amazonaws.com
This, effectively, eliminates the possibility that the Sarin precursors mentioned in the DIA report had anything at all to do with the Sarin used in Ghouta, but instead shows that this Sarin was made from Syrian-produced precursors.
This was also stated by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry in 2014, which said that the perpetrators of the 08/2013 attack “likely had access to chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military”.
reuters.com
reuters.com
For Maté and Hersh, if they understood the subject, this would only leave the possibility of arguing that the Sarin (or at least precursors) used in Ghouta in 2013 were stolen from the Syrian army by al-Nusra.
However, this has already been denied by the Syrian government itself. nytimes.com
Hersh and Maté, undoubtedly by accident, have now disclosed that it was also the DIA’s alleged finding that al-Nusra did not at all communicate about any capture of any Sarin precursors before the 2013 Ghouta attack:
In summary, the newly released document again shows a lot of what was already known: Al-Nusra was nowhere near technically capable of carrying out the 08/2013 Ghouta chemical attack. The only logical perpetrator is Assad.
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