. . . And, perhaps a lot more inside information about the covert U.S. war in Syria.
This may be the real reason the Deep State has it out for Flynn – he exposed the actual U.S. Syria agenda: regime change over stopping terrorism. Sy Hersh’s source at DIA was Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
According to a series of articles published by Hersh in the London Review of Books (LRB), the Joint Chiefs of Staff pushed back against the covert policy of arming the Jihadi opposition initiated by CIA Director Petraeus and Secretary of State Clinton that was being pursued at the time Gen. Flynn was forced out as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Hersh wrote that a highly classified 2013 Defense Intelligence Agency/Joint Chiefs of Staff report on Syria forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to “chaos” and possibly to Islamist extremists taking over Syria and spreading the Islamic State across the region.
Hersh reports that Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, told him that his agency sent a “constant stream” of warnings to the “civilian leadership” about the dire consequences of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The DIA’s reporting “got enormous pushback” from the Obama administration, Hersh quotes Flynn as saying. “I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.”
Flynn also was severely criticized last year by officials within the intelligence services after he publicly raised questions about whether the the poison gas attack in 2013 was actually the result of an official orders from the Assad regime. See, https:/www.cnn.com/2016/11/20/politics/kfile-michael-flynn-rt-syria
Hersh `s reporting on the apparent split in U.S. Syria policy started with a controversial December 2013 article that challenged the Obama Administration’s claims about the authorship of the sarin attack that summer. https:/www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
The sarin incident in August 2013 almost led to a direct US military intervention in Syria at the time that Gen. Flynn was Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn resigned from that post, reportedly under pressure from the White House, Hersh writes after the General and others at the highest levels of the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff resisted the Syria regime change operation.
While the U.S. sources for Hersh’s December 2013 story, “Whose Sarin?” remain unstated, he quotes Flynn in the later LRB article confirming the resistance within the Pentagon to the CIA program program of arming the Syrian resistance: https:www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military
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 wasn’t 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 Isis’s 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 DIA’s reporting, he said, `got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. `I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’
Flynn’s role as Hersh’s source in the article about JCS resistance to the CIA and State Department orchestrated efforts to overthrow the Syrian government was not the initial focus of reports about that article, which appeared in December 2015. A UPI report at the time attributed sourcing to “an anonymous former Advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/12/27/Seymour-Hersh-report-on-Syria-White-House-knew-US-was-armi
ng-Islamic-State/6951451232210
The report, published in the Jan. 7, 2016 edition of the London Review of Books, relies heavily on an anonymous former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Hersh writes that the adviser told him the DIA/Joint Chiefs report took a “dim view” of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups and found that the covert U.S. program to arm and support those “moderate” rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, which then morphed the program into an “across-the-board technical, arms and logistical program for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.”
“The assessment was bleak: there was no viable `moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the U.S. was arming extremists,” Hersh wrote.
In October, the Pentagon announced that it was discontinuing its program to train and equip moderate rebels in Syria, saying the program cost $500 million and only succeeded in training a “handful” of recruits. In November, however, the CIA increased its shipments of arms to rebels in Syria, joining with U.S. allies in challenging Russia and Iran’s involvement in Syria in support of the Assad regime.
Finally, another aspect of Hersh’s January 2016 that perhaps didn’t garner enough attention at the time was commented upon by Steven Rosenfeld at Alternet, who focused on the “military to military” relationship described by Hersh. At the head of the quiet back channel with top Russian generals, as Hersh tells it, was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey. Together, a small group of top Russian and American military officers worked to prevent ISIS from overthrowing the Assad government. This undermined CIA, Saudi and Turkish efforts to arm Islamic extremists trying to overthrow Damascus regime: http://www.alternet.org/investigations/sy-hersh-blockbuster-top-us-general-ignored-obama-led-secret-
plot-protect-assad-and
President Obama’s top military commander secretly orchestrated intelligence sharing with military leaders in Germany, Israel and Russia to thwart the president’s policy to remove Bashar Assad from power in Syria and lay the groundwork for Russia’s military entrance into the Syrian civil war, because he believed Obama’s anti-ISIS strategies were hopelessly misguided.
That is just one of the astounding takeaways from a 6,800-word expose by venerated investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, that was just published in the London Review of Books. Hersh, whose sources include top senior aides to the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, which commands all U.S. military forces, also described in great detail how Turkey’s president Recep Erdoğan has deceived the White House by siding and arming ISIS and other extremist Islamic militias in Syria, in a gambit for Turkey to emerge as a regional power akin to the Ottoman Empire.
The attack on Flynn by elements of the intelligence services and allies of the former Administration must be viewed in light of this under-reported mutiny by Flynn and others at the top ranks of the U.S. military against the Syria regime change operation. Hersh’s reporting on the the role of the JCS and DIA coordinating with Russian military leaders provides a unique insight into the broader context of the so-called “Russiagate” scandal.
Seymour Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Samson Option, which exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons programs. He was widely criticized for his “The Killing of Osama bin Laden” report that accused President Barack Obama and his administration of lying about the circumstances surrounding the killing of bin Laden in 2011. Much of his initial reporting has subsequently been confirmed by other sources. Many media establishments, intelligence analysts and officials, including the White House, rejected the claim that US Syria operations went ahead despite warnings from within the Pentagon that the program would help arm and spread Islamic extremism, and Hersh has also become the target of a widespread campaign of derision in the U.S. media.
Thank you, leveymg. You are absolutely on target here.
You write:
Of course. Derision is the main weapon of the PermaGov media, its first and strongest non-personing weapon whenever anyone disagrees with its policies.
No matter how honest or crooked, how right or wrong the person who disagrees may be, they are incessantly derided in the media as fools.
It seems to work, too, as does the “hero” treatment when someone is part of any PermaGov policy push. However, if there is anything that can be conidered positive in Trump’s win this time around, it is the following:
The American people are getting wise to the scam. In fact, many of them are reflexively resisting it by going the other way. Trump was the perfect target, and the captive media attacked with glee.
But this time…for the first time ever as far as I can see…it simply didn’t work.
And the answer came down from on high.
I am by no means a Trump supporter…neither am I a kneejerk Dem or Republican supporter…and I watch almost no TV news anymore, but I must admit that I took great pleasure on election night in watching CNN’s Wolf Blitzer’s frenzied attempts at spinning the rapidly accelerating Trump election eve juggernaut into some kind of positive for HRC and his eventual almost total breakdown of reportorial neutrality into what looked like the beginning of an on-camera crying jag when his co-host…John King, I believe, who by the way looked like the only real pro in the room…continued to quite dispassionately point out the rising tide of HRC defeats in supposedly safe, blue areas.
The “sure thing,” media-enforced fix simply wasn’t working anymore.
Wow!!!
Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end for the 50+ year rule of the current Deep State. They foisted Viet Nam on us; who knows how many assassinations they sponsored to maintain control; they got rid of their choice for president when Nixon defied them; they elected a Hollywood B-actor as president…one who was already approaching senility; they got rid of Jimmy Carter after one term because he wasn’t the chosen one that time around; they effectively eliminated Ross Perot, Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul and a host of other potential opposition candidates before those people could rise to a position of real potential power; they ran a media number that has never since been equalled to get us into the Blood For Oil Iraq war (What a production that was!!!), and only God knows how many other horrible things they have done to maintain power.
But they couldn’t stop The Clown King…not even after 7+ years of trying.
I have to give them this:
They do keep trying, and they may eventually succeed again. But every time they need to up their output in order to pull off a media coup, they further tip their hand to the American people.
Can they find a new trick?
Could be…
I hesitate to even think of what that might be, but I will bet that they will try and I will further bet that this time even more blood will be spilled than has been spilled in the past. If virtual war doesn’t work anymore, there’s always the real thing on which to fall back.
Shock and Awe at home?
Could happen…
It’s happened before.
Watch.
AG
there seem to be a lot of reasons to distrust Flynn. I’m not convinced this is an important one; actually this story seems mostly to his credit. The fact that Obama’s policy was regime change was hardly a well-kept secret.
And considering all the quotes ascribed to Flynn in the article, he wasn’t a secret (anonymous) source. While he probably gave Hersh more than what he’s given credit for in the article, it’s doubtful that Hersh relied on a single source.
So they’re not going after Flynn because he was taking money from the Turkish government and delaying plans to attack Raqqa at their request? They’re not going after him because he failed to disclose receiving foreign payments without notifying the DOD?
Instead, they’re targeting him because he may have “leaked” something to Hersh for a story that had relatively zero domestic impact.
It’s important not to discount Hersh.
Hersh after all did have the scoop on Obama’s 2011 attacks on Iran before they happened, before anyone else even had the story.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that leaks by the IC are bad but leaks to Seymour Hersh are good. All in the same post.
If true, all leaks are good. (As long as an individual on a covert and potentially dangerous assignment isn’t exposed. Whether or not Valerie Plame was on such an assignment, there didn’t seem to be any consideration of that when the Cheney gang blew her cover for political reasons. That’s why it was an egregious act on their part.) The IC WMD leaks to Judith Miller were false and therefore, very bad. The IC doesn’t have a great track record of truthfulness in public statements or leaks planted with the NYTimes and WaPo, their go-to publications for a very long time.
But My Lai!!
In 1970 Hersh was thirty-three years old. What stories of similar import have your go-to reporters cracked at that age or a few years older? What are their records for accuracy over the years? Willingness to be silenced, censored, and/or distort their reports to please their sources and/or employers?
DERP.
Or maybe you could have gone to the original article and read it before offering a snotty comment.
This isn’t much of a diary, but I appreciate the reminder of Hersh’s 1/7/16 Military to Military and took advantage of the reminder and reread it. It’s even more illuminating today than when it was originally published. Read along with James Kitfield’s 10/16/16 How Mike Flynn Became America’s Angriest General and Ray McGovern’s 5/27/17 Europe May Finally Rethink NATO Costs and a decent full picture emerges. (A note of caution: where Kitfield’s article differs from Hersh and/or McGovern’s, he’s merely repeating propaganda that has been so effective that most people believe it as much as they believed Saddam’s WMD in 2002-3.)
What’s fascinating about Kitfield’s article is that Flynn was an adversary of Erdogan and Turkey and other than coordinating with Putin-Russia to defeat IS in Syria has no use for Putin-Russia. From Hersh’s article, it can be seen that Flynn shared those two positions with many in the military high command.
The CIA positions that have also been embraced by a faction of the military (the survivors and those that have opted to keep their heads down and retire with full benefits) and the Obama administration civilian control is eerily similar to what existed wrt Vietnam circa 1965-68. The solution back then was even simpler and quicker, but Ho Chi Minh was as intolerable to those nutters then as Assad is to the nutters today.
Oh, and it’s timely not to forget Zbig who was instrumental in the rise of this scourge.
>>What’s fascinating about Kitfield’s article is that Flynn was an adversary of Erdogan and Turkey and other than coordinating with Putin-Russia to defeat IS in Syria has no use for Putin-Russia.
it sure didn’t take Flynn long to change those opinions when the Turks and the Russians waved money at him.
So we’re told. And until reviewing this today, I also took as fact.
In many ways that I don’t doubt, Flynn has some scary and nutty beliefs. But in this one area, IS in Syria and on which he was fact directed and in accordance with his skill set, which military colleagues still praise, he appears to have been totally sane. He accepted being ousted by the Obama administration rather than back down or shutting up on this assessment. So, how do we square that circle with the allegations that he took payoffs from Erdogan and Putin?
One difficulty in assessing this is that Erdogan can shift sides in a nanosecond. Whatever in the moment is most convenient with his primary objective, restoration of an Islamic caliphate with himself as the Sultan. But can outside observers define the sides that he shifts among? Plus, many of those sides have internal divisions. For example, where did Erdogan leave the CIA when he split from Gulen? I’m barely able to ask some questions and haven’t a clue as to any answers on this.
From the following, it sure doesn’t confirm that Flynn had changed his spots on Erdogan:
Does Flynn know who engineered the coup attempt? Did Erdogan misread who was behind it?
Were Flynn’s speaking engagements, TV appearances, and consulting work different from that of the raft of other retired generals these days? It’s a gravy train for many, but perhaps Flynn wasn’t popular enough and therefore, was desperate for money.
What can’t be excused is Flynn not owning his choice to retire and seeking revenge on those he holds as responsible for giving him that choice. He sunk down to the level of Charlton Heston, Lieberman, and Zell Miller by taking his bruised widdle ego to a convention stage and railed in the ugliest way possible at those he’s declared are his enemies. He’s an unacceptable person for public office, but it would also be unacceptable to string him up for false accusations. So, I’ll wait for all the real facts to emerge before making my conclusions.
Thank you for your comment. I assume you realize I was responding to the title and not the article.
Well then neither of us did that as directly and clearly as we could have. I pointed out that Flynn wasn’t a secret or unidentified source for Hersh’s article, but IMO that was only one problem with the title and I didn’t deal with that. I also disagree with the allegations/claims that have been made and you recited as facts and as the reasons why they went after him. If money flows from Turkey and Russia to US politicians, IC/military consultants, and/or lobbyists are high crimes, a whole lot of people would be in big trouble.
The reasons why Flynn had to go are more complex and more interesting. The reasons in 2014 and 2017 are similar but the equation is different. Hersh presented a good picture of the various factions and the turf they were each protecting. Broadly and approximately from 2012 through 2014, the CIA was on one side and a majority at the senior level of the military was on the other side. Both engaged in duplicity to advance their position but only one had the ear/support of the CIC. The military was purged and the divide between the two reduced if not eliminated. Hillary would pick up from where Obama left off with full support from the CIA and Joint Chiefs, and as Ash Carter is more in line with HRC’s hawkishness, he would have been retained.
Flynn being on the other side from the Pentagon and CIA survivors was only a minor problem. The top guys in both are skilled in how to ignore and get around a CIC and Nat Sec Advisor. However, Flynn knows the ways of the Pentagon tricks and he also has support lower down the chain of command that wouldn’t have been purged to any great extent in the past few years. And at the enlisted level, Trump has huge support. Thus, Flynn was a risk to those at the top and would have been an asset for Trump and Pompeo in controlling and clearing out the Obama/Clinton loyalists at the CIA.
No, it was pretty clear because I used similar same words as in the title (“going after Flynn”) and indicated that what is being reported about Flynn likely has much more to do with why he is being targeted now (since he joined the Trump administration) than the story from Hersh.
You simply are incapable of admitting you are wrong, being so hasty in your attempt to respond to a “snotty” comment.
It does not matter if the allegations about Flynn are true or not nor do I care. It matters if the IC believes them to be true.
Trump does not need Flynn to purge Obama (Clinton?) loyalists – I assume you mean civil appointees – in the CIA or other government agencies.
Good conjecture, in any case.
It is/was clear to you, but on first read not so much to me. However, in addressing the intended content of your original comment in my second response, it seemed clear to me that I owned my original misinterpretation. Guess it would have been clearer if I had included a “sorry for that.” Seemed redundant to me, but if I had known it was that important to you, I would have included it.
How you extrapolated from what to me was originally a minor misunderstanding on my part to “You simply are incapable of admitting you are wrong,…” suggests that you have gone way beyond the content of this dispute. Characterizing a comment as “snotty” is very different from an attack on the being of the person that made the comment. The latter is improper in this forum. IMO you were wrong to attack me in this way, but I’m not going to get all bent out of shape over it.
WRT the topic of this diary and thread, Flynn, I was putting all of this into the framework of the institutions and their current and long-standing cultures (and class is a strong element in that as well) that Trump (as with every new POTUS) inherited. Interesting to me but probably not to others; so, I junked that part of this response.
I didn’t ask for an apology. I think my characterization is fair but feel free to file a complaint.
. . . just understandably been too busy with these more pressing matters here.
I find it fascinating that people who dismiss the ever-growing mountain of evidence about the Trump/Russia connection on the grounds that “it hasn’t been tested in a court of law” are quite content with Seymour Hersh and his litany of unnamed sources.