Daily Sabah, Turkey
April 12 2014
ROBERT FISK FALLS INTO THE SAME TRAP AS HERSH
The Independent’s Fisk falls into the same trap as Hersh, believing
claims denied by all and supporting his arguments with fallacies
by Tevhid Nazmi BaÅ?türk
ISTANBUL ‘ Veteran journalist and self-declared “Ottoman Empire
correspondent,” Robert Fisk on Thursday published an article in The
Independent that backed the claims made by Seymour Hersh earlier this
week in the London Review of Books. Hersh’s article raised controversy
and drew criticism from across the world as the White House along with
many journalists and experts debunked his accusations against Turkey
and the U.S. Now it seems that his “old mate” (in Fisk’s own words)
has run to his defense in the form of a rant that matches in scale the
bizarreness of Hersh’s piece.
Fisk even adds his own accusations, which, like the accusations of
Hersh, have no viable backing and come from arguably non-existent
sources.
The fact that the article, clearly intended to attack Prime Minister
ErdoÄ?an’s personal character and not his policy, looks to things as
irrelevant as ErdoÄ?an’s language pronunciation as a gateway to attack
him as an individual.
Fisk even claims that Turkey was behind the alleged March 16 attack on
Armenians in Kasab, stating that it was Turkey that armed the
insurgent groups responsible for the attacks.
This accusation holds no truth as it was a joint effort by the Turkish
Foreign Ministry and legitimate opposition groups to safely evacuate
Kasab’s Armenian population from the battle which raged around the
city.
Daily Sabah spoke to Feeda Majnoun, a senior official within the Free
Syrian Army (FSA), earlier this week to clarify what had occurred in
Kasab, revealing a story of friendship and cooperation rather than the
blatant force pitched by Fisk. “Firstly, we apologize to the Armenians
because we entered their church without permission and disturbed them
because of the ongoing war,” said Feeda Majnoun, who helped organize
the Armenians’ safe transfer to Turkey. “We are really sorry that
Kasab turned into a warzone and the Armenians had to leave their
homes.”
Majnoun continued, “After the military operations, it became
impossible to stay in the region. The electricity is gone, public
transport is not operating, there are continuous bomb attacks. That’s
why the youth of the region fled to the southern region of Latakia
while the elders stayed here. We told the elders that they may stay
here as long as they want and we will try to meet their requirements
to the utmost.
“After staying there nearly 10 days, we handed over the Armenians to
Turkish officials on the YayladaÄ?ı border,” explained Majnoun. “The
Armenians underwent medical examinations immediately and their needs
were met by the Turkish officials.”
Later in the article Fisk goes on to build on Hersh’s alternative
reality in which the U.S. and Turkey provided the al-Nusra Front with
the Sarin gas chemical weapons which killed nearly 1,500 and injured
3,000 in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, despite the United Nations
pinpointing the attack to Assad regime forces. Fisk adds insight to
Hersh’s accusation, stating that this alleged transaction, which the
U.S. and Turkey falsified, claiming that the Sarin weapons provided to
the insurgent group came from Muammar al-Gaddafi’s supplies, stocks
that were destroyed prior to the Libyan revolution and his death in
2011.
Daily Sabah once again spoke to Dan Kaszeta, a chemical, biological
and radiological defense expert to see if Fisk’s alternative reality
had any factual basis. “As far as the possibility that the sarin was
old Libyan stock? I seriously do not believe this is possible, for
several reasons. First, the sarin used on Aug. 21 was made in a way
that indicates it was likely to have been mixed soon before use,
so-called binary sarin. We know this due to the decomposition products
of one of the key ingredients, found in the samples by the OPCW-
[Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] U.N. team,”
said Kaszeta. “Second, it appears that a new and innovative process,
not seen before, used the chemical hexamine as an ‘acid scavenger’ in
the binary sarin. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this technique
had not been used elsewhere. If Libya had that technique, I have not
heard this. But the Syrian Assad regime confessed to Ake Sellstrom
that hexamine was in their formula for sarin and the Syrian state made
an official declaration to the OPCW that they had an inventory of 80
tons of hexamine as part of their chemical weapons program,” he
continued. “Also, there is no evidence that Libya was able to produce
sarin with any longevity of shelf-life. Very few countries have
mastered the dark art of refining sarin to a level of purity that
allows it to last years, not months.
The U.S. and Soviet Union spent many years and vast resources learning
how to refine the residual acid out of sarin. The U.S. and Soviet
Union used something called the Di-Di process to create sarin which
they could then store for decades. However, it is clearly obvious that
the sarin used on Aug. 21 was not made by this method and the Syrian
regime’s method was not this either. I seriously doubt that Gaddafi
had somehow mastered the secret to make sarin that was going to last
for a long time in storage,” Kaszeta said, casting away any
plausibility of Fisk’s accusations.