Hersh Comments On The ‘Rat Line’

 

By Mark Howell

 

Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh is the Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist who came to the world’s attention in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre during the war in Vietnam.

 

 

Currently at work on an alternative history of the War on Terror, Sy has a web of personal and professional contacts that happens to extend to the Florida Keys.

 

 

He recently celebrated his 77th birthday by publishing an article in the April issue of the London Review of Books called “The Rat Line and the Red Line,” which casts astonishing new light on the connection between the burning of the U.S consulate in Libya and unfolding events in Syria.

 

 

The red line is the one that President Obama warned Bashar al-Assad not to cross. The rat line is explained in these paragraphs from the article:

 

 

“ The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line,’ the back-channel highway into Syria. Authorized in 2012, it 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. (The Director of National Intelligence denies that the U.S. was supplying weapons from Libya to anyone.)

 

 

“In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault in Libya by a local militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others.

 

 

“The report revived animosities in Washington, with Republicans accusing Obama and Hilary Clinton of a cover-up. A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama administration and the Turkish government that pertained to the rat line.

 

 

By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of Britain’s MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Libya.

 

 

“Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. 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. (Petraeus denies the operation ever took place.)

 

 

“The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation.

 

 

“The annex report did not tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the ‘moving of arms,’ a 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.”

 

 

Now you know, which we guarantee you didn’t before the publication of this article out of London.

 

 

Quotes for the Week:

 

 

“It’s spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you’ve got it, you want — oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”

 

 

— Mark Twain

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