Kassem

La réponse de Moon of Alabama : “How Criticism Of Hersh’s New Piece Fails To Understand What Really Happened”
▻http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/12/how-a-critic-of-hershs-new-piece-fails-to-understand-what-really-happ

Hersh is of course perfectly aware what Dempsey said and thought in early 2013. The one not aware is the critic.
Dempsey argued in early 2013 that the Pentagon should give weapons to a few carefully vetted rebels.
The Pentagon plan was killed by the White House in favor of the ongoing CIA operation. This exchange then does not contradict but even supports the Hersh reporting. Let me explain the context.

By early 2013 Dempsey knew perfectly well that the CIA was supplying -directly or indirectly- everyone in Syria who asked for arms and ammunition. These weapons were going to the Jihadis who were simply the best financed groups. Because the CIA program was secret Dempsey of course could not say so in a public Congress hearing. But Dempsey wanted to give arms to “carefully vetted Syrian rebels” to replace the CIA program with a Pentagon program under his command. He would then have been able to direct the weapon flow and to prevent a further arming of the Islamist terrorists. Dempsey supported a Pentagon program arming the rebels so he could control the arming of the rebels that was already happening under a CIA program but was creating long term trouble.

When the hostile takeover of the CIA arming program failed, Dempsey and the JCS tried to sabotage it by providing old Turkish weapons to the CIA.

Voix’s #Max_Fisher is wrong about Seymour Hersh, explained
▻https://shadowproof.com/2015/12/22/voxs-max-fisher-is-wrong-about-seymour-hersh-explained

Fisher chose to ignore comments by former DIA director Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who spoke to Hersh on the record. Flynn shares his belief that the Obama administration did not want to hear the truth about Syria. DIA and the Joint Chiefs were concerned about the Islamic State’s long-term strategy and how jihadists controlled the opposition. They feared what would happen if Assad was toppled. So, according to a former Joint Chiefs adviser, they took the step of indirectly passing intelligence to Assad in order to possibly prevent a feared outcome.

[...]

Fisher declines to contemplate the realpolitik nature of sharing intelligence indirectly with Syria, and contends it is impossible for retired JCS Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey to be an opponent of arming the “moderate” rebel groups.

“While in office, Dempsey famously and publicly clashed with Obama over Syria because Dempsey wanted to do more to arm Syrian rebels. Contemporaneous accounts of arguments within the White House support this, with Dempsey arguing the US should more robustly arm Syrian rebels, and Obama arguing for less,” Fisher writes.

One major flaw in this rebuttal is that the story linked to is a New York Times report on statements Dempsey made in February 2013. When was the DIA’s defense intelligence assessment put together? Summer 2013.

[...]

Individuals like Fisher should be inspired to dig deeper when Hersh publishes investigative reports, but instead, they publish hammy explainers and demonstrate they are nothing more than ornamented stenographers of power.

#chiens_de_garde #sténographes