A recently published report says that a renowned journalist is claiming that the Obama administration falsely blamed the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack, and that as secretary of state at the time, Hillary Clinton was directly involved.

As reported by The Free Thought Project, in April 2013 Britain and France informed the United Nations they had found credible evidence that Syrian government forces used the deadly gas in an attack against rebel forces, which was documented by CBS News’ “60 Minutes” program nearly two years later.

A few months after the attack, the Obama administration said publicly that it had evidence Assad’s forces were behind the attack and as such, according to published reports at the time, Obama authorized the U.S. military to begin providing direct support to various Syrian rebel groups.

Since the funding of “moderate” rebels began, as of August 2015, per the United Nations, more than a quarter-million people have been killed in the Syrian civil war, with more than 7.6 million displaced.

“All of this death and destruction carried out by a sadistic army of rebels who’ve been funded and armed by the United States government, based on, what we are now told, was a complete fabrication,” The Free Thought Project reported.

Now, journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed, in a series of books and interviews, that the Obama administration falsely blamed the gas attack on Assad, as an excuse to begin providing support for anti-Assad factions:

As Eric Zuesse explained in Strategic Culture, Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the U.S. could invade and overthrow Assad.

Hersh intimated that the gas actually came from a stockpile in Libya, one that was maintained by the late dictator Mohamar Gaddafi. He also said that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi served as a “rat line” to smuggle those and other weapons into Syria via Turkey.

Clinton, Hersh said, was acutely aware of the rat line.

Of Hillary Clinton’s involvement, Hersh told AlterNet:

The only thing we know is that she was very close to Petraeus who was the CIA director at the time … she’s not out of the loop, she knows when there’s covert ops.  That ambassador [Christopher Stevens] who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody, who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel.

Hersh’s claim is supported by another journalist, Christof Lehmann, who reported that he discovered, after the attacks, an evidence trail leading back to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry.

Lehmann noted that experts, including some in Russia, have repeatedly said that the chemical weapon used in Syria could not have been standard-issue from the Syrian military, and that all available evidence including the fact that those who first offered aid to the victims were not harmed indicates the use of a liquid, homemade sarin compound. And that is corroborated by the seizure of such chemicals in Syria and Turkey.

Read the full report here.