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posted by takyon on Tuesday July 04 2017, @05:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the news?-what-news? dept.

The World Socialist Web Site reports

In 1969, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in which US troops slaughtered over 100 Vietnamese men, women and children--a story the US media at first refused to touch. He was also among the first to expose the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. And he exposed the Obama administration's lies about the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as the fabricated claims of a Syrian chemical weapons attack in 2013 that brought the US to the brink of another war.

[...] A full week has passed since the publication by a major German newspaper of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh's thoroughgoing debunking of the false claim of a Syrian government chemical weapons attack on April 4. The supposed atrocity by the regime of Bashar al-Assad was used to justify the April 6 US cruise missile strike on the al-Shayat air base. At least nine civilians, including four children, died when 59 Tomahawk missiles rained down on the base in western Syria.

Since the German daily Die Welt published Hersh's article, titled "Trump's Red Line", on June 25, its contents have been subjected to a total blackout by the major newspapers and broadcast and cable news networks in the United States.

Hersh's account makes clear that, not only was there no objective evidence to back up Washington's charges of a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, the fact that there was no such attack was known to the US military and intelligence apparatus even before the cruise missile strike was ordered.

"The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives", Hersh wrote. "Details of the attack, including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all US, allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region."

Basing himself on sources within the US intelligence apparatus who spoke on condition of anonymity, as well as access to "transcripts of real-time communications, immediately following the Syrian attack on April 4", Hersh establishes that a Syrian government plane dropped a conventional 500-pound bomb, not a chemical weapon, on the site of the meeting, which included "representatives of Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Qaida-affiliated group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra".

The target was a cinder block building that served as a "command and control center" for the so-called "rebels", who used its basement to store "rockets, weapons, and ammunition", as well as chlorine, fertilizers and insecticides, Hersh reports.

"A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the US military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground", he continues.

"Did the Syrians plan the attack on Khan Sheikhoun? Absolutely", a senior adviser to US intelligence told Hersh. "Do we have intercepts to prove it? Absolutely. Did they plan to use sarin? No. But the president did not say: 'We have a problem and let's look into it.' He wanted to bomb the shit out of Syria."

[...] As the "mainstream" media has assumed the role of mouthpiece and stenographer for the capitalist state and its military and intelligence apparatus, its journalistic standards have continued to plummet, a tendency highlighted by last week's walkout by hundreds of New York Times workers in protest over the drive by the flagship of the capitalist press to "streamline" its editing process through the destruction of dozens of copy editors' jobs.

One result of the media's slavish subordination to the government and Wall Street has been the effective blacklisting of Hersh, who used to write regularly for the New Yorker magazine.


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  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday July 04 2017, @08:28AM (3 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 04 2017, @08:28AM (#534731) Journal

    I sympathise but there's a logical fallacy in your argument. Certain sections of the media and politicians may have been wrong about Iraq but that doesn't mean the same ones are wrong about Syria. I'm older and wiser than when the Iraq WMD claims were being made, and I'm much more critical of what I hear, see and read. Some sources are more trustworthy than others and some sources present their information in a way that's open to honest scruitiny and they usually stand up to that scruitiny. I don't know what to make of this yet.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:18AM (#534739)

    Certain sections of the media and politicians may have been wrong about Iraq but that doesn't mean the same ones are wrong about Syria.

    It does, however, mean that anyone who honestly believes the propaganda this time had better still be in Iraq digging through the desert looking for weapons of mass destruction.

    Anyone who isn't still digging, but still claims to believe the propaganda must be assumed to be a part of the propaganda machine.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:19AM (#534740)

    It's not about right or wrong. People and organizations make mistakes, and that is fine. It's about a complete lack of investigative vigor in lieu of simply repeating the official line.

    In Iraq the media was completely unified in their pursuit for war. There were many major questions that needed to be asked, 'intelligence' that needed to be questioned, and various issues that needed to be investigated. These were, at best, mentioned in passing with no pursuit given - even though these questions and issues were undoubtedly the single most important ones of the time. It is the same thing today. There were major logical flaws in the official story of what happened in Syria. Why was there no investigation here? Why was the official line reported without even mentioning contradictory information?

    Why was there no attempt to explain basic questions? For instance literally 1 week before the bomb attack, the US representative at the UN stated that removing Assad was no longer considered a top priority. Assad, for some time, had been making steady progress retaking and stabilizing his country. If the status quo continued he would be undoubtedly come out on top. Why would he put all of this at risk with a chemical weapons attack that was a complete lose-lose option? Even if he wanted to, for whatever reason, go kill some random civilians - then a conventional weapons attack would have resulted in minimal to no possible retribution. The chemical attack stood a very real chance of dragging the US openly into the war (to say nothing of other countries) which would have all but certainly resulted in Assad's demise and certainly the loss of control of his country. Every single thing that is officially reported about that attack relies almost entirely on an appeal to authority. Logically it makes no sense and the evidence is questionable, at best.

    I don't care if the media gets it 'right' or 'wrong.' I'm not expecting prescience. What I am expecting is something even vaguely resembling due diligence and investigative pursuit. A media that simply unquestioningly reports war messaging is not a media - it's a propaganda machine. I hate using that term since it is so incredibly loaded, but that is exactly what this is.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 04 2017, @03:19PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 04 2017, @03:19PM (#534809) Journal

    I'll remind you that during and after the Iraq war, the warhawks insisted that the reason they didn't find WMD's in Iraq, was that Saddam shipped it all out to Syria.

    I was and still am skeptical of that claim. If Saddam had a credible weapons stock, he almost certainly would have used that stock against the US. He was already marked as a dead man by the US, he couldn't have made things any worse for himself by using NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) warfare against us. I have other reasons for being skeptical, but that leads the list.

    So depending on your political views, those reports of heavy truck traffic into Syria will support the claim that Syria has those NBC weapons available. Or, those reports will help to support the view that "Gubbermint is lying again!"

    Also, consider UN says US-backed opposition, not Syrian regime, used poison gas https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/07/syri-m07.html [wsws.org]

    And, of course, that last fits right in with the fact that we actually SUPPLIED Saddam Hussein with all the materials needed to manufacture chem and bio weapons. Gotta ask ourselves - "Is our government supplying chem/bio to the rebels, so that we have an excuse to invade Syria?"