SoylentNews

The Media Blackout of Seymour Hersh's Exposé on US Missile Strike Against Syria

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

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

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.

---

Original Submission

• Re:Point of Order? (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday July 05 2017, @04:23AM

  by khallow (3766) on Wednesday July 05 2017, @04:23AM (#535054) Journal

  The article itself not only references numerous sources

  Actually, no, it doesn't. For example:

  Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president's determination to ignore the evidence. "None of this makes any sense," one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. "We KNOW that there was no chemical attack ... the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth ... I guess it didn't matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.“

  We have no chain of communication by how Hersh allegedly learned of this statement. And notice how he just takes Russian/Syrian claims at face value:

  The Syrian target at Khan Sheikhoun, as shared with the Americans at Doha, was depicted as a two-story cinder-block building in the northern part of town. Russian intelligence, which is shared when necessary with Syria and the U.S. as part of their joint fight against jihadist groups, had established that a high-level meeting of jihadist leaders was to take place in the building, including representatives of Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Qaida-affiliated group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra. The two groups had recently joined forces, and controlled the town and surrounding area. Russian intelligence depicted the cinder-block building as a command and control center that housed a grocery and other commercial premises on its ground floor with other essential shops nearby, including a fabric shop and an electronics store.

  That just may be a transparent excuse for the flight path of a plane that deployed sarin.

  "The rebels control the population by controlling the distribution of goods that people need to live – food, water, cooking oil, propane gas, fertilizers for growing their crops, and insecticides to protect the crops," a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, told me. The basement was used as storage for rockets, weapons and ammunition, as well as products that could be distributed for free to the community, among them medicines and chlorine-based decontaminants for cleansing the bodies of the dead before burial. The meeting place – a regional headquarters – was on the floor above. “It was an established meeting place,” the senior adviser said. “A long-time facility that would have had security, weapons, communications, files and a map center.” The Russians were intent on confirming their intelligence and deployed a drone for days above the site to monitor communications and develop what is known in the intelligence community as a POL – a pattern of life. The goal was to take note of those going in and out of the building, and to track weapons being moved back and forth, including rockets and ammunition.

  In other words, an outside source told Hersh this, supposedly. Who knows who the source worked for at the time, or even if the source was real.
  
  The shtick here is that Hersh supposedly is speaking to intelligence sources in the US government. Then their admission would be typical adversarial evidence that things aren't as presented since one side is admitting evidence harmful to its side. But that only works if those sources exist and really are working for the US government. It wouldn't be hard for either Russia to fake such sources or for Hersh to outright lie.
  
  All I can say here is that piling your leadership on top of such a pile of hazardous gear and chemicals as is alleged here would be remarkably foolhardy. Hard to believe that such leadership could survive in the environment of the Syrian civil war.

  its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground

  Which let us note would also be ideal weather for a sarin attack.

  For instance numerous outlets/groups reported a smell of chlorine around the site of the bombing even though Sarin is odorless.

  Sarin need not be pure in order to kill. For example, natural gas has a strong odor because of an impurity added to give it a scent - methane and ethane, the principle components of natural gas, don't have an odor. So just because some chemical mixture has an odor of chlorine doesn't mean that it doesn't have sarin in it.
  
  Finally, I'll note the complete lack of physical evidence to support Hersh's assertion. Where's aerial photos of the bombed regional headquarters? Supposed the UN has determined that victims were exposed to sarin. That seems fairly strong evidence though it doesn't rule out sarin stored locally by this rebellion group.
  
  What's Hersh's counterclaim? Anonymous experts who may not exist and who may not work for the US, if they do exist.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+1
  Insightful=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		2