[Peace-discuss] FW: After Hersh Investigation, Media Connive in Propaganda War on Syria

Mon Jul 3 16:48:29 UTC 2017

From: David Sladky [mailto:tanstl at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2017 10:40 AM
Subject: After Hersh Investigation, Media Connive in Propaganda War on Syria

<https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/30/after-hersh-investigation-media-con
nive-in-propaganda-war-on-syria/> After Hersh Investigation, Media Connive
in Propaganda War on Syria

by  <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/> JONATHAN COOK

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Nazareth.

If you wish to understand the degree to which a supposedly free western
media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate
their audiences, keeping us uninformed and pliant, then there could hardly
be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer prize-winning
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

All of these highly competitive, for-profit, scoop-seeking media outlets
separately took identical decisions: first to reject Hershs latest
investigative report, and then to studiously ignore it once it was published
in Germany last Sunday. They have continued to maintain an absolute radio
silence on his revelations, even as over the past few days they have given a
great deal of attention to two stories on the very issue Hershs
investigation addresses.

These two stories, given such prominence in the western media, are clearly
intended to serve as spoilers to his revelations, even though none of
these publications have actually informed their readers of his original
investigation. We are firmly in looking-glass territory.

So what did Hershs
<https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165905578/Trump-s-Red-Line.html>
investigation reveal? His sources in the US intelligence establishment 
people who have helped him break some of the most important stories of the
past few decades, from the Mai Lai massacre by American soldiers during the
Vietnam war to US abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004  told him
the official narrative that Syrias Bashar Assad had dropped deadly sarin
gas on the town of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 was incorrect. Instead, they
said, a Syrian plane dropped a bomb on a meeting of jihadi fighters that
triggered secondary explosions in a storage depot, releasing a toxic cloud
of chemicals that killed civilians nearby.

It is an alternative narrative of these events that one might have assumed
would be of intense interest to the media, given that Donald Trump approved
a military strike on Syria based on the official narrative. Hershs version
suggests that Trump acted against the intelligence advice he received from
his own officials, in a highly dangerous move that not only grossly violated
international law but might have dragged Assads main ally, Russia, into the
fray. The Syrian arena has the potential to trigger a serious confrontation
between the worlds two major nuclear powers.

But, in fact, the western media were supremely uninterested in the story.
Hersh, once considered the journalists journalist, went hawking his
investigation around the US and UK media to no avail. In the end, he could
find a home for his revelations only in Germany, in the publication Welt am
Sonntag.

There are a couple of possible, even if highly improbable, reasons all
English-language publications ignored Hershs story. Maybe they had evidence
that his inside intelligence was wrong. If so, they have yet to provide it.
A rebuttal would require acknowledging Hershs story, and none seem willing
to do that.

Or maybe the media thought it was old news and would no longer interest
their readers. It would be difficult to sustain such an interpretation, but
at least it has an air of plausibility  except for everything that has
happened since Hersh published last Sunday.

His story has spawned two clear spoiler responses from those desperate to
uphold the official narrative. Hershs revelations may have been entirely
uninteresting to the western media, but strangely they have sent Washington
into crisis mode. Of course, no US official has addressed Hershs
investigation directly, which might have drawn attention to it and forced
western media to reference it. Instead Washington has sought to deflect
attention from Hershs alternative narrative and shore up the official one
through misdirection. That alone should raise the alarm that we are being
manipulated, not informed.

The first spoiler, made in the immediate wake of Hershs story, were
statements from the Pentagon and White House warning that the US had
evidence Assad was planning yet another chemical attack on his people and
that Washington would respond extremely harshly if he did so.

Here is how the Guardian
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/27/us-syria-warning-assad-regime
-chemical-attack> reported the US threats:

The US said on Tuesday that it had observed preparations for a possible
chemical weapons attack at a Syrian air base allegedly involved in a sarin
attack in April following a warning from the White House that the Syrian
regime would pay a heavy price for further use of the weapons.

And then on Friday, the second spoiler emerged. Two unnamed diplomats 
<http://news.sky.com/story/sarin-gas-confirmed-as-weapon-in-khan-sheikhoun-1
0932066> confirmed that a report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had found that some of the victims from Khan
Sheikhoun showed signs of poisoning by sarin or sarin-like substances.

There are obvious reasons to be mightily suspicious of these stories. The
findings of the OPCW were already known and had been discussed for some time
 there was absolutely nothing newsworthy about them.

There are also well-known problems with the findings. There was no chain of
custody  neutral oversight  of the bodies that were presented to the
organisation in Turkey, as Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector in Iraq,
has
<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ex-weapons-inspector-trumps
-sarin-claims-built-on-lie/> noted. Any number of interested parties could
have contaminated the bodies before they reached the OPCW. For that reason,
the OPCW has not concluded that the Assad regime was responsible for the
traces of sarin. In the world of real news, only such a finding  that Assad
was responsible  should have made the OPCW report interesting again to the
media.

Similarly, by going public with their threats against Assad, the Pentagon
and White House did not increase the deterrence on Assad, making it less
likely he would use gas in the future. That could have been achieved much
more effectively with private warnings to the Russians, who have massive
leverage over Assad. These new warnings were meant not for Assad but for
western publics, to bolster the official narrative that Hershs
investigation had thrown into doubt.

In fact, the US threats increase, rather than reduce, the chances of a new
chemical weapons attack. Other, anti-Assad actors now have a strong
incentive to use chemical weapons in false-flag operation to implicate
Assad, knowing that the US has committed itself to intervention. On any
reading, the US statements were reckless  or malicious  in the extreme and
likely to bring about the exact opposite of what they were supposed to
achieve.

But beyond this, there was something even more troubling about these two
stories. That these official claims were published so unthinkingly in major
outlets is bad enough. But what is unconscionable is the medias continuing
blackout of Hershs investigation when it speaks directly to the two latest
news reports.

No serious journalist could write up either story, according to any accepted
norms of journalistic practice, and not make reference to Hershs claims.
They are absolutely relevant to these stories. In fact, more than that, the
intelligence sources he cites are are not only relevant but are the reason
these two stories have been suddenly propelled to the top of the news
agenda.

Any publication that has covered either the White House-Pentagon threats or
the rehashing of the OPCW report and has not mentioned Hershs revelations
is writing nothing less than propaganda in service of a western foreign
policy agenda trying to bring about the illegal overthrow the Syrian
government. And so far that appears to include every single US and UK
mainstream newspaper and TV station.

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