An Army of Smear Artists Is Working Overtime to Undermine Sy Hersh’s Syria Bombshell

July 7th, 2017

Awake Goy

Those who support, either explicitly or implicitly, the meddling in Syria’s affairs by hostile foreign powers are delighted that Hersh’s revelations are being kept out of the spotlight. They don’t want every side heard, only their side. And those of us who expect all the evidence to be aired, so we aren’t corralled into yet another disastrous “intervention” in the Middle East, are being denounced as Assad loyalists.

A good example of this kind of willful misrepresentation is by Brian Whitaker, the Guardian’s former Middle East editor. In a recent blog post, he accused me and Media Lens, among others, of being “loyal supporters of Hersh” – and by insinuation, of Syrian leader Bashar Assad – of being “sarin denialists” and of demonstrating blatant hypocrisy in approving Hersh’s use of anonymous sources when we oppose reliance on such sources by other journalists.

Before I address these criticisms, let’s briefly recap what Hersh’s investigation found.

His sources in the US intelligence establishment have countered an official narrative – spread by western governments and the corporate media – that assumes Assad was behind a chemical weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4. Hersh’s account suggests that Syria used a conventional bomb to hit a jihadist meeting in the town, triggering secondary explosions in a storage depot containing pesticides, fertilizers and chlorine-based decontaminants. A toxic cloud was created that caused symptoms similar to sarin for those nearby.

Trump was so convinced Assad had used sarin in Khan Sheikhoun that he violated international law and fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase as punishment, even though, according to Hersh, his own intelligence community disputed that this is what had happened. Given that Vladimir Putin is closely allied with Assad, the move had the potential to drag Russia into a dangerous confrontation with the US.

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