June 25, 2017
Exclusive: The mainstream
media is so hostile to challenges to its groupthinks that famed journalist
Seymour Hersh had to take his take-down of President Trump’s April 6 attack on
Syria to Germany, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
Legendary investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh is challenging the Trump administration’s version of
events surrounding the April 4 “chemical weapons attack” on the northern Syrian
town of Khan Sheikhoun – though Hersh had to find a publisher in Germany to get
his information out.
In the Sunday edition of Die
Welt, Hersh reports
that his national security sources offered a distinctly different account,
revealing President Trump rashly deciding to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles
against a Syrian airbase on April 6 despite the absence of intelligence
supporting his conclusion that the Syrian military was guilty.
Hersh draws on the kind of
inside sources from whom he has earned longstanding trust to dispute that there
ever was a “chemical weapons attack” and to assert that Trump was told that no
evidence existed against the Syrian government but ordered “his generals” to
“retaliate” anyway.
Marine General Joseph Dunford,
Chairman of the, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Marine General, now Defense
Secretary James “Mad-Dog” Mattis ordered the attacks apparently knowing that
the reason given was what one of Hersh’s sources called a “fairy tale.”
They then left it to Trump’s
national security adviser Army General H. R. McMaster to further the deceit
with the help of a compliant mainstream media, which broke from its current
tradition of distrusting whatever Trump says in favor of its older tradition of
favoring “regime change” in Syria and trusting pretty much whatever the
“rebels” claim.
According to Hersh’s sources,
the normal “deconfliction” process was followed before the April 4 strike. In
such procedures, U.S. and Russian officers supply one another with advance
details of airstrikes, such as target coordinates, to avoid accidental
confrontations among the warplanes crisscrossing Syria.
Russia and Syrian Air Force
officers gave details of the flight path to and from Khan Sheikhoun in English,
Hersh reported. The target was a two-story cinderblock building in which senior
leaders – “high-value targets” – of the two jihadist groups controlling the
town were about to hold a meeting. Because of the perceived importance of
the mission, the Russians took the unusual step of giving the Syrian air force
a GPS-guided bomb to do the job, but the explosives were conventional, not
chemical, Hersh reported.
The meeting place was on the
floor above the basement of the building, where a source whom Hersh described
as “a senior adviser to the U.S. intelligence community,” told Hersh: “The
basement was used as storage for rockets, weapons, and ammunition … and also
chlorine-based decontaminates for cleansing the bodies of the dead before
burial.”
A Bomb Damage Assessment
Hersh describes what happened
when the building was struck on the morning of April 4: “A Bomb Damage
Assessment by the U.S. 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 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.
“According to intelligence
estimates, the strike itself killed up to four jihadist leaders and an unknown
number of drivers and security aides. There is no confirmed count of the
number of civilians killed by the poisonous gases that were released by the
secondary explosions, although opposition activists reported that there were
more than 80 dead, and outlets such as CNN have put the figure as high as 92.”
Due to the fog of war, which
is made denser by the fact that jihadists associated with Al Qaeda control the
area, many of the details of the incident were unclear on that day and
remain so still. No
independent on-the-ground investigation has taken place.
But there were other reasons
to doubt Syrian guilt, including the implausibility of Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad choosing that time – while his forces were making dramatic strides in
finally defeating the jihadists and immediately after the Trump administration
had indicated it had reversed President Obama’s “regime change” policy in Syria
– to launch a sarin attack, which was sure to outrage the world and likely draw
U.S. retaliation.
However, logic was brushed
aside after local “activists,” including some closely tied to the jihadists,
quickly uploaded all manner of images onto social media, showing dead and dying
children and other victims said to be suffering from sarin nerve
gas. Inconsistencies were brushed aside – such as the “eyewitness” who
insisted, “We could smell it from 500 meters away” when sarin is odorless.
Potent Images
Still, whether credible or
not, these social-media images had a potent propaganda effect. Hersh writes
that within hours of watching the gruesome photos on TV – and before he had
received any U.S. intelligence corroboration – Trump told his national security
aides to plan retaliation against Syria. According to Hersh, it was an
evidence-free decision, except for what Trump had seen on the TV shows.
Hersh quotes one U.S. officer
who, upon learning of the White House decision to “retaliate” against Syria,
remarked: “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious
– claiming we have the real intel and know the truth…”
A similar event had occurred
on Aug. 21, 2013, outside Damascus – and although the
available evidence now points to a “false-flag” provocation pulled off by
the jihadists to trick the West into mounting a full-fledged assault on Assad’s
military, Western media still blames that incident on Assad, too.
In the Aug. 21, 2013 case,
social media also proved crucial in creating and pushing the Assad-did-it
narrative. On Aug. 30, 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry pinned the
responsibility on Assad no fewer than 35 times, even though earlier that week
National Intelligence Director James Clapper had warned President Obama
privately that Assad’s
culpability was “not a slam dunk.”
Kerry was fond of describing
social media as an “extraordinarily useful tool,” and it sure did come in handy
in supporting Kerry’s repeated but unproven charges against Assad, especially
since the U.S. government had invested heavily in training and equipping Syrian
“activists” to dramatize their cause. (The mainstream media also has
ignored evidence that the jihadists
staged at least one chlorine gas attack. And, as you may recall, President
George W. Bush also spoke glowingly about the value of “catapulting the
propaganda.”)
Implications for U.S.-Russia
To the extent Hersh’s account
finds its way into Western corporate media, most likely it will be dismissed
out of hand simply because it dovetails with Moscow’s version of what happened
and thus is, ipso facto, “wrong.”
But the Russians (and the
Syrians) know what did happen – and if there really was no sarin bombing – they
recognize Trump’s reckless resort to Tomahawks and the subsequent attempts to
cover up for the President. All this will have repercussions.
This is as tense a time in
U.S-Russian relations as I can remember from my five decades of experience
watching Russian defense and foreign policy. It is left to the Russians to
figure out which is worse: a President controlled by “his generals” or one who
is so out of control that “his generals” are the ones who must restrain him.
With Russia reiterating its
threat to target any unannounced aircraft flying in Syrian airspace west of the
Euphrates, Russian President Putin could authorize his own generals to shoot
first and ask questions later. Then, hold onto your hat.
As of this writing, there is
no sign in “mainstream media” of any reporting on Hersh’s groundbreaking
piece. It is a commentary on the conformist nature of today’s Western
media that an alternative analysis challenging the conventional wisdom – even
when produced by a prominent journalist like Sy Hersh – faces such trouble
finding a place to publish.
The mainstream hatred of Assad
and Putin has reached such extraordinary levels that pretty much anything can
be said or written about them with few if any politicians or journalists daring
to express doubts regardless of how shaky the evidence is.
Even the London Review of
Books, which published Hersh’s earlier debunking of the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin-gas
incident, wouldn’t go off onto the limb this time despite having paid for his
investigation.
According to Hersh, the LRB
did not want to be “vulnerable to criticism for seeming to take the view of the
Syrian and Russia governments when it came to the April 4 bombing in Khan
Sheikhoun.” So much for diversity of thought in today’s West.
Yet, what was interesting
about the Khan Sheikhoun case is that was a test of whom the mainstream media
detested more. The MSM has taken the position that pretty much whatever Trump
says is untrue or at least deserving of intense fact-checking. But the MSM also
believes whatever attacks on Assad that the Syrian “activists” post on social
media are true and disbelieves whatever Putin says. So, this was a tug-of-war
on which prejudices were stronger – and it turned out that the antipathy toward
Syria and Russia is more powerful than the distrust of Trump.
Ignoring Critics
The MSM bought into Trump’s
narrative to such a degree that any criticism, no matter how credentialed the
critic, gets either ignored or ridiculed.
For instance, the Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity produced a
memo on April 11 questioning Trump’s rush to judgment. Former MIT professor
Ted Postol, a specialist in applying science to national security incidents,
also poked
major holes in the narrative of a government sarin attack. But the MSM
silence was deafening.
In remarks to Die Welt,
Seymour Hersh, who first became famous for exposing the My Lai massacre story
during the Vietnam War and disclosed the Abu Ghraib abuse story during the Iraq
War, explained that he still gets upset at government lying and at the
reluctance of the media to hold governments accountable:
“We have a President in
America today who lies repeatedly … but he must learn that he cannot lie about
intelligence relied upon before authorizing an act of war. There are those
in the Trump administration who understand this, which is why I learned the
information I did. If this story creates even a few moments of regret in
the White House, it will have served a very high purpose.”
But it may be that the Germans
reading Welt am Sonntag may be among the few who will get the benefit of
Hersh’s contrarian view of the April 4 incident in Khan Sheikhoun. Perhaps they
will begin to wonder why Chancellor Angela Merkel continues with her “me-too”
approach to whatever Washington wants to do regarding tensions with Russia and
warfare in Syria.
Will Merkel admit that she was
likely deceived in parroting Washington’s line making the Syrian government
responsible for a “massacre with chemical weapons” on April 4? Mercifully, most
Americans will be spared having to choose between believing President Trump and
Seymour Hersh.
Ray McGovern works with the
publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
Washington. During his 27 years as a CIA analyst, he was Chief of the
Soviet Foreign Policy Branch; he also prepared the President’s Daily Brief, and
conducted the early morning briefings of President Reagan’s top national security
advisers.
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