After Hersh Investigation, Media Connive in Propaganda War on Syria
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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
Hersh’s 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 Hersh’s 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 Hersh’s 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 Syria’s 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. Hersh’s 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 Assad’s main ally, Russia, into the fray. The Syrian
arena has the potential to trigger a serious confrontation between the
world’s two major nuclear powers.
But, in fact, the western media were supremely uninterested
in the story. Hersh, once considered the journalist’s 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 Hersh’s story. Maybe
they had evidence that his inside intelligence was wrong. If so, they
have yet to provide it. A rebuttal would require acknowledging Hersh’s
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. Hersh’s 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 Hersh’s investigation directly, which might have drawn
attention to it and forced western media to reference it. Instead
Washington has sought to deflect attention from Hersh’s 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 Hersh’s
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 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 “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 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 Hersh’s 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 media’s continuing blackout of Hersh’s 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 Hersh’s 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 Hersh’s 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.
Weekend Edition
June 30, 2017
Friday - Sunday
June 30, 2017
Friday - Sunday
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