"The U.S. 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."
On Friday, the second spoiler emerged. Two unnamed diplomats "confirmed" that a report by the Organization 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 mighty suspicious of these stories. The findings of 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 organization 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 OPCW. For that reason, 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 U.S. 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 a false-flag operation to implicate Assad, knowing that the U.S. has committed itself to intervention. On any reading, the U.S. 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 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 of the Syrian government. And so far that appears to include every single U.S. and UK mainstream newspaper and TV station.
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