Sy Hersh's Bombshell

A lot of reporters write articles purporting to expose secrets of the American intelligence community, but this is different. The article is written by Seymour Hersh, the country's foremost investigative journalist. He began his career in 1969 by exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and its coverup. Younger folks will know him for his reporting of American torture at the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq.

In an article appearing today in the London Review of Books, Hersh accuses the Obama administration of “cherry picking” intelligence to support the conclusion that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in Eastern Ghouta last August, said to have killed somewhere between 280 and 1400 people. This conclusion was used to justify the threat of US bombing of Syria. His article begins this way:

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded—without assessing responsibility—had been used in the rocket attack.

That other party is al-Nusra, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, that is part of the coalition of rebel groups trying to overthrow Assad that the US government supports.

Hersh doesn't say Assad was not responsible for the attack, just that the US doesn't have enough evidence to threaten to start a Middle Eastern war. In effect, he is saying the Obama administration was as foolish and/or dishonest as the George W. Bush administration was during the buildup to the American invasion of Iraq. You might say it's deja vu all over again.

You should read the article, but I'll try to summarize: The US had wiretaps intended to monitor coversations of the Syrian high command, and sensors in the ground near chemical weapons facilities designed to detect any movement of these weapons. The wiretaps, and possibly the sensors, were discovered and neutralized sometime earlier in the year, so if the Syrians carried out the attack, the US was taken by surprise. Two days after the attack, the US used computer keywords to analyze several thousand radio communications from the Syrian army, looking for evidence of the attack. In other words, they started with the assumption that the Syrian government was responsible and look for confirming evidence—a clear example of confirmatory bias. They then assembled a scenario of what the Syrian army would have done if they had carried out the attack, based in part on a training exercise that the Syrians carried out the year before. This scenario was presented as if the US had monitored it in real time, which of course they did not. Hersh says the US also ignored evidence that the shells said to have been used to deliver the sarin had a shorter range than they claimed.

At the same time, another suspect, al-Nusra, has emerged. Hersh cites US intelligence sources claiming to be certain that al-Nusra has sarin, and others stating that the evidence is inconclusive. Those who claim al-Nusra does have sarin refer to the presence in their ranks of Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert from Iraq—a bit of possible  “blowback” from the Iraq War. Needless to say, the US didn't try to construct a case implicating al-Nusra. They probably didn't have the necessary data.

As journalist Marcy Wheeler points out, Hersh's story helps to answer such questions as why our European allies did not support our threat to attack Syria, and why Obama surprisingly backed off from the threat, agreeing to take the question to Congress, where he faced almost certain defeat, and eventually accepting the Russian plan for dismantling Syria's chemical weapons that is now being carried out. As Hersh puts it:

Do we have the whole story of Obama's willingness to walk away from his 'red line' threat to bomb Syria? He claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.

Hersh's article appears in a journal unlikely to be encountered by many Americans. (Why was it not published by The New Yorker, his usual outlet?) It will be interesting to see how many American media cover this article, and how it is covered. The corporate media usually jump on any story likely to embarrass the President. But in this case, the story conflicts with their usual unquestioning loyalty to the American security state. We'll probably hear a lot of anonymous denials coming from Washington in the next few days.

Update (12/10):

The corporate media have been largely silent about Hersh's article.  The exceptions are interviews he did on Democracy Now (see the interview below, in two parts) and CNN. As expected, a national intelligence spokesperson denied everything.

The most interesting facts to emerge so far are that the piece was turned down by both The New Yorker and The Washington Post.  The Post told Hersh the sourcing of the article did not meet their standards.

You may also be interested in reading:

Deja Vu

A Stroll Down Memory Lane