"the story is fundamentally at odds with reality as we know it"

[Thomas Eckhardt]

 From the article:

"It is difficult to trust this story solely on Hersh's 
record for another reason: His record over the past decade 
has been highly questionable. Since 2006, Hersh has 
reported a stream of increasingly spectacular and thinly 
sourced stories: that the US considered dropping nuclear 
bombs on Iran, that US special forces are secretly run by 
ancient Illuminati-style orders such as Opus Dei, that the 
US secretly trained Iranian terrorists in Nevada, that 
Syria's 2013 chemical weapons attacks were a "false flag" 
launched by Turkey, and so on.

None of these reports has ever been confirmed. That stands 
in stark and concerning contrast to My Lai and Abu Ghraib, 
which were quickly confirmed by numerous other reporters."


I can't say anything about the veracity of Hersh's other 
claims but the main point of his report about the Ghouta 
chemical weapons attacks has been confirmed by the MIT. 
The attacks were not committed by Assad's forces.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1006045/possible-implications-of-bad-intelligence.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/sts/Analysis%20of%20the%20UN%20Report%20on%20Syria%20CW.pdf

Here is the summary from the first analysis:

"What is the main policy issue?

The Syrian Improvised Chemical Munitions that Were Used in 
the August 21,
Nerve Agent Attack in Damascus Have a Range of About 2 
Kilometers
The UN Independent Assessment of the Range of the Chemical 
Munition Is in
Exact Agreement with Our Findings
This Indicates That These Munitions Could Not Possibly 
Have Been Fired at
East Ghouta from the “Heart”, or from the Eastern Edge, of 
the Syrian
Government Controlled Area Shown in the Intelligence Map 
Published by the
White House on August 30, 2013.
This mistaken Intelligence Could Have Led to an 
Unjustified US Military
Action Based on False Intelligence.
A Proper Vetting of the Fact That the Munition Was of Such 
Short Range
Would Have Led to a Completely Different Assessment of the 
Situation from
the Gathered Data.
Whatever the Reasons for the Egregious Errors in the 
Intelligence, the Source
of These Errors Needs to Be Explained.
If the Source of These Errors Is Not Identified, the 
Procedures that Led to this
Intelligence Failure Will Go Uncorrected, and the Chances 
of a Future Policy
Disaster Will Grow With Certainty."

http://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1006045/possible-implications-of-bad-intelligence.pdf

There is also common sense: If you were Assad and the 
President of the United States had drawn a "red line" at 
the use of chemical weapons against your opponents, would 
you attack your opponents with chemical weapons? Of course 
not! Because you may be a murderous dictator but you're 
not an idiot.

It seems clear to me that this was a flase flag attack. 
The aim was, of course, to provoke a military intervention 
by the US.


To return to Max Fisher's article: Fisher either does not 
know the MIT's analysis or consciously ignores it. Not a 
good sign either way.

For a detailed discussion of Hersh's indeed thinly sourced 
report and Fisher's criticism, see:

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/12/how-a-critic-of-hershs-new-piece-fails-to-understand-what-really-happened.html



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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l