White House ‘Forgot’ Facts About Gas Attacks

As an investigative journalist, it would be hard to have a more impressive CV than Seymour Hersh. He has a Pulitzer Prize on his shelf, revealed the massacre at My Lai in 1969 and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. History has given him the right to say that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on false information.

However, it is one thing to be celebrated for one’s previous revelations of the lies of those in power and quite another to claim that those in power lie today.

Hersh’s fine credentials meant nothing when he wrote an article attempting to show that the White House deliberately hid information that suggested that rebel groups carried out the gas attacks in Syria. The purpose [of hiding these facts] was to justify the planned (and later canceled) war with ” cherry-picked” reports where only the data that pointed toward the Assad regime’s atrocities was left. His former employers The Washington Post and The New Yorker rejected the reportage, which he instead had to sell for substantially less to the London Review of Books.

No one has been able to point out any inaccuracies in the article, but only two British newspapers (Daily Mail and Telegraph) have referred to it. In the U.S., the website the Huffington Post is the only major media outlet to mention the allegations.

“…The sourcing in the article did not meet the Post’s standards,” was The Washington Post’s declaration, according to Hersh. Amy Goodman from the radio program Democracy Now points out that the stringent criteria rarely seems to have been applied to the numerous articles that clearly pointed to Assad.