By Dave Lindorff
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese women, children and old people by US troops, the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in Iraq, and many other critically important stories, has now obliterated the US government’s (and the US media’s) claim that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military killed nearly 100 people with a Sarin nerve gas bombing in April, an incident which prompted President Trump to order a Tomahawk cruise missile attack on a Syrian Air Force base.
Hersh’s My Lai expose was initially published by the Dispatch News Service, and was eventually run by 33 US newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times (which employed him in its Washington bureau during the Watergate Scandal era, from 1972-75). His later Abu Ghraib expose ran in the New Yorker magazine, as did several other important investigative pieces about the origins of the Iraq war, and about a US covert bombing campaign in Iran.
But this latest piece, arguably his potentially most explosive — because it shows a President Trump risking triggering a World War III with Russia based upon his own rash decision, over the objections and to the dismay of his own military and intelligence advisers — couldn’t find a mainstream publisher in the US or the UK. Instead, he had to run it in a German newspaper, Die Welt.
Fortunately, Die Welt, one of Germany’s major daily newspapers, realized the importance of what Hersh was exposing, and has made the article, as well as a side-barthe transcript of a conversation between an American soldier and an intelligence service person in Syria, available online — in English. Here they are:
Trump’s Red Lline and We’ve got a fucking problem!
I won’t go into all the details. Everyone should read these two piece for themselves. Suffice to say that Hersh, who has excellent sources in the military and in various US intelligence organizations, has documented how the Trump administration lied about the deaths in an ISIS-held town called Khan Sheikhoun that the Syrian Air Force bombed last April, claiming Syria had used a sarin nerve-gas bomb when in fact the US military knew all about the attack beforehand and that the weapon had been a Russian-provided smart bomb, which was used to target an ISIS leadership meeting underway in the targeted building. (The Russians had contacted the US about the bombing earlier, to make sure no CIA personnel would be in the building at the time.)…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively-run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3588
It’s another war crime that Hersh can’t find a publisher in the English speaking world. London Review admits they won’t publish it under political pressure, even though they COMMISSIONED it!!
That’s a story in itself!