Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has said that the 2013 sarin gas attack in Damascus was carried out by jihadi rebels. He is possibly right
Why would anyone believe Seymour HershIJ True, he's the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who broke the story of the massacre committed by US Army troops at My lai in 1968 during the Vietnam War, and revealed the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by US military police at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. But he's getting old (77), and he's a freelancer, and he won't even disclose the name of his key informant.
Whereas the US Government has hundreds of thousands of people working for it just gathering and analysing intelligence, and the American media are famed worldwide for their brave defence of the truth no matter what the cost. Besides, has the US Government ever lied to you in the pastIJ
So we obviously should not give much credence to Mr Hersh's most recent story. It alleges that the poison gas attack in Damascus last August that killed more than a thousand people, and almost triggered a massive US air attack on Syria, was not really carried out by Bashar al-Assad's tyrannical regime (which the US wants to overthrow)
It was, Mr Hersh says, a false-flag operation carried out by the rebel Al Nusra Front with the purpose of triggering an American attack on President Assad. If you can believe that, you will probably also believe his allegation that it was the Turkish Government, a US ally and Nato member, that gave the jihadi extremists of Al Nusra the chemicals to make sarin (nerve gas) and the training to carry out the mass attack in Damascus.
Mr Hersh even says that it was General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told President Barack Obama just days before the American strikes on Syria were due to start, that the evidence was not strong enough to justify an American attack on the Syrian regime.
The rest of the story we already know. Mr Obama postponed the attack by deciding, quite suddenly, that he had to get Congressional support for it. Then he cancelled it entirely once the Russians gave him the face-saving alternative of getting Mr Assad to hand over all of his chemical weapons for destruction. There is no chance of an American attack on Syria now. But could Mr Hersh's back-story be trueIJ
President Obama had already said that any use of poison gas by the Syrian regime would cross a “red line” and trigger an American attack. In mid-August, there were United Nations inspectors in Damascus to look into two much smaller attacks earlier in 2013 that seemed to involve poison gas. And we are asked to believe that at that precise moment Mr Assad thought it would be a neat idea to kill one or two thousand innocent civilians in the city with poison gas.
So who did itIJ The obvious question to ask was: Who stands to benefit from this attackIJ And the answer was certainly not Mr Assad. He would not have done this unless he was very stupid, and being wicked does not make you stupid. Whereas the rebels had every reason to do it, in order to suck American firepower in on their side.
Mr Hersh says that he has been told by a former senior official in the US Defense Intelligence Agency that that is what happened. You can read the details on the website of the london Review of Books. And yes, he's old, but that just means he has been getting it right about a lot of different things for a long time.