Trump+Kushner+gang hell-bent on presenting Assad's head on a platter to Netanyahu ...

which reminded me of the Jewess Salome, daughter of Herod II, who demanded John the Baptist's head on a platter so she could present it to her mother who bore a grudge against that disciple of Jesus.
Seymour Hersh, investigative journalist extraordinaire, should be applauded for his work.  Sadly, our world has been corrupted and thus his truth-telling is not appreciated by the PTB. 

 

 








Von Dirk Laabs at Welt.de
Fog of War

Seymour Hersh and the Question as to What Really Happened in Khan Sheikhoun.

Reporter Seymour Hersh was just 32 years old when he became a legend. In late 1969, he revealed that U.S. soldiers had massacred over 100 civilians -- including women, children and old men -- in the small village of My Lai in South Vietnam. Several informants had long tried unsuccessfully to find a journalist to report on the slaughter, which had actually taken place in early 1968 in an area known within U.S. Army as "Pinkville." After Hersh published his first article on My Lai, he spoke with one of the participants, who expressed surprise that the media had kept quiet for so long. “Pinkville has been a word among GIs for a year… I’ll never cease to be amazed that it hasn’t been written about before.” It was a crucial lesson for Hersh. Enormous scandals, he learned, can be common knowledge within an institution like the U.S. Army and still the general public knows nothing of it. And sometimes, journalists hear about these stories but fail to follow up. Indeed, it became an insight that became a leitmotif of Hersh’s career: Write stories that others don't want to write, read or believe. To this day, most of Hersh’s work focuses on overreach and abuse by the U.S. government in its deployment of the nation's powerful intelligence agencies and military -- and how that power is often used to cover up scandals.
The risk of such scandals is always heightened in times of war. Such as Iraq. The U.S. invaded the country in 2003 on the search for chemical weapons that, as Washington had previously insisted to the international community, were sure to be found.

As they had in Vietnam, U.S. troops committed war crimes in Iraq as well. In Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, they systematically tortured and abused inmates in addition to humiliating them by photographing them naked and bound.

Hersh was the first journalist to report on the Abu Ghraib scandal as well. The U.S. government had tried to keep the scandal under wraps, seeking to prevent documents, photos and other evidence from reaching the public. But sources provided the material to Hersh, knowingly breaking U.S. law to do so........

.....As has always been his practice, Hersh has told Welt am Sonntag the identities of all the sources he quotes anonymously in his story about Trump's retaliatory strike against Syria. The paper was thus able to speak independently to the central source in the U.S.

Hersh had also offered the article to the London Review of Books. The editors accepted it, paid for it, and prepared a fact checked article for publication, but decided against doing so, as they told Hersh, because of concerns that the magazine would vulnerable to criticism for seeming to take the view of the Syrian and Russian governments when it came to the April 4th bombing in Khan Sheikhoun. Hersh had met a few times with Stefan Aust when he was editor of Der Spiegel and followed his career. According to Hersh, he knew Aust to be someone who was unafraid of the consequences of publishing stories that, when verified and checked, he knew to be true. It was a natural move to send the story, as edited, to him.

It was a situation that Seymour Hersh had experienced before. At the very beginning of his career, no publication wanted to print his My Lai story either.

What exactly happened in western Syria on April 4, 2017, when Khan Sheikhoun was bombed, is still not entirely clear. The events continue to be obscured by the thick fog of war........