Mainstream Media Ignore Hersh’s Shocking Reports on Benghazi, Syria Atrocities

The major U.S. media have ignored for the most part Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster column April 4 reporting the Obama administration's deceptive accounts of notorious killings in Benghazi and Syria.

Several major U.S. outlets reportedly declined to publish his column The Red Line and the Rat Line. That is their right, of course, and he proceeded to publish his source-based allegations in the London Review of Books.

But at some point, failure to raise questions to authorities and publish criticism smacks of a cowardly self-censorship, not mere fact-checking.

I have monitored reaction to his revelations in part because I reported similar findings in my fall 2013 book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters and on this site seven months ago.

One of Hersh's most explosive claims is that Turkey, a NATO member and U.S. ally in the fight to overthrow Syria's government, helped plan a sarin gas attack Aug. 21 that reportedly caused more than a thousand deaths in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus.

The deaths, a war crime if proven, nearly prompted a massive U.S. bombing attack on the grounds that Syria's government had crossed a "red line" set by President Obama against use of chemical weapons.

The silent treatment helps authorities foster secret military actions worldwide for regime changes that arguably violate international law.

Reasonable people can differ on what constitutes adequate sourcing to publish claims even by such a noted reporter as Hersh, especially if his sources are anonymous. Hersh said in an interview with Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman that he respects a decision by the Washington Post not to publish his report that Turkey was behind the sarin attack. He is shown in a screenshot from a Democracy Now! video.

But if an iconic reporter like him cannot get his findings published in a major outlet in his home country or otherwise make a significant impact, who can?

Hersh cited anonymous sources, as I did in Puppetry, to describe how the infamous Benghazi attack in 2012 grew out of covert U.S. arms smuggling organized by the CIA from Libya via Turkey to NATO-supported rebels in Syria.

The smuggling violated official statements that the United States was providing merely non-lethal aid to rebels. Hersh named the smuggling route through Turkey "The Rat Line" in his column. My book described the arms and fighter smuggling as being under the command of CIA Director David Petraeus in 2012, whose role has long been obscured by both major political parties and an increasingly timid corporate-controlled media. 

On April 4, Hersh also reported that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, left, led a joint chiefs effort to dissuade President Obama from undertaking a bombing campaign against Syria beginning Sept. 2 as reprisal for crossing the president's "red line" with sarin gas attacks two weeks previous.

Hersh reported the evidence of Syrian complicity was too disputed for easy answers, and so the president needed to obtain congressional approval at the minimum. Hersh’s report thus amplified his column Whose Sarin? published by the London Review of Books Dec. 8.

Those findings by Hersh are congruent with those I made Sept. 3 in a report here on the Justice Integrity Project site about Dempsey's role. My report was based primarily on anonymous sourcing. So was an independent report Sept. 1 by former Navy intelligence analyst Wayne Madsen, who broke the story two days before me.

The mainstream media did not report these matters to my knowledge.

Instead, they misled the public by portraying a White House and Pentagon unified in decision-making, albeit with bomb planning that shifted from a presidentially ordered bombing attack to a bombing plan requiring congressional approval.

InThe Red Line and the Rat Line, Hersh described the tense White House internal debates late last summer in much more detail. He confirmed that Dempsey played a key role in persuading Obama to seek congressional approval for any attack.

Support for an attack failed to materialize in Congress. Russia proposed a face-saving plan whereby Syria would destroy its chemical weapons and avoid allied bombing.

The White House photo at right shows President Obama and his top national security advisors on Aug. 30. It illustrates the seemingly united front at the White House as authorities described Syria's guilt in the sarin attacks, and White House  determination to bomb Syria in reprisal.

My column today summarizes Hersh's findings and interprets the implications. The gist is that the news blackout symbolizes the continued erosion of the media's willingness to report government operations -- aside from obedient stenography of misleading government announcements.

The Justice Integrity Project has frequently reported this dire trend, especially regarding the crackdowns by authorities on government employees who communicate with the media without approval. The Hersh experience is a case study on how the problems get worse the more important the story.

Seymour Hersh

Seymour "Sy" Hersh broke the story of the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. He has won a Pulitzer and five Polk awards. For more than two decades, he has been a frequent contributor to the New Yorker on national security issues. A self-described freelancer, he is the most honored of all such investigative reporters in the English-speaking world and is widely respected for his independence.

His office for years until recently was in the same office building on Connecticut Avenue where I used to work in Washington, DC. After chance encounters in the building I invited him for a couple of extended discussions about pressures on journalists. That was the topic in 1987 of my first book, Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper.

As regular readers here know, this site has focused increasingly on the timid coverage that mainstream news organizations are providing on major issues covering the full range of public policy, especially on intelligence, war, and police matters. Hersh holds a rare position in being able to overcome those obstacles.

Thus I looked him up this fall when he was reported to have questioned conventional wisdom regarding Benghazi in a way seemingly congruent with my findings reported in Puppetry. Seymour Hersh Attacks Obama, Fellow DC Journalists was my report, and I dropped off a courtesy copy of my book. He told me he rarely does interviews or speeches except when he is about to publish a book, which he plans to do this summer. 

His ambivalence on those promotional issues make his revelations all the more important for the rest of us to study.

In Hersh's Red Line column this month, he quotes a former senior U.S. intelligence officer as saying of the sarin attack, "We now know it was a covert action planned by [Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan's people to push Obama over the red line."

Hersh also exposed in his column what the CIA calls "the rat line," the supply route for the Syrian rebels that the CIA has overseen in secret cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The information reputedly comes from a secret part of the report by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on the attack by Libyans on the U.S. consulate annex in Benghazi Sept. 11, 2012 in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed along with three other men.

Freelancer Brad Hoff, a Marine from 2000 to 2004 at Headquarters Battalion at Quantico, summarized Hersh's recent disclosures on Syria as follows. Hoff lived, studied, and traveled throughout Syria off and on from 2004 to 2010 following his military service.

His column, Media Blackout over Syria, states, "Hersh’s newest investigative findings are going unacknowledged in mainstream US media." Hoff listed 11 major points (excerpted below). The first was "Obama’s push for attack on Syria was halted last minute when evidence that the Syrian government had nothing to do with the August 21 chemical attack became too overwhelming."

Consortium News founder Robert Parry assessed the importance of Hersh's report in Was Turkey Behind Syrian Sarin Attack?  Parry is especially well-qualified to make such judgments after taking the lead role in breaking the Iran-Contra arms smuggling scandal in the 1980s while he worked for the Associated Press and Newsweek.

"The significance of Hersh's latest report is twofold," Parry wrote. "First, it shows how Official Washington's hawks and neocons almost stampeded the United States into another Mideast war under false pretenses, and second, the story's publication in the London Review of Books reveals how hostile the mainstream U.S. media remains toward information that doesn't comport with its neocon-dominated conventional wisdom."

"In other words," Parry continued, "it appears that Official Washington and its mainstream press have absorbed few lessons from the disastrous Iraq War, which was launched in 2003 under the false claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was planning to share hidden stockpiles of WMD with al-Qaeda, when there was no WMD nor any association between Hussein and al-Qaeda."

Passing up Hersh’s column, according to news reports, were the New Yorker, Washington Post and New York Times. Hersh had won a Pulitzer at the Times for exposing the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War.

Congressman Frank Wolf, a senior Republican representing Northern Virginia, is among others facing difficulty raising some of these issues. Wolf has tried with scant success to raise media attention regarding his suspicion that the Obama administration and the CIA were running an arms smuggling program from Benghazi to Syria via Turkey.

Wolf, even more than Hersh, would seem an unlikely Washingtonian to face the silent treatment. Elected in 1980 with Ronald Reagan leading their GOP ticket, Wolf represents the 10th Congressional district that includes the CIA’s headquarters. Also, Wolf chairs the House Appropriations Justice, Science and Technology Subcommittee during a period when his House colleagues continue, as they did during the 2012 Presidential campaign, to make the Benghazi killings a central attack point against the Obama presidency.

But his questions, like Hersh’s reporting and my book, do not neatly play out in traditional Republican vs. Democrat politics, and so are ignored for the most part.

In sum, these developments illustrate how government and the media are increasingly dominated by what I call their “masters” who keep a low profile in the private sector.

Critics

Major media mostly gave Hersh the silent treatment, as noted here. Those relatively few high-profile critics who commented attacked him for publishing such an important story based on anonymous sources.

In Seymour Hersh Gasses Turkey, the Daily Beast quoted pro-intervention analysts and anonymous government officials as disputing Hersh. But the Daily Beast, a glitzy, celebrity-focused founded by the now-departed Tina Brown, is an apologist for the UK-US foreign policy establishment. Its criticism of Hersh relies on the unsupported opinion of pro-government advocates, some anonymous. 

Hersh was subjected also to derogatory commentaries on various discussion groups, such as the TerraList thread "Why Doesn't New Yorker Publish Seymour Hersh Anymore?"

Much of that criticism was misplaced. Neither Hersh nor anyone else can readily quote on-the-record sources and documents without subjecting sources to job or criminal reprisals. Mainstream publications increasingly fail to identify top government spokespeople who making official messages. Most leading news organizations cooperate -- not always but all too frequently -- by keeping officials anonymous when they spin reporters on sensitive matters, thereby preventing accountability if the officials are wrong.

Furthermore, most major news and publishing companies have employees who are highly sympathetic to their official contacts, thereby posing a risk to sources that is not entirely theoretical.

Under such circumstances, it is preposterous for some critics to suggest that work of such established journalists as Hersh should not even be mentioned because the sources are not more verifiable. 

Under the Obama administration especially, government security experts risk indictment as spies if they help a reporter as a source. Among those charged with such spy charges in an unprecedented crackdown have been Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, Stephen Kim, and John Kiriakou. Sources run extreme risk of arrest and punishment because of the advanced detection methods now possible from NSA surveillance and retention of essentially all electronic communications of Americans with the cooperation of private sector companies.

An Even Bigger Picture

In Presidential Puppetry, I  asked readers to reflect on where they would go if they thought they had important, secret information about a major news story. Congress? Somewhere in the press? 

I suggested that it is not as easy to find an outlet as one might think even if -- or especially if -- the information is important.

As noted above, Hersh published his findings April 4 in the London Review of Books. It is a well-regarded publication but has a circulation of just 59,000 and little ripple effect in the United States.

Roughly at the same time, on April 2, the Associated Press distributed a major investigative story published in the Washington Post under the headline, U.S. secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’  to stir unrest on communist island. The long investigative report by Alberto Arce, Desmond Butler and Jack Gillum show how the social network was meant to be a tool to organize demonstrations that might trigger a Cuban Spring.

It's revealing to compare follow up treatment of the the AP and Hersh stories. The commitment by the nation's largest news organization, AP, meant that the story would be carried widely by member news organizations, particularly the relatively few that still have a strong commitment to international news.

Yet even in this instance, the elite media (largely concentrated in Washington and New York City) timidly avoided mentioning facts that would have underscored major implications of the secret U.S. government effort to use social media and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a botched and expensive effort to overthrow another government.

For one thing, the government plot illustrated why governments in many parts of the world increasingly distrust U.S.-control of the Internet and funding of "democracy-building" initiatives in nation's whose leaders might be thrown out by similar U.S. intelligence operations.

Also, the AP story failed to note that President Obama's mother had worked in the 1960s following a coup in Indonesia for precisely the same government contractor, Development Alternatives, Inc., identified by AP in the Cuba story. In the CIA-orchestrated coup, whose history we now know from declassified documents and books, Indonesia's founding president Sukarno (1949 to 1966) was overthrown in favor of a pro-West leader, Suharto.

That factoid becomes even more interesting when one learns, as first Madsen and then I have documented, that President Obama's first job out of college was with Business International Corp., a CIA front company. Business International had been involved in a CIA-orchestrated coup against Australia's left-leaning prime minister, Gough Whitlam in the mid-1975 to install a pro-CIA leader.

Presidential Puppetry lays out the details in a century of history, documented with more than 1,100 endnotes. True, all of that may be subject to rationales or even revision further analysis.

But my larger point is that very few have any incentive to do so even though the nation has vast numbers of quasi-academic think tanks and actual universities that are supposed to be undertaking such work, in theory, after investigative reporters break the story. But clearly there is little money or other career incentive for such study, and the public loses out.

During recent weeks, we have been publishing numerous columns reporting the apathy if not cowardice of most in the mainstream media on vital issues. This overview would not be complete without noting that the CIA issues a $600 million contract last year to Amazon.com to handle its advanced computing needs.

Amazon.com is the source of the fortune of the Washington Post's new owner, Jeffrey Bezos.

Defenders of the arrangement note that Amazon.com and the Post are separate companies, and that intelligence agencies have often worked closely with the Post and other major media. Frank Wisner, the CIA's propaganda chief during the 1950s and early 1960s, had weekly dinners with Post owners Philip and Katherine Graham. Insiders have described how Wisner coined the phrase "A Mighty Wurlitzer" to describe for fellow insiders on a confidential basis the spy agency's ability to generate major news stories on topics of its choice, and stifle others.

As a new development, CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, right, announced on Fox News her resignation from the network in March after two decades in journalism. She described "unprecedented" restrictions that journalists face under the Obama administration. 

Full details of her dispute are not public. Her comments suggest, however, that her differences involve timid treatment by the media of powerful news subjects, as reflected in such decisions as assignments, sourcing, editing and air-time. She is hardly the first to have such disputes. Edward R. Morrow and Dan Rather were among of her prominent predecessors forced out from CBS.

Yet academic studies and anecdotal evidence suggests that the problem is getting worse. Her situation is especially interesting because CBS News President Andrew Rhodes is the brother of White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. That relationship is far from unique, and illustrates the tight, overlapping circles in Washington between government and the media.

In sum, prominent journalists have been warning that many stories in Washington are off-limits to vigorous news coverage.

Update: Director of National Intelligence announced April 21, 2014 that anyone in the government's intelligence sector who talks to the media, broadly defined, even about unclassified intelligence matters may be fired, reprimanded or lose security clearance. FireDogLake published a news report, Clapper Clamps Down. 

New York Times investigative reporter James Risen, a Pulitizer winner, spoke at a major conference last year run by the National Press Club and Overseas Press Club to analyze the impact on the public of the Obama administration's crackdown on leaks to reporters from government and former government employees, especially on matters involving intelligence, war and diplomacy. I covered the event in Press Probes 'Obama's War On Leaks.

“The fundamental issue,” said Risen, “is whether you can have a democracy without aggressive reporting. I don’t think you can.”

Editor's Recommendations

London Review of Books, The Red Line and the Rat Line, Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels, April 4, 2014. In 2010, Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.​ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

London Review of Books, Whose Sarin? Seymour M. Hersh, Dec. 8, 2013. Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Obama caved under last-minute pressure from Dempsey, Sept. 1, 2013 (Subscription required). Wayne Madsen was a Navy intelligence officer for 14 years, including a year on detail to the National Security Agency. On the evening of Friday, August 29, President Obama was on track to launch a sustained 72-hour cruise missile and drone attack on pre-selected air defense and other strategic military targets in Syria. Obama had been convinced by his national security adviser Susan Rice, UN ambassador Samantha Power, and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, all "Responsibility to Protect" advocates, that he could trump congressional approval for his attack by claiming that humanitarian operations do not require approval under the War Powers Resolution or Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Many of Washington's insiders went to bed Friday night firmly convinced that Obama would give the final order to attack Syria sometime during the early Saturday morning hours of August 30. However, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, made a hurried trip to the White House during the early morning hours of Saturday to make one last final plea to hold off on any attack. WMR has learned from White House sources that Dempsey told Obama that the president's plan would not work: If you do this, the plan will fail and you'll get in deeper. And without congressional approval, you'll be screwed, Dempsey told Obama.

Wayne Madsen Report, USAID: a history of front companies acting on behalf of the CIA, Wayne Madsen, April 4, 2014. The recent disclosure by the Associated Press that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a notorious nexus for contract fraud within the State Department, contracted out a project to develop a rival to Twitter in order to foment rebellion in Cuba has refocused attention on USAID's long history of acting as a contract vehicle for various CIA covert activities. The setting up of the Cuban Twitter-like system, called ZunZuneo, was contracted to Creative Associates, Inc. (CAI), which conducted most of its out-of-Cuba operations in Costa Rica. The contract to CAI was awarded as part of the State Department's "Civil Society Support Program," the same program that has been used by the CIA to foment rebellions in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Iran, and other countries.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Petraeus affair known as early as 2004, Feb. 8, 2013. WMR has learned from U.S. intelligence sources that the National Security Agency (NSA) carried out electronic surveillance of the personal and official phone calls of then-Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq (MNSTC-I) commander General David Petraeus as early as 2004. In addition, NSA maintained surveillance of the personal phone calls of Petraeus's wife Holly. The NSA discovered in 2004 that Petraeus was having an affair with Paula Broadwell, the rising Army officer star who was a specialist on counter-terrorism and the Middle East. Broadwell insists she first met Petraeus in 2006 at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University but 2004 NSA intercepts of her and Petraeus's phone calls and emails reveal something much different, according to our NSA sources who routinely read transcripts of phone calls between Petraeus and Broadwell. Broadwell began her studies at the Kennedy School in 2006, the year she claims she first met Petraeus. The Obama White House had access to the Petraeus-Broadwell intercepts that began in 2004 and used the information to force Petraeus to step down as CIA director shortly after Obama's re-election.

Justice Integrity Project, Learn the Truth About Benghazi Before Syria Vote! Andrew Kreig, Sept. 3, 2013 The public deserves to know the facts about the Benghazi massacre in 2012 before approving the bombing of Syria sought by President Obama. Persistent reports suggest the CIA was using Benghazi last year as a base to smuggle arms and foreign fighters to overthrow Syria’s government. Iraq and Vietnam are previous examples of war based on false evidence: WMDs in 2003; the false claim in 1989 that Saddam Hussein’s forces had killed babies in Kuwait; and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing Vietnam escalation.

Justice Integrity Project, Hersh Attacks Government, DC Media, Andrew Kreig, Sept. 28, 2013 (subscription required). New Yorker columnist Seymour Hersh harshly attacked President Obama and fellow journalists in an interview reported Sept. 27. Hersh said of official accounts about the death of Osama bin Laden: ‘It’s one big lie, not one word of it is true.’' The White House released a now-iconic photo at right showing Obama and cabinet reaction to a video of the 2011 raid. Hersh also said during his outspoken interview with Guardian reporter Lisa O'Carroll that most network broadcasters should be immediately fired to improve news coverage. The acerbic Hersh, born in 1937, is best known for breaking the story of the My Lai Massacre by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. Editor's Note: Hersh later told the Justice Integrity Project that the Guardian reporter, presented as an interview, was drawn for the most part from a Hersh speech during the summer.

Related News Coverage

Updates

Global Research, Cracking The 'Conspiracy Theories’ Psycholinguistic Code: The Witch Hunt against Independent Research and Analysis, James F. Tracy, May 21, 2014. A new crusade appears to be underway to target independent research and analysis available via alternative news media. This March saw the release of “cognitive infiltration” advocate Cass Sunstein’s new book, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. In April, the confirmed federal intelligence-gathering arm, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), released a new report, “Agenda 21: The UN, Sustainability, and Right Wing Conspiracy Theory.” Most recently, Newsweek magazine carried a cover story, titled, “The Plots to Destroy America: Conspiracy Theories Are a Clear and Present Danger.” As its discourse suggests, this propaganda campaign is using the now familiar “conspiracy theory” label, as outlined in Central Intelligence Agency Document 1035-960, the 1967 memo laying out a strategy for CIA “media assets” to counter criticism of the Warren Commission and attack independent investigators of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. At that time the targets included attorney Mark Lane and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who were routinely defamed and lampooned in major US news outlets. Declassified government documents have proven Lane and Garrison’s allegations of CIA-involvement in the assassination largely accurate. Nevertheless, the prospect of being subject to the conspiracy theorist smear remains a potent weapon for intimidating authors, journalists, and scholars from interrogating complex events, policies, and other potentially controversial subject matter.

Los Angeles Review of Books, A Dangerous Method: Syria, Sy Hersh, and Art of Mass-crime Revisionism, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, June 1, 2014. No one expects a literary journal to possess the capacity to judge technical claims, but every journalistic enterprise has to meet minimal standards. The use of anonymous sources is not problematic per se. But it is common practice among serious editors to find a second, named source to corroborate information obtained from an anonymous one. Hersh’s damning allegations are all attributed to a single source. There is no independent corroboration.

Associated Press via Fox News, Weakened rebels in last stand for Homs, capital of Syrian revolution, as Assad forces advance, April 22, 2014. Weakened Syrian rebels are making their last desperate stand in Homs, as forces loyal to President Bashar Assad launch their harshest assault yet to expel them from the central city, once known as the capital of the revolution. Some among the hundreds of rebels remaining in the city talk of surrender, according to opposition activists there. Others have lashed back against the siege with suicide car bombings in districts under government control. Some fighters are turning on comrades they suspect want to desert, pushing them into battle. "We expect Homs to fall," said an activist who uses the name Thaer Khalidiya in an online interview with the Associated Press. "In the next few days, it could be under the regime's control."

Positive Commentaries on Hersh Columns

Consortium News via OpEdNews, Was Turkey Behind Syrian Sarin Attack?  Robert Parry, April 6, 2014. Journalist Seymour Hersh has unearthed information implicating Turkish intelligence in last summer’s Sarin attack near Damascus that almost pushed President Obama into a war to topple Syria’s government and open a path for an al-Qaeda victory, writes Robert Parry. Last August, the Obama administration lurched to the brink of invading Syria after blaming a Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on President Bashar al-Assad's government.

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