JUSTICE INTEGRITY PROJECT
By Andrew Kreig
04/17/2014
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Seymour Hersh |
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 the Justice Integrity Project 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.
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Obama, CIA poodle Erdogan neck-deep in Syria gassings |
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?
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Obama responsible for Benghazi deaths |
The smuggling violated official statements that the United States was providing merely non-lethal aid to rebels.
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.
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.
In The 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 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.
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My Lai massacre |
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.
Obama with CIA puppet Erdogan |
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."
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Saudi Prince "Chemical" Bandar involved in CIA/FSA gassings |
"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."
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Powell giving now infamous UN Iraq WMD speech |
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.
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Congressman Frank Wolf |
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.
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Pretty face, empty head - The Beast's Kirsten Powers |
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.
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Colonel Lolo Soetoro with Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama |
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.
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Stanley Ann Dunham with son Obama |
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.
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 issued 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.
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Sharyl Attkisson |
Full details of her dispute are not public.
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.
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Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods died at Benghazi consulate |
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.
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.”
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Andrew Kreig |