ilmdge posted:

I;ve never heard anything about any preparations ever being detected??

well you see we didn't detect the Preparations because they seemed like business as usual that in no way suggested the Syrian government ever prepared or used chemical weapons, so we had to redefine "business as usual that in no way suggests the Syrian government is preparing to use chemical weapons" as a sign that the Syrian government is definitely about to use chemical weapons

mediumpig posted:

Someone on twitter said it read like something fabricated by Russians,

The Russians are so crafty they've masterminded a conspiracy to systematically undermine journalism just to smear the US, for reasons that appear not to make any sense but that's just more evidence of how crafty they are! Four dimensional chess! But don't worry, at the same time the Russians are so stupid and hapless they can't find someone competent at the English language to write for them in an appropriate style.

They are simultaneously brilliant secret conspirators controlling everything, and also incompetent idiot failures. Does this sound familiar to anyone??

thatfatkid posted:

Could someone please provide a summary or explanataion of why so many consider Hersh's piece on Khan Sheikhoun to be unreliable. The self proclaimed experts and imperialists in the dnd thread just handwave it away as a deluded conspiracy theory of a senile crazy man without offering any explanation as to why it should be disregarded. tia

How do you think people reacted when he uncovered My Lai and all of his other stories we now know to be true? Liberals like to think they were on the right side of history but a simple investigation of the facts shows the opposite. And in 15 years liberals will pretend they were on the right side of history on Syria just like Iraq even though that example is within living memory. The only way the truth comes out is if the US empire collapses, other than that you'll have to be satisfied with bitterly laughing at liberals. That's what this forum is for.

KK: Could you respond to the criticism of your article by Elliot Higgins, who alleged that open-source satellite material supposedly shows the site of the bombing was not the structure you described? (Higgins in a self-styled weapons analyst whose Bellingcat open source investigative site is funded by entities including the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-backed NGO that has promoted regime change around the globe).

SH: He offers no facts, just insults and a lot of certitude about things about which he just does not know, or seems not to, e.g. that the U.S. and other foreign military (have) the most sophisticated satellite data to do bomb damage assessments, and would never think of relying on commercial satellites. They fly over Khan Shaykhun, so I have been told, something like every five days and their images actually provide very little reliable data about bomb damage. Buildings that look intact from on high with intact roofs may have no living space in them… the difference between post-strike damage photos from a military satellite or drone and the available commercial stuff is day and night.

https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165906452/The-Fog-of-War.html

As has been the case so often in his professional life, Hersh was harshly criticized for his most recent stories about Syria, about Obama, and about bin Laden. Many say he goes too far and relies too heavily on anonymous sources. Crucially, though, no source who is actively working for a government can reveal classified information “on the record” without incurring considerable personal risk. That holds true in Germany as well.

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.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/columns/imperialcity/12025/

Why do journalists use anonymous sources?
Because people who are willing to tell reporters interesting things—that is, confidential or disturbing information or opinions—are usually disinclined to appear to be the candid plain talkers or snitches or whistle-blowers or gossips or backstabbers they are.

Whoa! That’s quite a gamut of motives and moral postures.
Exactly. Anonymous sources could be graphed on a bell curve running from dime-dropping scumbags to heroes, with the vast majority (probably including W. Mark Felt and Newsweek’s source) somewhere in the big, fat middle. Such a graph would almost certainly be an asymmetrical bell curve, however, with a skew (probably including Cooper’s and Miller’s sources) toward the sleazy end of the axis.

So because anonymity makes it easier for sources to blab, it makes it easier for reporters to do their jobs?
Yes. And in lots of cases makes it possible to do their jobs.

Does anyone seriously propose a ban on anonymous sources?
“Editors or news directors who permit their use,” Al Neuharth, the 81-year-old former chairman of the Gannett newspapers, recently wrote in USA Today, a paper he created, “are violating their trust.” In the last year, USA Today has reduced its use of unnamed sources to an average of fewer than one a day. If you want a sense of how banning anonymous sources might transform journalism, USA Today provides a pretty good preview. As The New Yorker’s David Remnick said when I asked him about his reporter Seymour Hersh’s use of anonymous sources, “How many national-security stories has USA Today broken?”

But anonymity makes it easier for sources to lie, doesn’t it?
There are ten or a hundred times as many on-the-record lies as unattributed lies in the press every day.

Edited by Constantignoble (June 29, 2017 13:42:49)

Constantignoble posted:

considering how important these propaganda organs are to the modern humanitarian intervention MO, it's concerning that we can't already point to such a thing

this, but more: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/China-Releases-Human-Rights-Report-on-US-Terrible-Problems-20170309-0002.html

telesur itself presents a multinational model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesur_(TV_channel)

europe and america are not only plundering the world but are fast themselves becoming fascist failed states despite that, so i think such a project would be helpful to their citizens - probably would get as much crowdfunding as the western pro-war humanitarian orgs say they get

that being said: maybe this would help counter 'humanitarian' wars of gentle democrats like libya & syria, but trump doesnt seem to bother making any justification for his wars at all

Constantignoble posted:

1700 in Syria in particular? the biggest ISIS massacres, like Sinjar or Camp Speicher, tend to be in Iraq, which i take as the other reason ISIS winds up looking like a hippie commune in snhr's figures

no, the 1700 killed in speicher is the largest massacre ISIs have filmed themselves, and that was in Iraq.
i believe the next highest of their mass murders that they themselves have filmed was several hundred, I think of surrendered (iraqi?) soldiers ... i havent checked this tho.

the estimated killings in sinjar are 10,000, which near the syrian border -- SNHR seem to know ISIS turn into harmless kittens once they move a few miles west into Syria.
the largest ISIS massacres in Syria are supposedly in Deir Ez Zor, but i dont think we will find out the truth till isis is removed (by then there will be new lies by new anonymous NGOs invented, and these claims will all be safely forgotten about)
https://www.newsdeeply.com/syria/articles/2016/04/18/36-mass-graves-uncovered-in-deir-ezzor-activists
http://acloserlookonsyria.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Talk:Massacre_of_the_Sheitat_Tribe

The White House statement comes on the heels of the publication of an article by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a German publication, Die Welt, which questions, among many things, the validity of the intelligence underpinning the allegations leveled at Syria regarding the events of April 4 in and around Khan Sheikhun. (In the interests of full disclosure, I had assisted Mr. Hersh in fact-checking certain aspects of his article; I was not a source of any information used in his piece.) Not surprisingly, Mr. Hersh’s article has come under attack from many circles, the most vociferous of these being a UK-based citizen activist named Eliot Higgins who, through his Bellingcat blog, has been widely cited by media outlets in the U.S. and UK as a source of information implicating the Syrian government in that alleged April chemical attack on Khan Sheikhun.

Neither Hersh nor Higgins possesses definitive proof to bolster their respective positions; the latter draws upon assertions made by supposed eyewitnesses backed up with forensic testing of materials alleged to be sourced to the scene of the attack that indicate the presence of Sarin, a deadly nerve agent, while the former relies upon anonymous sources within the U.S. military and intelligence establishments who provide a counter narrative to the official U.S. government position. What is clear, however, is that both cannot be right—either the Syrian government conducted a chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhun, or it didn’t. There is no middle ground.

http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2017-06-30/medias-propaganda-war-on-syria-in-full-flow/

If you wish to understand the degree to which a supposedly free western media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate their audiences, keeping us uninformed and docile, then there could hardly be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

All of these highly competitive, for-profit, scoop-seeking media outlets separately took identical decisions: first to reject Hersh’s latest investigative report, and then to studiously ignore it once it was published in Germany last Sunday. They have continued to maintain an absolute radio silence on his revelations, even as over the past few days they have given a great deal of attention to two stories on the very issue Hersh’s investigation addresses.

These two stories, given such prominence in the western media, are clearly intended to serve as “spoilers” to his revelations, even though none of these publications have actually informed their readers of his original investigation. We are firmly in looking-glass territory.