US Media Blocks Revelations of Washington’s Lies on Sarin Attack in Syria

Information leaked by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was blacked out by the US media after demonstrating that US Administration has deceived its own people by claiming that Syrian government was in charge of Sarin attack.

Barry Grey in an article for World Socialist Web Site wrote that US officials along with Britain and France sought to persuade their public opinion into an attack on Syria by blaming Bashar al-Assad for the sarin attack which occurred in 21st August, near Damascus.

“Hersh’s article, entitled ‘Whose sarin?’ was published Sunday by the London Review of Books. Based on information provided by current and former US intelligence and military officials, Hersh showed in great detail that Washington manipulated intelligence to create the impression that it had tracked the Syrian military preparing to launch a poison gas attack in the days leading up to the sarin strike on Eastern Ghouta. In fact, US intelligence had no advance warning of the attack,” Grey said.

Hersh also revealed that US President Barack Obama and other top officials deliberately ignored the information provided by intelligence and military services, showing that extremist groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda, including the al-Nusra Front, had access to sarin gas and are capable of turning it into weapon.

“The previous May, Carla Del Ponte, a member of the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria, had reported ‘strong, concrete’ evidence that earlier gas attacks had been carried out by Western-backed forces,” Grey underlined.

Hersh also said that the American media helped the government to promote its lies and justify its excuse for commencing another war, this time in syria, as they did about Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The response of the American media to Hersh’s authoritative exposure of US government criminality has been to bury it. In Britain, only two major newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, have thus far reported on it. In the US, there has been a total blackout by major newspapers and broadcast and cable news networks,” Grey said.

Hersh is an internationally known and respected journalist, who gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and its cover-up, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.