The Failed Pretext For War: Seymour Hersh, Eliot Higgins, MIT Rocket Scientists On Sarin Gas Attack in Syria, April 15, 2014

The U.S. almost-attack on Syria last September and John Kerry’s estranged relationship with the truth:

As usual, the devil (aka the “Father of Lies”) is in the detail, but these damning revelations have been totally censored out of the “mainstream [corporate] media.”

The Failed Pretext For War: Seymour Hersh, Eliot Higgins, MIT Rocket Scientists On Sarin Gas Attack

 

Together with Mike German (ex-FBI), Julia Angwin (ProPublica), David Pozen (Columbia Law professor), Ray took part in a March 11 panel on “Whistleblowers: Dissenters, Advocates, Criminals, or Loyalists?”

The panel discussion was co-sponsored by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and PEN American Center, with Suzanne Nossel of PEN moderating. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein provided fresh grist for the discussion earlier that day in a major speech sharply criticizing the CIA. Ray’s sort-of-prepared remarks go from minute 9:00 to minute 20:30. The Q&As begin at minute 50:30.

http://www.centeronnationalsecurity.org/node/1073

 

Ray interviewed April 7 by Scott Horton on how Obama barely escaped being mousetrapped into another unnecessary war with Syria late last summer.

Ray has time to describe the play-by-play last August/September, when neocons were within hours of getting Obama to attack Syria, but were thwarted this time by senior officials with integrity – first and foremost, JCS Chairman Martin Dempsey. The interview was occasioned by Sy Hersh’s disclosures that morning in his explosive “The Red Line & The Rat Line” (see below) about how the sarin gas attacks near Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013 actually went down. The Fawning Corporate Media has missed this story so far (surprise, surprise).

25 min (from minute 1:00 to 26:00)

http://scotthorton.org/interviews/2014/04/07/040714-ray-mcgovern/

 

The Red Line and the Rat Line

by Seymour Hersh, London Review of Books, April 6, 2014

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2014/04/06/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line

Hersh shows how the neocons and the Turks very nearly mousetrapped Obama into a major war with Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry was not telling the truth on Aug. 30, 2013 when he declared, 35 times, “we know” that the Syrian regime was responsible for the Aug. 21, 2013 chemical event near Damascus. He did NOT know; he adduced no evidence. Hersh presents a convincing case that the perpetrators were NOT the Syrian government but the “rebels.”

While the neocon-dominated media beat the drums for what Kerry called an “unbelievably small war,” Hersh writes that the “small war” was also a fiction. Rather, it was to be Shock and Awe Number 2.

Integrity thwarted it. Honest British and US military and intelligence officers, led by gutsy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, nipped war in the bud. Dempsey told Obama the truth, leaving Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham fulminating as they complained at White House the following day. The neocons would not get their war with Syria.

Worse still from the neocons’ point of view, Vladimir Putin moved quickly to pull Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire by getting the Syrians to agree to give their chemical weapons over to be destroyed.

No wonder the neocons hate Putin so much. I’m reminded of why those “Indian savages” kept hating Gene Autry. They hated him yet from an earlier movie!