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World News See other World News Articles Title: Seymour Hersh Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine on national security matters and has also written for the London Review of Books since 2013.[6][7] Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards. In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award.[8] In recent years, Hersh has stirred controversy by accusing the Obama administration of lying about the death of Osama bin Laden and by disputing that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians in the Syrian Civil War. In September 2013, during an interview with The Guardian, Hersh commented that the 2011 raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden was "one big lie, not one word of it is true". He said that the Obama administration lies systematically, and that American media outlets are reluctant to challenge the administration, saying "It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]".[36] Hersh later clarified that he didn't dispute Bin Laden's death in Pakistan, and rather meant that the lying began in the aftermath of bin Laden's death.[37] On May 10, 2015, Hersh published the 10,000-word article "The Killing of Osama bin Laden" in the London Review of Books (LRB) on the fourth anniversary of the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden (Operation Neptune Spear). It immediately went viral, crashing the LRB website.[38] Hersh outlined with extensive quoting of both named and unnamed sources the background to how bin Laden's presence in Abbotabad came to be known to the U.S. government and how the SEAL raid was in fact known to the Pakistanis and had ISI cooperation. Hersh alleged the U.S. government's narrative was in fact an elaborate cover story meant to conceal Pakistan's relationship with the Al Qaeda leader and to yield maximum political payoff for President Barack Obama in the runup to the 2012 election season: The killing was the high point of Obama's first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan's army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration's account.[39] During the Syrian Civil War US President Obama argued in a 2012 speech that a chemical attack in Syria would constitute crossing a "red line" and that this would trigger a US military intervention against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.[54] After this speech, and prior to the chemical attacks in Ghouta, chemical weapons were suspected to have been used in at least four attacks in the country.[55] On March 23, 2013, the Syrian government requested the UN to send inspectors in order to investigate an incident in the town of Khan al-Assal, where it said opposition forces had used chlorine-filled rockets.[56] However, on April 25 US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel stated that US intelligence showed the Assad government was likely to have used chemical weapons, in this case sarin gas.[57] On December 8, 2013, the London Review of Books published "Whose Sarin?", an article rejected by the New Yorker and Washington Post[58][59][60] in which Hersh argued that President Obama had "omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts" in his assertion during his televised speech of September 10 that the Syrian government had been responsible for the use of sarin gas in the Ghouta chemical attack of August 21, 2013 against a rebel-held district of Damascus.[61] In particular, Hersh wrote of anonymous intelligence sources telling him that the Syrian army was not the only agency with access to sarin, referring to the Al-Nusra Front Jihadist group, and that, during the period before the Ghouta attack, secretly implanted sensors at the country's known bases had not detected suspicious movements suggesting a forthcoming chemical attack in the period.[61] The White House denied Hersh's allegations,[59][62] and a number of Syria and chemical weapons experts were critical of the article.[59][63] On December 22, 2015, the London Review of Books published Hersh's article "Military to Military"[64] in which he said that there was a divide between the US top brass and the politicians in the White House when it came to dealing with Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq. Hersh reported that the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) of the United States Department of Defense has indirectly supported Syria's President Bashar al-Assad with quality intelligence in an effort to help him defeat jihadist groups, providing said intelligence, via Germany, Israel and Russia, to help Assad push back Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State. Hersh also writes the military even undermined a US effort to arm Syrian rebels in a bid to prove it was serious about helping Assad fight their common enemies. Hersh said the Joint Chiefs' maneuvering was rooted in several concerns, including the US arming of unvetted Syrian rebels with jihadist ties, a belief the administration was overly focused on confronting Assad's ally Russia, and anger the White House was unwilling to challenge Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey over their support of extremist groups in Syria. On June 25, 2017, Welt am Sonntag published Hersh's article "Trump's Red Line"[65] which had been rejected by the London Review of Books.[66] He said there was a split between the U.S. intelligence community and president Donald Trump over the alleged 'sarin attack' at the rebel-held town of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib on April 4, 2017: "Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon."[65][67] Bellingcat accused Hersh of sloppy journalism: "Hersh based his case on a tiny number of anonymous sources, presented no other evidence to support his case, and ignored or dismissed evidence that countered the alternative narrative he was trying to build."[68] In his article,[65] Hersh states that the CIA was told directly by the Russians and Syrians of the place and time of the Syrian bombing ahead of time. He asserts that the Russians knew that the CIA was working with the opposition jihadists, and did not want any Americans killed. According to Hersh, the Syrian Air Force officers gave exact flight details in advance to the American deconfliction monitors aboard their AWACS plane, so that the Syrian jets could be tracked precisely, and the U.S. military did a bomb damage assessment (BDA) report on the attack, showing the Syrian Air Force dropped a 500-lb conventional-explosives bomb that wiped out the entire building the jihadis were meeting in.[65] Journalist George Monbiot asked Hersh to identify this building but he was unable to.[69 Poster Comment: In recent years, Hersh has stirred controversy by accusing the Obama administration of lying about the death of Osama bin Laden and by disputing that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians in the Syrian Civil War. Uncovering lies has hurt his career in recent years. He is Jewish but he told the truth about Osama and Assad. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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