Hersh Revelations on Syria Prompt Only Official and Media Silence; Distractions

So what did Hersh's investigation reveal? His sources in the US intelligence establishment -- people who have helped him break some of the most important stories of the past few decades, from the Mai Lai massacre by American soldiers during the Vietnam war to US abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004 -- told him the official narrative that Syria's Bashar Assad had dropped deadly sarin gas on the town of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 was incorrect. Instead, they said, a Syrian plane dropped a bomb on a meeting of jihadi fighters that triggered secondary explosions in a storage depot, releasing a toxic cloud of chemicals that killed civilians nearby.

It is an alternative narrative of these events that one might have assumed would be of intense interest to the media, given that Donald Trump approved a military strike on Syria based on the official narrative... But, in fact, the western media were supremely uninterested in the story. Hersh, once considered the journalist's journalist, went hawking his investigation around the US and UK media to no avail. In the end, he could find a home for his revelations only in Germany, in the publication Welt am Sonntag.

There are a couple of possible, even if highly improbable, reasons all English-language publications ignored Hersh's story. Maybe they had evidence that his inside intelligence was wrong. If so, they have yet to provide it. A rebuttal would require acknowledging Hersh's story, and none seem willing to do that.

...

His story has spawned two clear "spoiler" responses from those desperate to uphold the official narrative. Hersh's revelations may have been entirely uninteresting to the western media, but strangely they have sent Washington into crisis mode.