Above, chemical weapon ingredients from Saudi Arabia, a key nation fighting against Assad in Syria.
On Tuesday, the New York Times assigned two of its most committed anti-Syrian-government propagandists to cover the Syrian poison-gas story, Michael B. Gordon and Anne Barnard.
Gordon has been at the front
lines of the neocon “regime change” strategies for years. He co-authored the
Times’ infamous aluminum tube
story of Sept. 8, 2002, which relied on U.S. government sources
and Iraqi defectors to frighten Americans with images of “mushroom clouds” if
they didn’t support President George W. Bush’s upcoming invasion of Iraq. The
timing played perfectly into the administration’s advertising “rollout” for the
Iraq War.
Of course, the story turned out
to be false and to have unfairly downplayed skeptics of the claim that the
aluminum tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, when the aluminum tubes actually
were meant for artillery. But the article provided a great impetus toward the
Iraq War, which ended up killing nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis.
Gordon’s co-author, Judith
Miller, became the only U.S. journalist known to have lost a job over the reckless
and shoddy reporting that contributed to the Iraq disaster. For his part,
Gordon continued serving as a respected Pentagon correspondent.
Gordon’s name also showed up in a
supporting role on the "Toilet Paper's" botched “vector
analysis,” which supposedly proved that the Syrian military was
responsible for the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin-gas attack. The “vector analysis” story
of Sept. 17, 2013, traced the flight paths of two rockets, recovered in
suburbs of Damascus back to a Syrian military base 9.5 kilometers away.
The article became the
“slam-dunk” evidence that the Syrian government was lying when it denied
launching the sarin attack. However, like the aluminum tube story, the Times’
”vector analysis” ignored contrary evidence, such as the unreliability of one
azimuth from a rocket that landed in Moadamiya because it had struck a building
in its descent. That rocket also was found to contain no sarin, so it’s
inclusion in the vectoring of two sarin-laden rockets made no sense.
But the Times’ story ultimately
fell apart when rocket scientists analyzed the one sarin-laden rocket that had
landed in the Zamalka area and determined that it had a maximum range of about
two kilometers, meaning that it could not have originated from the Syrian
military base. C.J. Chivers, one of the co-authors of the article, waited
until Dec. 28, 2013, to publish a
halfhearted semi-retraction. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Backs Off
Its Syria-Sarin Analysis.”]
Gordon was a co-author of another
bogus "Toilet Paper" front-page story on April 21, 2014, when the State Department and
the Ukrainian government fed the Times two photographs that supposedly proved
that a group of Russian soldiers – first photographed in Russia – had entered
Ukraine, where they were photographed again.
However, two days later, Gordon
was forced to pen a retraction because it turned out that both photos had been
shot inside Ukraine, destroying the story’s premise. [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“NYT Retracts
Russian-Photo Scoop.”]
Gordon perhaps personifies better
than anyone how mainstream journalism works. If you publish false stories that
fit with the Establishment’s narratives, your job is safe even if the stories
blow up in your face. However, if you go against the grain – and if someone
important raises a question about your story – you can easily find yourself out
on the street even if your story is correct.
Anne Barnard, Gordon’s co-author
on Tuesday’s Syrian poison-gas story, has consistently reported on the Syrian
conflict as if she were a press agent for the rebels, playing up their
anti-government claims even when there’s no evidence.
For instance, on June 2, 2015,
Barnard, who is based in Beirut, Lebanon, authored a front-page story that
pushed the rebels’ propaganda theme that the Syrian government was somehow in cahoots
with the Islamic State though even the U.S. State Department
acknowledged that it had no confirmation of the rebels’ claims.
When Gordon and Barnard teamed up
to report on the
latest Syrian tragedy, they again showed no skepticism about early
U.S. government and Syrian rebel claims that the Syrian military was
responsible for intentionally deploying poison gas.
Perhaps for the first time, The
New York Times cited President Trump as a reliable source because he and his
press secretary were saying what the Times wanted to hear – that Assad must be
guilty.
Gordon and Barnard also cited the controversial
White Helmets, the rebels’ Soros-financed civil defense group that
has worked in close proximity with Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and has come under
suspicion of staging heroic “rescues” but is nevertheless treated as a fount of
truth-telling by the mainstream U.S. news media.
In early online versions of the
Times’ story, a reaction from the Syrian military was buried deep in the
article around the 27th paragraph, noting: “The government denies that it
has used chemical weapons, arguing that insurgents and Islamic State fighters
use toxins to frame the government or that the attacks are staged.”
The following paragraph mentioned
the possibility that a Syrian bombing raid had struck a rebel warehouse where
poison-gas was stored, thus releasing it unintentionally.
But the placement of the response
was a clear message that the Times disbelieved whatever the Assad government
said. At least in the version of the story that appeared in the morning
newspaper, a government statement was moved up to the sixth paragraph although
still surrounded by comments meant to signal the Times’ acceptance of the rebel
version.
After noting the Assad
government’s denial, Gordon and Barnard added, “But only the Syrian military
had the ability and the motive to carry out an aerial attack like the one that
struck the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun.”
But they again ignored the
alternative possibilities. One was that a bombing raid ruptured containers for
chemicals that the rebels were planning to use in some future attack, and the
other was that Al Qaeda’s jihadists staged the incident to elicit precisely the
international outrage directed at Assad as has occurred.
Gordon and Barnard also could be
wrong about Assad being the only one with a motive to deploy poison gas. Since
Assad’s forces have gained a decisive upper-hand over the rebels, why would he
risk stirring up international outrage at this juncture? On the other hand, the
desperate rebels might view the horrific scenes from the chemical-weapons
deployment as a last-minute game-changer.
None of this means that Assad’s
forces are innocent, but a serious investigation ascertains the facts and then
reaches a conclusion, not the other way around.
However, to suggest these other
possibilities will, I suppose, draw the usual accusations about “Assad
apologist,” but refusing to prejudge an investigation is what journalism is
supposed to be about.
The Times, however, apparently
has no concern anymore for letting the facts be assembled and then letting them
speak for themselves. The Times weighed in on Wednesday with an editorial
entitled “A New Level
of Depravity From Mr. Assad.”
Another problem with the behavior
of the Times and the lame stream media is that by jumping to a conclusion they
pressure other important people to join in the condemnations and that, in turn,
can prejudice the investigation while also generating a dangerous momentum
toward war.
Once the political leadership
pronounces judgment, it becomes career-threatening for lower-level officials to
disagree with those conclusions. We’ve seen that already with how United
Nations investigators accepted rebel claims about the Syrian government’s use
of chlorine gas, a set of accusations that the Times and other media now report
simply as flat-fact.
Yet, the claims about the Syrian
military mixing in canisters of chlorine in supposed “barrel bombs” make little
sense because chlorine deployed in that fashion is ineffective as a lethal
weapon but it has become an important element of the rebels’ propaganda
campaign.
U.N. investigators, who were
under intense pressure from the United States and Western nations to give them
something to use against Assad, did support rebel claims about the government
using chlorine in a couple of cases, but the investigators also received
testimony from residents in one area who described the staging of a chlorine
attack for propaganda purposes.
One might have thought that the
evidence of one staged attack would have increased skepticism about the other
incidents, but the U.N. investigators apparently understood what was good for
their careers, so they endorsed a couple of other alleged cases despite their
inability to conduct a field investigation. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “UN Team Heard
Claims of Staged Chemical Attacks.”]
Now, that dubious U.N. report is
being leveraged into this new incident, one opportunistic finding used to
justify another. But the pressing question now is: Have the American people
come to understand enough about “psychological
operations” and “strategic
communications” that they will finally show the skepticism that no
longer exists in the major U.S. news media?
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