{"id":315871,"date":"2017-07-05T02:11:46","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T01:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/useful-idiots-who-undermine-dissent-on-syria\/"},"modified":"2017-07-05T02:11:46","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T01:11:46","slug":"useful-idiots-who-undermine-dissent-on-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/useful-idiots-who-undermine-dissent-on-syria\/","title":{"rendered":"Useful Idiots Who Undermine Dissent on Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>There has been much disingenuous criticism of those, like me, who question why the western corporate media have studiously ignored the latest investigation by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh on Syria. Hersh had to publish his piece in a German newspaper, <em>Welt am Sonntag<\/em>, after the entire US and UK media rejected\u00a0his article. There has still been no mention of his investigation more than a week later.<\/p>\n<p>Those who support, either explicitly or implicitly, the meddling in Syria\u2019s affairs by hostile foreign powers are, of course, delighted that Hersh\u2019s revelations are being kept out of the spotlight. They don\u2019t want every side heard, only their side. And those of us who expect all the evidence to be aired, so we aren\u2019t corralled into yet another disastrous \u201cintervention\u201d in the Middle East, are being mischievously denounced as Assad loyalists.<\/p>\n<p>A good example of this kind of wilful misrepresentation is by Brian Whitaker, the <em>Guardian\u2019s<\/em> former Middle East editor. In a <a href=\"http:\/\/al-bab.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/syria-seymour-hersh-and-sarin-denialists\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent blog post<\/a>, he has accused me and <em>Media Lens<\/em>, among others, of being \u201cloyal supporters of Hersh\u201d \u2013 and by insinuation, of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad \u2013 of being \u201csarin denialists\u201d, and of demonstrating blatant hypocrisy in approving Hersh\u2019s use of anonymous sources when we oppose reliance on such sources by other journalists.<\/p>\n<p>Before I address these criticisms, let\u2019s briefly recap on what Hersh\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.welt.de\/politik\/ausland\/article165905578\/Trump-s-Red-Line.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">investigation<\/a> found.<\/p>\n<p>His sources in the US intelligence establishment&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2017\/07\/useful-idiots-who-undermine-dissent-on-syria\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There has been much disingenuous criticism of those, like me, who question why the western corporate media have studiously ignored the latest investigation by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh on Syria. Hersh had to publish his piece in a German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, after the entire US and UK media rejected\u00a0his article. There has still [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-315871","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}