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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA Media Unmoored From Facts
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36221-a-media-unmoored-from-factsBut what Hiatt and other neocon columnists consistently ignore from The Atlantic article is the disclosure that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed Obama that U.S. intelligence analysts doubted that Assad was responsible for the sarin attack.
Clapper even used the phrase slam dunk, which is associated with the infamous 2002 pledge from then-CIA Director George Tenet to President George W. Bush about how slam dunk easy it would be to make the case that Iraq was hiding WMD. More than a decade later, brandishing that disgraced phrase, Clapper told Obama that it was not a slam dunk that Assad was responsible for the sarin attack.
In other words, Obamas decision not to bomb Assads military was driven, in part, by the intelligence communitys advice that he might end up bombing the wrong people. Since then, evidence has built up that radical jihadists opposed to Assad staged the sarin attack as a provocation to trick the U.S. military into entering the war on their side.
But those facts clearly are not convenient to Hiatts neocon goal i.e., how to get the United States into another Mideast regime change war so he simply expunges the slam dunk exchange between Clapper and Obama and inserts instead a made-up fact, the flat-fact certainty of Assads guilt.
Hiatts assertion of the death toll as 1,400 or more people is also dubious. Doctors on the ground in Damascus placed the number of dead at several hundred. The 1,400 figure was essentially manufactured by the U.S. government using a dubious methodology of counting bodies shown on social media, failing to take into account the question of whether the victims died as a result of the Aug. 21, 2013 incident.
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A Media Unmoored From Facts (Original Post)
eridani
Apr 2016
OP
Scuba
(53,475 posts)1. Dorothy was right ...
The heaviest restriction upon the freedom of public opinion is not the official censorship of a press, but the unofficial censorship by a press which exists not so much to express opinion as to manufacture it.
Dorothy L. Sayers
1893-1957
British writer, essayist, playwright and translator.
Dorothy L. Sayers
1893-1957
British writer, essayist, playwright and translator.
ronnie624
(5,764 posts)2. The DU neocons aren't interested in this topic anymore. n/t