Hersh
© Jana Birchum
Whenever a big, media-hyped attack or atrocity happens, the mainstream media always says the same thing: "The bad guys did it."

And who are these "bad guys"? The enemy-du-jour of the powers-that-be.

The authorities blamed 9/11 on "radical Muslims." They blamed the Boston Marathon, Sandy Hook and Aurora, Colorado massacres on "gun nuts" and "extremists."

The mainstream media have not yet admitted that these atrocities were false-flag operations. They are too recent. People would be too angry.

But mainstream journalists and historians do admit the truth about past false-flags.

During the Cold War, Western governments and media blamed the Operation Gladio massacres in Brabant, Belgium and Bologna, Italy on "anti-American leftists". . . just as they blamed the fake Gulf of Tonkin attack on the North Vietnamese. Today, everyone admits that these were all false-flag operations commanded by the US military.

During Operation Ajax - the CIA's overthrow of Iran's prime minister Mossadeq in 1953 - CIA operatives repeatedly committed mass murder and falsely blamed Mossadeq supporters. They blew up mosques, targeted religious leaders for assassination, machine-gunned crowds, then scattered thousands of leaflets claiming Mossadeq was responsible.

Former CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt has admitted to committing these murders and spreading these lies. CIA documents released this year confirm the Agency's role in the atrocities.

The Israelis, world champion false-flag terrorists, have admitted that their agents dressed up as Egyptian Arabs and bombed American targets in Egypt during the Lavon Affair in 1954. It took the Zionists fifty years to admit the truth. When the Israeli government finally confessed in 2005 to its attack on America, it lavished honors on the false-flag terrorists.

When will Israel finally admit that its slaughter of the American sailors of the USS Liberty in 1967 was a botched false-flag designed to be blamed on Egypt and trigger a US attack on Cairo?

Today, thanks to the power of the internet, more and more people are learning about false-flags. The media are finding it more and more difficult to ignore this critically-important, massively-censored topic.

A few days ago, award-winning mainstream journalist Seymour Hersh forced the mainstream media to talk about false-flags. In his article "Whose sarin?" Hersh confirmed what alternative media outlets like Press TV and Veterans Today reported back in August: The chemical weapons attack in al-Ghouta was almost certainly perpetrated by Saudi-supported militants, not the Syrian government.

That was the only conceivable purpose of such an attack. Obama had drawn a "red line" around the chemical weapons issue. Hence, the only way the rebels could hope to convince the US to bomb Syria was by staging a chemical weapons attack and falsely blaming Assad on such an attack.

In August, no mainstream publication even raised this as a possibility. They all mindlessly echoed Israeli and US government sources assuring the world that Assad must have been responsible for the al-Ghouta atrocity. Yet they offered no convincing evidence of Assad's responsibility.

If you were paying attention to Press TV, Veterans Today, Global Research, or other independent media outlets, you knew how unlikely it was that Assad would unleash chemical weapons in a militarily useless attack just a few miles from where chemical weapons inspectors were touching down in Damascus.

The mainstream story was ridiculous on its face...almost as ridiculous as the official story of 9/11, which blames nineteen debauched "radical Muslims" with box-cutters led by a terminal kidney patient in a cave in Afghanistan for the three most logistically-complex, technologically-advanced skyscraper demolitions in history.

The mainstream media would rather report ridiculous, self-evidently false assertions than even raise the possibility of a false-flag. That is because the corporate media are, as Noam Chomsky puts it, "manufacturers of consent."

Their job is not to report the truth, but to help powerful forces shape public opinion. And false-flags are the most powerful tool available to those who wish to shape public opinion.

The media will never even mention that false-flags exist unless they are forced to do so by someone like Seymour Hersh.

Hersh's article cites all kinds of documentary evidence proving that US intelligence sources knew that the Syrian rebels, not Assad's government, were behind the al-Ghouta gas attack.

For example: "One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration's assurances of Assad's responsibility a "ruse." The attack "was not the result of the current regime," he wrote.

Another high-level US intelligence source compared the al-Ghouta attack to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which is now officially admitted to have been a false-flag designed to trigger massive US escalation of the war against Vietnam.

This is not the first time that Hersh has forced false-flag talk upon a reluctant media. During the Bush Administration's attempt to win public support for its increasingly unpopular occupation of Iraq, Hersh reported that the one-legged al-Qaeda superman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a "composite figure" whose exploits were being wildly exaggerated, if not invented out of whole cloth, by US government propagandists.

More recently, Hersh reported that the official story of the alleged killing of Osama Bin Laden by US Navy Seals is "one big lie, not one word of it is true." He added, "The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple."

Hersh's revelations about al-Zarqawi, Bin Laden, and the al-Ghouta false-flag raise a larger question: Is "al-Qaeda" itself one big Western false-flag operation designed to demonize Islam and destabilize the Islamic world?

KB/AB

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is www.truthjihad.com