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I think you summed it up pretty succinctly, but you forgot the best conspiracy theory angle - Seymour Hersh was deliberately fed a poison pill that bore enough similarities to his other big breaks to convince him to suspend his skepticism, tanking the credibility of the concept in the eyes of the public!
I still don't think that makes him an irredeemable source though.
I'm not convinced Hersh has any particular credibility in the eyes of the public as large. There's a reason vouches for his career credibility tend to reach back 20 years or more, rather than since the Bush administration. Even the man's more ardent defenders during the Ukraine story were leaning back to the Vietnam War reputation than his post-9-11 middle east pattern.
At least on a public/policy level, Hersh got dropped like most of the Bush-era anti-war movement when it became clear he was going to make the same sort of claims and accusations against Obama and the Democrats as he did against Bush. The sort of 'we could believe it' credibility that that was leant when he was making various accusations against Bush as a warmonger, or that Reagan was the real villains for Pakistan going nuclear, dried up when he was blaming the Syrian rebels for Assad's gas attacks, and accusing Obama of fabricating the Bin Laden raid. Abu Ghraib was real, but the man made so many unfalsifiable claims, and then claimed other things false, that even his fans tend to mumble mumble over the stuff since 2004.
Honestly, I was(/am?) still on the fence about the Assad gas attacks because it would be such an insanely stupid thing for him to do, but I'm more inclined to believe he makes incredibly stupid decisions since he lost in the way he did.
I am convinced it was kabuki by the very fact the White Helmets were involved.
The narrative about Assad the evil eye doctor using nerve gas to make it clear how evil he is compared to the moderate democratic Al-Qaeda affiliates he was fighting is complicated bc the munitions supposedly used to dispense the nerve gas being very short-ranged garage made contraptions that would have required a truck convoy to get within 1-2 km of the targets. The state department map shows that the only place where these could have been safe was Western Ghouta, were funnily enough basically no actual sarin residue was found.. All the places with actual evidence of nerve gas were fairly deep into the area where government did not have solid presence in.
Those who want to see it in painful detail, aerodynamic calculations were made and published.
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People tend to forget that one of the Syrian civil war's proximate instigating sparks- the events that might not have been necessary but helped push uncontrolled protests into violent rebellion- was a sniper campaign against protestors.
This is / was a more common suppression method in the broader autocrat toolbox in the early 2010s, especially Russia-aligned. In theory, you can not only use the the violence from the snipers to take out key organizers, or to frighten / scatter crowds, but you can even use it as a pretext to send in armed forces to 'protect the people,' including escalating your own use of force.
In practice, government snipers backfired terribly in both Syria (2011) and Ukraine (2014). Digital media distribution, more capable phone-cameras, and now adays drones make it far easier to publicize/highlight/share the presence of snipers emplaced for longer periods of time. Once the presence of the snipers is known, it changes the political context and response vis-a-vis an unknown shot from unknown source.
That may / may not be 'stupid,' and the Arab Spring challenged a lot of underlying assumptions, but it an inclination towards a certain sort of murderous brutality.
There were also anti-government snipers in Ukraine, cooperating with the most radical protesters and fired on both the protesters and the government, trying to spark a bloodbath.
Some of the activists were now saying, during the trial that they were shot from behind by unknown people who were in the part of a hotel which was controlled by opposition.
Of course, good people who have been brought up on a steady diet of pro-social propaganda and who have been groomed to be morally invested into a sordid little geopolitical pissing match have to believe that their side would never, ever do anything shady or horrible.
This was even caught on video by BBC journalists who were under fire from their own hotel, of course, it never made the cut and wasn't shown. Would have complicated the narrative of evil stupid Yanukovich and brave, saintly protesters.
^^@FistfullOfCrows it's all kabuki.
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