I don't cheerlead for anyone. I know that peaceful protestors were killed initially. However, I don't think that a 3 year war with a destroyed and ruined country, 190,000 dead and millions displaced should have happened because of that.
I think the West should not have taken sides and should not have armed and trained rebels and that our allies should not have spent billions trying to overthrow Assad in a proxy war where mercenaries, Jihadis and terrorists from all over the world were used to try and defeat the Syrian army, and where barbaric mercenaries butchered Syrians by beheading them, crucifying them etc. I think we should end all funding for the rebels and all funding to Isis should end and that we should negotiate a peace deal with Assad where he remains in power. Even Tony Blair has belatedly come to realise that
"The war in Syria is an “unmitigated disaster” and the best way forward may be an interim peace deal that allows Bashar al-Assad to stay in power for a short period, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair said.
“Two years ago, I said we had to intervene and take tougher measures otherwise Syria would disintegrate and we’d be left with increasingly tough options,” Blair said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in London today. “Right now, all the options are ugly and difficult in Syria but the best option is the one that allows us to evolve with some kind of peaceful transition to a new constitution.”
www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-23/blair-says-syria-peace-progress-may-mean-assad-staying-in-power.html
I, like many other people in this counry am sick of seeing the cast and troupe of UK Jihadi sympathisers, and "filmmakers" who are among the Jihadis in Syria, being interviewed and given airtime on our BBC and Channel 4, while they hardly ever interview a single person from Assad's regime which is fighting the whole band of funded terrorists, Jihadis, mercenaries and volunteers of Al Nusra, Isis, Al Qaeda, the Islamic Front and all the rest of them. One wonders whether the whole cast of interviewed Jihadis shown on our TV is intended to give Muslims a bad name. All we seem to hear from some voices is Muslims chided for not doing enough to condemn the Jihadis, and as soon as they condemn the Jihadis, another one of the cast of Jihadis pops up and is given airtime on our media.
I was unaware of the report you linked to which "debunks" what Seymour Hersh said. I have spent about 15 minutes googling to look into it. There are lots of articles supporting the debunking argument of Eliot Higgins, a blogger known as Brown Moses, but there is also discussion that supports Seymour Hersh.
So, who are Seymour Hersh and Eliot Higgins?
I think we have nearly all heard of the eminent American journalist, Seymour Hersh, and hardly any of us have heard of the UK blogger Eliot Higgins.
"Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award.[5]
He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh
For Eliot Higgins, who is the blogger Brown Moses, we have:
"How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room"
"Leicester-based blogger's monitoring of weapons used in conflict has been taken up by media and human rights groups"
www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/21/frontroom-blogger-analyses-weapons-syria-frontline
"Eliot Higgins has no need for a flak jacket, nor does he carry himself with the bravado of a war reporter. As an unemployed finance and admin worker his expertise lies in compiling spreadsheets, not dodging bullets. He has never been near a war zone. But all that hasn't stopped him from breaking some of the most important stories on the Syrian conflict in the last year.
His work on analysing Syrian weapons, which began as a hobby, is now frequently cited by human rights groups and has led to questions in parliament."
...
"And he's done it all, largely unpaid, from a laptop more than 3,000 miles away from Damascus, in his front room in a Leicester suburb."
...
"Higgins, 34, has no training in weapons, human rights research or journalism – he dropped out of a media studies course at university. But his work is being taken up by everyone from Amnesty International to the New York Times."
He is amused to be referred to as a weapons expert. "Journalists assume I've worked in the arms trade," he says, "But before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons that the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo."
...
Higgins goes through about 450 YouTube channels from Syria every evening. The list includes uploaded footage from activists, rebel brigades and Islamist groups, as well as from Assad supporters and state TV footage. "If EastEnders isn't on I get straight on the laptop. On a good night when nothing much has been posted, it will take me an hour and a half, but I've been looking more closely recently."
Whereas award winning journalist, Seymour Hersh, breaks stories partially based on information that he receives from top-level contacts in the American establishment, based on his reputation and contacts built up over a lifetime of journalism in the United States, Eliot Higgins blogs from his front room in Leicester based largely on meticulously analysing about 450 Youtube uploaded videos per night.
Fans of Eliot's approach to journalism call this "open source video evidence", and this is claimed to be a new type of journalism that old guards like prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh have not kept up to date with. I'm not a journalist, but has anyone asked the question whether any of these 450 Youtube videos per night are fake or whether the rockets they show may possibly come from warzones in Iraq, Libya, Chechnya or Timbuktoo rather than Syria? Seymour Hersh doesn't need to scrutinise 450 Youtube videos per night because he has contacts at the highest level of US society who tell him things which he then tries to corroborate.
I tend to believe that Seymour Hersh has a better handle on what goes on than a UK blogger in a front room in Leicester who uses Youtube for information. but lots of people prefer Eliot's work.
Here is an old school journalist, the acclaimed Robert Fisk of the Independent. He's probably not the best "open source" Youtube video analyst on the planet, but he is a fine journalist nonetheless.
"In a country – indeed a world – where propaganda is more influential than truth, discovering the origin of the chemicals that suffocated so many Syrians a month ago is an investigation fraught with journalistic perils. Reporters sending dispatches from rebel-held parts of Syria are accused by the Assad regime of consorting with terrorists. Journalists reporting from the government side of Syria's front lines are regularly accused of mouthing the regime's propaganda. And even if the Assad regime was not responsible for the 21 August attacks, its forces have committed war crimes aplenty over the past two years. Torture, massacre, the bombardment of civilian targets have long been proved.
Nevertheless, it also has to be said that grave doubts are being expressed by the UN and other international organisations in Damascus that the sarin gas missiles were fired by Assad's army. While these international employees cannot be identified, some of them were in Damascus on 21 August and asked a series of questions to which no one has yet supplied an answer. Why, for example, would Syria wait until the UN inspectors were ensconced in Damascus on 18 August before using sarin gas little more than two days later – and only four miles from the hotel in which the UN had just checked in? Having thus presented the UN with evidence of the use of sarin – which the inspectors quickly acquired at the scene – the Assad regime, if guilty, would surely have realised that a military attack would be staged by Western nations.
As it is, Syria is now due to lose its entire strategic long-term chemical defences against a nuclear-armed Israel – because, if Western leaders are to be believed, it wanted to fire just seven missiles almost a half century old at a rebel suburb in which only 300 of the 1,400 victims (if the rebels themselves are to be believed) were fighters. As one Western NGO put it yesterday: "if Assad really wanted to use sarin gas, why for God's sake, did he wait for two years and then when the UN was actually on the ground to investigate?"
The Russians, of course, have made similar denials of Assad's responsibility for sarin attacks before. When at least 26 Syrians died of sarin poisoning in Khan al-Assal on 19 March – one of the reasons why the UN inspectors were dispatched to Syria last month – Moscow again accused the rebels of responsibility. The Russians later presented the UN with a 100-page report containing its "evidence". Like Putin's evidence about the 21 August attacks, however, it has not been revealed.
A witness who was with Syrian troops of the army's 4th Division on 21 August – a former Special Forces officer considered a reliable source – said he saw no evidence of gas shells being fired, even though he was in one of the suburbs, Moadamiya, which was a target for sarin. He does recall the soldiers expressing concern when they saw the first YouTube images of suffocating civilians – not out of sympathy, but because they feared they would have to fight amid clouds of poison.
"It would perhaps be going beyond conspiracy theories to say the government was not involved," one Syrian journalist said last week, "but we are sure the rebels have got sarin. They would need foreigners to teach them how to fire it. Or is there a 'third force' which we don't know about? If the West needed an excuse to attack Syria, they got it right on time, in the right place, and in front of the UN inspectors."
www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/gas-missiles-were-not-sold-to-syria-8831792.html
At the end of the day, none of us knows what happened, but we have to decide which journalist is the better, more reliable sources - the award winning lifelong journalist with contacts at the highest levels or the blogger with a trained eye for a Youtube video.