Konflikten i Syrien

"Vi kommer att reagera med värdighet, i proportion till den verkliga situationen som kan äga rum", sa ryska utrikesminister Sergei Lavrov på onsdagen under en presskonferens.

Lavrov tillade att han hoppades att USA inte skulle använda sina underrättelser om den syriska regeringens påstådda avsikter att ytterligare provocera landet."

As has always been his practice, Hersh has told Welt am Sonntag the identities of all the sources he quotes anonymously in his story about Trump's retaliatory strike against Syria. The paper was thus able to speak independently to the central source in the U.S.

Why Haven’t Chemical Weapons Inspectors Gone to Syria’s Shayrat Air Base?

However, Shayrat’s centrality to the U.S. allegations is somewhat problematic, because so far the United States appears to have shown little interest in getting that base scrutinized by outside inspectors.

The Assad regime and its allies have for months been calling on the OPCW to visit Shayrat and see if it can verify the U.S. allegations. Moscow “insists on the necessity to send an [OPCW] team to Khan Sheikhoun and the Shayrat airbase without any delay,” I was told by Russia’s OPCW representative Alexander Shulgin in April.

Immediately after the Khan Sheikhoun attack, Russia and Iran launched a proposal for a new inspections regime in the OPCW Executive Council. Their plan would have rearranged current inspection teams by adding Russian and other members while also explicitly requiring the inspectors to go to Khan Sheikhoun and Shayrat.

However, this plan was soundly defeated in an OPCW Executive Council vote on April 20, with only four other countries supporting the Russian-Iranian plan against twenty-one members that wanted to preserve the present model.

As has been the case so often in his professional life, Hersh was harshly criticized for his most recent stories about Syria, about Obama, and about bin Laden. Many say he goes too far and relies too heavily on anonymous sources. Crucially, though, no source who is actively working for a government can reveal classified information “on the record” without incurring considerable personal risk. That holds true in Germany as well.

As has always been his practice, Hersh has told Welt am Sonntag the identities of all the sources he quotes anonymously in his story about Trump's retaliatory strike against Syria. The paper was thus able to speak independently to the central source in the U.S.

/.../Asked, if government lies still make him as angry as in his first days of his career, Hersh replied: „It is more than being upset about lying – it’s about the reluctance of us in the press to hold the men and women who run the world's governments to the highest possible standards. We have a President in America today who lies repeatedly about the most meaningless of information, but he must learn that he cannot lie about the intelligence relied upon before authorizing an act of war. There are those in the Trump administration that understand this, which is why I learned the information I did. If this story creates even a few moments of regret in the white house it will have served a very high purpose.“