Foreword: The secret Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) is very
close to ratification by the US Congress and the final draft of this
insidious corporate takeover has already been signed by twelve countries
that value corporate interests more than those of their own sovereign
nations. In Europe and the UK the TTIP treaty is the mirror image of
this proposed treasonous treaty and just as secret. Both must be
stopped! Now!
Thanks to Judicial Watch obtaining new memos, Fox News is now
reporting that the Obama administration knew that Benghazi was being
used as a hub for the transfer of lethal weapons to Syria back in 2012.
Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell suggested to Bret Baier that the
CIA wasn’t doing the transferring, but was watching someone else do it.
According to another memo dated September 16, 2012, just FIVE DAYS
after the attack on the ‘consulate’ in Benghazi, the Obama
administration via the DNI concluded that the terrorist attack had been
planned at least 10 days before the attack occurred and that it wasn’t a
coincidence that it happened on the anniversary of 9/11. If you recall,
the Obama administration was lying about it, saying it was a
demonstration against a film about the Prophet Muhammad that got out of
control. They were saying this on the very same day this DNI memo went
out to different agencies including the National Security Council and
the State Department.
MARK TALIANO: Beneath the protection of this psychological operation,
the engineered enemy is Islam, and the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT)
has become a brand to disguise imperial wars of aggression as
“humanitarian”.
As Saudi war crimes and crimes against humanity continue apace in Yemen,
Saudi Arabia is now apparently attempting to gain public support and
better reception from the viewing audience by painting itself as an
enemy of al-Qaeda and ISIS,
Trade Agreements - in who's interest? As "The Guardian" revealed, the
world-wide operating oil company "Chevron" lobbied the EU to give
foreign investors the legal right to challenge government decisions such
as laws to ban fracking. With an powerful tool like that governments
would be even more discouraged to set important (environmental)
standards in fear of lawsuits. #StopTTIP
Well, there are really not many likeable issues about #TTIP, #CETA and #TISA
- but the mutual recognition of standards used to be at least one
benefit of trade agreements, especially for small businesses and
medium-sized companies. Now it is becoming more and more clear that even
those benefits will likely not be included when TTIP is accepted.
The Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL) and the Center for
International Environmental Law (CIEL) have launched a new campaign (tradinghealthforprofit.wordpress.com - private)!
The campaign aims to ensure that the EU-US trade talks do not undermine
EU chemicals legislation. If chemicals are included in TTIP, the EU
could see its global leadership in protecting public health through
tough laws watered down. In addition to pesticide legislation, TTIP
could halt the EU’s progress on a policy to limit exposure to hormone
disrupting chemicals. #stopTTIP#HEAL#CIEL Check out the new campaign's Twitter account : @TTIPingToxics
Between 500 and 700 Palestinian children are prosecuted in Israel’s military courts each year, says rights group.
A jabbing pain in his shoulder and thigh roused Obada from his sleep
at 3am. In the half-light, the 15-year-old could make out eight masked
men surrounding his bed, their rifles pointed at him.
“I felt terrified,” he said of the experience of being arrested in
February from his home in the village of al-Araqa, near Jenin in the
northern West Bank.
Obada is one of more than 100 Palestinian children who, in recent
months, have found themselves dragged from bed at gunpoint in the middle
of the night by Israeli soldiers, according to children’s right groups.
Testimonies like Obada’s feature in a new report,
No Way to Treat a Child, compiled by Defence for Children International
– Palestine (DCIP), a group monitoring Israeli violations of
Palestinian children’s rights.
The 440 children currently in military detention are the highest total since the Israeli army started issuing figures in 2008 – and more than double the number detained this time last year.
The rights group says that, despite promises two years ago from the
Israeli army to phase out night raids following international
condemnation, in practice they are used as routinely as ever.
During his arrest, Obada said he was hit with a rifle butt,
blindfolded and his hands tied with a plastic cord that cut into his
flesh. “The soldiers dragged me out of the house without allowing me to
say goodbye to my family and without telling me why and where they were
taking me,” he said.
Over the next fortnight, according to Obada, he was repeatedly
beaten. Indignities included being locked overnight in a small toilet
cubicle and assaulted with a taser when he protested.
For 12 days, his only break from solitary confinement was to be taken
from his cell to an interrogation room where he was tied tightly to a
chair, slapped and threatened.
He was repeatedly questioned about his ties to two school friends, Nihad and Fuad Waked, who had been killed a few days earlier during an attack on soldiers.
India’s farmers are the
targets of structural violence aimed at uprooting indigenous agriculture
and replacing it with an intensive corporate model based on GMOs and
agrochemicals. But as Monsanto’s GM cotton succumbs to insect
infestations despite repeated pesticide applications, agroecological
farming is an increasingly attractive option for cultivators.
The mantra of global agribusiness is that it cares about farmers. It
also really cares about humanity and wants to help feed a growing world
population by using its patented genetically modified (GM) seeds.
It says it wants to assist poor farmers by helping them grow enough
to earn a decent income. Seems like it’s a win-win situation for
everyone!
If you listen to the PR, you could be forgiven for believing that
transnational agribusiness companies are driven by altruistic tendencies
and humanitarian goals rather than by massive profit margins and
delivering on shareholder dividends.
To promote itself and its products, the US multinational company
Union Carbide came out with a series of brochures in the 1950s and 60s
with powerful images depicting a large ‘hand of god’ in the sky, which
hovered over a series of landscapes and scenarios in need of ‘fixing’ by
the brave new world of science and the type of agricultural technology
to be found in a pesticide canister.
One such image is of a giant hand pouring chemicals from a lab flask
upon Indian soil, with a pesticide manufacturing factory in the distance
and Mumbai’s Gateway of India opposite.
It was a scene where science met tradition, where the helping hand of
God, in this case Union Carbide, assisted the ignorant, backward Indian
farmer who is shown toiling in the fields. The people at Union Carbide
didn’t do subtlety back then.
We can now look back and see where Union Carbide’s hubris got the
people of Bhopal and the deaths caused by that pesticide factory
depicted in the image. And we can also see the utter contempt its top
people in the US displayed by dodging justice and failing the victims of
Bhopal. There’s humanitarianism for you: playing god with people’s
lives and avoiding accountability for the death and havoc created.
The supposed humanitarian motives of global agribusiness are little more than a sham.
If these companies, their supporters, media shills and PR mouthpieces
really want to feed the world and assist poor farmers in low income
countries, as they say they do, they would do better by addressing the
political, economic and structural issues which fuel inequality, poverty and hunger.
Laughing all the way to the bank at the farmer’s expense
Many of the people these companies supply their inputs to and make a
profit from are smallholder farmers who live on a financial knife edge
in low income countries. Monsanto has appropriated around $900 million
from India’s farmers over the last decade or so – illegally according to Vandana Shiva. By way of contrast, Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant brought in $13.4 million in 2014 alone, according to Bloomberg.
Writing in India’s Statesman newspaper,
Bharat Dogra illustrates the knife-edge existence of the people that
rich agribusiness profits from by discussing the case of Babu Lal and
his wife Mirdi Bai who have been traditionally cultivating wheat, maize,
and bajra (millet) on their farmland in Rajasthan. Their crops provided
food for several months a year to the 10-member family as well as
fodder for farm and dairy animals which are integral to the mixed
farming system employed.
Dogra notes that company (unspecified – but Monsanto and its
subsidiaries dominate the GM cotton industry in India) agents approached
the family with the promise of a lump-sum payment to plant and produce
Bt (GM) cotton seeds in two of their fields. Babu Lal purchased
pesticides to help grow the seeds in the hope of receiving the payment,
which never materialised because the company agent said the seeds
produced had “failed” in tests.
The family faced economic ruin, not least because the food harvest
was much lower than normal as the best fields and most labour and
resources had been devoted to Bt cotton. There was hardly any fodder
too. It all resulted in Babu Lal borrowing from private moneylenders at a
high interest rate to meet the needs of food and fodder.
Things were to get much worse though as the company’s agent allegedly
started harassing Babu Lal for a payment of about 10,000 rupees in lieu
of the fertilisers and pesticides provided to him. Several other tribal
farmers in the area also fell into this trap, and reports say that the
soil of fields in which Bt cotton was grown has been badly damaged.
The promise of a lump-sum cash payment can be very enticing to poor
farmers, and when companies use influential villagers to get new farmers
to agree to plant GM cotton, tribal farmers are reluctant to decline
the offer. When production is declared as having failed, solely at the
company’s discretion it seems, a family becomes indebted.
According to Dogra’s piece, there is growing evidence that the trend
in tribal areas to experiment with Bt cotton has disrupted food security
and has introduced various health hazards and ecological threats due to
the use of poisonous chemical inputs.
What seed companies are doing is experimenting with farmers’
livelihoods and lives. ‘Success’, regardless of the impact on the
farmer, is measured in terms of company profits. However, failure for
the farmer is a matter of life and death. Look no further than the spike
in suicides across the cotton belt since 1997. Even ‘success’ for the
farmer may not amount to much when the costs of the seeds and associated
chemical inputs are factored into any possible increase in yield or
income.
Despite constant denials by Monsanto and its supporters in the media
that Bt cotton in India has nothing or little to do with farmer suicides
in India, a new study directly
links the crisis of suicides among Indian farmers to Bt cotton adoption
in rain-fed areas, where most of India’s cotton is grown.
As outlined in the case of Babu Lal above, many fall into a cycle of
debt from the purchase of expensive, commercialised GM seeds and
chemical inputs that then often fail to yield enough to sustain farmers’
livelihoods.
In essence, the European Commission
has effectively deserted its principles when it comes to GMO’s entering
the food chain within the 28 nation bloc. Intense lobbying by United
States representatives for the EU Commission to disregard current GMO
rules which require stringent safety tests and labelling has proved
successful. The result is that genetically modified organisms produced
through a modified technique called ‘gene editing’ will be allowed. Gene
editing is all but the same as anything we understand about GMO’s
generally.
Freedom of Information documents show the scale of US lobbying has
overwhelmed the EU Commission who now stand accused of bowing to US
pressure and abdicating to the corporations and rejecting citizen
concerns. The documents reveal that US representatives pushed for the EU
to disregard its own GMO rules on the basis that the EU were simply
putting up barriers and stifling trade under the proposed TTIP
negotiations. The papers state that the EU should completely ignore
health and environmental safeguards to pave the way for successful
negotiations.
On the EC website
the very first paragraph reads: “The European Union has established a
legal framework to ensure that the development of modern biotechnology,
and more specifically of GMOs, takes place in safe conditions.”
In the EU’s GMO directive/2001/18 the
Directive clearly states: (clause 10)”For a comprehensive and
transparent legislative framework, it is necessary to ensure that the
public is consulted by either the Commission or the Member States during
the preparation of measures and that they are informed of the measures
taken during the implementation of this Directive” and (clause 19) “A
case-by-case environmental risk assessment should always be carried out
prior to a release. It should also take due account of potential
cumulative long-term effects associated with the interaction with other
GMOs and the environment.”
In addition, the GMO Directive is quite clear on one thing (clause 23): “No
GMOs, as or in products, intended for deliberate release are to be
considered for placing on the market without first having been subjected
to satisfactory field testing at the research and development stage in
ecosystems which could be affected by their use.”
Many leaks and reports show that most of these Jihadist and Islamic
factions are American-made tools to invade and destabilize other
countries as a new way of war tactics called proxy war without using
their US and western soldiers on the soil. They mainly remind us of the
late Osama Bin Laden as the most famous CIA Jihadist agent.
Israeli soldiers talk about the occupied territories
We continue with The 10 Plagues of the Occupation. And this time>> The Plague of Ambushes
"The army wanted us to go in on some ambush, and another force would go
in and patrol, and it was obvious that, like, there was a good chance
we’d catch and simply kill them, shoot them from our ambush." (Staff Sergeant, Paratroopers, Tulkarem area, 2005)
This Passover we would like to share The 10 Plagues of the Occupation with you.
This Passover we will present you with testimonies of military
activities in which we took part during our service in the occupied
territories, all of which are a part of the routine of military control
over a civilian population. As we remember the 10 plagues that swept
Egypt, it is our duty to tell of the plagues of the occupation that we
bring upon Palestinians every day. This Passover when we celebrate
our liberation from slavery to freedom, we will acknowledge the millions
of Palestinians who live under occupation stripped of their own
freedom.
33 acts approved by the Catalan government which have later been taken before the Constitutional Court
Two more Catalan laws taken before the Spanish Constitutional Court
There have been 33 acts approved by the Catalan government and
Parliament which have later been taken before the Constitutional Court
The Catalan law which bans ‘fracking’ in Catalonia and the regulation against building department stores of more than 800 m2
in urban areas have been taken before the Spanish Constitutional Court.
Regarding the prohibition of ‘fracking’, the Catalan law foresaw the
prohibition of this well-simulation technique in which rock is fractured
by a pressurised liquid “when it may have negative effects on the
geologic, environmental and socioeconomic characteristics of the area”.
However, the TC considered that it “invaded competences of the Spanish
state”. In relation to the law which banned the construction of big
department stores in urban areas, the TC considered that such
prohibition doesn’t respond to “imperative reasons of general interest”.
So far, there have been 33 acts approved by the Catalan government
and Parliament which have later been taken before the Constitutional
Court. Last Friday, the Spanish executive challenged the Law for Local
Government, the Law on Empty Houses and the Law on Equality between Men
and Women in the Court.
Suspension of the ‘fracking’ regulation
In particular, the TC gave leave to proceed with article 167.1 of the
Parliament Law which established the prohibition of exploring,
investigating and extracting hydrocarbons deposits through this
technique in which rock is fractured by a pressurised liquid. According
to the Court, it is the Spanish State which has the competences to allow
or forbid this technique and the magistrates referred to the sentences
which banned ‘fracking’ in other Autonomous Communities in Spain and
which have ultimately been suspended.
According to the TC, the Catalan law “reformulates from a radically
different perspective” the Spanish legislation, which allows ‘fracking’
as long as it “complies with certain technical and environmental
requirements”.
Hydraulic fracturing is highly controversial in many countries.
Opponents argue that the benefits of fracking, which are mainly to do
with making hydrocarbons more accessible, are outweighed by the
potential environmental impacts, which include risks of ground and
surface water contamination, air and noise pollution, and potential
earthquakes, along with the consequential hazards to public health and
the environment.
Therefore, hydraulic fracturing is under international scrutiny, restricted in some countries, and banned altogether in others.
Open door to build shopping malls in urban areas
The TC also suspended the article which prohibited the implementation of commercial establishments with a surface area of 800 m2
or more in “consolidated urban areas”. According to the magistrates,
the suspension doesn’t respond to “imperative reasons of general
interest” and therefore it is not aligned to what the state regulation
establishes.
According to the Court, the Catalan law “doesn’t externalise any
reason to restrict so strongly the implementation of commercial
establishments” of 800 m2 or more and therefore “directly opposes” the Spanish law on this matter.
A network of European cities and regions have called on the EU to
suspend current trade negotiations and to refrain from ratifying the
recently finished EU-Canada trade agreement. Here are all the details: http://bilaterals.org/?european-cities-and-regions-rally - #TTIP
Madrid challenges three more Catalan laws in the Constitutional Court
CNA
Madrid (CNA).- The Spanish government has challenged
three more Catalan laws in the Constitutional Court, bringing to 30 the
number of acts passed by the Catalan government and Catalan Parliament
appealed so far. The Spanish executive, led by President Mariano Rajoy,
has decided to take to the Court the Law for Local Government, the Law
on Empty Houses and the Law on Equality between Men and Women. Once the
appeals, announced on Friday, are accepted by the Court, the laws will
be automatically temporarily suspended.
Despite the meeting between Mariano Rajoy and the Catalan President
Carles Puigdemont and their compromise to reduce the number of judiciary
conflicts between both administrations, the litigations between Madrid
and Barcelona not only continue, but increase. There are now 30 laws
being challenged in the Constitutional Court, most of them because
Madrid considers that Catalonia is acting beyond its recognised powers.
Besides this, the Spanish government also says it could challenge Law
24/2015 against evictions and energy poverty. A similar law was already
suspended by the Spanish Constitutional Court, but consumers are
protected by this one that is now, as well, under threat.
The Spanish Minister of Justice, Rafael Catalá, said in a press
conference in Madrid that they are “convinced” that the Catalan
government is legislating on issues that involve powers “reserved” for
the central government. According to Catalá, challenging laws in court
is part of “normal” institutional activities because the Spanish
government wants that “law, the Constitution and the power framework”
are respected.
The Catalan government spokeswoman, Neus Munté, regretted that they
only found out about the appeal “48 hours after the President meeting
with Mariano Rajoy”. In a press conference, Munté said the decision is
“an attack on local autonomy, on the equality between men and women and
on the empty property tax”. She argued that the law on Empty Houses
“intended to compensate” the Spanish government’s “inaction and its
failure to manage the problem”.
According to Munté, the decision by the Spanish government “deepens”
the “scepticism” of the Catalan Government about the possibility to
reach an agreement with Madrid. “We asked for more political solutions
and they’ve replied with more litigation”, she regretted. “This
reaffirms our commitment to continue with our road-map and protect the
social rights of the Catalan people”, she added, referring to the path
towards independence.
Despite the fact that the LuxLeaks scandal was the largest
exposure of corporate tax evasion documents prior to the Panama Papers,
the government of Luxembourg does not recognize Deltour and Halet as
whistleblowers, nor does it recognize Perrin’s journalistic freedom.
Mintpress editor like emoticon
Mnar A. Muhawesh explains how trust in the mainstream media has reached
dramatic lows ahead of the US's new press freedom ranking of 41 by
Reporters Without Borders , and it’s simply because the corporate media
is lying to us about the true driving factors behind the Empire's wars . #Syria#HillaryClinton
Fox news Channel’s Sean Hannity campaigns on behalf of of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.March 18, 2016, in Phoenix.
The world has made incredible progress for children over the past 25
years. But that progress hasn’t been fair. Millions of children have
been forgotten - because they live in the wrong place, or because they
are girls, refugees, disabled or from a minority. Myleene Klass
visited our work in Tanzania with child brides and survivors of sexual
abuse - read their story in The Mirror and find out how you can help #EveryLastChild.
Myleene Klass is working with Save The Children in Tanzania
L’évolution de la situation au Burundi depuis 2015 pourrait provoquer
une grave déstabilisation régionale, ce qui impose une observation
prudente et une clarification de ses éléments constitutifs. Ce risque
est d’autant plus sérieux que nombre d’acteurs majeurs de la région ont
peu ou prou intérêt à ce que la situation dégénère.
Independent investigators did not find "a single piece of evidence" to
support the Mexican government's claim that the 43 students missing
students were collectively incinerated.
We
went to Umm al-Khair, which is right up next to [the settlement of]
Carmel, we went there for a demolition. We demolished a shed or two in
there. You get an order about what to demolish, you coordinate it with
the brigade, and you do it. Every demolition we do, you bring people to
move stuff and you carry the contents out, put them at a distance from
the demolition site, take footage inside and around the empty structure
that we’re going to destroy. We walk through the structure to see that
there’s nothing valuable left inside of it, or anyone inside it, and
only after that we demolish it. Any claims that goats were killed, that
things like that were destroyed – are total fabrications, I tell you
this with certainty. I don’t agree with the demolition activities, and I
think that in most cases they are wrong – simply not humane. Would I
say that I’m at peace with what I did while I was in the army? No. But
would I say that we adhered to working according to the protocols, down
to the smallest detail? Yes, we did. We adhered to them and we knew
them, and there had already been cases that the civil administration was
sued because it demolished and wrecked things by accident. No structure
was demolished with its contents still inside, ever. We never
demolished a single house without clearing out its contents first. [One
time,] we went to Umm al-Khair, and there was a disagreeable demolition.
The village’s sheikh, he lay there in front of the tractor, and we had
to get the border police to pull him away, there was cursing and
yelling. In the end he came up to us and asked, “Do you hear the
tractors working in the new neighborhood in Carmel? What’s that?” And we
told him, “They’re building with an approved plan, you aren’t.” He
goes, “Does that sound just, to you?” And we told him, “That’s the way
it is.” And you know that the new neighborhood was indeed approved, and
it had a plan and they were working according to the plan and
everything, but that man, who lives five meters from their fence and is
illegal according to the administration’s definitions, that’s
unpleasant. It’s a difficult situation, a bad situation. You force
people the age of your grandma out of some tin shed where they live,
onto a pile of rocks, and it breaks your heart. But what can you do
about it.
Israel started arming Azerbaijan, who neighbors Iran and Armenia.
Is this proxy war a precursor to war with Iran?
An
ethnic Armenian man walks past a destroyed house during the fighting in
Martakert province in the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh,
Azerbaijan, Monday, April 4, 2016. (Vahan Stepanyan, PAN Photo via AP)
Digging deep into Hillary's connections to Wall Street, Abby Martin
reveals how the Clinton's multi-million-dollar political machine
operates.
This episode chronicles the Clinton's rise to power in
the 90s on a right-wing agenda, the Clinton Foundation's revolving door
with Gulf state monarchies, corporations and the world's biggest
financial institutions, and the establishment of the hyper-aggressive
"Hillary Doctrine" while Secretary of State.
Learn the essential facts about the great danger she poses, and why she's the US Empire's choice for its next CEO.
Cinq ans après l’intervention militaire occidentale en Libye, le chaos
qui règne dans le pays n’incite pas les dirigeants éditoriaux français à
effectuer un retour critique sur leurs engagements.
European gas market competition has entered a new phase. Russia's #Gazprom is gradually increasing its supplies to #Europe. The company is looking for new
ways to deliver gas along north-south routes. The US, Russia's main
geopolitical rival, has rushed to export liquefied natural gas (LNG)
transported by sea.
It appears that Australia has approved a license application
from Big Pharma company PaxVax for the intentional release of a GMO
vaccine consisting of live bacteria into Queensland, via the use of
chemtrails distributed by airplane emissions.
According to wikipedia a chemtrail is defined as: “a visible trail
left in the sky by an aircraft and believed by some to consist of
chemical or biological agents released as part of a covert operation,
rather than the condensed water of a vapour trail.”
No longer the stuff of so-called conspiracy theory or covert
operations, what we are seeing here is a human population vaccination
programme that should alarm absolutely everyone.
The Office of the Gene Technology Regulator
(OGTR) in Barton, Australia says that the vaccine qualifies as a
limited and controlled release under section 50A of the Gene Technology
Act 2000.
The Issue of licence DIR 126 to PaxVax Australia Pty Ltd for a
clinical trial of a genetically modified vaccine against cholera can be
read HERE
The company PaxVax sought approval to conduct the clinical trial of a
genetically modified live bacterial vaccine. This is an application
that was started in 2013
and has had its obstacles but now received government approval and once
underway, the trial is expected to be completed within one year, with
trial sites selected from local government areas in Queensland, South
Australia, Victoria and Western Australia. PaxVax has stated it has
proposed a number of control measures they say will restrict the spread
and persistence of the GM vaccine and its introduced genetic material,
however there is always a possibility of these restrictions failing and
infecting wildlife and ecosystems. That is fairly obvious when it comes
to aerial spraying.
Aerial vaccines have been used in the United States directed towards
animals by the use of plastic packets dropped by planes or helicopters.
Sanofi (who is one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world)
has subsidiary companies such as Merial Limited who manufacture Raboral,
an oral live-virus poisonous to humans yet distributed to wildlife in
the atmosphere. This immunisation programme intends to reach raccoons
and coyotes, two of the most significant wildlife carriers of rabies in
North America – but sprayed from the sky, what could go wrong!
In the meantime, there has been a growing belief that the
‘chemtrails’ you see in the sky every day are not what they seem.
Geo-engineers are ‘proposing’ to spray toxic substances such as
aluminium oxide and sulphuric acid from aircraft to reflect sunlight in a
claimed attempt to solve the controvertible issue of global warming.
Geoengineeringwatch.org
says: “Stratospheric aerosol geoengineering is a primary term for the
ongoing global climate modification programs being conducted by major
powers around the world. “Aerosols” is simply a term for a microscopic
particle that is suspended in the air. A primary stated goal of the
geoengineering programs is to provide a “solar shield” to slow “runaway
climate change” by spraying tens of millions of tons of highly toxic
metal nano particulates (a nanometer is 1/1,000,000,000 of a meter) into
the atmosphere from jet aircraft. Is the spraying only for solar
radiation management? Based on available data, there are a number of
known objectives including but not limited to SRM, weather warfare, over
the horizon radar enhancement, controlling food production, and
probable biological testing.”
In part two of an extended interview, Seymour Hersh discusses the
reporting he did for his latest book, "The Killing of Osama bin Laden,"
and reacts to the White House's response.
Journalist Seymour Hersh
defends his reporting on the deadly chemical weapon attacks in the
Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013 that killed hundreds of Syrian
civilians.
