“An acclaimed American journalist has come under fire over his report suggesting Turkey was behind an August 21 chemical weapons attack in Syria that brought the United States to the brink of military action against Damascus.” Thus reads the lead of an April 9 Radio Free Europe/RadioLiberty (RFE/RL) report about “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” Seymour Hersh’s recent article in the London Review of Books, about which I have previously written in Al-Monitor.

It also states, “Analysts, meanwhile, have criticized the reliability of key sources and individuals in Hersh's story published recently in the 'London Review of Books,' while accusing him of ignoring evidence they say corroborates the U.S. position of the Assad regime's culpability.”

For me, this is more important than US and Turkish officials rejecting the claims in Hersh’s piece that Syrian rebels had carried out the Aug. 21 Ghouta assault with the aid of Turkish intelligence, with the intention of provoking Washington into launching strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, as the attack represented a breach of the chemical weapons “red line” drawn by President Barack Obama. Some 1,000 people were killed in the assault.

Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, stood by his reporting, as RFE/RL acknowledged, citing a “classified June 20 document issued by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency as saying that the Al-Qaeda-linked [Jabhat] Al-Nusra Front rebels in Syria maintained a sarin-gas production cell that constituted 'the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort.'”