He was smeared by the U.S. government and the organs of state intelligence.
And by their enablers in the media.
From Narratively:
These Syrian children survived attacks that left them burned beyond belief. One program thousands of miles from home is offering them life-changing treatment.
Winter was on its way in northwestern Syria when Hana Al Saloom awoke around 6 a.m., preparing to make morning tea. There was a chill in the air. Her 5-year-old daughter, Aysha, was asleep near a gas heater, as her brothers and sisters slept in other rooms. Hana’s husband stirred nearby.
Hana blinked. The blast knocked her down. Silence. Then screams. She swiveled on her knees. She looked around. Everything was on fire. It was as if her house had exploded. She didn’t realize it right away, but a missile had blown off the side of the concrete-and-steel home. The impact must have caused the gas heater to blow up too. The flames spread fast.
Hana raced outside with her older children. That’s when she saw her husband carrying Aysha’s listless body. He had reached into the flames to pull her out. His legs and hands were seared. But Aysha was injured the worst. Neighbors rushed to put out the fire on her body — and all around them. By the time they blotted out the flames, Aysha’s flesh had turned a chalky whitish-gray. Her skin was smoldering.
Aysha Al Saloom, 8, at the apartment in Irvine, California, where she lives with her mother.“First, I was screaming,” Hana remembers. “And then I was crying.”A neighbor rushed Aysha and her dad to a hospital. But since Aysha’s wounds were so severe, she was transferred to another hospital across the border in Turkey.Hana would not see her daughter again for seven months.* * *Three years later, sitting next to Aysha’s bedside at Shriners for Children Medical Center in Pasadena, California, Hana pulls out her phone and scrolls to a photo of her daughter before the bombing, a smooth-skinned girl with pink lips and reddish-blonde eyebrows. Her wavy hair dances around her bright eyes. There she is in a white blouse. There she is in a purple plaid dress. There she is with pigtails, sitting on a swing, wearing a white, blue and red polka-dotted tutu.
Aysha will spend several years here while she undergoes surgeries for her burn wounds
Hana shows a photo taken on the day of the bombing, moments after Aysha’s father pulled her from the flames. Her mouth hung open, her eyes slightly cracked, her neck as reddish-pink as a bloody raw steak. Her face looked as if someone had slathered it with a mud mask. Pasty in some places, blackened in others. But her skin, Hana says, was still there, even if it had turned a different shade. Badly hurt and on the brink of death, that is how Hana remembered her daughter on the day she was burned.
(L-R) Yazen, Anwar, Abdullah, and Manal Al Hindawi, 13. All four
children and their families live together in one apartment in Galveston.
Well it turned into one hell of a civil war with the west backing one side and Iran and Russia backing the other with Turkey attacking the Kurds and transshipping ISIS oil while the west took pictures of the tanker trucks.After Aysha was whisked away to Turkey for medical care on the day of the accident, an uncle who accompanied her sent a photo of her face wrapped in white bandages. But not many more photos arrived in Hana’s phone over the next few months. Instead, the uncle would call regularly with updates from Turkey. Aysha’s burns would heal, he told Hana. She was going to be OK. Doctors focused on her lungs especially, which were damaged from the smoke.Hana prayed and cried, waiting for Aysha to be well enough to come home. Finally, that day came. Hana waited, and when she saw the car coming down the road, she ran out of her house in time to see her little girl step out.She remembers that Aysha wore jeans and a red and white striped dress. Her hair had been shaved off. But it was her face that shocked Hana the most. She did not know that the burned layer of skin had fallen away in sheaths, and that the new skin that replaced it was a combination of grafts, recent growth and irregular-shaped scars. Aysha’s lips had been whittled away too. It looked as if someone else’s flesh had been stretched too thin across her facial bones.Aysha did not look like the little girl her mother remembered, but Hana had no doubt she was her daughter. She grabbed Aysha and carried her inside of the house. She sat down, weeping. “I would not let anybody touch her, or talk to her,” Hana remembers. “I just took her to the room, and we continued hugging each other, hugging for hours.”...MUCH MORE
Here are some of our posts on/about Hersh:
June 2018
CJR: "Seymour Hersh on spies, state secrets, and the stories he doesn’t tell"
April 2016
Seymour Hersh On Killing Bin Laden, Syria, Saudis and Sarin
December 2013
What on earth does the West think it is doing in Syria?
Seymour Hersh writing at the London Review of Books:...
December 2015
This is just a nasty, dirty story...
The techniques the American doctors are using were initially attempted by the French in World War I and by Dr. Sir Harold Gillies.
See: "WWI: The Men With Broken Faces (Les Gueules Cassées)"
The techniques the American doctors are using were initially attempted by the French in World War I and by Dr. Sir Harold Gillies.
See: "WWI: The Men With Broken Faces (Les Gueules Cassées)"
The surgery methods were dramatically advanced by Dr. Sir Archibald McIndoe during WWII.
I should maybe do a post on him.
