Earlier quoted context omitted.
> anonymous officials. ... this is the standard for journalism on these topics Unfortunately, it's also standard for planted false stories. It's notable that Hersh won the Nobel prize for producing photographic evidence of war crimes. None of his anonymously sourced articles has ever been confirmed true
> None of his anonymously sourced articles has ever been confirmed true While not "confirmed true", I think this piece shows that later evidence strongly supported Hersh's anonymous claims in this case: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemi... It's an interesting style of analysis. You'll need to click on "Show more" below each section to see their actual evidence and reasoning.
A short version of their argument is "You might think for any number of reasons that the Syrian government launched the missile, but other peoples calculations of the launch location were wrong and ours were right so it couldn't be the government." Their prior begins at 95-5 for the government doing it, then it becomes 69-31 for the government doing it when they show a video of an anti-government guerrilla wearing a chemical hazard suit, then it becomes 7-93 in favour of the opposition once they decide they know the launch site. The launch site evidence is supposed to mean the Syrian government's probability is divided by 3 and the opposition's probability is multiplied by 15. That's the whole argument, that's where the rabbit is in the hat. After that point, no other evidence can adjust anything.
Most of the other evidence is just conjecture: they assign a 90% confidence to the evidence point "No western countries shared their evidence that the Syrian government did it" and they feel this fact is enough evidence to half their confidence in the Syrian government doing it. As proof for this, they literally say "The US says they have signals intercepts saying the Syrian government did it, but what if they actually have signals intercepts from the Syrian government asking if they did it or maybe they did admit to doing it but they were lying" This is not evidence.
This really seems like crank people trying to apply a rational choice / scientific skeptic veneer to a process of qualitative reasoning. And frankly I flicked through another ten or fifteen pages on the blog and almost everything discussed was discussed in the exact manner LessWrong/Slate Star Codex commenters would, and many of the issues being discussed were the exact issues discussed on those sites.
(I have no prior at all on the Syrian gas attacks, as I don't pretend to know anything about Syria or chemical weapons)