The public deserves from the White House far more hard evidence before the country takes military action to punish the Syrian government for last week’s civilian deaths in Damascus from chemical weapons.

We are seeing a rush to judgment that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, below at left, committed the atrocity. Neither the White House, Congress nor the mainstream media are showing the objective investigation deserved by such an important topic as launching airstrikes that could lead to a wider war and vastly more deaths.

The United States has a long and tragic history of wars based on information that was, at best, mistaken, thereby leading to millions of deaths.

Examples of misinformation go far beyond the notorious “Weapons of Mass Destruction” before the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Our first invasion of Iraq was justified in part by a false story devised by a DC public relations firm that Saddam Hussein’s troops were killing babies in Kuwait, as documented in several books that include those by Harper’s Publisher John “Rick” MacArthur and longtime DC-based CIA historians Joseph and Susan Trento.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution escalated the Vietnam War. And, we now know from declassified documents that President Kennedy rejected the “Operation Northwoods” plan by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to kill innocent Americans to justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

The public receives images, reports of evidence, but scant evidence that open-minded inquiries are actually occurring.

At right is a White House file photo showing President Obama listening as Lisa Monaco, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, briefs him on the terror threat, in the Map Room of the White House on Aug. 6, 2013. Also participating in the briefing are National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.

Shown below is a sample of recent news stories from both the mainstream media, especially the Washington Post, and the alternative or foreign press. You will see that some of those media, most notably alternative and the Wall Street Journal, describe the activities of Saudi intelligence and CIA Director John Brennan in ways almost entirely absent from the news coverage that most Americans receive.

I do not pretend to know what happened with the fatal chemical assault in Damascus last week.

But anyone can see we are experiencing the same stampede to military action as in two previous Iraq wars, the Libya airstrikes, and a number of other wars orchestrated by government and the beat reporters dependent on government sources for their news and jobs. Furthermore, only a small proportion of the public receives from mainstream media reporting that illustrates the complexities of the situation, such as the large number of foreign fighters on the rebel side funding by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and (some claim) the United States using secret appropriations.

The possibility that foreign mercenaries and their sponsors, faced with losing the war, may have inflicted death on helpless Syrian civilians to bring in outside air power is rarely addressed by the mainstream media. Neither are the contacts and potential shifting alliances between such key figures as CIA Director John Brennan and Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, the Saudi Arabia intelligence chief and former U.S. ambassador. He reputedly visited Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this summer to offer a $15 billion business deal in exchange for withdrawal of Russia’s support for Assad.