Seymour Hersh Alleges Obama Administration Lied on Syria Gas Attack The Atlantic Wire By Adrian Lee
http://news.yahoo.com/seymour-hersh-alleges-obama-administration-lied-syria-gas-204437397.html
Seymour Hersh Alleges Obama Administration Lied on Syria Gas Attack
The Atlantic WireBy Adrian Lee | The Atlantic Wire – 22 hrs ago
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has dropped yet another bombshell allegation: President Obama wasn't honest with the American people when he blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a sarin-gas attack in that killed hundreds of civilians.
In early September, Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States had proof that the nerve-gas attack was made on Assad's orders. "We know the Assad regime was responsible," President Obama told the nation in an address days after this revelation, which he said pushed him over the "red line" in considering military intervention.
But in a long story published Sunday for the London Review of Books, Hersh — best known for his exposés on the cover-ups of the My Lai Massacre and of Abu Ghraib – said the administration "cherry-picked intelligence," citing conversations with intelligence and military officials.
A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’
Here's what Hersh alleges:
The administration buried intelligence on the fundamentalist group/rebel group al-Nusra. It was seen, Hersh says, as an alarming threat by May, with the U.S. being aware of al-Nusra member able to make and use sarin, and yet the group – associated with the rebel opposition in Syria – was never considered a suspect in the sarin attacks. Hersh refers to a top-secret June cable sent to the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency that said al-Nusra could acquire and use sarin. But the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Defense Intelligence Agency could not find the document in question, even when given its specific codes.
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Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: ‘It’s very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.’
It is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power’s office, but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration.
The administration was learning about the attack at roughly the same speed civilians were. Hersh says the thorough daily intelligence briefings in the days surrounding the gas attack did not make a single mention of Syria, even as videos and photos of the attack went viral across the Internet. He added that there was revealed a sensor system in Syria that had, in December 2012, shown sarin production at a chemical weapons depot arranged by the Syrian army. Though it was unclear whether this was a simulation or not – all militaries, Hersh says, practice simulations of such things – Obama promptly warned Syria that use of sarin gas would be "unacceptable."
‘If what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the same warning three days before the gas attack in August?’
The media succumbed to confirmation bias in response to a UN report on the attack. That report, which is less than certain in its terms, said that the spent weapon "indicatively matches" the specifics of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket. MIT professor Theodore Postol and other munitions experts later reviewed the photos and said that it was improvised, likely made locally, didn't match anything in the Syrian arsenal and would not have been able to travel the nine kilometres from the Syrian army base that the media presumed it was fired from.
Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.
Though a UN resolution nullified the chances of American military intervention, the impact would be significant if the allegations hold up; recall that President George W. Bush's legacy was deeply tainted by charges that the U.S. had no proof of nuclear weapons in Iraq when they said they did. Hersh hints at the seriousness of the charges himself: "The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war."
This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/12/seymour-hersh-alleges-obama-administration-lied-syria-gas-attack/355899/
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Seymour Hersh Says Obama Cherry Picked Intel On Syrian Sarin Ga
Seymour Hersh Says Obama Cherry Picked Intel On Syrian Sarin Gas Attack
December 09, 2013 CNN
Deceiving the US Public on Syria December 9, 2013
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/09/deceiving-the-us-public-on-syria/
Deceiving the US Public on Syria
December 9, 2013
Exclusive: The United States nearly went to war with Syria last summer after a rush to judgment over a mysterious sarin attack. Now, several months later, reporter Seymour Hersh shows how the case was spun, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has confirmed that President Barack Obama misled the American people over the Aug. 21 Syrian chemical attack by cherry-picking evidence about the Syrian government’s presumed guilt and excluding suspicions about the rebels’ capability to produce their own sarin gas.
Hersh also reported that he discovered a deep schism within the U.S. intelligence community over how the case was sold to pin the blame on President Bashar al-Assad. Hersh wrote that he encountered “intense concern, and on occasion anger” when he interviewed American intelligence and military experts “over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks on Syria at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 30, 2013. [State Department photo]
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks on Syria at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 30, 2013. [State Department photo]
According to Hersh, “One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote.
“A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening.
“The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy.”
Despite Hersh’s legendary reputation dating back to the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam War and revelations about CIA abuses in the 1970s, his 5,500-word article appeared in the London Review of Books, a placement that suggests the American media’s “group think” blaming the Assad regime remains hostile to any serious dissent.
Much of the skepticism about the Obama administration’s case on the Syrian sarin attack has been confined to the Internet, including our own Consortiumnews.com. Indeed, Hersh’s article dovetails with much of what we reported in August and September as we questioned the administration’s certainty that Assad’s regime was responsible.
Our skepticism flew in the face of a solid consensus among prominent opinion leaders who joined in the stampede toward war with Syria much as they did in Iraq a decade earlier.
Hostility Toward Dissent
Another parallel with the Iraq War was the hostility that any dissent over the rush to judgment received. In 2003, my articles challenging President George W. Bush’s claims about Iraqi WMD meant that whenever the U.S. invading force stumbled upon a barrel of chemicals – and Fox News touted the discovery as proof that Bush was right – I’d get bombarded with e-mails demanding that I admit I was wrong and apologize to Bush.
There has been a similar tone in some of the criticism of our articles on Syria, when we have noted that the Obama administration’s case against Syria over the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack was stunningly lacking in any verifiable proof, only a series of assertions framed as “we assess” this and “we assess” that.
Beyond questioning the fragility of the “evidence,” our articles cited a split within the U.S. intelligence community, a division that the administration sought to conceal by avoiding a National Intelligence Estimate, which would have had to include footnotes about why many analysts were skeptical of the Assad-did-it scenario.
Instead of an NIE, the White House issued something called a “Government Assessment,” which dumped all the doubts and pumped up the certainty. Once the “Government Assessment” was posted on Aug. 30 by the White House press office, Secretary of State John Kerry was put forward to present the case for launching a military strike against Syria.
War was only averted because President Obama abruptly decided to seek congressional approval and then reached a diplomatic accord, with the help of the Russian government, in which the Syrian government agreed to dispose of its chemical weapons arsenal (while still denying that it was responsible for the Aug. 21 attack).
Obama’s last-minute reversal spared the United States another war in the Middle East, a conflict that could have easily spread into a regional conflagration. Many thousands of people could have died and the possible disruption of oil supplies could have thrown the world into an economic depression.
The “happy” outcome of a diplomatic solution surely is welcome. But it also has obscured a troubling reality – that Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. news media have learned little from the Iraq War debacle. Timely skepticism on matters of war or peace remains marginalized in small-circulation Web sites with very few financial resources.
The unsettling message from Hersh’s detailed exposé – as it was published in December in the United Kingdom – is that the story could very well have appeared three months after the United States blundered into another war.
[Here is some of our earlier reporting on the Syrian crisis: “A Dodgy Dossier on Syrian War”; “Murky Clues From UN’s Syria Report”; “Obama Still Withholds Syria Evidence”; “How US Pressure Bends UN Agencies”; “Fixing Intel Around the Syria Policy.”]