Hersh accuses US President Barack Obama of using “cherry-picked intelligence”, regarding an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian government in Damascus countryside last August, in order to carry out a military strike against Syri

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh accuses US President Barack Obama of using “cherry-picked intelligence”, regarding an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian government in Damascus countryside last August, in order to carry out a military strike against Syria.

In a report published in the London Review of Books, Hersh referred to a top-secret June cable sent to the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency that said Nusra front 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.

In the report titled, "Whose Sarin?", Hersh said the US administration buried intelligence on the terrorist group and never considered it a suspect in the sarin attacks, so much so that Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: “It’s very important to note that only the [Syrian] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.”

"In some instances, he (Obama) omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts," Hersh wrote.
"Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the U.S. intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a U.N. study concluded — without assessing responsibility — had been used in the rocket attack."

The journalist who is best known for breaking the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004 cited interviews with intelligence and military officers as well as American intelligence documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reports by the Washington Post that have been published based on those documents.

Hersh said that the Obama administration "cherry-picked" the intelligence it cited in favor of blaming Syrian President Bashar Assad for the use of sarin gas, when it should have included Nursa in its list of suspects.
"We know the Assad regime was responsible," Obama said in a speech he gave Sept. 10.

 

"In the days leading up to Aug. 21, we know that Assad's chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighborhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces. I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike," Obama added.

Hersh argues that Obama was about to go to war against Syria because Assad had apparently crossed the "red line" by using chemical weapons, but he was about to do so without verifying who it really was that had used the chemical weapons on the Aug. 21 attack.

According to the Hersh, there was a lot of frustration and even anger over what those in the intelligence and military community viewed as a "deliberate manipulation of intelligence" by the administration.

"One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration's assurances of Assad's responsibility a 'ruse," Hersh wrote. "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 make it look like the administration had captured intelligence in "real time," Hersh explained.