Hersh: Obama administration lied about gas attack in Syria
Seymour Hersh
Sun Dec 8, 2013 10:28PM GMT
Prominent American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says US
President Barack Obama did not tell the whole story about a chemical
weapons attack near the Syrian capital, Damascus in August.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, in a new report published in the
London Review of Books, wrote that the administration of President Obama
was aware of the fact that the militants fighting against the Syrian
government had the ability to make chemical weapons but did not inform
the public about it.
“Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to
make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical
weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted
important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as
facts,” he wrote in the article.
Hersh added that the US president refused to acknowledge that the
al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliated group, according to classified US
intelligence reports, had mastered the mechanics of producing Sarin gas.
Sarin is a nerve agent which based on the findings of a UN investigation
team was used in the chemical rocket attack near Damascus.
“When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the
administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against
Assad.”
Obama in a televised speech on 10 September accused the Syrian
government of carrying out the chemical attack which killed hundreds of
people including women and children.
“We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after
careful deliberation, 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.” said Obama.
President Obama was going to war with Syria but he was doing so without
knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August, Hersh
went on to add.
The American investigative journalist said that military and
intelligence officials were angry with “the deliberate manipulation of
intelligence” over the incident.
Hersh said that a high-level intelligence officer described the Obama
administration’s assurances of Syrian government’s responsibility a
‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, the
officer wrote in an email to a colleague.
He wrote that another senior intelligence official told him 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 analyzed in real time, as the attack was happening.”
The Syrian government has vehemently denied the US allegations. It
blames the foreign-backed Takfiri militants for carrying out the deadly
chemical attack
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