[Note from BZ: The 76-year-old Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer award winner, a George Orwell and Polk winner, who exposed the My Lai massacre in 1969 and reported on Abu Ghraib as well. He is no shill for Republicans or Conservatives whatsoever.]
From YahooNews.com:
by Adrian Lee
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.
That was, if you recall, the predicating event that Mr Obama wanted to use for an incursion into Syria including placement of “boots on the ground.”
Mr Hersh writes (from the London Review of Books):
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. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US 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 UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
Please read both articles entirely. And please see my posts on Syria here and here and here and here and here.
Proving, once again, that Obama is
And that he is a
It turns out that Mr Obama is in fact a dangerous war monger.
BZ
