Seymour Hersh: Obama "Cherry-Picked" Intelligence on Syrian Chemical
Attack to Justify US Strike
Monday, 09 December 2013 12:30
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
<http://truth-out.org/news/item/20523-seymour-hersh-obama-cherry-picked-intelligence-on-syrian-chemical-attack-to-justify-us-strike>
New Yorker, Washington Post Passed On Seymour Hersh Syria Report
By Michael Calderone
December 09, 2013
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37059.htm
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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/12/10/pers-d10.html
Seymour Hersh exposes US government lies on Syrian sarin attack
10 December 2013
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has
published an article demonstrating that the US government and
President Barack Obama knowingly lied when they claimed that the
Syrian government had carried out a sarin gas attack on
insurgent-held areas last August.
Hersh's detailed account, based on information provided by current
and former US intelligence and military officials, was published
Sunday in the London Review of Books. The article, entitled "Whose
sarin?," exposes as a calculated fraud the propaganda churned out day
after day by the administration and uncritically repeated by the
media for a period of several weeks to provide a pretext for a
military attack on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The article also reveals sharp differences within the state apparatus
over the launching of an air war that one high-level special
operations adviser said would have been "like providing close air
support for [Al Qaeda-affiliated] al-Nusra."
In the end, internal differences over the launching of direct
military action, compounded by massive popular opposition to another
unprovoked war in the Middle East, led the administration to pull
back and accept a Russian plan for the dismantling of Syrian chemical
weapons. This was followed by the opening of talks with Syria's main
ally in the region, Iran.
Hersh's account of systematic manipulation of intelligence aimed at
dragging the American people into yet another war based on lies
underscores the fact that Obama's retreat in Syria by no means
signaled a turn away from militarism. Rather, it reflected a
provisional change in tactics in relation to US hegemonic aims in the
oil-rich Middle East, and a decision to focus more diplomatic and
military resources on Washington's drive to isolate and contain what
it considers more critical antagonists: Russia and, above all, China.
"Barack Obama," Hersh writes, "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 gas 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 Qaeda, 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."
Hersh cites Obama's nationally televised speech on September 10 in
which he categorically asserted, "We know the Assad regime was
responsible" for a sarin gas attack on Eastern Ghouta that reportedly
killed hundreds of people. In that speech, Obama claimed that US
intelligence had tracked Syrian government preparations for the
attack for several days before it occurred.
As Hersh documents, citing his intelligence and military sources (who
are not named for obvious reasons), the US government had no advance
warning of the sarin attack. Instead, it used intelligence on a
previous Syrian nerve gas dry run to concoct a scenario and present
it as real-time intelligence of the August 21 attack.
Hersh cites one of his sources as comparing this falsification of
intelligence with the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the
Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security
Agency intercepts to justify the launching of bomb attacks on North
Vietnam.
Perhaps even more damning than the "cherry-picking" and falsification
of intelligence was the decision to ignore and conceal a series of
intelligence reports the previous spring and summer that had
concluded the Western-backed and jihadi-dominated "rebels" had the
capability to acquire and use sarin. These included CIA analyses on
which the White House had been briefed and an Operations Order
ordered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that concluded US ground troops
sent in to seize chemical weapons sites might confront "rebel" forces
"capable of attacking an American force with sarin because they were
able to produce the lethal gas."
Hersh's revelations provide insider proof of what was already obvious
to any impartial and moderately informed observer-that the war
propaganda about a Syrian government gas attack was a tissue of lies
intended to provide a pretext for military aggression and
regime-change.
The Syrian regime had no reason to carry out such an attack at the
time. It was militarily routing the Sunni "rebel" forces, which were
hated and despised by most of the population and had descended into
looting and indiscriminate killing of Christians and Shiites. The
attack occurred only a few miles from the Damascus headquarters of
United Nations weapons inspectors who had been invited into the
country by Assad and were beginning to investigate previous gas
attacks. In May, Carla del Ponte, a member of the UN Independent
Commission of Inquiry on Syria, had reported "strong, concrete"
evidence that those earlier attacks had been carried out by
Western-backed forces.
The Al Qaeda-linked "rebels," however, and their American, French,
British and Saudi sponsors, had every reason to carry out such an
atrocity, of which they were eminently capable, in order to justify
direct Western intervention and avert defeat.
The Obama administration was never able to produce a single concrete
piece of evidence proving that the Assad regime had carried out the
gas attack.
Hersh's article provides a devastating exposure of the American
media, which jumped at the chance once again to pump out government
war propaganda. Within hours of last August's sarin attack, both the
Washington Post and the New York Times were publishing editorials
proclaiming as fact the Syrian government's guilt and demanding a
military response. Well-bribed television "journalists" were
promoting the government line and seeking to shift public opinion
behind a new war.
Hersh notes that nine days after the sarin attack, the White House
invited a select group of Washington reporters and handed them a
"government assessment" that he describes as a "political argument to
bolster the administration's case against the Assad government."
Excluded was "at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay,
the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers."
Particularly criminal was the role of the New York Times. The
"newspaper of record" reprised its efforts to promote and legitimize
government lies in the run-up to the Iraq War, once again reporting
as fact, without any independent investigation, all of the
administration's claims.
Hersh cites a Times article that purported to prove, based on an
analysis of the flight path of two spent rockets believed to have
carried sarin, that the shells had to have been fired from a Syrian
army base more than nine kilometers from the target. He quotes
Theodore Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of
technology and national security who has advised the US naval chief
of operations, calling the Times piece "totally nuts" because the
range of the rockets was unlikely to have been more than two
kilometers.
Giving expression to the deeply undemocratic character of the whole
operation, the Times ' Roger Cohen wrote in a column the day of the
White House meeting with the press: "War fatigue in the United States
and Britain is not an excuse for the surrender of a commodity of
enduring strategic importance-national credibility-to an ephemeral
one-public opinion."
Rounding out the chorus baying for war were the pseudo-left
organizations such as the International Socialist Organization, which
took the government's claims as good coin and grist for their pro-war
mill.
Hersh's article completely vindicates the position taken by the World
Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth
International.
As the WSWS wrote on August 22: "The unsubstantiated charges that the
Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out a chemical
weapons attack outside Damascus killing large numbers of civilians
have all the hallmarks of a staged provocation aimed at provoking
Western intervention."
Four days later, we wrote: "Ten years after the US government went to
war in Iraq on the basis of lies about nonexistent weapons of mass
destruction, a no less grotesque provocation is being concocted by
Paris, London and Washington to justify a new war of aggression
against Syria.
"The allegations that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
carried out mass chemical weapons attacks last Wednesday in Ghouta,
near Damascus, lack any credibility."
The WSWS published dozens of articles and statements over the ensuing
five weeks analyzing the war drive and exposing the imperialist aims
behind the demagogy and lies. This record makes clear that the WSWS
and the world socialist movement for which it speaks is the unique
voice of the international working class in the struggle against war.
Barry Grey
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