Syria sarin report blows holes in US claims

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-101213.html



Syria sarin report blows holes in US claims
By Victor Kotsev
Dec 10, '13

The United States nearly went to war over the use of chemical weapons in Syria a few months ago - and then backed off, ostensibly swayed by Russia's initiative to have the Syrian government's chemical stockpile shipped out and destroyed - but those who had been saying all along that the White House version of the story was highly problematic just received a major boost from Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

On Sunday, Hersh, who previously exposed the American atrocities at My Lai during the Vietnam War and in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, published a lengthy report in the London Review of Books [1] charging that US President Barack Obama and his top officials had mislead the world with their statements, most notably in two respects: when they claimed that they had strong evidence implicating the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in an August 21 chemical weapons attack near the capital Damascus that killed hundreds of civilians, and when they claimed they had no evidence that any of the rebel groups in the country had any chemical weapons or expertise.

Hersh sourced some of his information to "recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present" and described how, in the wake of the August attack, the Obama administration "cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad". The White House fed a carefully manipulated story to the public and the media, Hersh asserted, comparing this process to how both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War started.

He reported that despite what was implied by American officials on several occasions, the US had no advance warning of the attack. Several important intelligence sources that had previously provided sensitive information about the Syrian chemical weapons sites, including a sophisticated sensor network operated jointly with Israel, were either countered by the Syrians or simply did not detect any activity. Instead, the American intelligence community started frantically sifting through immense volumes of stored communication intercepts after the attack took place, looking above all for ways to implicate the Assad regime.