The Obama administration on Monday flatly denied a report from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who reported that the Obama administration "cherry-picked intelligence" when building its case for a military strike on Syria. In the story, published in the London Review of Books,| reportedly because the Washington Post refused to publish the article... |
Hersh accused the administration of assuming that Syrian leader Bashar Assad was responsible for a sarin gas attack outside of Damascus that killed more than 1,400 people. Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, called Hersh's reporting "simply false."
Hersh reported that al-Nusra had also "mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity." That would contradict repeated claims by the president and other top administration officials that only the Assad regime was capable of manufacturing and deploying the chemical weapon.
To bolster his argument, Hersh pointed to an incident late last year in which a U.S. sensor system showed sarin production at a Syrian chemical weapons depot in December 2012. At that time, Obama issued a warning to Syria not to deploy the weapon -- something that did not occur before the August attack. Hersh also quoted a munitions expert who raises doubts about whether, as alleged, Syrian rockets were used in the attack. The expert says the weapons used appear to be improvised and not of the Syrian arsenal, casting doubt on another central underpinning of the Obama administration's intelligence assessment.
In August, the administration released an unclassified report that said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with "high confidence" that the Assad regime carried out the attack.