The Killing of Osama Bin Laden by Hersh Seymour M

Author:Hersh, Seymour M. [Hersh, Seymour M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Journalism, Politics, War, Pakistan, United States, History, Terrorism, Military History, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781784784379
Goodreads: 25893511
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2016-02-02T08:00:00+00:00

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Whose Sarin?

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 August 21. 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.

In his nationally televised speech about Syria on September 10, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line”: “Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,” he said. “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.” Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of August 21.

He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: “In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighborhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.” Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: “No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence” directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.

But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a “ruse.” The attack “was not the result of the current regime,” he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information—in terms

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