8 Dec 2013<\/i><\/p>\n
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\u2019s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded \u2013 without assessing responsibility \u2013 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 \u2013 a planning document that precedes a ground invasion \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad\u2019s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a \u2018red line\u2019: \u2018Assad\u2019s government gassed to death over a thousand people,\u2019 he said. \u2018We know the Assad regime was responsible \u2026 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\u2019s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.\u2019 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 21 August.<\/p>\n
He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad\u2019s culpability: \u2018In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad\u2019s 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 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.\u2019 Obama\u2019s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times<\/i>: \u2018No one with whom I\u2019ve spoken doubts the intelligence\u2019 directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s assurances of Assad\u2019s responsibility a \u2018ruse\u2019. The attack \u2018was not the result of the current regime\u2019, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information \u2013 in terms of its timing and sequence \u2013 to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: \u2018The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, \u201cHow can we help this guy\u201d \u2013 Obama \u2013 \u201cwhen he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report includes no political or economic information, but provides a summary of important military events around the world, with all available intelligence about them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two days \u2013 20 and 21 August \u2013 there was no mention of Syria. On 22 August the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal change in the command structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day. It was not until 23 August that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the administration knew no more than the public.<\/p>\n
Obama left Washington early on 21 August for a hectic two-day speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania; according to the White House press office, he was briefed later that day on the attack, and the growing public and media furore. The lack of any immediate inside intelligence was made clear on 22 August, when Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, told reporters: \u2018We are unable to conclusively determine [chemical weapons] use. But we are focused every minute of every day since these events happened \u2026 on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.\u2019 The administration\u2019s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama\u2019s press secretary, told reporters \u2013 without providing any specific information \u2013 that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not responsible \u2018are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn\u2019t occur\u2019.<\/p>\n
The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.<\/p>\n
On 29 August, the Washington Post<\/i> published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad\u2019s office. The document said that the NSA\u2019s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been \u2018able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there\u2019. But it was \u2018a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s forces apparently later recognised\u2019. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)<\/p>\n
The Post<\/i> report also provided the first indication of a secret sensor system inside Syria, designed to provide early warning of any change in status of the regime\u2019s chemical weapons arsenal. The sensors are monitored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that controls all US intelligence satellites in orbit. According to the Post<\/i> summary, the NRO is also assigned \u2018to extract data from sensors placed on the ground\u2019 inside Syria. The former senior intelligence official, who had direct knowledge of the programme, told me that NRO sensors have been implanted near all known chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are designed to provide constant monitoring of the movement of chemical warheads stored by the military. But far more important, in terms of early warning, is the sensors\u2019 ability to alert US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for changes in the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American intelligence on early warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin, has a shelf life of a few days or less \u2013 the nerve agent begins eroding the rocket almost immediately: it\u2019s a use-it-or-lose-it mass killer. \u2018The Syrian army doesn\u2019t have three days to prepare for a chemical attack,\u2019 the former senior intelligence official told me. \u2018We created the sensor system for immediate reaction, like an air raid warning or a fire alarm. You can\u2019t have a warning over three days because everyone involved would be dead. It is either right now or you\u2019re history. You do not spend three days getting ready to fire nerve gas.\u2019 The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21 August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.<\/p>\n
The sensors had worked in the past, as the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system picked up signs of what seemed to be sarin production at a chemical weapons depot. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian army was simulating sarin production as part of an exercise (all militaries constantly carry out such exercises) or actually preparing an attack. At the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that using sarin was \u2018totally unacceptable\u2019; a similar message was also passed by diplomatic means. The event was later determined to be part of a series of exercises, according to the former senior intelligence official: \u2018If what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and say, \u201cKnock it off,\u201d why didn\u2019t the president issue the same warning three days before the gas attack in August?\u2019<\/p>\n
The NSA would of course monitor Assad\u2019s office around the clock if it could, the former official said. Other communications \u2013 from various army units in combat throughout Syria \u2013 would be far less important, and not analysed in real time. \u2018There are literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,\u2019 he said, \u2018and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in \u2013 and the useful return would be zilch.\u2019 But the \u2018chatter\u2019 is routinely stored on computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. \u2018What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event \u2013 the use of sarin \u2013 and reached to find chatter that might relate,\u2019 the former official said. \u2018This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.\u2019 The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
The White House needed nine days to assemble its case against the Syrian government. On 30 August it invited a select group of Washington journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay, the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited), and handed them a document carefully labelled as a \u2018government assessment\u2019, rather than as an assessment by the intelligence community. The document laid out what was essentially a political argument to bolster the administration\u2019s case against the Assad government. It was, however, more specific than Obama would be later, in his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it stated, knew that Syria had begun \u2018preparing chemical munitions\u2019 three days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more details. He said that Syria\u2019s \u2018chemical weapons personnel were on the ground, in the area, making preparations\u2019 by 18 August. \u2018We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.\u2019 The government assessment and Kerry\u2019s comments made it seem as if the administration had been tracking the sarin attack as it happened. It is this version of events, untrue but unchallenged, that was widely reported at the time.<\/p>\n
An unforseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the Free Syrian Army\u2019s leadership and others about the lack of warning. \u2018It\u2019s unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the crime,\u2019 Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy<\/i>. The Daily Mail<\/i> was more blunt: \u2018Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people \u2013 including more than 400 children.\u2019 (The number of deaths attributable to the attack varied widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by the Obama administration, to many fewer. A Syrian human rights group reported 502 deaths; M\u00e9dicins sans Fronti\u00e8res put it at 355; and a French report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal<\/i> to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In other words, it was little more than a guess.)<\/p>\n
Five days later, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement to the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: \u2018Let\u2019s be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible attack took place. The intelligence community was able to gather and analyse information after the fact and determine that elements of the Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to using chemical weapons.\u2019 But since the American press corps had their story, the retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post<\/i>, relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page that American intelligence was able to record \u2018each step\u2019 of the Syrian army attack in real time, \u2018from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials\u2019. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the narrative.<\/p>\n
So when Obama said on 10 September that his administration knew Assad\u2019s chemical weapons personnel had prepared the attack in advance, he was basing the statement not on an intercept caught as it happened, but on communications analysed days after 21 August. The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops. The White House\u2019s government assessment and Obama\u2019s speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical attack. \u2018They put together a back story,\u2019 the former official said, \u2018and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used was the template that goes back to December.\u2019 It is possible, of course, that Obama was unaware that this account was obtained from an analysis of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas attack, rather than from direct evidence. Either way he had come to a hasty judgment.<\/p>\n
The press would follow suit. The UN report on 16 September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note that its investigators\u2019 access to the attack sites, which came five days after the gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces. \u2018As with other sites,\u2019 the report warned, \u2018the locations have been well travelled by other individuals prior to the arrival of the mission \u2026 During the time spent at these locations, individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.\u2019 Still, the New York Times<\/i> seized on the report, as did American and British officials, and claimed that it provided crucial evidence backing up the administration\u2019s assertions. An annex to the UN report reproduced YouTube photographs of some recovered munitions, including a rocket that \u2018indicatively matches\u2019 the specifics of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket. The New York Times<\/i> wrote that the existence of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack \u2018because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency\u2019.<\/p>\n
Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was \u2018something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop\u2019. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times<\/i>, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent \u2018pointed directly\u2019 to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times<\/i> and elsewhere \u2018were not based on actual observations\u2019. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, \u2018totally nuts\u2019 because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was \u2018unlikely\u2019 to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times<\/i> reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as \u2018leading weapons experts\u2019. The pair\u2019s later study about the rockets\u2019 flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times<\/i> reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
The White House\u2019s misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned al-Nusra, the Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist organisation. Al-Nusra is known to have carried out scores of suicide bombings against Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim sects inside Syria, and to have attacked its nominal ally in the civil war, the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA). Its stated goal is to overthrow the Assad regime and establish sharia law. (On 25 September al-Nusra joined several other Islamist rebel groups in repudiating the FSA and another secular faction, the Syrian National Coalition.)<\/p>\n
The flurry of American interest in al-Nusra and sarin stemmed from a series of small-scale chemical weapons attacks in March and April; at the time, the Syrian government and the rebels each insisted the other was responsible. The UN eventually concluded that four chemical attacks had been carried out, but did not assign responsibility. A White House official told the press in late April that the intelligence community had assessed \u2018with varying degrees of confidence\u2019 that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks. Assad had crossed Obama\u2019s \u2018red line\u2019. The April assessment made headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation. The unnamed official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence community assessments \u2018are not alone sufficient\u2019. \u2018We want,\u2019 he said, \u2018to investigate above and beyond those intelligence assessments to gather facts so that we can establish a credible and corroborated set of information that can then inform our decision-making.\u2019 In other words, the White House had no direct evidence of Syrian army or government involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted in the press coverage. Obama\u2019s tough talk played well with the public and Congress, who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.<\/p>\n
Two months later, a White House statement announced a change in the assessment of Syrian culpability and declared that the intelligence community now had \u2018high confidence\u2019 that the Assad government was responsible for as many as 150 deaths from attacks with sarin. More headlines were generated and the press was told that Obama, in response to the new intelligence, had ordered an increase in non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But once again there were significant caveats. The new intelligence included a report that Syrian officials had planned and executed the attacks. No specifics were provided, nor were those who provided the reports identified. The White House statement said that laboratory analysis had confirmed the use of sarin, but also that a positive finding of the nerve agent \u2018does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination\u2019. The White House further declared: \u2018We have no reliable corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.\u2019 The statement contradicted evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n
Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified \u2018as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin\u2019. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.<\/p>\n
On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra\u2019s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. \u2018What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,\u2019 the consultant said. \u2018It was not a bunch of \u201cwe believes\u201d.\u2019 He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin. A sample of the sarin that had been used was also recovered \u2013 with the help of an Israeli agent \u2013 but, according to the consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic.<\/p>\n
Independently of these assessments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuming that US troops might be ordered into Syria to seize the government\u2019s stockpile of chemical agents, called for an all-source analysis of the potential threat. \u2018The Op Order provides the basis of execution of a military mission, if so ordered,\u2019 the former senior intelligence official explained. \u2018This includes the possible need to send American soldiers to a Syrian chemical site to defend it against rebel seizure. If the jihadist rebels were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that Assad would not fight us because we were protecting the chemical from the rebels. All Op Orders contain an intelligence threat component. We had technical analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I & W [indications and warnings] people working on the problem \u2026 They concluded that the rebel forces were capable of attacking an American force with sarin because they were able to produce the lethal gas. The examination relied on signals and human intelligence, as well as the expressed intention and technical capability of the rebels.\u2019<\/p>\n
There is evidence that during the summer some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by the prospect of a ground invasion of Syria as well as by Obama\u2019s professed desire to give rebel factions non-lethal support. In July, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provided a gloomy assessment, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in public testimony that \u2018thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces\u2019 would be needed to seize Syria\u2019s widely dispersed chemical warfare arsenal, along with \u2018hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers\u2019. Pentagon estimates put the number of troops at seventy thousand, in part because US forces would also have to guard the Syrian rocket fleet: accessing large volumes of the chemicals that create sarin without the means to deliver it would be of little value to a rebel force. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, Dempsey cautioned that a decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could have unintended consequences: \u2018We have learned from the past ten years, however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state \u2026 Should the regime\u2019s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.\u2019<\/p>\n
The CIA declined to comment for this article. Spokesmen for the DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American intelligence agency, including the DIA, \u2018assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin\u2019.<\/p>\n
The administration\u2019s public affairs officials are not as concerned about al-Nusra\u2019s military potential as Shedd has been in his public statements. In late July, he gave an alarming account of al-Nusra\u2019s strength at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. \u2018I count no less than 1200 disparate groups in the opposition,\u2019 Shedd said, according to a recording of his presentation. \u2018And within the opposition, the al-Nusra Front is \u2026 most effective and is gaining in strength.\u2019 This, he said, \u2018is of serious concern to us. If left unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements\u2019 \u2013 he also cited al-Qaida in Iraq \u2013 \u2018will take over.\u2019 The civil war, he went on, \u2018will only grow worse over time \u2026 Unfathomable violence is yet to come.\u2019 Shedd made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he was not allowed to: the reports his office received were highly classified.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
A series of secret dispatches from Syria over the summer reported that members of the FSA were complaining to American intelligence operatives about repeated attacks on their forces by al-Nusra and al-Qaida fighters. The reports, according to the senior intelligence consultant who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is \u2018more worried about the crazies than it is about Assad\u2019. The FSA is largely composed of defectors from the Syrian army. The Obama administration, committed to the end of the Assad regime and continued support for the rebels, has sought in its public statements since the attack to downplay the influence of Salafist and Wahhabist factions. In early September, John Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing with a sudden claim that al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority players in the Syrian opposition. He later withdrew the claim.<\/p>\n
In both its public and private briefings after 21 August, the administration disregarded the available intelligence about al-Nusra\u2019s potential access to sarin and continued to claim that the Assad government was in sole possession of chemical weapons. This was the message conveyed in the various secret briefings that members of Congress received in the days after the attack, when Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive against Syrian military installations. One legislator with more than two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came away from one such briefing persuaded that \u2018only the Assad government had sarin and the rebels did not.\u2019 Similarly, following the release of the UN report on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: \u2018It\u2019s very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.\u2019<\/p>\n
It is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power\u2019s office, but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration. \u2018The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,\u2019 the former senior intelligence official told me. \u2018The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion \u2026 drives to the White House and says: \u201cLook at what I\u2019ve got!\u201d It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama\u2019s hand: \u201cThis is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react.\u201d Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were alerted that he was going to attack weren\u2019t so sure it was a good thing.\u2019<\/p>\n
The proposed American missile attack on Syria never won public support and Obama turned quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare complex. Any possibility of military action was definitively averted on 26 September when the administration joined Russia in approving a draft UN resolution calling on the Assad government to get rid of its chemical arsenal. Obama\u2019s retreat brought relief to many senior military officers. (One high-level special operations adviser told me that the ill-conceived American missile attack on Syrian military airfields and missile emplacements, as initially envisaged by the White House, would have been \u2018like providing close air support for al-Nusra\u2019.)<\/p>\n
The administration\u2019s distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama\u2019s willingness to walk away from his \u2018red line\u2019 threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad\u2019s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.<\/p>\n
The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September by the Security Council, dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces such as al-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm: \u2018no party in Syria should use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer [chemical] weapons.\u2019 The resolution also calls for the immediate notification of the Security Council in the event that any \u2018non-state actors\u2019 acquire chemical weapons. No group was cited by name. While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad\u2019s stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone. There may be more to negotiate.<\/p>\n
_______________________________<\/p>\n
Seymour M. Hersh<\/i> is writing an alternative history of the war on terror. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1993. His journalism and publishing awards include a Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. As a staff writer, Hersh won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest for his 2003 articles \u201cLunch with the Chairman,\u201d \u201cSelective Intelligence,\u201d and \u201cThe Stovepipe.\u201d In 2004, Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces in the magazine; in 2005, he again received a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, an Overseas Press Club award, the National Press Foundation\u2019s Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism award, and his fifth George Polk Award, making him that award\u2019s most honored laureate. He lives in Washington DC.<\/i><\/p>\n