PULITZER PRIZE WINNING JOURNALIST: OBAMA LIED ABOUT SYRIA

 If Barack Obama has one reputation as president, it’s that he is becoming known for his lies. From Benghazi, to Fast and Furious, and ObamaCare, this president has incredible difficulty telling the truth.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, said that Obama lied to the American people when he blamed Syrian President Bashar al Assad for the sarin gas attacks on civilians in Syria.

According to a report from Yahoo News, Hersh laid out his argument accusing Obama of lying in an article in the London Book of Review. In early September, Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States had proof that the nerve-gas attack was made on Assad’s orders. “We know the Assad regime was responsible,” President Obama told the nation in an address days after this revelation, which he said pushed him over the “red line” in considering military intervention.

But in a long story published Sunday for the London Review of Books, Hersh — best known for his exposés on the cover-ups of the My Lai Massacre and of Abu Ghraib – said the administration “cherry-picked intelligence,” citing conversations with intelligence and military officials.

In this long story, Hersh cites interviews with members of the intelligence field and military officers regarding Obama’s lies on blaming the sarin gas attack on the Assad regime.

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 of its timing and sequence – 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: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’

Read the full article in the London Review of Books.

http://www.tpnn.com/pulitzer-prize-winning-journalist-obama-lied-about-syria/

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin