quote:


"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?

quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

FR

Since the events, with Assad as the perpetrator, forced President Obama into a corner with his "red line," ultimately making him look like a fool on the world stage, what, exactly would be the motivation to twist the data?

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

Producing sarin at the purity needed to use in a rocket attack is not something that can be done with out a fairly sophisticated chemical plant. I can find no evidence that the Syrian rebels control such a facility.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

Producing sarin at the purity needed to use in a rocket attack is not something that can be done with out a fairly sophisticated chemical plant. I can find no evidence that the Syrian rebels control such a facility.

quote:

ORIGINAL: angelikaJ

Assad said they did not have any chemical weapons.

The point I am trying to make, while Hershfeld's claims are being sorted, is that Assad denied that the Syrian Government had any chemical weapons and 1,300 tons were found by the OPCW.
Not *just* Sarin.


To go from a stockpile of zero to one of 2,600,000 lbs is a substantial mis-statement.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Kana

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

Producing sarin at the purity needed to use in a rocket attack is not something that can be done with out a fairly sophisticated chemical plant. I can find no evidence that the Syrian rebels control such a facility.

Sigh
No one bothers to read anymore. They just spout their pre-detrmined diatribes
FTFA,direct quote

"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 ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.

On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we believes”.’ 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 – with the help of an Israeli agent – but, according to the consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic."