I know, I mean about this in particular:
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’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.
...
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?”’
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