Obama lied US into war with Syria: Seymour Hersh

Leading American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, says US President Barack Obama had nearly “cherry-picked” its evidence for launching a military strike against Syria after a chemical weapons attack near the Syrian capital, Damascus, in August.

In an article published in the London Review of Books on Sunday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist wrote that Obama did his best to hold the Syrian government responsible for the deadly attack by “omitting important facts” even though he knew well that the attack is to blame on the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front.

Hersh noted that in some instances, the US president “presented assumptions as facts” in a bid to “justify a strike against Assad.”

The US journalist pointed to a series of highly classified reports prepared by the American intelligence agencies several months before the attack, saying that Obama deliberately ignored the reports which revealed that the al-Nusra Front “had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin [nerve gas] and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity.”

Hersh went on to say that according to a high-level intelligence officer, Obama meticulously “altered the available information” with regard to sarin gas — a nerve agent, which based on the findings of a UN investigation team, was used in the chemical attack near Damascus — to find an excuse for bombing Syria.

In a televised speech on September 10, Obama accused the Syrian government of carrying out the chemical attack which killed hundreds of people, including women and children, on August 21.

Damascus vehemently denied the accusation, saying the attack was carried out by the militants themselves as a false-flag operation.