Public Comment

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, the Obama administration appears to have “cherry-picked” intelligence to justify its original planned attack on Syria. It failed to disclose that it was well aware that radical Islamic groups - Syrian forces al-Nusra Front and AQI, al-Qaeda of Iraq had significant quantities of sarin and the know-how to produce other lethal chemical agents. Hersh asserts that the administration clearly had this knowledge and deliberately misled the public by asserting through their official spokesman, press secretary, James Carney that only the Assad regime had stockpiles of chemical weapons and that an attack was, therefore, justified. 

Fortunately, the attack did not happen but it does create an uncomfortable feeling that President Obama, like his predecessor, President Bush can distort facts and misled the public in pursuit of a policy agenda – much like the false claims of weapons of mass destruction which resulted in the Iraq war debacle.