Seymour Hersh, the legendary investigative journalist who broke the My Lai massacre and the abuses at Abu Ghraib, says in a new report for the London Review of Books (the New Yorker and the Washington Post both reportedly passed) that the Obama administration did not tell the whole truth while arguing for a military strike against Syria's Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons.

Hersh accuses the Obama administration of cherry-picking its evidence and omitting key, contradictory facts. But the administration's greatest sin, according to Hersh, was its failure to reveal its knowledge that an al Qaida-aligned group of Syrian rebels — the al-Nusra Front — had mastered the creation of sarin gas, the substance used in the chemical attack the administration cited as a cause for war. "When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect," Hersh writes, "but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad."

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Responding to Hersh's report, Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, said Hersh's allegations are "simply false."

"The intelligence clearly indicated that the Assad regime and only the Assad regime could have been responsible for the 21 August chemical weapons attack," Turner said. "The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false."

More from Hersh at the London Review of Books:

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