Obama aides deny Syria intelligence story

David Jackson | USA TODAY

Administration officials are pushing back on a story that claims President Obama "cherry-picked intelligence" in accusing Syria President Bashar Assad of using chemical weapons.

In an article for the London Review of Books,veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote that Obama and aides ignored evidence that a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaeda also has the ability to weaponize and use sarin gas.

Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of National Intelligence, said "the intelligence clearly indicated that the Assad regime and only the Assad regime could have been responsible for the 21 August chemical weapons attack" that targeted anti-government rebels.

"The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a non-existent alternative explanation is simply false," Turner said.

In his report, Hersh wrote that Obama "did not tell the whole story" when he made his case against Assad this past fall.

While Obama reportedly considered military action against Assad's government over the chemical weapons attack, he eventually decided to seek authorization from Congress.

Worth nothing: The Huffington Post reported that The New Yorker and The Washington Post passed on Hersh's article, which is why it appeared in a London periodical.

Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, and also did reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq.

In his Syria article, Hersh wrote of Obama: "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 U.S. 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 U.N. study concluded — without assessing responsibility — had been used in the rocket attack."