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White House: Sy Hersh report 'false'

The White House is dismissing as "simply false" a new report from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, which states that the Obama Administration “cherry-picked intelligence” in order to make its case for a military strike against Syria.

In an article for The London Review of Books, published Sunday, Hersh writes that President Obama "did not tell the whole story... 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. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports... citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.

On Monday, Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, called Hersh’s reporting “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,” he said in a statement to The Hill. “The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false.”

Hersh, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, is responsible for some of the most groundbreaking reports on U.S. intelligence since the Vietnam War, having exposed atrocities ranging from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. Still, the fact that his article ran in the LRB has raised some flags.

According to reports, both The New Yorker and The Washington Post passed on Hersh's article. The New Yorker did not comment on the decision; Hersh said he was informed by Post editor Marty Baron “that the sourcing in the article did not meet the Post's standards." He went to LRB instead.

The slights from The New Yorker and the Post will no doubt frustrate Hersh, who has become a staunch critic of American media. Earlier this year, he told The Guardian that 90 percent of American news editors should be sacked. His chief complaint: Almost no one in American media was willing to challenge the Obama Administration, which he says has no qualms about lying to the American people.