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Members of Congress are "not being given any of the underlying elements of the intelligence reports," according to Grayson. He's not sure if the information will come before the votes on a proposed strike next week.
The anti-war Democrat said there are other examples of intelligence he believes has been manipulated to favor war.
The four-page White House report on the alleged attack is no more than "a briefing paper with arguments in favor of attacking Syria" that "doesn't present both sides of the issue," Grayson said. "The administration wants to flood the zone by excluding other information or points of view," he alleged. "I think that it is interesting that the administration consistently refers to Assad doing this and Assad doing that and Assad doing the other thing without giving the public any evidence to support the proposition that Assad has done anything."
He points to an article published by The Daily Caller that alleges the communications actually showed Syrian officers were surprised by the alleged chemical weapon attack. The communications, according to unnamed sources paraphrased in article, were intercepted by Israeli intelligence and "doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion."
According to Monday’s Wall Street Journal, a senior administration official called UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon before the inspectors ever left Damascus, “telling him the inspection mission was pointless and no longer safe.”
The White House has gone to great lengths to shut down any independent investigation of the facts.
The Obama administration has selectively used intelligence to justify military strikes on Syria, former military officers with access to the original intelligence reports say, in a manner that goes far beyond what critics charged the Bush administration of doing in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel’s famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.
The New York Times reported this morning that the White House is now backing off its claims to have a “smoking gun that directly links President Bashar al-Assad to the attack.”
Click Below Here For The US's Evidence For War
Official Document
To conclude, there is a substantial body of information that implicates the Syrian government’sresponsibility in the chemical weapons attack that took place on August 21. As indicated, there isadditional intelligence that remains classified because of sources and methods concerns that is being provided to Congress and international partners
""I am not aware of this administration misleading the public on this issue or any other issue. "?
But even without hard evidence tying Mr. Assad to the attack, administration officials asserted, the Syrian leader bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of his troops and should be held accountable.
“The commander in chief of any military is ultimately responsible for decisions made under their leadership,” said the State Department’s deputy spokeswoman, Marie Harf — even if, she added, “He’s not the one who pushes the button or says ‘go’ on this.”…
…The Obama administration, Mr. Cordesman said, needs to use intelligence about the attack “as a key way of informing the world, of building up trust in U.S. policy and intelligence statements, and in moving U.S. strategic communications from spin to convincing truth.”
And yet it appears that the public presentation of the Syria evidence will be limited.
Instead of the theater of Mr. Powell’s 2003 speech — which included satellite photographs, scratchy recordings of conversations between Iraqi officials and a vial of white powder meant to symbolize anthrax — American officials said the intelligence assessment they are preparing to make public will be similar to a modest news release that the White House issued in June to announce that the Assad government had used chemical weapons “on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.”...
www.nytimes.com...