U.S. Military and Intelligence Officials to Obama: “Assad NOT Responsible for Chemical Attack”

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236. 9/10- Gareth Porter: Some in US Intel. Community Reject Obama Admin Case for Syria Attack (part 1)

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10690

Some in US Intel. Community Reject Obama Admin Case for Syria Attack

Pt 1: Gareth Porter: US Intelligence on Syria "cherry-picked" by proponents of proposed strike
September 10, 13

VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT

Guest Bio:
Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore. And welcome to this latest edition of The Porter Report.

As the Obama administration continues to outline its case for attacking Syria, new revelations have come to light that call into question the very intelligence the White House is using to justify its actions.

Now joining us to discuss this is Gareth Porter. He's a historian and investigative journalist on U.S. foreign and military policy. He writes regularly for the Inter Press Service, and he received the U.K.-based Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2011 for his articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new piece published today in IPS is "Obama's Case for Syria Didn't Reflect Intel Consensus".

Thank you so much for joining us, Gareth.

GARETH PORTER, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Thank you, Jaisal.

NOOR: So, Gareth, what do you know and how do you know it?

PORTER: Well, we know that there's a problem with the way in which the intelligence paper that the White House issued August 30 has been described, for a number of reasons. The thing that--the tipoff that should have alerted me and many others but which I and others missed is the fact that this paper about the intelligence on the Syrian chemical weapons attack or alleged attack of August 21 has been called by the White House, labeled a U.S. government assessment.

Now, that raises very fundamental question: why would the White House call a paper that's supposed to represent the intelligence community's perspective or their analysis of this intelligence a U.S. government assessment? And that is a tipoff that in fact this was not a paper that was put forward by the intelligence community itself and then simply released by the White House. It was a paper that went through a process which did involve the intelligence community, no doubt about that. They undoubtedly submitted their analyses, various intelligence agencies, the CIA, the DIA, and the 14 others, to the office of the director of national intelligence, James Clapper. There was a press report a couple of days, I think three days before the release of this paper indicating that the plan was that Clapper would be the person who would be the alleged author or the person whose name would be on this paper. But in fact his name is nowhere to be found. And I found from a very careful search of the website of the office of the director of national intelligence that it's nowhere to be found there either. It's only found on the White House website itself.

And incidentally, when I called the office of the director of national intelligence for this story on three successive days, a number of phone calls as well as an email, I could get no response whatsoever from them, and it's very clear they were refusing to talk to me about this. So this is the first clue that this was in fact a White House product in the end. But the White House had the final say over what was included in the product and not the director of national intelligence, not the CIA director or any of the other top officials of the intelligence community.

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