►http://seenthis.net/messages/205134 @kassem
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Seymour Hersh : Obama "Cherry-Picked" Intelligence on Syrian Chemical Attack to Justify U.S. Strike | Democracy Now !
►http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/9/seymour_hersh_obama_cherry_picked_intelligence
AMY GOODMAN: And why this is significant today? In the end, President Obama chose not to strike Syria because the American people just overwhelmingly said no. But what this means for what’s happening in Syria today? And also, why then did the Syrian—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me interrupt you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Amy, let me interrupt you. He didn’t—I’m telling you, he didn’t do it because the American people said no. He knew it because he didn’t have a case. And there was incredible opposition that will be, one of these days, written about, maybe in history books. There was incredible operation from some very, very strong-minded, constitutionally minded people in the Pentagon. That’s the real story. I don’t have it; I could just tell you I know it.
And so, it wasn’t just a case—you know, from the military’s point of view, this was a president who many respected in many ways. There’s many good things about Obama. There’s a lot of things—as I said, I voted for him twice. And he’s probably going to be the brightest president we’re ever going to have, and maybe the best president we’re ever going to have. The system is—doesn’t produce always the very best, our system. But the fact of the matter is that this president was going to go to a war because he felt he had to protect what he said about a red line. That’s what it was about, in the military’s point of view. And that’s not acceptable. You don’t go to war, you don’t throw missiles at a country, when there’s no immediate national security to the United States. And you don’t even talk about it in public. That’s wrong, and that was a terrible thing to do.
And that’s what this story is really about. It’s about a president choosing to make political use of a war crime and not do the right thing. And I think that’s—to me, Amy, that’s a lot more important than where it was published and who told me no and who told me yes. I know the press likes to focus on that stuff, but that’s not the story. The story is what he was going to do, and what it says maybe about him, what it says about that office, what it says about the power, that you can simply—you can create a narrative, which he did, and you know the mainstream press is going to carry out that narrative.
I mean, it’s almost impossible for some of the mainstream newspapers, who have consistently supported the administration. This is after we had the WMD scandal, when everybody wanted to be on the team. It turns out our job, as newspaper people, is not to be on the team. You know, we’ve got a world run by a lot of yahoos and wackos, and it’s our job as reporters to do the kind of work and make it hard for the nincompoops that run the world to get away with some of the stuff we’re doing. That’s what we should be doing more and more of. And that’s just—you know, I don’t think there’s any virtue in it; it’s just the job we have. And there’s heroism—you know, there’s nothing heroic about what we do. It’s heroic for some of the people, reporters in Africa, to do some of that work when they’re at personal risk. We’re not at personal risk. It’s just not so hard to hold the people in office to the highest standard. And the press should be doing it more and more.