Contrary to the general impression in Congress and the news media, the Syria chemical warfare intelligence summary released by the Barack Obama administration Aug. 30 did not represent an intelligence community assessment, an IPS analysis and interviews with former intelligence officials reveals.

The evidence indicates that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper culled intelligence analyses from various agencies and by the White House itself, but that the White House itself had the final say in the contents of the document.

Leading members of Congress to believe that the document was an intelligence community assessment and thus represents a credible picture of the intelligence on the alleged chemical attack of Aug. 21 has been a central element in the Obama administration’s case for war in Syria.

That part of the strategy, at least, has been successful. Despite strong opposition in Congress to the proposed military strike in Syria, no one in either chamber has yet challenged the administration’s characterisation of the intelligence. But the administration is vulnerable to the charge that it has put out an intelligence document that does not fully and accurately reflect the views of intelligence analysts.

Former intelligence officials told IPS that that the paper does not represent a genuine intelligence community assessment but rather one reflecting a predominantly Obama administration influence.

In essence, the White House selected those elements of the intelligence community assessments that supported the administration’s policy of planning a strike against the Syrian government force and omitted those that didn’t.

In a radical departure from normal practice involving summaries or excerpts of intelligence documents that are made public, the Syria chemical weapons intelligence summary document was not released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence but by the White House Office of the Press Secretary.

It was titled “Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013.” The first sentence begins, “The United States government assesses,” and the second sentence begins, “We assess”.

The introductory paragraph refers to the main body of the text as a summary of “the intelligence community’s analysis” of the issue, rather than as an “intelligence community assessment”, which would have been used had the entire intelligence community endorsed the document.

A former senior intelligence official who asked not to be identified told IPS in an e-mail Friday that the language used by the White House “means that this is not an intelligence community document”.

The former senior official, who held dozens of security classifications over a decades-long intelligence career, said he had “never seen a document about an international crisis at any classification described/slugged as a U.S. government assessment.”

The document further indicates that the administration “decided on a position and cherry-picked the intelligence to fit it,” he said. “The result is not a balanced assessment of the intelligence.”

Greg Thielmann, whose last position before retiring from the State Department was director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told IPS he has never seen a government document labeled “Government Assessment” either.

“If it’s an intelligence assessment,” Thielmann said, “why didn’t they label it as such?”

Former National Intelligence Officer Paul Pillar, who has participated in drafting national intelligence estimates, said the intelligence assessment summary released by the White House “is evidently an administration document, and the working master copy may have been in someone’s computer at the White House or National Security Council.”

Pillar suggested that senior intelligence officials might have signed off on the administration paper, but that the White House may have drafted its own paper to “avoid attention to analytic differences within the intelligence community.”

Comparable intelligence community assessments in the past, he observed – including the 2002 Iraq WMD estimate – include indications of differences in assessment among elements of the community.

An unnamed “senior administration official” briefing the news media on the intelligence paper on Aug. 30 said that the paper was “fully vetted within the intelligence community,” and that, ”All members of the intelligence community participated in its development.”

But that statement fell far short of asserting that all the elements of the intelligence community had approved the paper in question, or even that it had gone through anything resembling consultations between the primary drafters and other analysts, and opportunities for agencies to register dissent that typically accompany intelligence community assessments.

The same “senior administration official” indicated that DNI Clapper had “approved” submissions from various agencies for what the official called “the process”. The anonymous speaker did not explain further to journalists what that process preceding the issuance of the White House paper had involved.

However, an Associated Press story on Aug. 29 referred to “a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence outlining the evidence against Syria”, citing two intelligence officials and two other administration officials as sources.

That article suggests that the administration had originally planned for the report on intelligence to be issued by Clapper rather than the White House, apparently after reaching agreement with the White House on the contents of the paper.

But Clapper’s name was not on the final document issued by the White House, and the document is nowhere to be found on the ODNI website. All previous intelligence community assessments were posted on that site.

The issuance of the document by the White House rather than by Clapper, as had been apparently planned, points to a refusal by Clapper to put his name on the document as revised by the White House.

Clapper’s refusal to endorse it – presumably because it was too obviously an exercise in “cherry picking” intelligence to support a decision for war – would explain why the document had to be issued by the White House.

Efforts by IPS to get a comment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence suggest strongly that Clapper is embarrassed by the way the Obama White House misrepresented the Aug. 30 document.

An e-mail query by IPS to the media relations staff of ODNI requesting clarification of the status of the Aug. 30 document in relation to the intelligence community was never answered.

In follow-up phone calls, ODNI personnel said someone would respond to the query. After failing to respond for two days, despite promising that someone would call back, however, ODNI’s media relations office apparently decided to refuse any further contact with IPS on the subject.

A clear indication that the White House, rather than Clapper, had the final say on the content of the document is that it includes a statement that a “preliminary U.S. government assessment determined that 1,429 people were killed in the chemical weapons attack, including at least 426 children.”

That figure, for which no source was indicated, was several times larger than the estimates given by British and French intelligence.

The document issued by the White House cites intelligence that is either obviously ambiguous at best or is of doubtful authenticity, or both, as firm evidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack.

It claims that Syrian chemical weapons specialists were preparing for such an attack merely on the basis of signals intelligence indicating the presence of one or more individuals in a particular location. The same intelligence had been regarded prior to Aug. 21 as indicating nothing out of the ordinary, as was reported by CBS news Aug. 23.

The paper also cites a purported intercept by U.S intelligence of conversations between Syrian officials in which a “senior official” supposedly “confirmed” that the government had carried out the chemical weapons attack.

But the evidence appears to indicate that the alleged intercept was actually passed on to the United States by Israeli intelligence. U.S. intelligence officials have long been doubtful about intelligence from Israeli sources that is clearly in line with Israeli interests.

Opponents of the proposed U.S. strike against Syria could argue that the Obama administration’s presentation of the intelligence supporting war is far more politicised than the flawed 2002 Iraq WMD estimate that the George W. Bush administration cited as part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

*The story moved on Sep. 9, 2013, incorrectly attributed the pull quote to Greg Thielmann, when in fact it is attributable to the unnamed former senior intelligence official cited earlier in the story.

Cyber threats appear to have largely replaced terrorism as posing the greatest risks to U.S. national security, which also confronts major longer-term challenges from the effects of natural resource shortages and climate change, according to the latest in a series of annual threat assessments by the U.S. intelligence community.

The report, delivered Tuesday in testimony by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, also cited economic threats to U.S. security, including the possible impact of the ongoing Eurozone crisis on social stability and defence budgets in Europe and Washington’s failure to resolve its fiscal deficits as most recently manifested by the so-called sequester – the indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts in all discretionary spending that took effect Mar. 1.

“Let me now be blunt for you and the American people,” Clapper told the Senate panel. “Sequestration forces the intelligence community to reduce all intelligence activities and functions, without regard to impact on our mission.”

The intelligence community (IC) faces a roughly seven percent cut in its roughly 72-billion-dollar budget. The IC’s budget reached an all-time high of 80 billion dollars last year.

On other issues, the “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community”, as the report is called, noted that the so-called “Arab Spring” had “unleashed destabilizing ethnic and sectarian rivalries” across the Middle East and that new governments there faced major challenges in controlling “ungoverned spaces” and overcoming economic hardship.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programmes pose a “serious threat” to the U.S. and to East Asian security, according to Clapper, although its leaders were focused primarily on “deterrence and defense”.

He also reiterated the intelligence community’s six-year-old position that, while Iran is steadily building its capacity to develop a missile-deliverable nuclear weapon, it has not yet decided to build one.

“We assess Iran is developing nuclear capabilities to enhance its security, prestige, and regional influence and give it the ability to develop nuclear weapons, should a decision be made to do so. We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that the intelligence community was confident it would discover any attempt by Iran to divert its enriched uranium stockpiles to a weapons programme.

The report also cited threats in specific global regions, highlighting more than two dozen countries in South and East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, Latin America, and Europe, as well as the Middle East and North Africa.

The annual threat assessment report represents the consensus view of the 17 agencies that make up the IC, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as number of agencies that fall under the Pentagon’s jurisdiction.

While the report does not explicitly prioritise threats, the fact that he opened this year’s testimony with an extensive discussion of “Cyber” – in contrast to “Terrorism” that has led the litany of threats featured in the DNI’s testimony over the last decade – was seen by analysts here as both remarkable and significant.

“We are in a major transformation because our critical infrastructure, economy, personal lives, and even basic understanding of – and interaction with – the world are becoming more intertwined with digital technologies and the Internet,” he said.

“In some cases the world is applying digital technologies faster than our ability to understand the security implications and mitigate potential risks.”

The IC was particularly concerned with “cyber attacks” – defined as a “non-kinetic offensive operation intended to create physical effects or manipulate disrupt, or delete data” – and “cyber espionage”.

While he said there is only a “remote chance” of a major cyber attack against U.S. critical infrastructure systems that could, for example, cause a regional power outage during the next two years and that the most advanced cyber actors “such as Russia and China” are unlikely to launch one outside an actual military conflict, isolated state or non-state actors could deploy less-sophisticated attacks against poorly protected U.S. networks.

It noted, in particular, an attack last August against the Saudi oil company ARAMCO – widely believed to have been launched by Iran – that effectively destroyed 30,000 computers, as well as a denial-of-service campaign against websites of several U.S. banks and stock exchanges.

It also cited cyber actors targeting classified networks to gain sensitive information, especially about U.S. weapons systems, “almost certainly allowing our adversaries to close the technological gap between our respective militaries, slowly neutralizing one of our key advantages in the international arena.”

While Clapper did not explicitly accuse China of such activity, his testimony came the day after President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, charged Beijing with carrying out such activities and noted that the issue “has become a key point of concern and discussion with China at all levels of our government”.

On terrorism, Clapper said violent Islamist movements have become increasingly decentralised, but that “the Arab Spring has generated a spoke in threats to U.S. interests in the region that likely will endure until political upheaval stabilizes and security forces regain their capabilities.”

The Pakistan-based core Al-Qaeda, he said, has continued to suffer losses over the past year and is now “probably unable to carry out complex, large-scale attacks in the West.”

At the same time, however, he stressed that the rise of transitional governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya, as well as the unrest in Syria and Mali, have “offered opportunities for established (Al-Qaeda) affiliates, aspiring groups, and like-minded individuals to conduct attacks against U.S. interests,” such as the one that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi last September.

He also cited Nigeria’s Boko Haram, and Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Tayibba (LT); the latter, he said, has the “long-term potential to evolve into a permanent and even HAMAS/Hizballah-like presence in Pakistan.”

As for Iran and Hezbollah itself, Clapper noted they prefer to avoid confrontation with the U.S. despite what he alleged to be an increased level of terrorist activity on both their parts.

On climate change and natural resources, the report stressed that competition and scarcity “are growing security threats” and that “(e)xtreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.”

Disruptions in food supplies caused by, among other things, extreme weather conditions, competition for land between a number of actors, including wealthy foreign countries that are buying up land in poor countries, and population growth, are likely to lead to political violence and insurgencies. Much the same applies to reductions in freshwater supplies.

In an interview with the Boston Globe this weekend, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), Adm. Samuel Locklear, told the Boston Globe that the impact of global warming on affected populations is “probably the most likely thing that is going to happen …that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”

He said PACOM was engaging the militaries of other regional countries, including China and India, about possible co-operation in dealing with the impact in the Asia-Pacific.

“If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly,” he told the Globe.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.