WarSclerotic

UK downplays chance of military action in Syria | JPost | Israel News.

( “So are they all, all honorable men…” – JW )

‘Iran, not Israel, faces an existential threat’ | The Times of Israel.

Top US analyst says all of Islamic Republic’s population centers now within range of Israeli missiles with hydrogen warheads

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu draws a red line for Iran’s nuclear program during his address to the UN General Assembly in September 2012. (photo credit: AP/Seth Wenig)

Iran, not Israel, faces an existential threat, according to a top US analyst who is considered one of the world’s leading scholars on the Iranian nuclear issue.

In a research paper published earlier this week, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said that in preparation for a nuclear Iran, Israel had been working in recent years to extend the range of its missiles, and that it now poses a real threat to all of the Islamic Republic’s major population centers.

Cordesman, a former national security aide to Senator John McCain, said Iran is now within the range of Israeli missiles carrying hydrogen warheads, which are far more powerful than standard atomic warheads. According to the report, each bomb with a hydrogen warhead has about a hundred times more power than a conventional nuclear bomb.

Israel has never admitted to having hydrogen warheads, much like it has never admitted to holding any nuclear weapons.

According to Cordesman’s report, Iran will not have the ability to threaten Israel with a long-range nuclear warhead for several years. Today, the Islamic Republic can attack Israel with small bombs from the sea, or with long-range non-nuclear missiles, he noted.

Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only and has no military component, a claim that Israel and Western powers reject.

Deputy FM: Action on Syria red line sends message to Iran | JPost | Israel News.

Elkin says now that US, int’l community understand that Assad crossed chemical weapons red line, failure to act will send message to Iran that it can continue to develop nuclear weapons program with impunity.

Exiled Muslim Brotherhood plans return to Syria – FT.com.

©AFP

The Muslim Brotherhood is set to open offices inside Syria for the first time since the organisation was crushed there decades ago, in an apparent effort to capitalise on the increasingly Islamised rebellion.

Riad al-Shaqfa, the movement’s exiled leader, said in an interview with the Financial Times that a decision was recently taken to revive organisational structures inside Syria and followers have been asked to start opening party offices in rebel-held areas.

“In the beginning we said this is a time for revolution, not ideology. Now there are many groups inside so we feel we should reorganise,” he said, adding that the Brotherhood – a similar movement to its Egyptian counterpart – was hoping to promote a more moderate brand of Islamist thinking at a time of growing radicalisation.

The decision comes amid heated controversy over the Brotherhood’s behind-the-scenes influence on the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, and it is likely to be treated with suspicion by many of the group’s secular and liberal critics. At the same time, some in the opposition fear the Brotherhood’s efficiency, strong organisation and superior fundraising networks could enable them to dominate a fractured Syrian opposition.

The opening of the offices follows the launch of a twice-monthly newspaper that the group says is now distributing 10,000 copies in liberated areas of the country.

Speaking at the Brotherhood’s offices in Istanbul, a Syrian revolution flag wrapped around his neck, Mr Shaqfa denounced what he said was a campaign against the group backed by “outside” forces. He countered widespread accusations that his organisation, which has existed only in exile since a bloody 1980s crackdown by Mr Assad’s father Hafez, has been trying to control the fractious Syrian opposition.

“Those who attack us have no influence on the ground – they are media personalities and are trying through their attacks to create influence for themselves,” he said.

The regional context, and the questions raised over the commitment to democracy of its sister organisations which have taken power elsewhere in the region is not helping the Syrian Brotherhood’s case. “The fact that the Brotherhood won in Egypt and Tunisia raised fears about the Brotherhood in Syria,” said Mr Shaqfa.

The Brotherhood is not thought to have significant support on the ground, where membership in the organisation has been a capital offence under the Assad regime.

It is difficult to gauge the extent to which it will be able to reassert itself, especially at a time when armed groups and not political parties hold sway. Many of the rebel groups are puritanical Salafis, espousing a stricter interpretation of Islam than the Brotherhood.

Perhaps in an attempt to pave the way for a more official political comeback, the Brotherhood now has armed rebels affiliated with it. Dozens of small brigades calling themselves shields of the revolution emerged over the past year and are supported by the organisation.

Mr Shaqfa said these groups were formed not by members but by people with a political leaning close to the Brotherhood. They came together in a meeting in Istanbul last May and are now part of the supreme military command, the nominal rebel leadership backed by western and Arab governments. “These groups have their own commands and agreed to give back their weapons after the revolution,” he claimed.

Although the Brotherhood is believed to be backed by Qatar and Turkey, Mr Shaqfa insisted that all the help it has given on the ground, including the humanitarian support it has provided, comes from exiled members, many of them working in the Gulf.

Within the political opposition, which is based outside Syria, the Brotherhood has operated through the Syrian National Council, the first opposition front formed after the eruption of the revolt in 2011.

Accusations that it was imposing its will on the SNC, however, drove other opposition groups and western states to promote the creation of a broader body, the Syrian National Coalition, which is now recognised as the representative of Syrians.

This, however, did not put an end to the controversy over the Brotherhood’s dominance. The infighting escalated last month when the Brotherhood backed the formation of an interim opposition government and its choice for prime minister won the internal Coalition election.

Secular activists in the Coalition were livid, some suspended their membership and stepped up their denunciations of the Brotherhood. Discussions are under way between various factions to contain the quarrel and the Coalition might be expanded to bring in more liberal and minority voices.

Mr Shaqfa said the Brotherhood has only 10 per cent of the seats on the Syrian National Council, which is now part of the Coalition, and had followed others, rather than led, in the election of Ghassan Hitto as interim prime minister. Though Mr Shaqfa is not opposed to expanding the Coalition, he said: “There is a group outside the coalition which wants to get in and so they say we control the coalition which isn’t true.”

The Brotherhood, however, is more organised than others, and it is also flexible in its positions, which creates suspicion over its motives. “If we haven’t pushed to form the Syrian National Council it would not have been formed, because there were no other parties. Others were not organised or strong,” said Mr Shaqfa.

White House: We don’t know if Syria red line has been crossed | The Cable.

Despite a new U.S. intelligence community assessment that the Syrian regime likely used chemical weapons on its own people, the White House is still waiting for more evidence before deciding whether Bashar al-Assad has crossed President Barack Obama’s “red line.”

The White House scrambled Thursday to set up a conference call with reporters following Thursday morning’s news that the U.S. intelligence community has concluded with varying levels of confidence that there has been small-scale use of sarin, a deadly nerve gas, inside Syria, most likely by the Syrian regime. Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers Thursday that the assessment referenced two instances of chemical weapons use in Syria.

A senior White House official said on the conference call that the intelligence community’s assessment was not enough to determine that President Obama’s red line regarding U.S. intervention in Syria has been crossed.

“We are continuing to do further work to establish a definitive judgment as to whether or not the red line has been crossed and to inform our decision-making about what to do next,” the official said. “If we reach a definitive determination that this red line has been crossed, based on credible, corroborated information, what we will be doing is consulting closely with our friends and allies and the international community more broadly, as well as the Syrian opposition, to determine what the best course of action is.”

The official indirectly referenced the flawed intelligence assessments about Saddam Hussein‘s programs of weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the Iraq war as justification for caution.

“I’d say that given our own history with intelligence assessments, including intelligence assessments related to weapons of mass destruction, it’s very important that we are able to establish this with certainty and that we are able to present information that is airtight in a public and credible fashion to underpin all of our decision-making. That is, I think, the threshold that is demanded given how serious this issue is,” the official said. “But again, I think nobody should have any mistake about what our red line is… It is absolutely the case that the president’s red line is the use of chemical weapons or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups.”

The Obama administration is keeping all options on the table, but the official declined to say what options might be considered if and when it is confirmed that the president’s red line has been crossed. The official also declined to identify the locations or dates of the two alleged uses of chemical weapons in Syria, but acknowledged that a March incident in Aleppo had spurred the United States to press for a fuller investigation.

“We will constantly have prepared contingency planning for different scenarios within Syria,” the official said. “What the Assad regime needs to know is that we are watching this incredibly closely.”

The White House’s conclusion that not enough evidence exists to confirm that the Syrian regime has crossed Obama’s red line was contradicted Thursday by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“It is clear that ‘red lines’ have been crossed and action must be taken to prevent larger scale use,” she said in a statement. “Syria has the ability to kill tens of thousands with its chemical weapons. The world must come together to prevent this by unified action which results in the secure containment of Syria’s significant stockpile of chemical weapons.”

The original announcement about the new intelligence community assessment on Syrian chemical weapons came in statements Thursday from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and in a letter from the White House to several senators delivered Thursday morning during an otherwise classified briefing.

“Our intelligence community does asses with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent Sarin,” Miguel Rodriguez, the director of the White House office of legislative affairs, wrote in the letter.

The Boston Marathon bombing – The FBI investigates (Satire) – YouTube.

Russia Told U.S. Bomb Suspect Was Radical Islamist – NYTimes.com.

Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

Secretary of State John Kerry and several senators leaving a classified intelligence briefing in Washington on Thursday.

By SCOTT SHANE, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and ERIC SCHMITT.

¶ WASHINGTON — In March 2011, the Russian security service sent a stark warning to the F.B.I., reporting that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “a follower of radical Islam” who had “changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to Russia’s turbulent Caucasus to connect with underground militant groups. Six months later, Russia sent the same warning to the C.I.A.

¶ On April 15, law enforcement officials say, Mr. Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and maiming many others.

¶ The Russian warnings to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. also raised questions about Mr. Tsarnaev’s mother, Zubeidat, according to two senior American officials. The Russians were most concerned about Mr. Tsarnaev because they had information that he planned to travel to Russia, according to one of the officials. “The Russians were concerned that mother and son were very religious and strong believers, and they could be militants if they returned to Russia,” the other official said.

¶ The mother, the officials said, did not fit the profile of a potential extremist, leading American counterterrorism officials to not express much concern about her. They did not set up a travel alert on her, for instance, one of the officials said. But they nonetheless added her name to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE database, when Tamerlan’s name was added to it in October 2011, the official said.

¶ Should the Russian warnings — seemingly confirmed in part last year when the counterterrorism task force in Boston learned that Mr. Tsarnaev was traveling to Russia — have permitted American officials to foil the marathon plot? That question emerged on Thursday as the crux of a debate among members of Congress, counterterrorism officials and outside experts about whether, and how, the security system failed.

¶ F.B.I. officials have defended their response to the Russian tip, which prompted agents to interview Mr. Tsarnaev and his parents and check government databases and Internet activity. The bureau found nothing.

¶ On Thursday, some members of Congress and former government officials said Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s six-month visit to Dagestan last year was a missed opportunity to refocus attention on him and potentially prevent the attack. Others suggested that the criticism was 20-20 hindsight, and that the F.B.I.’s performance was reasonable under the circumstances.

¶ The critical moment came in January 2012, when a Customs database sent an alert about Mr. Tsarnaev’s plan to travel to Russia to a Customs agent assigned to the F.B.I.-led Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston, according to a Congressional official. It is unclear who else saw the information, but it does not appear to have prompted any new scrutiny of Mr. Tsarnaev at the time or when he returned to the United States that July.

¶ “If there was a failure at any time, maybe it was at that point, to get a follow-up interview,” said Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, a former F.B.I. agent. “But even so, it’s hard to say they did something wrong. Travel in and of itself is not derogatory information, and that area is far down on our priority list.”

¶ Across Capitol Hill, senators from both parties emerged from a classified briefing on the bombings sounding generally supportive of the F.B.I. “I wish there would have been more,” said Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican on the Intelligence Committee, “but I’m not in a position to say that I would have done it differently.” Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who leads the Armed Services Committee, said, “Unless there’s additional information that pops up, I’m not critical of their actions.”

¶ But Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in earlier remarks to reporters that the Boston bombing case “is becoming, to me, a case study in system failure.”

¶ “You have Russian intelligence services contacting two agencies within our federal government responsible for our national security, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.,” he said. “They tell us, ‘We believe you have a radical Islamist in your midst.’ ” Despite the warning and the F.B.I.’s initial follow-up, Mr. Graham said, Mr. Tsarnaev was able to visit Dagestan and return unnoticed, and discuss “killing Americans” openly on the Internet undetected.

¶ Jimmy Gurulé, a former counterterrorism official who teaches at Notre Dame Law School, said the alert about Mr. Tsarnaev’s travel plans should have prompted new attention, since it appeared to give weight to the Russian warning. He said that the authorities should have sought a court warrant to monitor his cellphone and e-mail while he was in Russia. “When he came back to the United States, they should have pulled him out of the Customs line, inspected his belongings, looked at his laptop and cellphone and questioned him about what he had done in Dagestan,” said Mr. Gurulé.

¶ But law enforcement officials said it was unrealistic to expect the F.B.I., which had already taken a hard look at Mr. Tsarnaev, to reopen the case merely because of his travel. The TIDE database has roughly 700,000 names in it, a senior law enforcement official said, and Customs officials get 20 or 30 alerts every day about travel by people in various databases.

¶ In addition, the official said, it would have violated Justice Department guidelines to keep pursuing Mr. Tsarnaev after the initial assessment found no evidence of a crime. “You pursue the original information, come to conclusions,” he said.

¶ The official said that the F.B.I. would certainly have looked at Mr. Tsarnaev again if the Russians had told the bureau that they had developed more information on him during his trip. “That is all that would have taken,” the official said.

¶ One factor in the failure to follow up may have been Mr. Tsarnaev’s ethnicity as a Chechen and his destination, Dagestan, according to both government officials and independent specialists. While those might have set off suspicions in Russia, militants from the Caucasus have generally not targeted the United States.

¶

U.S. Says It Suspects Assad Used Chemical Weapons – NYTimes.com.

By MARK LANDLER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The White House said Thursday that it believes the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in its civil war, an assessment that could test President Obama’s repeated warnings that such an attack could precipitate American intervention in Syria.

The White House, in a letter to Congressional leaders, said the nation’s intelligence agencies assessed “with varying degrees of confidence” that the government of President Bashar al-Assad had used the chemical agent sarin on a small scale.

But it said more conclusive evidence was needed before Mr. Obama would take action, referring obliquely to both the Bush administration’s use of faulty intelligence in the march to war in Iraq and the ramifications of any decision to enter another conflict in the Middle East.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the agencies actually expressed more certainty about the use of these weapons than the White House indicated in its letter. She said Thursday that they voiced medium to high confidence in their assessment, which officials said was based on the testing of soil samples and blood drawn from people who had been wounded.

American officials said the attacks, which occurred last month in a village near Aleppo and in the outskirts of Damascus, had not been definitively connected to Mr. Assad. The White House said the “chain of custody” of the weapons was not clear, raising questions about whether the attacks were deliberate or accidental.

“Given the stakes involved, and what we have learned from our own recent experience, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient,” the White House said in the letter, which was signed by its legislative director, Miguel E. Rodriguez. “Only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making.”

That meticulously legal language did not disguise a thorny political and foreign policy problem for Mr. Obama: he has long resisted the calls to arm the Syrian rebels and has expressed deep doubts about the wisdom of intervening in an Arab nation so riven with sectarian strife, although he has also issued pointed warnings to Syria.

In a statement last summer, Mr. Obama did not offer a technical definition of his “red line” for taking action, but said it was when “we start seeing a whole bunch of weapons moving around or being utilized.” In Jerusalem last month, he said proof that Syria had used such weapons would be a “game changer” for American involvement.

The Pentagon, administration officials said, has prepared the president a menu of options that include commando raids that would secure chemical weapons stockpiles and strikes on Syrian planes from American ships in the Mediterranean. Last year, the United States secretly sent a 150-member task force to Jordan to help deal with the possibility that Syria would lose control of its stockpiles. Mr. Obama could also provide more robust aid to the rebels, including weapons.

White House officials gave no indication of what Mr. Obama might do, except to say that any American action would be taken in concert with its allies.

While lawmakers from both parties swiftly declared that the president’s red line had been breached, they differed on what he should do about it.

“The political reality is that he put himself in that position that if the ‘red line’ is crossed — he made it very clear — it would change his behavior,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said. The intelligence “is a compelling argument for the president to take the measures that a lot of us have been arguing for all along,” he said.

The timing of the White House disclosure also suggested the pressures it is facing. It came the same day that the British government said that it had “limited but persuasive” evidence of the use of chemical weapons, and two days after an Israeli military intelligence official asserted that Syria had repeatedly used chemical weapons.

In a letter to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, several weeks ago calling for a United Nations investigation, Britain laid out evidence of the attacks in Aleppo and near Damascus as well as an earlier one in Homs.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, reported that dozens of victims were treated at hospitals for shortness of breath, convulsions and dilation of the pupils, common symptoms of exposure to chemical warfare agents. Doctors reported eye irritation and fatigue after close exposure to the patients.

Citing its links to contacts in the Syrian opposition, Britain said there were reports of 15 deaths in the suburban Damascus attack and up to 10 in Aleppo, where the government and rebels have each accused the other of using chemical weapons.

“Fortunately the deaths have not been high,” Senator Feinstein said, “but there have been deaths.”

The United States has also pushed for a United Nations investigation, but it made clear on Thursday that it has collected enough evidence on its own and with Britain and other countries to make its assessment. An official said the United States was also suspicious about the attack in Homs.

While several officials said the intelligence agencies expressed medium to high confidence about its overall assessment, two intelligence officials noted that there were components of the assessment about which the agencies were less certain. They did not offer details.

Administration officials had begun the week casting doubt on the claims made by the Israeli official, Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, about chemical weapons. “Suspicions are one thing; evidence is another,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Wednesday on a visit to Egypt.

But by then, a senior administration official said, the intelligence agencies had already become more confident of their assessment, after several weeks of examining the evidence. With Secretary of State John Kerry scheduled to brief senators on Syria on Thursday, the White House decided on Wednesday evening to get ahead of that meeting.

The administration’s disclosure came in a response to Mr. McCain, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the committee’s chairman, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who wrote to the White House asking whether Mr. Assad or his supporters had used chemical weapons during the two-year-long war.

“Given the fact that we have been developing additional information within our intelligence community,” a White House official said to reporters, “we felt it was the right and prudent thing to do to respond in an unclassified form to this letter.”

Lawmakers generally welcomed the White House’s disclosure, though some suggested that the administration was still inclined to play down the implications of the assessment.

“It is important that we read the intelligence as it is laid out, not as we would like it to be,” said Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

US has a range of military options in Syria | The Times of Israel.

White House makes clear that any action against Assad would likely be either with NATO backing or with a coalition of nations

An illustrative photo of US Marines during a drill in California (photo credit: LCpl Ali Azimi/US Marines)

WASHINGTON (AP) — US commanders have laid out a range of possible options for military involvement in Syria, but they have made it clear that any action would likely be either with NATO backing or with a coalition of nations similar to the NATO-led overthrow of Libyan dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

The White House announced Thursday that intelligence officials have concluded that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has twice used sarin gas on its own people. But even though President Barack Obama has called that a “red line” for taking some kind of further action to assist the rebels, administration officials said Thursday the intelligence wasn’t solid enough to warrant such a move.

On Thursday, US officials said that there has been no new movement of US military assets to the region.

The military options could include establishing a no-fly zone or a secured area within Syria, launching airstrikes by drones and fighter jets and sending in tens of thousands of ground forces to secure the regime’s chemical weapons caches.

Setting up a no-fly zone over Syria would present a greater challenge than it did in Libya because Syria has a more sophisticated and robust air defense system. Crippling it would require jamming the radars and taking out the missile sites, or possibly even using some type of cyberattack to interfere with the system.

According to a report by the Institute for the Study of War, Syria’s largely Soviet-era air defense system includes as many as 300 mobile surface to air missile systems and defense systems, and more than 600 static missile launchers and sites.

Some senators have also pressed for the US to set up a narrow, so-called safe zone inside Syria, along its border with Turkey where citizens could go and be safe. To do so would also require neutralizing Syria’s air defenses. US hunter-killer drones, fighter jets and missile launches from ships could be used to attack the air defense sites.

During a recent Senate Armed Services hearing, Adm. Jim Stravidis, the top US commander in Europe and NATO’s supreme allied commander, said there is a “great deal of discussion” among allies about the various options, including the no-fly zone and providing additional lethal support to the rebels.

The US has taken only minimal military steps so far, including the deployment of about 200 troops to Jordan to assist that country’s military. The US also participated in NATO’s placement of Patriot missile batteries in Turkey near the border to protect against an attack from Syria.

A new Army headquarters unit is being deployed to replace the 200 troops in Jordan, giving the US a stronger command and control unit, if the decision is made to send any additional forces.

In testimony to Congress last week, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked whether he was confident that US forces could secure the chemical weapons caches within Syria.

“Not as I sit here today, simply because they’ve been moving it and the number of sites is quite numerous,” Dempsey said.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press

US says Assad used sarin, but unsure if red line was crossed | The Times of Israel.

Two days after Israeli bombshell, US defense secretary says intelligence confirms use of nerve agents; White House still checking into matter

Chuck Hagel speaking with reporters after reading a statement on chemical weapon use in Syria during a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Thursday. (photo credit: AP/Jim Watson, Pool)

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday that the US intelligence community now believes Syria has likely used chemical weapons on a “small scale” against its civilians.

Hagel added that the use of chemical weapons “violates every convention of warfare.”

Get The Times of Israel’s Daily Edition by email
and never miss our top stories   Free Sign up!

The statement came on the heels of a public declaration Tuesday by the Israeli army’s top intelligence analyst that forces loyal to President Bashar Assad had used sarin gas against rebel forces and civilians, and may push the US closer to intervening in the two-year-old conflict.

The White House, however, said the news would not necessarily trigger a response.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said the Syrian regime had launched two chemical attacks.

Hagel, speaking to reporters in Abu Dhabi, said the White House had informed two senators by letter that, within the past day, “our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin.”

Britain followed the statement by saying London also believed there had been chemical attacks.

“We have limited but persuasive information from various sources showing chemical weapon use in Syria, including sarin,” a statement by the Foreign Office said. “This is extremely concerning. Use of chemical weapons is a war crime.”

Sarin, used by Saddam Hussein in aerial strikes against Iraqi Kurds in 1988 and in a Japan terror attack in 1995, is a nerve agent that cripples the respiratory system. It is hundreds of times more toxic than cyanide and is considered a weapon of mass destruction.

No information was made public on what quantity of chemical weapons might have been used in Syria, or when or what casualties might have resulted.

A victim of an alleged chemical attack in Jobar, Syria, earlier this month. (Screenshot via YouTube)

Hagel and President Barack Obama have said in the past the use of chemical weapons would be a “game-changer” in the US position on intervening in the Syrian civil war.

However, the White House said the intelligence fell short of what was needed to cross Obama’s “red line” on Syrian chemical weapons.

“We are continuing to do further work to establish a definitive judgment as to whether or not the red line has been crossed and to inform our decision-making about what to do next,” a senior administration official told reporters, according to a report in Foreign Policy. “If we reach a definitive determination that this red line has been crossed, based on credible, corroborated information, what we will be doing is consulting closely with our friends and allies and the international community more broadly, as well as the Syrian opposition, to determine what the best course of action is.”

Alluding to faulty intelligence in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War, the official said the White House would do its homework before acting.

“I’d say that given our own history with intelligence assessments, including intelligence assessments related to weapons of mass destruction, it’s very important that we are able to establish this with certainty and that we are able to present information that is airtight in a public and credible fashion to underpin all of our decision-making,” the official said.

White House legislative director Miguel Rodriguez, who signed the letter cited by Hagel, wrote that “because the president takes this issue so seriously, we have an obligation to fully investigate any and all evidence of chemical weapons use within Syria.”

The letter went to Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Carl Levin, D-Mich.

The assessment, Rodriguez said, is based in part on “physiological samples.”

He also said the US believes that the use of chemical weapons “originated with the Assad regime.” That is consistent with the Obama administration’s assertion that the Syrian rebels do not have access to the country’s stockpiles.

Reacting to Washington’s announcement, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Syria to let inspectors into the country to independently ascertain suspicions that Assad had used chemical weapons.

“The secretary general has consistently urged the Syrian authorities to provide full and unfettered access to the team. He renews this urgent call today,” UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

“The fact-finding team is on stand-by and ready to deploy in 24-48 hours,” he added.

Earlier in the week, Hagel and Kerry had said they could not confirm a report by Israeli Brig. Gen. Itai Brun that the IDF was quite certain that Assad deployed chemical weapons against rebel forces in Syria on March 19.

Speaking at a security conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Brun said further that based on the pictures of the victims — the size of their pupils, “and the foam coming out of their mouths” — the army believed that Assad’s troops had used sarin.

Brun also claimed that in Syria today there are over 1,000 tons of chemical weapons, including sarin and VX, both of which can be deployed from artillery rounds and long-range ballistic missiles.

Chemical weapons have been used on more than one occasion in Syria, and the world’s persistent reluctance to act in response to the use of those weapons is typical of the major powers’ current approach to the tremors shaking the Middle East, Brun said.

“We should be very, very worried about [chemical weapons] falling into the hands of those who do not conduct gain-loss considerations,” he said.

Kerry responded to Brun’s comments by saying he had spoken to Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who could not confirm them.

On Wednesday, Hagel said he had not been briefed on the Israeli assessment during consultations with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.

He added then that Washington was looking for “real intelligence” on the issue of Syrian chemical weapon use. “Suspicions are one thing. Evidence is another,” Hagel said. “I think we have to be very careful here before we make any conclusions, draw any conclusions, based on real intelligence.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.