Will Social Media Get Obama Off the Hook on Syria?

Pres­id­ent Obama was well aware that he had a cred­ib­il­ity prob­lem in mak­ing the case against Syr­ia over its al­leged chem­ic­al-weapons use be­cause of the bad in­tel­li­gence on Ir­aq a dec­ade ago. The Brit­ish Par­lia­ment re­minded him of this prob­lem Thursday when it shock­ingly re­jec­ted mil­it­ary ac­tion in a close vote. And in his power­ful in­dict­ment of Syr­i­an dic­tat­or Bashar al-As­sad on Fri­day as a “thug and a mur­der­er,” Sec­ret­ary of State John Kerry said the ad­min­is­tra­tion was “more than mind­ful of the Ir­aq ex­per­i­ence. We will not re­peat that.”

So it was not sur­pris­ing, per­haps, that both in Kerry’s present­a­tion and in the heav­ily re­dac­ted in­tel­li­gence sum­mary re­leased by the ad­min­is­tra­tion ahead of ex­pec­ted air strikes against Syr­ia, U.S. of­fi­cials re­lied greatly on so­cial-me­dia and In­ter­net videos to sup­ple­ment the evid­ence gathered from more-tra­di­tion­al sources.

That was a strik­ing con­trast to the Ir­aq ex­per­i­ence, when it was re­vealed only later that much of the shoddy in­tel­li­gence used to jus­ti­fy that war re­lied on su­per-secret sources such as “Curve­ball,” the code name for an Ir­aqi de­fect­or who falsely claimed that Sad­dam Hus­sein had bio­lo­gic­al weapons.

Fri­day’s in­tel­li­gence sum­mary refers to “mul­tiple streams of in­tel­li­gence,” in­clud­ing satel­lite de­tec­tions, as back­ing up the claim that the Syr­i­an re­gime killed more than 1,400 people, in­clud­ing at least 426 chil­dren, in a chem­ic­al-weapons at­tack on Aug. 21. But as part of that the sum­mary refers in de­tail to “loc­al so­cial-me­dia re­ports” that in­dic­ated the chem­ic­al at­tack began at 2:30 a.m., and “with­in the next four hours there were thou­sands of so­cial-me­dia re­ports on this at­tack from at least 12 dif­fer­ent loc­a­tions in the Dam­as­cus area,” the re­port says. “Mul­tiple ac­counts de­scribed chem­ic­al-filled rock­ets im­pact­ing op­pos­i­tion-con­trolled areas.”

The re­port goes on to say that the U.S. in­tel­li­gence com­munity has “iden­ti­fied one hun­dred videos at­trib­uted to the at­tack, many of which show large num­bers of bod­ies ex­hib­it­ing phys­ic­al signs con­sist­ent with, but not unique to, nerve-agent ex­pos­ure.” It ad­ded that “the Syr­i­an op­pos­i­tion does not have the cap­ab­il­ity to fab­ric­ate all of the videos, phys­ic­al symp­toms veri­fied by med­ic­al per­son­nel and NGOs, and oth­er in­form­a­tion as­so­ci­ated with this chem­ic­al at­tack.”

Kerry, in his state­ment, said that just 90 minutes after the at­tack, “all hell broke loose on so­cial me­dia”¦. It was or­din­ary Syr­i­an cit­izens who re­por­ted all of these hor­rors.”

It re­mains to be seen wheth­er the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s case against As­sad will stand up well in world opin­ion. But taken to­geth­er with the re­mark­able way that, back in April, Bo­ston po­lice and fed­er­al au­thor­it­ies col­lec­ted private video im­ages and called upon the pub­lic to re­lay in­form­a­tion about the Bo­ston Mara­thon sus­pects on cell phones and so­cial me­dia, the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion’s in­tel­li­gence case amounts to a new kind of evid­ence for the age of om­ni­present data col­lec­tion.