UN report - http://www.un.org/di...Investigation.pdf (41 page .pdf)

UN fact sheet - https://s3.amazonaws..._SG_CW_Report.pdf (1 page .pdf)

The UN didn't make conclusions about which party was responsible.

Your quote:

The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’

would be meaningful if we had a government that was only made up of Obama supporters. We don't. The US government is huge and is made up of people of every possible view.

Remember?

"It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass." - http://www.rollingst...l-20100622?page=2

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.

A fuller quote from Hirsch's piece at LRB:

http://www.lrb.co.uk...hersh/whose-sarin

But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’

IOW, griping from some guy who used to work for one of many US intelligence agencies. It doesn't say he worked at the White House. There's no indication that what he is saying is anything other than what people say when they gripe about their bosses at a bar. Sometimes the griping is justified, sometimes it isn't.

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.