Secretary of State John Kerry announced Friday that the Obama administration was releasing an unclassified report on its findings linking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to a chemical weapons attack in Damascus on Aug. 21, urging the public to look at the evidence for themselves.
“I’m not asking you to take my word for it,” Kerry said. “Read for yourself, everyone, all of you read for yourselves the evidence from thousands of sources — evidence that is already publicly available. Read for yourselves the verdict reached by our intelligence community about the chemical weapons attack the Assad regime inflicted.”
“So the primary question is really no longer what do we know,” Kerry added. “The question is what are we, collectively, what are we in the world going to do about it?”
More than 1,400 people were killed in the devastating attack earlier this month, which was extensively documented on YouTube, including 426 children, the report says.
Kerry also reassured Americans that a possible military intervention in Syria would not repeat the mistakes of the Iraqi invasion.
“More than mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment,” he said at the State Department.
