Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said today that the United States doesn’t need permission from the United Nations or any other international body to strike Syria for the use of chemical weapons against civilians.
“No nation, no group of nations is bound by only one dimension of whether they’d make a decision to respond to any self-defense or any other violation of the kind of humanitarian violations that we saw in Syria,” Hagel told the BBC.
The secretary also said that he thought it was “pretty clear that chemical weapons were used against people in Syria,” and he believes that “the intelligence will conclude that it wasn’t the rebels who used it, and there’ll probably be pretty good intelligence to show that the Syria [sic] government was responsible.”
Earlier today, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that President Obama had not decided on a response to the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons. Carney said the president will make an announcement once a decision on a course of action has been made.