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out even realizing it. Others shared the results of their searches with people who weren't authorized to see them.
• It took nearly three years before the government figured out that so much had gone wrong. It took even longer to figure out why.
• Newly declassified documents released Tuesday tell a story of a surveillance apparatus so unwieldy and complex that nobody fully comprehended it, even as the government pointed it at the American people in the name of protecting them.
• ___
Obama buys time, makes his Syria pitch without looming failure -- and it shows
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- On this night, President Barack Obama looked like a man who had escaped imminent defeat.
• The Obama who made the case for military action in Syria on Tuesday night appeared more confident, more assured, perhaps even more relieved than the president who confronted the press corps twice during last week's trip to Stockholm, Sweden, and St. Petersburg, Russia. Then Obama was defensive, arguing that the world, not he, had set a red line against Syria's use of nuclear weapons and maintaining it was not his credibility that was at stake if the U.S. did not respond to the breach of that red line.
• Last week, when he scheduled Tuesday's national address, few aides believed it would be the pivotal moment they needed to change public opinion and prompt Congress to grant him authority to use military force against Syria. Americans were weary of war and suspicious of any reason to take up arms once again in a faraway land.
• On Tuesday, Obama still made a case for striking at the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, invoking the image of hundreds gassed by chemical weapons on Aug. 21 in the outskirts of Damascus and the anguish of a father "clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk." Obama still laid the blame on Assad, making the case he has been making for two weeks that the regime was responsible for launching sarin gas that killed more than 1,400, including more than 400 children.
• Assad has blamed the attack on opposition forces and struck a confrontational pose against the United States.
• ___
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