Israel's Airstrike in Syria

When I was in Savannah, I saw on a press conference on Fox News where the Syrian Ambassador was denying US reports that on September 6, 2007, Israel had bombed a Syrian facility designed with the help of North Korea to produce nuclear weapons. I hadn’t heard this story since it broke after I went on the trip down south and I found it alarming for about four different reasons.

When the ambassador opened up the floor for questions, Fox News cut off coverage and Trace Gallagher restated what had just been said in the most patronizing, sarcastic way possible. I wish I had the video clip for the coverage because it was ridiculously awful. Okay, so Fox News is biased. Everyone knows that but the smarmy editorializing that Gallagher did bordered on parody. If Saturday Night Live had imitated a Fox News anchor saying what Gallagher said in the way that he said it, I would’ve said it was a little over the top but in this case…it would’ve been accurate. This is another reason why I can’t bear to watch Fox News for more than about five minutes at a time.

I flipped to CNN, Headline News, MSNBC and CNBC but most outlets were covering a shark attack and none were covering the press conference or talking about the story. Throughout my trip, I tried to learn more about this story but I never saw any more coverage on any of the all-news channels. I heard a lot more about the shark attack and Headline News, every 15 minutes was covering a swinger’s club in a neighborhood but no mention that Country A claimed that Country B was bombed by Country C while Country B was denying the facts of the bombing. To me, this was a fascinating story.

So as soon as I got home, I started reading everything I could and found that the best coverage was outside of the US since our own media is too busy talking about (insert one of the many examples of frivolous news coverage the media engages in on an hourly basis).

I found a report in The Specator that came out a month after the September airstrike that gives an interesting view of what the reporting was like at the time, although most of the media was looking somewhere else. The details in this report is startling. I vaguely remember the airstrike but I don’t remember that it was supposed to have been a nuclear reactor that was hit. Syria staying mum on it helped mute the story. Which makes you wonder why they didn’t protest loudly at something that is a violation international law.

For months, the US wouldn’t comment on the September strike, refusing even to confirm that it took place. Then on Thursday, the CIA held a series of briefings with Congress where they presented the following video:



After the briefings, the White House released a statement accusing Syria of operating a nuclear reactor for non-peaceful purposes and charging that North Korea assisted Syria in their nuclear program. Previously classified photos and videos were released for public viewing. The photos were apparently obtained by US spies who took a handheld camera into the facility.

Originally, Syria claimed the bombs fell on empty farmland and did no damage but now they are acknowledging that a building was destroyed, though when the International Atomic Energy Agency asked to inspect the site, Syria refused to grant permission. Syrian ambassador to the US, Imad Moustapha has pledged full cooperation with the IAEA while denying Syria has any nuclear program, not one for weapons or energy purposes.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the newspaper Al-Watan, that September’s airstrike “hit a military site under construction, not a nuclear site as Israel and America claimed… Does it make sense that we would build a nuclear facility in the desert and not protect it with anti-aircraft defenses?” He said, “Why did they raid it, we do not know what data they had, but they know and they see through satellites; they have raided an incomplete site that did not have any personnel or anything. It was empty.”

Assad maintains that there is no reason Syria would need a nuclear weapon because it wouldn’t fit their strategic goals within the region. Syrian officials claim they have nothing to hide from the world community and notes they signed onto the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty. Currently, no Arab nation has nuclear capability.

Moustapha also questioned the legitimacy of the pictures the US government has released, “They were showing me photos from inside a building somewhere in the world.” And even if they were real, he felt there wasn’t any proof that it was a nuclear reactor. “I had to remind them that it is on one hand preposterous. And on the other hand there is something silly about this. Not a single security guard. No barbed wire. It's just photographs of vacant buildings.” He referred to this situation as “Iraq déjà vu.”

Obviously, after the intelligence failures in Iraq, it’s easy to be skeptical of these new charges. That’s part of the reason some believe the US hasn’t pressed too hard on the issue of Iran providing IEDs to Shiite militia groups in Iraq.

A congressional aide speaking on the condition of anonymity said Friday that the “general consensus” in Congress following the briefing was that the presentation was “legitimate.”

Any reports from American intelligence are going to naturally be viewed with a certain amount of skepticism. According to Moustapha, “This administration has a proven record of falsifying and fabricating stories about WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). They have done this before. The difference is, the hope that this time the representatives of the American people and the American people themselves will be more careful in believing any such absurd, preposterous stories as the one we heard (on Thursday).” He predicted that the story will “implode from within” and “will be a major embarrassment to the U.S. administration for a second time -- they lied about Iraqi WMDs and they think they can do it again.”

The Washington Post’s Dan Foomkin also wrote a column pointing out the questionable track record of the Bush administration’s intelligence reports. He suggests that Israel was using their version of the Bush Doctrine of preemption and that the US tacitly approved of the action since, according to a senior intelligence officer within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Israel faced an “existential threat.”

Anthony Cordesman at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies said, “Once again, the US intelligence community has created an unnecessary mess by rushing out a half-complete product, and failing to put the information in releases in proper context.”

Which does raise the question: Why remain silent after the strike and why release this information now?

A senior administration official claimed that they withheld this information to keep Syria from retaliating against Israel, leading to a region-wide conflict. Though other experts believe the silence might’ve been to guarantee Syria’s cooperation in the Annapolis peace talks that were being planned at that time.

The explanation of trying to keep Syria engaged in the peace summit makes sense but why release the pictures now? Couldn’t that provoke Syria to retaliate now?

President Assad was asked if Syria would respond and he answered, “Retaliation does not mean a missile for a missile, a bomb for a bomb or a bullet for a bullet…They (Israel) understand what we mean. We do not say that we will retaliate, i.e. we will bomb. You have to ask a different question; had Syria not been harming Israeli policy would Israel have carried out an operation of this sort? The truth is that we have the means to respond, but in our own way. We understand Israel wants to provoke Syria and possibly to drag Syria into war while we do not seek war. We have been clear about this point. We have other means and we do not necessarily have to declare them.”

The second reason the release might have occurred now is because, according to a senior administration official, Bush cleared the release of the information to get North Korea to come clean with their nuclear involvement and encourage other countries to agree to support sanctions against Iran.

This seems somewhat strained to me. The US delegation just met with North Korea earlier in the week and to release this information seems more inflammatory than anything else, which leads to explanation number three.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposed releasing the information while Vice President Dick Cheney supported it, according to several rumors, to derail the six party talks (the nations included being the United States, North Korea, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan). One senior official said, “Making public the pictures is likely to inflame the North Koreans. And that’s just what opponents of this whole arrangement want, because they think the North Koreans will stalk off.

Could this release of information really be tied to an intra-administration dispute? A senior official in the State Department told ABC News that the release of this information “just made a difficult job impossible” regarding negotiations with North Korea.

The efforts by chief negotiator Christopher Hill, have been viewed as counter to the Bush strategy of toppling governments like North Korea’s rather than negotiating with them to find common ground. According to several former officials, Bush told aides time and again not agree to anything with North Korea that “makes me look weak.”

Hill’s negotiations also haven’t led to North Korea being more open. Under the previous agreement, they were required to reveal all information regarding potential nuclear proliferation but missed the December 31st deadline.

Which leads to the final possible reason this information was released when it was. There’s a suggestion that the US is revealing this information to get in on the table and move ahead with the six-party talks. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Jon Wolfsthal, “This could actually be an attempt by the Bush administration to throw out the garbage because this is an issue that they don't think can be resolved easily, that they don't think is as important as other issues.”

Sami al-Khiyami, Syria's ambassador to Britain, seems to view it that way as well. “They just want to exert more pressure on North Korea. This is why they are coming up with this story. This is political manipulation ahead of the talks with North Korea to exert more pressure on them.”

Whatever led to this release, the IAEA is angry they weren’t alerted before the strike was carried out. The head of the agency, Mohamed El Baradei released a tersely written statement saying, “Under the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty), the agency has a responsibility to verify any proliferation allegations in a non-nuclear weapon state party to the NPT… light of the above, the director general views the unilateral military action by Israel as undermining the due process of verification that is at the heart of the non-proliferation regime.”

How long has the United States known about this possible reactor?

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the CIA received intelligence on the existence of this reactor in the summer of 2001 after spotting an unexplained building from a spy satellite. The investigation of AQ Khan, who was revealed as a major figure in nuclear proliferation in 2004, provided additional information about a possible Syrian nuclear program.

It wasn’t totally clear that it was a reactor or what the reactor was being used for. “U.S. intelligence had "high confidence" that the structure bombed by the Israelis was a nuclear reactor, "medium confidence" that the North Koreans were involved in building it, and "low confidence" that plutonium from it was for nuclear weapons.”

Alalam, an Iranian news website quotes an unnamed IAEA official who said, “When you look at the pictures, they show only raw construction. It was just the shell of a site, and the walls did not look like the ones needed for a plutonium reactor…[which would] need a lot of piping, there was nothing like that on the pictures.”

President of the Institute for Science and International Security, David Albright complained that the CIA didn’t explain how the plant was fueled, which “raises questions about when the reactor could have operated, despite evidence that it was nearing completion at the time of the attack.” He also noted that the lack of a processing plant “gives little confidence that the reactor was part of an active nuclear weapons program.”

Albright does believe that the facility was a reactor saying that when he analyzed commercial satellite photography of the site, he believed that it was a nuclear reactor but says, “It's not clear-cut it was ready to turn on.” He also thinks it’s too early to rule out possible a peaceful purpose for the reactor. “Civilian uses are possible and cannot be dismissed out of hand. I think the CIA and the White House have not shown that the only possibility for this reactor is that it was to make plutonium for nuclear weapons.”

Siegfried Hecker, the co-director for Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, believes that the site wasn’t well suited for energy purposes and was likely designed to produce plutonium. “[The site] was the best path to bomb-grade plutonium. That was most likely the primary purpose of this facility.”

According to The New York Times, “two senior intelligence officials acknowledged that the evidence had left them with no more than “low confidence” that Syria was preparing to build a nuclear weapon. They said that there was no sign that Syria had built an operation to convert the spent fuel from the plant into weapons-grade plutonium, but that they had told President Bush last year that they could think of no other explanation for the reactor.”

Israel decided that it could no longer afford to wait and made the call to take the reactor out in a move similar to their action in 1981 when they bombed the nuclear reactor that was being built in Iraq, though the Syrian facility was reportedly less advanced than the one in Osirak, 18 miles south of Baghdad.

Syria has accused the US government of encouraging and participating in the attack. They believe the release of this information is part of a cover-up for US involvement in the strike. “This campaign launched by the US administration is aimed primarily at misguiding the US Congress and international public opinion... in order to justify the Israeli raid on Syria in September last year, which this administration apparently was involved in executing,” an unnamed Syrian government official said.

Senior officials within the US government said that the US military did not have any involvement in the attack and that while the US was notified in advance, they did not issue an approval. One administration official said that the strike occurred “without a green light from us…None was asked for, none was given.” According to Haaretz, the Bush administration, namely Secretary Rice, tried to convince Israel not to launch an airstrike on the possible reactor.

Again, the article in The Specator goes into great detail of the assault itself, which leveled the entire location.

According to Al Jazeera, the site that was destroyed has been rebuilt with a larger building in its place, though it doesn’t say what is there now. The BBC has pictures on their website of the location before the assault, afterwards and another that shows the new building that’s been constructed.

What is North Korea’s role in this situation?

If you can make the leap that this is a nuclear reactor, the connection to North Korea is a slight bit more tenuous. Though it should be noted that while there’s definitely a credibility gap for the Bush administration, previous assessments about North Korea have proven correct.

One undated picture showed the head of the Syrian nuclear commission next to a car with a Syrian license plate standing with the head of North Korea's Yongbyon reactor, the facility that the Syrian reactor supposedly resembled. Yongbyon is a 35 year old nuclear reactor in North Korea, which is no longer active but has yet to be dismantled.

North Korea hasn’t commented on whether they have assisted Syria in a nuclear program, only releasing a statement saying that the April 22-24 meeting with US delegation “was constructive and led to significant progress.” The State Department is refusing to discuss private conversations on the matter, instead saying that Pyongyang can respond publically if they choose. When asked what motivation North Korea would have to work with Syria and a senior intelligence official replied, “Cash.”

As mentioned earlier, there’s been impatience growing with Christopher Hill and the State Department’s negotiation efforts and Congress has threatened to pull funding for the US delegation.

The release of this information didn’t help relations between Congress and the President, which have been strained for a while.

Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, expressed frustration at being kept out of the loop on this issue for so long and said, “I think many people believe that we were used today by the administration because - not because they felt they had to inform Congress because it was their legal obligation to do that, but because they had other agendas in mind… Remember, it is the legal responsibility of the administration to keep Congress fully and currently informed on the issues that the administration is dealing with. I think we have a question as to whether the administration actually moved forward in that direction.”

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino responded to Rep. Hoekstra’s complaint, “Obviously we would be very disappointed that he feels that way...and hope he understands our tremendous respect for members of Congress.” She did note that “in the fall, we briefed 22 members of Congress, consistent with our obligations. He was one of them. There are tensions that exist between the executive branches and the legislative branches on a range of issues in regards to who should know what when.” Basically, she chalked it up to the inherent differences between the branches of government.

The Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) echoed the complaints of Rep. Hoekstra, “The challenge we're having particularly with [the] administration today is that there is a veil of secrecy that gets in the way of our committee feeling comfortable that we're getting the kind of information that we're supposed to have to carry out our oversight responsibilities.”

What’s next for Israel?

Defense Minister Ehud Barak was supposed to come to the US on Sunday, April 27th to meet with Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates but the trip was postponed according to Haaretz following the CIA’s recent briefing about the September airstrike. The paper believes the visit was delayed because it might give the appearance of impropriety. The visit hasn’t been rescheduled.

Israel and Syria had been engaged in peace negotiations recently and it’s unclear what effect this information being released will have on those talks. President Assad said that he would be interested in peace talks with Israel but that any talks would have to come after President Bush leaves office. He said that the current administration “does not have the vision or will for the peace process.”

ABC News reported this past week that Israel might be willing to return Golan Heights to Syria as part of a peace agreement. When asked about the report, Israeli officials refused to confirm or deny the story but there have been back channel communications going on between Assad and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Golan Heights was seized as part of the Six Day War in 1967. Syria tried to retake it by force in 1973 but failed and a ceasefire was negotiated the following year. It’s a strategic military area for Israel and has been mentioned as a mandatory starting point for any negotiations between the two countries.

Reportedly, Olmert gave the message to Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who then passed it onto Assad by phone, according to Buthaina Shaaban, a Syrian cabinet minister.

Former Prime Minister and current opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu objected, saying, “the Golan Heights must remain in our hands at times of peace as well, otherwise Iran will get there… I find it very surprising that the prime minister is ready to cede all of the Golan Heights before the negotiations have even begun. He is acting recklessly and like an amateur. This is not the way to attain peace.” Though it should be noted that Netanyahu, during his time in office, had signaled he was willing to give back the land as part of negotiations with Syria.

I look forward to seeing how the Bush administration’s decision to release the information will effect Israel’s peace negotiations with Syria, the six-party talks with North Korea and the United States’ attempts to get the world to rally behind additional sanctions for Iran.

Whether or not the American media decides to appropriately cover those consequences will also be interesting. I’m guessing if (insert young Hollywood celebrity here) shows up to a party without underwear, we might be forced to check out foreign coverage for the results of this administration’s actions.

Jimmy Carter: Bigot?

Israel’s UN ambassador apparently doesn’t have warm and fuzzy feelings about former President Jimmy Carter. Carter, according to Ambassador Dan Gillerman, “went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas.”

This statement is a slander against both men’s hygiene habits. Carter, according to Gillerman, doesn’t wash his hands and Mashaal doesn’t wash his and now they both are sharing the germs they didn’t wash off originally.

Gillerman also called Carter “a bigot.” Carter was unavailable to be reached for comment so we’ll never know whether he understands he was called “a bigot” as opposed to a spigot, something I would imagine he’s used to being called.

Important Headlines

Last week, US contracted ships fired warning shots at boats off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf. Just another thing to keep an eye on.

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) said she will be the best quarterback for America. Mel Kiper was unable to be reached for comment

There’s a Dutch bill out there that will ban magic mushrooms. Opposition to the bill is led by Mario and Luigi, two Italian plumbers who say such an effort will make it much more difficult to save the princess.

Florida lawmakers consider bill banning ornamental testicles. Uh, I don’t know what to add to that. I…I just don’t.

Law enforcement officials in Congo have arrested 13 who are accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises. Again, I don’t really know what to add to that.

What I'm Listening to on My Mp3 Player

Bob Dylan's 'Nettie Moore' off his "Modern Times" album. The album isn't as good as his last two, but it has a couple of his best songs ever, I'm thinking of 'Working Man's Blues #2.' Like the album before, 'Love and Theft,' a controversy emerged about the writing of the songs, namely that Dylan stole some of his lyrics from people who wrote lines that were very similar to those that appear in the songs. 'Nettie Moore' was one of those songs off the newest disc, though not as blatant as 'Working Man Blues,' which is actually kind of embarrassing how similar it is to the poet Ovid. Ovid also gets 'borrowed' from on other songs on the CD as well. If I were Ovid, I'd feel honored but he died in 17AD and CDs hadn't been invented yet.

What I Watched on Television Today

I watched the Braves lose to the Mets 6-3. I'll write something about that series and when I do, it'll be posted at http://www.sportingnews.com/blog/djwright.

Random Thoughts

I was sitting on my couch and I thought of Mr. T and I thought I remembered seeing that he was going to be in an upcoming TV show or in a movie but I knew that it might’ve been a dream, so I went to the computer, checked Internet Movie Database. Turns out he has nothing going right now. It’s sad. Mr. T’s receiving more work in my dreams than in real life

Somewhere, right now, someone is listening to 97.1 The River. My guess is an Eagles’ song is playing.

I did three sit-ups and then looked in the mirror this morning and I was happy with what I saw…until I realized I was actually looking at the television and watching The Smurfs.