As many of you know, Israeli warplanes invaded Syrian airspace on September 6th and and may, or may not, have bombed unknown and unidentified targets near the Syrian/Turkish border. Since then any number of individuals, prominent among them former UN ambassador and neoconconservative darling John Bolton, have alleged that the attacks may have been carried out to destroy “secret facilities” where Syria was working on a “nuclear weapons program” with the assistance of North Korea. No one in the Israeli government is officially acknowledging that the incursion even occurred (although Benjamin Netanyahu has as much as admitted the attack was pre-approved by political allies of Prime Minister Olmert), but one has to wonder why claims are being floated in the media that Syria is suddenly engaged in producing nukes with the connivance/active assistance of North Korea?
After all, Bolton has laid these types of charges at Syria’s doorstep before in 2004, only to have Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA (and the one person who has consistently exposed the Bush administration’s false and exaggerated claims about the former Iraqi and current Iranian nuclear programs) shoot them down as lacking any substance.
“The Syrians told me they would be happy if we go and verify whatever we need to verify,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters on Saturday [i.e., June 2004] during a flight to Moscow for a four-day official visit. “But we haven’t gotten any piece of information on why we should be concerned about Syria.”
Last week [June 2004], diplomats told Reuters that the IAEA considered Damascus a top candidate for being the fourth customer of the nuclear black market that supplied uranium enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
But ElBaradei said no country had provided any hard evidence that would implicate Syria as a customer in the black market set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic weapons programme. “This is something I read in the paper. Nobody came to us with any information (about Syria),” ElBaradei said. The IAEA, along with governments and intelligence agencies, has been investigating the details of Khan’s network so that it can be dismantled. The results of the investigation are classified.
So perhaps that is why Mr. Bolton and others are connecting the Israeli incursion to an alleged secret Syrian nuclear facility. In other words, its a favorite hobby horse of Mr. Bolton, now out of power, and apparently still angry that his desired approach to resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis (military confrontation) was discarded in favor of diplomatic negotiations by Condoleezza Rice and President Bush. He, and other neocons hot to attack Syria as part of their grand scheme to remake the Middle East in their own “fantabulous” image, would like nothing more than to resurrect his spurious speculations that Syria is a clear and present danger to acquire nukes, a program for which his particular nemesis, the North Koreans are responsible.
(cont.)
The latest reports, attributed to “US government sources”, say that Israel, with tacit assistance and support from the US, bombed a facility at which nuclear weapons were being developed with assistance from North Korea.
Both Syria and North Korea have denied that they are cooperating in nuclear technology, and Pyongyang issued a harsh condemnation of the Israeli intrusion into Syrian airspace.
The two countries insist that the accusations have been fabricated by the US for political reasons – mainly targeting North Korea. Hawks, notably former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, are concerned by the peaceful direction in which the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program are going, preferring confrontation.
Joshua Landis, a professor at Oklahoma University who is an expert on Syrian affairs and runs Syriacomment.com, said: “Bolton represents the crowd that is very distressed that the US has declared defeat in North Korea by trusting the North Koreans. They would like to scuttle that agreement.”
A diplomat associated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was quoted saying that the organization didn’t know anything about any nuclear facility in Syria. […]
The North Korea-Syria story started when Andrew Semmel of the US State Department claimed that Syria “might have” obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, adding that “there are North Korean people there [in Syria]. There is no question about that.”
He repeated claims, made as early as 2004, that a network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the now-disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist who is believed to have supplied gas centrifuges and uranium hexaflouride to North Korea, operated from Syria. But there is no evidence whatsoever – otherwise it would have surfaced – of the Khan network operating from Syrian territory. […]
The reports have not gone unchallenged. Joseph Cirincione, author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons and a senior fellow and director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, said, “This story is nonsense.”
As mentioned above, the North Korea story is not new. It started in 2004 when Bolton, then under secretary for arms control, accused Syria of harboring nuclear ambitions. This was part of the stream of accusations against Syria after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
First it was that cronies of Saddam Hussein had fled to Damascus. When they were arrested one after the other within Iraq, the story was changed: Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were hidden in Syria. When that proved false, Bolton came out with his thundering accusation.
This prompted the IAEA to investigate, after which it said there was no evidence to back the claims. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei commented on June 26, 2004, “We haven’t gotten any piece of information on why we should be concerned about Syria.”
David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector to Iraq, says that IAEA found Bolton’s claims on Syria “unsubstantiated”.
So, there has never been any solid evidence of a Syrian nuclear program, whether aided by AQ Khan, Saddam Hussein, North Korea, Iran or anyone else. All we have are the vapid accusations of current and former Bush administration officials and other neoconservative hangerson, and a great deal of useless speculation in the US media, desperate to find another Middle Eastern hotpoint to get excited about, and, of course, a “good story” with which to scare all of us. Chief among the confabulators of this bizarre tale is a bitter and angry man known for his reckless and indifferent relationship with the the truth, John Bolton.
I have no idea why Israeli planes overflew Syrian airspace earlier this month and whether or not they did indeed attack Syrian facilities there. It may have been a strike at a militant camp, or an attack on ballistic missiles shipped to Syria from Iran, as Stratfor.com has speculated. Or it may have been nothing more than a simple reconnaissance mission. But whatever the reason for this incident, I think it reasonable to assume that attacking a secret Syrian nuclear facility was not the focus of their efforts.
By all accounts, that nuclear weapons program exists only in the fevered brains of people like Mr. Bolton, whose credibility and reputation as an honest and accurate truth teller regarding WMD threats is, to but it charitably less than stellar. That our credulous American journalists still give him a platform to spout his nonsensical ravings says all you need to know about the state of the news media in America.
What I do fear is that this is just one more piece of the disinformation campaign by the Bush administration (or the Cheney faction within it) to justify a wider war in the Middle East, involving Iran, Syria and any of their allies, including Hezbollah. Evidence of this can be seen in inflammatory articles in the Israeli press which hype the Syrian nuclear threat based on anonymous sources from British intelligence (and where have we heard that sort of thing before?):
Meanwhile, publications of the Syrian Reform Party, an opposition group representing the oppressed Assyrian minority in Syria, recently reprinted a story originally published in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyasa in December 2006, which quoted European intelligence sources as saying that Syria is conducting “an advanced nuclear program” in Hasakah, a province in northeastern Syria.
The report quoted British sources as having identified Colonel Maher Assad, a relative of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Rami Mahmouf as the two people “supervising” the project.
According to the report in Al-Siyasa, the Syrian nuclear program used Iraqi materials smuggled by Saddam Hussein’s sons prior to the American invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.
Some 60 Iraqi scientists, along with Iranian and former Soviet experts, “are contributing to the Syrian nuclear program,” according to the British sources quoted in the report.
Old lies never die, they just get recycled to justify new aggressions. Something more to worry about the next time you see any of these warmongers making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows or Fox news.