This may or may not be related to why the Wall Street Journal's top editor, Marcus Brauchli, quit yesterday, but it sure looks to be connected. The "this" that I am referring to is the propaganda piece published in the WSJ - now owned by propaganda magnate, R. Murdoch - today on what went down in Syria last year:
"North Korea was helping Syria
build a
plutonium-producing nuclear reactor before Israel bombed the site last
September, the Bush administration is set to tell Congress.
The new information could increase the position
of
hard-liners in Congress and the administration who have argued against
a deal being negotiated to dismantle North Korea's nuclear-weapons
program. The hard-liners say Pyongyang hasn't provided enough
assurances it will dismantle its atomic arsenal in return for economic
and diplomatic incentives.
Neither Israel nor the U.S. has made public
information about the strike in Syria, though speculation has been
widespread that the targeted site was a nascent nuclear reactor. Some
Republicans have charged that the U.S. is playing down the matter to
avoid hurting talks with North Korea.
<snip>
This week, the Central Intelligence Agency is
expected
to begin briefing members of the Senate and House intelligence
committees on the Israeli strike, according to congressional and
administration officials. The briefings will be based in part on
intelligence provided by the Israeli government, they said.
The CIA is expected to say it believes North
Korea was
helping Syria develop a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor similar to
the Yongbyon facility North Korea built north of Pyongyang, said an
official familiar with the deliberations. It also is likely to say
North Korean workers were active at the Syrian site at the time of the
Israeli attack.
It isn't clear what specific evidence the U.S.
officials will present to support their allegations. They are likely to
acknowledge uncertainty about whether the alleged Syrian reactor was
designed solely to produce nuclear power for peaceful purposes or also
to make fissile material for a nuclear weapon, according to the U.S.
official.
Syrian officials have denied that they have
sought to
develop a nuclear capability of any kind and say the Bush
administration is hyping the issue as a means to pursue an aggressive
policy against both Iran and Syria.
"We have seen in the past that this
administration
doesn't require evidence, but will use false pretexts" to pursue its
agenda, said Ahmed Salkini, a spokesman at the Syrian Embassy in
Washington. "We hope the administration doesn't take a miscalculated
step that could cause even more chaos in our region."'
The claims regarding a Syrian nuclear facility are patently false. How do I know? Because I was on the story for months. It is not true that North Korea is helping Syria build a nuclear reactor. What is true, however, is that Syria has a chemical weapons program - that for some reason no one seems much interested in. But I suppose for the Cheney mechanism to move forward, introducing a whole new type of WMD to the mix might confuse the propaganda.
Furthermore, anyone from the CIA who testifies to Congress that Israel bombed a nuclear facility in Syria last year will be all-out lying. Let's go back to my first article on the bombing of Syria by the Israeli military:
"Israel did not strike a nuclear weapons facility in Syria on Sept.
6, instead striking a cache of North Korean missiles, current and
former intelligence officials say.
American intelligence sources familiar with key events leading up to the Israeli air raid tell RAW STORY
that what the Syrians actually had were North Korean No-Dong missiles,
possibly located at a site in either the city of Musalmiya in the
northern part of Syria or further south around the city of Hama.
While reports have alleged the US provided intelligence to Israel or
that Israel shared their intelligence with the US, sources interviewed
for this article believe that neither is accurate.
By most accounts of intelligence officials, both former and current,
Israel and the US both were well aware of the activities of North Korea
and Syria and their attempts to chemically weaponize the No-Dong
missile (above right). It therefore remains unclear why an intricate
story involving evidence of a Syrian nuclear weapons program and/or
enriched uranium was put out to press organizations.
The North Korean missiles -- described as "legacy" by one source and "older generation" by another -- were not nuclear arms."
You want on the record sourcing kids? Here you go, from my same article:
"Vincent Cannistraro, Director of Intelligence Programs for the
National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan and Chief of
Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center
under President George H. W. Bush, said Sunday that what the Israelis
hit was "absolutely not a nuclear weapons facility."
"Syria has a small nuclear research facility and has had it for
several years," Cannistraro said. "It is not capable of enriching
uranium to weapons capability levels. Some Israelis speculated that the
Syrians had succeeded in doing just that, but according to the US
intelligence experts that is simply not true."'
Let's go to another article I did on this:
"Allegations that a Syrian envoy admitted during a United Nations
meeting Oct. 17 that an Israeli air strike hit a nuclear facility in
September are inaccurate and have raised the ire of some in the US
intelligence community, who see the Vice President’s hand as allegedly
being behind the disinformation.
A United Nations press release discussing the General Assembly’s
Disarmament Committee meeting mistranslated comments ascribed to an
unnamed Syrian diplomat as saying that Israel had on various occasions
“taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack
in Syria.”
The UN has since gone through the tape recordings of the meeting and
found that there was no mention of the word “nuclear” at all. According
to the UN, the error was one of translation, involving several interpreters translating the same meeting.
Recent news articles, however, continue to make allegations and
suggest that a nuclear weapons facility was hit -- something that the
Syrian government has denied, the Israeli government has not officially
confirmed and US intelligence does not show.
<snip>
According to current and former intelligence sources, the US
intelligence community has seen no evidence of a nuclear facility being
hit.
US intelligence “found no radiation signatures after the bombing, so
there was no uranium or plutonium present,” said one official, wishing
to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject.
“We don't have any independent intelligence that it was a nuclear
facility -- only the assertions by the Israelis and some ambiguous
satellite photography from them that shows a building, which the
Syrians admitted was a military facility.”
Their statements come as officials claim
Syria has begun to 'disassemble' the site. An article today quotes
former Administration hawk and onetime Bush United Nations Ambassador
John Bolton, who links Syria's alleged action with Iran.
Israel has not spoken publicly about the air raid, other than to
confirm that it happened. The confirmation came nearly a month after
the Sept. 6 bombing, and provided only that “Israeli officials said the strike took place deep inside Syria.”
Want a nuclear arms expert? You got one, from my same article:
'Radiation signatures' are just the particular type of radiation that some activity would give off," Dr. Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear weapons expert at the
Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told RAW STORY.
"For example, a nuclear bomb would produce a lot of radioactivity and a
nuclear reactor explosion would produce a lot of radioactivity but if
you measure it carefully so you can tell, not just that it is
radioactive, but exactly what particular isotopes are contributing,
then it is easy to tell the difference.
"If a reactor explodes or is blown up then I can, with careful
measurements of the particular types of radiation, tell what the fuel
was for the reactor and how long the reactor had been running when it
was hit," Oelrich added. "It gets complicated because you have to take
into account how different species are transported in the air, how fast
they decay, etc. but it can be done."
