What Did Israel Really Attack in Syria?
Tight military censorship prevents clear answers, but the press hints at a North Korean nuclear connection, says PJM Tel Aviv editor Allison Kaplan Sommer.
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By Allison Kaplan Sommer
It is clearly difficult to be an Israeli journalist with good military sources this week. You can palpably feel the frustration on the page as you read news articles and sense that the writers know so much more than they are telling.
Whether or not reporters know the precise details of what happened in Syria on September 7, when Israeli planes attacked a mysterious target near the Syrian-Turkish border - the extremely tight censorship rules forbid them to report any of it - and Israeli officials are publicly, and uncharacteristically - silent.
So the Israeli press clenches their teeth and carefully does what they are permitted to do - repeat the reports that are emerging from overseas media and add their commentary as best they can. Meanwhile the public has had no way of knowing for certain whether the raid was “merely” an attempt to stem the flow of weapons from Syria to Hezbollah - or something of historic significance, a meaningful blow against an Axis of Evil.
Rocking the Israeli media this morning was the story published in the British Sunday Times on the attack citing “intelligence sources” as saying the attack was “a highly successful Israeli raid on nuclear material supplied by North Korea.”
An accompanying background article discussed the ongoing military cooperation between North Korea and Syria in the dangerous realms of nuclear and chemical weapon development.
The Times reported that:
According to Israeli sources, preparations for the attack had been going on since late spring, when Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, presented Olmert with evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea.
The Israeli spy chief apparently feared such a device could eventually be installed on North-Korean-made Scud-C missiles.
“This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel,” said an Israeli source. “We’ve known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds, but Israel can’t live with a nuclear warhead.”
The Times report came on the heels of another much-cited story published Saturday in the Washington Post, which stated:
A prominent U.S. expert on the Middle East, who has interviewed Israeli participants in a mysterious raid over Syria last week, reported that the attack appears to have been linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.
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7 Comments
fulldroolcup:If a nuclear target with weapons-grade plutonium or uranium was destroyed, one would expect high levels of radioactivity scattered around the site. This should be detectable via drones or even satellite. Additionally one would expect photo recon to show guys in hazmat suits decontaminating the area and creating a No-Go perimeter around it. OTOH the Israelis might have pre-emptively taken out the launch site before the arrival of warheads, sending a sharp message to Assad that their intelligence can find anything — including him.
Sep 16, 2007 - 9:21 am Rick Skeean:Prior to detonation, the material in a nuclear bomb is not highly radioactive. Radiation from such is indeed detectable, but probably only at close range, certainly not by satellite.
Sep 16, 2007 - 11:12 am Tomer:You are ignoring the problem/ bombing here or there will not solve the main problem which is Iran. Iran is the source of instability and to create prospects for peace in the middle east– the source must be taken cared of in various ways - military and non-military
for further reading
“Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas and the Global Jihad:
A New Conflict Paradigm for the West ”
in
http://jcpa.org/
Sep 16, 2007 - 11:52 am Another:I wonder how those nuclear warheads accidentally mounted to a B-52 last month fit into the picture?
Sep 16, 2007 - 3:09 pm Don:The fact the Israel attacked Syria and this event has for the most part not hit the front page tells me Syria does not want to admit what was there.
Sep 17, 2007 - 5:18 am Yo!:Cement. On a ship. All the way from North Korea. To Syria. Of course! ‘Cuz there’s no sand/stone and water in Syria.
Sep 17, 2007 - 4:36 pm Charles Martel:You think they’ll believe we’re shipping cement across the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea & Suez, no, strike that, Israelis wouldn’t like that, let’s ship around the horn of Africa, all the way up the coast, through Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean, to Syria? Why sure, of course they’ll believe it.
Bloody expensive too, having cement shipped all that way, and the *&%(&^% Zionist Entity goes and ruins that precious delivery on us.
Sure, Bashad, they’ll believe it — go ahead and call it cement.
Syria reported an accident with a missile. Nice cover story.
Sep 19, 2007 - 6:15 pm