Saed Bannoura, IMEMC & Agencies, Jan. 30, 2009
Israeli online daily Haaretz reported on Friday morning that Israel has decided to carry out what has been described as pinpoint attacks against Hamas and other factions in the Gaza Strip in retaliation to an attack carried out against Israeli soldiers at the Kissufim crossing on Tuesday.
One officer was killed and three soldiers were wounded in the attack, which came in response to Israeli military strikes in Gaza, carried out after the unilateral ceasefire was declared by Israel on January 17th.
Haaretz stated that Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, held a meeting on Thursday night with Israel Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, and Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, where they agreed upon “limited attacks” in the Gaza Strip.
The convening leaders also decided to carry out further offensives at the “right time”, based on what Haaretz refers to as practical considerations and facts on the ground.
Haaretz furthered that intelligence reports received by Barak and Livni reveal that Hamas is interested in the continuation of a truce with Israel, and is even trying to stop other factions, described as ‘more radical’, from carrying out any attacks against Israel.
A senior Israeli security official said that Hamas is delaying its retaliation to recent Israeli strikes, because of Hamas' interest in the continuation of the current ceasefire.
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Israel plans more pinpoint strikes against Hamas in Gaza
By Haaretz Staff Haaretz.com Jan. 30 2009
Decision-makers in Jerusalem said Israel would continue to launch pinpoint strikes against Hamas and other Palestinian militant organizations in the Gaza Strip, Haaretz has learned.
Israeli aircraft on Thursday wounded 10 Palestinians in the attempted killing of a Hamas operative in southern Gaza. Palestinian militants launched two Qassam rockets and one mortar round into Israel, resulting in no casualties or damage.
Hezbollah, meanwhile, has vowed to strike Israeli targets, and Cypriot authorities Wednesday detained an Iranian arms ship that Israel believes may have been en route to Hezbollah. The decision to carry out further pinpoint strikes against Hamas emerged after consultations between the security cabinet and top Israeli defense officials. The hostilities were necessary to let Hamas know that strikes against Israel would not go unanswered, one source said.
During the deliberations, intelligence officers said Hamas was trying to contain its radical elements because it was interested in cementing a cease-fire agreement. This, the intelligence officers said, was why the organization is delaying its response to recent strikes by the Israel Defense Forces.
The first IDF strike against Hamas after Operation Cast Lead came on Tuesday, after the death of one Israeli soldier in an explosion near the border with Gaza. Since then, the Israel Air Force carried out several retaliatory raids.
The latest, which wounded 10 Palestinians, was aimed at Mohammed Samiri, whom the IDF believes was involved in planning and carrying out the attack on the IDF patrol on Tuesday. According to reports from the Strip, Samiri was riding a motorcycle in Khan Yunis when a missile exploded near him, wounding him and several others.
Another IAF raid took out what the army believed to be a weapons production shop in Rafah.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Hamas' prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said reconciliation was Hamas' "main aim."
"I think it is not in America's interest to stay in conflict with the Arab and Muslim worlds, considering its interests in the region," he said. "We hope that the new American president revises all the policies of his predecessor."
Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, also spoke to the media yesterday, saying the organization had "an open score" with Israel." These statements, according to defense sources, sit well with Hezbollah's reported intention of carrying out a major attack as the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh approaches.
Mughniyeh, the organization's number two, died in a car blast in Damascus on February 14 a year ago. Hezbollah officials say they hold Israel responsible.
Although Hezbollah was mentioned as a likely recipient of the arms on board the Iranian ship the Cypriot customs services detained yesterday, Israeli sources said the cargo may have been meant for Hamas. The Cypriot customs service began unloading some of the cargo Wednesday, a diplomat from the European Union told Haaretz.
The move apparently came after Israel and the United States requested that Cyprus stop the ship, which was carrying a large amount of weapons, including artillery rounds and rockets.
The vessel left the Persian Gulf a few weeks ago and reached about 60 miles from Cyprus' port city of Limassol on Wednesday.
Since the ship was flying Cyprus' flag, the Cypriot authorities were the only ones authorized to confiscate its cargo.
According to the diplomat, Cypriot customs officials had contacted the Iranian boat and demanded that it sail to Limassol for inspection.
The U.S. Navy had earlier detained the ship in the Red Sea, but was forced to release it Tuesday when it became apparent that there was no legal basis for holding it. Cyprus' embassy in Tel Aviv declined to comment on the matter.
Amos Harel, Avi Issacharoff, Anshel Pfeffer, Yoav Stern and Barak Ravid contributed to this article.
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Saturday, January 31, 2009
Stop Israel's Attacks on Gaza & Open The Border Crossings
Rally & March
12 Noon
in front of Starbucks
7th St & Pecan Ave
Charlotte NC
Join us to call for an end to Israel's repeated viWe will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.olations of the ceasefire & an end to the criminal blockade that is preventing desperately needed humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza.
Boycott Starbucks and all businesses that support Israeli Apartheid!
We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.
*******************
We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.vWe will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.vvvvWe will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.vvvvvvvvvvWe will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.vvvvvvvvWe will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.vvvvvvvWe will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.vWe will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.We will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.vWe will also condemn the U.S. air strikes that took place over the weekend that killed civilians in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
For more info:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Sponsored by Charlotte Free Palestine Movement; Al-Awda, Palestine Right To Return Coalition; Muslim American Society-Freedom, Charlotte; Islamic Political Party Of America; Action Center For Justice; Students For A Democratic Society-UNCC; Jibril Hough, Spokesperson, Islamic Center Of Charlotte (listed for id purposes); & others.vvvvvvSat., Jan. 31: Forum & Film on Gaza, Palestine
5:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Mas Community Center
4301 Shamrock Dr, Charlotte NC
Some of our families in Charlotte from GAZA were directly affected by the current events by loss of immediate relatives and property. You are invited to spend an evening of solidarity & support this Saturday the 31st of Jan at MAS Community Center 4301 Shamrock Dr. at 5:00PM. We need to support our brothers/sisters in Palestine.
Program will include a documentary session on the Palestinian crisis and a parallel children program.
Potluck dishes are encouraged.
5:00pm - 6:00pm Documentary about the Palestinian crises
6:00pm - 6:30pm Question/Answer about Palesine (rewards for the youth)
6:30pm - 7:00pm A Palestinian brother/sister sharing their experience about the Palestinian crises
7:00pm Dinner
5:00pm - 7:00pm children's program ages from 3-10
Info: Hala Zaghari at 704-293-2243
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More events posted on our website:
Charlotte Free Palestine Movement
http://charlotte4palestine.ning.com
704.492.5226
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Top U.S. Officials Ordered Terrorist Strikes In Somalia, Syria, Pakistan & "Other Countries"
Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda
ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times, Nov. 9, 2008
These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.
In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.
Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.
But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.
More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.
Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.
According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.
It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a former senior military official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”
The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.
Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.
The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported.
For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
At the time, American officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy.
Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’ results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed.
But even with the new authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said.
The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, was aborted at the last minute.
Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command hastily put together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky.
Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some in the C.I.A. even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to authorize the mission.
Former military and intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, had pressed for years to win approval for commando missions into Pakistan. But the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington determined that the risks to American troops and the alliance with Pakistan were too great.
Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for General McChrystal, who is now director of the military’s Joint Staff, declined to comment.
The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.
Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.
The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.
Negotiations to hammer out the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. and the State Department about the military’s proper role around the world, several administration officials said.
American officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization.
Senior officials of the State Department and the C.I.A. voiced fears that military commandos would encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the C.I.A. had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador’s knowledge or approval.
Mr. Rumsfeld had pushed in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in countries where American commandos had not operated before.
Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.
Several officials said the negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination among the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A., and set a very high standard for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack.
The 2004 order also provided a foundation for the orders that Mr. Bush approved in July allowing the military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20 militants, American officials said.
Administration officials said that Mr. Bush’s approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to sign an order — separate from the 2004 order — that specifically directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the C.I.A., on the Qaeda network and other militant groups linked to it in Pakistan.
Unlike the 2004 order, in which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach, directing the military to work with the C.I.A. to find targets in the tribal areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to be approved by the group of Mr. Bush’s top national security and foreign policy advisers, called the Principals Committee.
ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times, Nov. 9, 2008
The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.WASHINGTON — The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.
These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.
In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.
Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.
But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.
More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.
Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.
According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.
It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a former senior military official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”
The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.
Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.
The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported.
For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
At the time, American officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy.
Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’ results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed.
But even with the new authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said.
The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, was aborted at the last minute.
Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command hastily put together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky.
Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some in the C.I.A. even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to authorize the mission.
Former military and intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, had pressed for years to win approval for commando missions into Pakistan. But the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington determined that the risks to American troops and the alliance with Pakistan were too great.
Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for General McChrystal, who is now director of the military’s Joint Staff, declined to comment.
The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.
Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.
The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.
Negotiations to hammer out the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. and the State Department about the military’s proper role around the world, several administration officials said.
American officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization.
Senior officials of the State Department and the C.I.A. voiced fears that military commandos would encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the C.I.A. had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador’s knowledge or approval.
Mr. Rumsfeld had pushed in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in countries where American commandos had not operated before.
Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.
Several officials said the negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination among the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A., and set a very high standard for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack.
The 2004 order also provided a foundation for the orders that Mr. Bush approved in July allowing the military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20 militants, American officials said.
Administration officials said that Mr. Bush’s approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to sign an order — separate from the 2004 order — that specifically directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the C.I.A., on the Qaeda network and other militant groups linked to it in Pakistan.
Unlike the 2004 order, in which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach, directing the military to work with the C.I.A. to find targets in the tribal areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to be approved by the group of Mr. Bush’s top national security and foreign policy advisers, called the Principals Committee.
Hezbollah gunmen seize control of Beirut neighborhoods
BASSEM MROUE, AP, May 9, 2008
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Shiite Hezbollah gunmen seized nearly all of the Lebanese capital's Muslim sector from Sunni foes loyal to the U.S.-backed government on Friday in the country's worst sectarian clashes since the 15-year civil war.
At least 11 people have been killed and more than 20 wounded in three days of street battles in West Beirut between the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah fighters and gunmen to the government, security officials said.
The satellite TV station affiliated with the party of Lebanon's top Sunni lawmaker, Saad Hariri, was forced off the air. Gunmen set the offices of the party's newspaper, Al-Mustaqbal, on fire in the coastal neighborhood of Ramlet el-Bayda.
Hariri and Druse leader Walid Jumblatt were besieged in their West Beirut residences. Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and several ministers holed up in Saniora's downtown office surrounded by troops and police.
Gunmen loyal to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party set ablaze a two-story building where Hariri's Future TV has its archives in the western neighborhood of Rawche, about 100 yards from the Saudi embassy. The secular pro-Syrian group, a longtime ally of Hezbollah, has dozens of its own gunmen in the streets.
A rocket-propelled grenade hit the fence of Hariri's heavily protected residence, security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the media.
Pro-government majority officials held an emergency meeting in a mountain town in the Christian heartland northeast of Beirut, according to LBC TV, a pro-government Christian station.
"Even if Hezbollah's militia took everything we remain the constitutional authority," Cabinet Minister Ahmed Fatfat told Al-Arabiya TV from Saniora's compound.
The unrest shut down Lebanon's international airport and barricades set up by both side closed major highways. The seaport also was closed, leaving one land route to Syria as Lebanon's only link to the outside world.
Arab foreign ministers called an emergency meeting for Sunday in Cairo, Egypt to discuss the crisis, Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said.
About 100 Shiite Hezbollah militants wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying assault rifles marched down Hamra Street, a normally vibrant commercial strip in a mainly Sunni area of Beirut. They took up positions in corners and sidewalks and stopped the few cars braving the empty streets to search their trunks.
On nearby streets, dozens of fighters from another Hezbollah-allied party appeared, some wearing masks and carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Lebanon's army, which has stayed out of the sectarian political squabbling that has paralyzed the country for more than a year, did not intervene in the clashes, which had largely tapered off into sporadic gunfire by early afternoon.
Troops then began taking up positions in some Sunni neighborhoods abandoned by the pro-government groups. A senior security official said the army would soon take over the Sunnis' last stronghold of Tarik Jadideh.
In some cases Hezbollah handed over newly won positions to Lebanese troops.
The sectarian tensions are fueled in part by the rivalry between predominantly Shiite Iran which sponsors Hezbollah, and Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The leaders of Syria, Hezbollah's other major backer, and Qatar, which supports the Lebanese government, met in Damascus and Syria's official news agency said both agreed the conflict was an internal affair and hoped the feuding parties would find a solution through dialogue.
France's Foreign Ministry said an evacuation of its citizens in Lebanon was not planned, but warned against travel to the country.
In an online briefing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pascale Andreani called on French nationals in Lebanon to act with the "utmost prudence."
The Lebanese government, which is allied with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, has only a slim majority in parliament. The two sides have been locked in a power struggle that has kept government at a standstill and the country without a president since November.
The eruption of the long-simmering tensions appeared to be triggered by the government's decision this week to confront Hezbollah by declaring its private communications network illegal and replacing the Beirut airport security chief for alleged ties to the militants.
Hezbollah first blocked roads in Beirut on Wednesday. Confrontations quickly spread and became more violent. Factions threw up roadblocks and checkpoints dividing Beirut into sectarian enclaves, and the chattering of automatic weapons and thumps of rocket-propelled grenades echoed across the city overnight.
Street clashes exploded into gunbattles in parts of Beirut on Thursday afternoon after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Lebanon's Western-backed government of declaring war on his group. It was the militant leader's strongest comments since Lebanon's political crisis erupted 17 months ago.
Hariri later went on television urging Hezbollah to pull its fighters back and "save Lebanon from hell." He proposed a compromise that would involve the army, one of the sole national institutions respected by Lebanon's long deadlocked factions.
But Hezbollah and its allies swiftly rejected the offer.
Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war left 150,000 dead and much of the city devastated and carved into warring sectarian enclaves.
___
Associated Press writer Scheherezade Faramarzi contributed to this report.
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Shiite Hezbollah gunmen seized nearly all of the Lebanese capital's Muslim sector from Sunni foes loyal to the U.S.-backed government on Friday in the country's worst sectarian clashes since the 15-year civil war.
At least 11 people have been killed and more than 20 wounded in three days of street battles in West Beirut between the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah fighters and gunmen to the government, security officials said.
The satellite TV station affiliated with the party of Lebanon's top Sunni lawmaker, Saad Hariri, was forced off the air. Gunmen set the offices of the party's newspaper, Al-Mustaqbal, on fire in the coastal neighborhood of Ramlet el-Bayda.
Hariri and Druse leader Walid Jumblatt were besieged in their West Beirut residences. Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and several ministers holed up in Saniora's downtown office surrounded by troops and police.
Gunmen loyal to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party set ablaze a two-story building where Hariri's Future TV has its archives in the western neighborhood of Rawche, about 100 yards from the Saudi embassy. The secular pro-Syrian group, a longtime ally of Hezbollah, has dozens of its own gunmen in the streets.
A rocket-propelled grenade hit the fence of Hariri's heavily protected residence, security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the media.
Pro-government majority officials held an emergency meeting in a mountain town in the Christian heartland northeast of Beirut, according to LBC TV, a pro-government Christian station.
"Even if Hezbollah's militia took everything we remain the constitutional authority," Cabinet Minister Ahmed Fatfat told Al-Arabiya TV from Saniora's compound.
The unrest shut down Lebanon's international airport and barricades set up by both side closed major highways. The seaport also was closed, leaving one land route to Syria as Lebanon's only link to the outside world.
Arab foreign ministers called an emergency meeting for Sunday in Cairo, Egypt to discuss the crisis, Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said.
About 100 Shiite Hezbollah militants wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying assault rifles marched down Hamra Street, a normally vibrant commercial strip in a mainly Sunni area of Beirut. They took up positions in corners and sidewalks and stopped the few cars braving the empty streets to search their trunks.
On nearby streets, dozens of fighters from another Hezbollah-allied party appeared, some wearing masks and carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Lebanon's army, which has stayed out of the sectarian political squabbling that has paralyzed the country for more than a year, did not intervene in the clashes, which had largely tapered off into sporadic gunfire by early afternoon.
Troops then began taking up positions in some Sunni neighborhoods abandoned by the pro-government groups. A senior security official said the army would soon take over the Sunnis' last stronghold of Tarik Jadideh.
In some cases Hezbollah handed over newly won positions to Lebanese troops.
The sectarian tensions are fueled in part by the rivalry between predominantly Shiite Iran which sponsors Hezbollah, and Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The leaders of Syria, Hezbollah's other major backer, and Qatar, which supports the Lebanese government, met in Damascus and Syria's official news agency said both agreed the conflict was an internal affair and hoped the feuding parties would find a solution through dialogue.
France's Foreign Ministry said an evacuation of its citizens in Lebanon was not planned, but warned against travel to the country.
In an online briefing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pascale Andreani called on French nationals in Lebanon to act with the "utmost prudence."
The Lebanese government, which is allied with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, has only a slim majority in parliament. The two sides have been locked in a power struggle that has kept government at a standstill and the country without a president since November.
The eruption of the long-simmering tensions appeared to be triggered by the government's decision this week to confront Hezbollah by declaring its private communications network illegal and replacing the Beirut airport security chief for alleged ties to the militants.
Hezbollah first blocked roads in Beirut on Wednesday. Confrontations quickly spread and became more violent. Factions threw up roadblocks and checkpoints dividing Beirut into sectarian enclaves, and the chattering of automatic weapons and thumps of rocket-propelled grenades echoed across the city overnight.
Street clashes exploded into gunbattles in parts of Beirut on Thursday afternoon after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Lebanon's Western-backed government of declaring war on his group. It was the militant leader's strongest comments since Lebanon's political crisis erupted 17 months ago.
Hariri later went on television urging Hezbollah to pull its fighters back and "save Lebanon from hell." He proposed a compromise that would involve the army, one of the sole national institutions respected by Lebanon's long deadlocked factions.
But Hezbollah and its allies swiftly rejected the offer.
Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war left 150,000 dead and much of the city devastated and carved into warring sectarian enclaves.
___
Associated Press writer Scheherezade Faramarzi contributed to this report.
Syria denies U.S. accusation over nuclear reactor
Samia Nakhoul, Reuters, April 24, 2008
LONDON (Reuters) - Syria on Thursday dismissed U.S. accusations that North Korea was helping it build a nuclear reactor that could produce plutonium.
Syria's ambassador to Britain, Sami al-Khiyami, told Reuters that the accusation, which President George W. Bush's administration was expected to lay out to lawmakers on Thursday, was to put pressure on North Korea in talks about Pyongyang's nuclear program.
"This has nothing to do with North Korea and Syria. They just want to exert more pressure on North Korea. This is why they are coming up with this story," Khiyami said.
"The cooperation between North Korea and Syria has nothing to do with (building) a nuclear facility. Cooperation is mainly economic.
"This is political manipulation ahead of the talks with North Korea to exert more pressure on them," he said.
Khiyami was speaking before what a U.S. official said would be evidence regarding Syria-North Korea nuclear cooperation to be put to lawmakers in Washington on Thursday.
The White House has said little about the possibility of such cooperation between the two since Israel conducted a mysterious September 6 air strike on Syria that media reports said targeted a nuclear site being built with Pyongyang's help.
The presentation to U.S. lawmakers was expected to include still photographs taken from videotape recorded inside the Syrian facility, another U.S. official said.
"Unfortunately the scenario of taking and retaking pictures looks like what happened before the Iraq war, when the U.S. administration was trying to convince the world that Iraq had nuclear weapons," Khiyami said.
"Instead of coming up with these ridiculous photos I think the U.S. administration should put all their effort into clearing the Middle East region of all weapons of mass destruction, starting with its closest ally Israel."
Israel is widely believed to have assembled the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal at Dimona, a plant out of bounds to foreign inspection.
(Editing by Charles Dick)
LONDON (Reuters) - Syria on Thursday dismissed U.S. accusations that North Korea was helping it build a nuclear reactor that could produce plutonium.
Syria's ambassador to Britain, Sami al-Khiyami, told Reuters that the accusation, which President George W. Bush's administration was expected to lay out to lawmakers on Thursday, was to put pressure on North Korea in talks about Pyongyang's nuclear program.
"This has nothing to do with North Korea and Syria. They just want to exert more pressure on North Korea. This is why they are coming up with this story," Khiyami said.
"The cooperation between North Korea and Syria has nothing to do with (building) a nuclear facility. Cooperation is mainly economic.
"This is political manipulation ahead of the talks with North Korea to exert more pressure on them," he said.
Khiyami was speaking before what a U.S. official said would be evidence regarding Syria-North Korea nuclear cooperation to be put to lawmakers in Washington on Thursday.
The White House has said little about the possibility of such cooperation between the two since Israel conducted a mysterious September 6 air strike on Syria that media reports said targeted a nuclear site being built with Pyongyang's help.
The presentation to U.S. lawmakers was expected to include still photographs taken from videotape recorded inside the Syrian facility, another U.S. official said.
"Unfortunately the scenario of taking and retaking pictures looks like what happened before the Iraq war, when the U.S. administration was trying to convince the world that Iraq had nuclear weapons," Khiyami said.
"Instead of coming up with these ridiculous photos I think the U.S. administration should put all their effort into clearing the Middle East region of all weapons of mass destruction, starting with its closest ally Israel."
Israel is widely believed to have assembled the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal at Dimona, a plant out of bounds to foreign inspection.
(Editing by Charles Dick)
US Makes Show of Force at Sea in Mideast
By PAULINE JELINEK, The Guardian, March 5, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. Navy switched out warships patrolling in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, maintaining a show of strength during a period of tensions with Syria and political uncertainty in Lebanon.
Officials said it was a routine, planned deployment but it was an action sure to draw attention in the Mideast, where an announcement on U.S. presence last week caused a political stir in Lebanon.
The USS Cole guided missile destroyer and support ships passed through the Suez Canal at midday Wednesday, heading from the Mediterranean Sea into the Red Sea, canal officials said. In Washington, a Navy official said the Cole had been relieved by the guided missile destroyer USS Ors and the guided missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea.
Both the canal official and navy official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of talking about ship movements.
``It's a sign of our commitment to stability in the region ... a stabilizing force and commitment to our allies,'' Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Wednesday of the U.S. presence.
``I think it prevents miscalculations,'' he told Pentagon reporters.
The deployment of the USS Cole had sparked criticism from Hezbollah and from pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon, who are locked in a political standoff with the pro-U.S. government. It also sparked criticism from Syria.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora has said his government did not ask for the ships and that they were not in territorial waters. Some in his coalition said they were surprised by the deployment.
Syria has said the deployment threatened security in the region. Syria's foreign minister warned the U.S. it cannot impose its own solutions to the political crisis in Lebanon. Syria's foreign minister and the pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon also reminded Washington of the bloody consequences of its 1980s intervention in Lebanon.
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters last week that the deployment should not be viewed as threatening or in response to events in any single country in that volatile region.
The decision to send the ships appeared to be a not-too-subtle show of U.S. force in the region as international frustration mounts over a long political deadlock in tiny, weak Lebanon. The U.S. blames Syria for the impasse, saying Syria has never given up its ambitions to control its smaller neighbor.
The presidential election in Lebanon has been delayed 15 times. It is now pushed back to March 11.
National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe had called the deployment of the Cole ``a show of support for regional stability'' and said President Bush is concerned about the situation in Lebanon.
---
Associated Press writer Salah Nasrawi in Cairo, Egypt, contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. Navy switched out warships patrolling in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, maintaining a show of strength during a period of tensions with Syria and political uncertainty in Lebanon.
Officials said it was a routine, planned deployment but it was an action sure to draw attention in the Mideast, where an announcement on U.S. presence last week caused a political stir in Lebanon.
The USS Cole guided missile destroyer and support ships passed through the Suez Canal at midday Wednesday, heading from the Mediterranean Sea into the Red Sea, canal officials said. In Washington, a Navy official said the Cole had been relieved by the guided missile destroyer USS Ors and the guided missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea.
Both the canal official and navy official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of talking about ship movements.
``It's a sign of our commitment to stability in the region ... a stabilizing force and commitment to our allies,'' Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Wednesday of the U.S. presence.
``I think it prevents miscalculations,'' he told Pentagon reporters.
The deployment of the USS Cole had sparked criticism from Hezbollah and from pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon, who are locked in a political standoff with the pro-U.S. government. It also sparked criticism from Syria.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora has said his government did not ask for the ships and that they were not in territorial waters. Some in his coalition said they were surprised by the deployment.
Syria has said the deployment threatened security in the region. Syria's foreign minister warned the U.S. it cannot impose its own solutions to the political crisis in Lebanon. Syria's foreign minister and the pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon also reminded Washington of the bloody consequences of its 1980s intervention in Lebanon.
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters last week that the deployment should not be viewed as threatening or in response to events in any single country in that volatile region.
The decision to send the ships appeared to be a not-too-subtle show of U.S. force in the region as international frustration mounts over a long political deadlock in tiny, weak Lebanon. The U.S. blames Syria for the impasse, saying Syria has never given up its ambitions to control its smaller neighbor.
The presidential election in Lebanon has been delayed 15 times. It is now pushed back to March 11.
National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe had called the deployment of the Cole ``a show of support for regional stability'' and said President Bush is concerned about the situation in Lebanon.
---
Associated Press writer Salah Nasrawi in Cairo, Egypt, contributed to this report.
Lebanon: The Unknown Crisis - What is the USS Cole doing off the Lebanese coast?
Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, March 3, 2008
The USS Cole isn't engaged in a sightseeing tour of the Eastern Mediterranean: its sudden deployment just "over the horizon" near Lebanon – in tandem with two other warships – is a clear sign that the Americans are preparing for something big. That's what the Arab world seems to believe, anyway, if you listen to al-Jazeera and the chatter coming from other Arab news outlets. The Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and the government of Bahrain have all warned their citizens to get out of Lebanon, pronto. What's curious, however, is that, while it's big news in the Arab world, this "visit" by a guided-missile destroyer and accompanying flotilla has received scant attention in the U.S. news media. What's going on?
Well, it depends on what U.S. government spokesman is speaking on what day: "I would not specifically relate this to any kind of events in Lebanon or any place else," said State Department spokesman Tom Casey on Friday. However, according to White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe, it is "a show of support for regional stability." Responding to the accusations of Hezbollah, the Muslim resistance organization that sits in the Lebanese parliament, that this amounts to interference in Lebanon's internal political affairs, Johndroe averred: "I would express some of our own concerns with Hezbollah's actions."
These actions consist of opposing the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, which has locked the opposition out of all governmental decisions, and effectively defending the country against the Israelis during the 30-Day War.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Michael Mullen, was a bit blunter, responding to the question of whether the Cole was showing the flag off the Lebanese coast in order to influence the outcome of elections scheduled for March 11: "To say it is absolutely tied would be incorrect, although certainly we are aware elections are due there at some point in time." Those elections have already been postponed on no less than 15 occasions, and no one is betting that they'll come off this time – although that is certainly the result desired by the U.S. Department of State. The idea is that the poll will strengthen the Siniora government and lay Hezbollah low, but this latest move – a provocation, really – is almost guaranteed to have the opposite effect. So much so that Siniora was forced to distance himself from the Americans, denying that the ships were in Lebanon's territorial waters and declaring that his government did "not ask anyone to send warships."
Everyone knows which government asked Washington for the warships: the same one that is now slaughtering children in Gaza and has threatened the besieged city with an Arab holocaust, the government whose deputy defense minister recently warned that the response to continued rocket attacks would be a Palestinian "shoah." The Palestinians, he brayed on state radio, are "bringing upon themselves a greater shoah because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate, whether in air strikes or on the ground."
The Lobby's line is that the whole thing is a misunderstanding based on a mistranslation. National Review's Tom Gross espies a radical difference between "a shoah" and "the Shoah." "It is like confusing a 'white house' with 'The White House,'" he writes – and furthermore, this was no innocent mistake. The whole brouhaha, in his considered opinion, is evidence of an anti-Semitic conspiracy by major American news organizations.
Such an interpretation can only succeed, however, if we wear the special blinders that the Lobby would have us don, which blank out the context in which this rhetoric is being uttered. The use of the word "shoah" against the backdrop of a major military operation in Gaza – one that seems to be escalating in ferocity – amounts to the very real threat of genocide. Any alternative explanation seems on the same factual and moral plane as garden-variety Holocaust denial. If, God forbid, the Israelis ever carry out their deputy defense minister's threat, these folks will morph into little David Irvings, busily spinning out heavily footnoted disquisitions on why it never happened.
Gaza, however, is just one prong in the U.S.-Israeli "surge." The main immediate target is Syria, not Gaza or Lebanon – and, standing behind them, Iran. The Americans and their Israeli allies have tried every sort of provocation to stir the Lebanese pot and lure the Syrians back into Lebanon, where a proxy war is brewing. With the Americans supplying cover by sea and air, the IDF may get revenge for its ignominious defeat in the 30-Day War by taking out Hezbollah once and for all, and then hitting Damascus – or so the most optimistic scenario would have it.
The USS Cole and accompanying warships are not merely making a strong gesture; they have also effectively blockaded the Lebanese coast and will surely be intercepting any arms coming from Turkey or elsewhere, readying the battleground for the Israeli incursion.
The first stages of the coming conflict with Iran will be fought as a proxy war in Lebanon against Hezbollah and Syria, as anticipated in this space on at least one occasion. In terms of predictive ability, however, my prognosis was hardly Nostradamus-like.
After all, the Israelis and their American sympathizers long ago set down in writing, and in plain English, the plan to do just what they are now doing. One need only consult "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written in 1996 by an influential group of future Bush administration officials as advice for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to make sense of recent U.S.-Israeli war moves.
While "A Clean Break" famously laid out a strategic rationale for deposing Saddam Hussein, it also offered a blueprint for "securing the northern border" that parallels what is happening and has been happening since the launching of the 30-Day War:
"Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which Americans can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by: [1] paralleling Syria's behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces, [2] striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper."
That's what's on the agenda of the radical Likud wing of the Israeli ruling elite, as represented in America as well as in Israel. The dogs of war are straining at the leash.
The War Party has never been shy about proclaiming its intentions. If only its ostensible opponents were half as bold. Yet we hear nothing – nothing – from either Barack Obama (or Hillary "Bring Them Home" Clinton) about the most significant and ominous American military mobilization since U.S. warships engaged in a massive show of force off the Iranian coast around this time last year. Of course, we don't have to ask John McCain where he stands on this deployment: he's for it. What the sudden outbreak of a major war in the Middle East will do for McCain's presidential prospects – currently rather dim – is a factor that is undoubtedly being considered by this White House.
Both Obama and Clinton have been mum on the Gaza shoah, and the coming storm in Lebanon seems not to have fazed them. Clinton can be relied on to keep her mouth shut, what with her support from the hawkish wing of the party. What we do know about Obama is that he, like Hillary, supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, albeit not with a degree of enthusiasm sufficient to impress the Lobby. However, if that invasion was okay, then why not the Gaza sweep? And why not invade Lebanon again? According to the logic of Obama's past positions, one would expect him to hop aboard the "Clean Break" express and ride it all the way to World War III (or is that IV?). But I guess we won't know until war breaks out and he gets that 3 a.m. call – from his campaign manager.
None of this is inevitable, of course. We don't have to wind up in a proxy war with Iran in the Levant, a conflict that could escalate until the entire region is aflame. Public pressure on Congress to hold hearings regarding the looming Lebanon intervention, including an inquiry into U.S. covert meddling in Lebanon's internal politics, would focus attention on the issue. We also need to pressure the candidates to at least issue statements on this rapidly developing situation.
I suppose we'll have to wait until the media declares this an official "crisis," but by that time the shooting will have already started – far too late to do anything about it. Which suits Obama and Clinton just fine – and, ultimately, serves McCain best of all.
The USS Cole isn't engaged in a sightseeing tour of the Eastern Mediterranean: its sudden deployment just "over the horizon" near Lebanon – in tandem with two other warships – is a clear sign that the Americans are preparing for something big. That's what the Arab world seems to believe, anyway, if you listen to al-Jazeera and the chatter coming from other Arab news outlets. The Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and the government of Bahrain have all warned their citizens to get out of Lebanon, pronto. What's curious, however, is that, while it's big news in the Arab world, this "visit" by a guided-missile destroyer and accompanying flotilla has received scant attention in the U.S. news media. What's going on?
Well, it depends on what U.S. government spokesman is speaking on what day: "I would not specifically relate this to any kind of events in Lebanon or any place else," said State Department spokesman Tom Casey on Friday. However, according to White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe, it is "a show of support for regional stability." Responding to the accusations of Hezbollah, the Muslim resistance organization that sits in the Lebanese parliament, that this amounts to interference in Lebanon's internal political affairs, Johndroe averred: "I would express some of our own concerns with Hezbollah's actions."
These actions consist of opposing the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, which has locked the opposition out of all governmental decisions, and effectively defending the country against the Israelis during the 30-Day War.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Michael Mullen, was a bit blunter, responding to the question of whether the Cole was showing the flag off the Lebanese coast in order to influence the outcome of elections scheduled for March 11: "To say it is absolutely tied would be incorrect, although certainly we are aware elections are due there at some point in time." Those elections have already been postponed on no less than 15 occasions, and no one is betting that they'll come off this time – although that is certainly the result desired by the U.S. Department of State. The idea is that the poll will strengthen the Siniora government and lay Hezbollah low, but this latest move – a provocation, really – is almost guaranteed to have the opposite effect. So much so that Siniora was forced to distance himself from the Americans, denying that the ships were in Lebanon's territorial waters and declaring that his government did "not ask anyone to send warships."
Everyone knows which government asked Washington for the warships: the same one that is now slaughtering children in Gaza and has threatened the besieged city with an Arab holocaust, the government whose deputy defense minister recently warned that the response to continued rocket attacks would be a Palestinian "shoah." The Palestinians, he brayed on state radio, are "bringing upon themselves a greater shoah because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate, whether in air strikes or on the ground."
The Lobby's line is that the whole thing is a misunderstanding based on a mistranslation. National Review's Tom Gross espies a radical difference between "a shoah" and "the Shoah." "It is like confusing a 'white house' with 'The White House,'" he writes – and furthermore, this was no innocent mistake. The whole brouhaha, in his considered opinion, is evidence of an anti-Semitic conspiracy by major American news organizations.
Such an interpretation can only succeed, however, if we wear the special blinders that the Lobby would have us don, which blank out the context in which this rhetoric is being uttered. The use of the word "shoah" against the backdrop of a major military operation in Gaza – one that seems to be escalating in ferocity – amounts to the very real threat of genocide. Any alternative explanation seems on the same factual and moral plane as garden-variety Holocaust denial. If, God forbid, the Israelis ever carry out their deputy defense minister's threat, these folks will morph into little David Irvings, busily spinning out heavily footnoted disquisitions on why it never happened.
Gaza, however, is just one prong in the U.S.-Israeli "surge." The main immediate target is Syria, not Gaza or Lebanon – and, standing behind them, Iran. The Americans and their Israeli allies have tried every sort of provocation to stir the Lebanese pot and lure the Syrians back into Lebanon, where a proxy war is brewing. With the Americans supplying cover by sea and air, the IDF may get revenge for its ignominious defeat in the 30-Day War by taking out Hezbollah once and for all, and then hitting Damascus – or so the most optimistic scenario would have it.
The USS Cole and accompanying warships are not merely making a strong gesture; they have also effectively blockaded the Lebanese coast and will surely be intercepting any arms coming from Turkey or elsewhere, readying the battleground for the Israeli incursion.
The first stages of the coming conflict with Iran will be fought as a proxy war in Lebanon against Hezbollah and Syria, as anticipated in this space on at least one occasion. In terms of predictive ability, however, my prognosis was hardly Nostradamus-like.
After all, the Israelis and their American sympathizers long ago set down in writing, and in plain English, the plan to do just what they are now doing. One need only consult "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written in 1996 by an influential group of future Bush administration officials as advice for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to make sense of recent U.S.-Israeli war moves.
While "A Clean Break" famously laid out a strategic rationale for deposing Saddam Hussein, it also offered a blueprint for "securing the northern border" that parallels what is happening and has been happening since the launching of the 30-Day War:
"Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which Americans can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by: [1] paralleling Syria's behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces, [2] striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper."
That's what's on the agenda of the radical Likud wing of the Israeli ruling elite, as represented in America as well as in Israel. The dogs of war are straining at the leash.
The War Party has never been shy about proclaiming its intentions. If only its ostensible opponents were half as bold. Yet we hear nothing – nothing – from either Barack Obama (or Hillary "Bring Them Home" Clinton) about the most significant and ominous American military mobilization since U.S. warships engaged in a massive show of force off the Iranian coast around this time last year. Of course, we don't have to ask John McCain where he stands on this deployment: he's for it. What the sudden outbreak of a major war in the Middle East will do for McCain's presidential prospects – currently rather dim – is a factor that is undoubtedly being considered by this White House.
Both Obama and Clinton have been mum on the Gaza shoah, and the coming storm in Lebanon seems not to have fazed them. Clinton can be relied on to keep her mouth shut, what with her support from the hawkish wing of the party. What we do know about Obama is that he, like Hillary, supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, albeit not with a degree of enthusiasm sufficient to impress the Lobby. However, if that invasion was okay, then why not the Gaza sweep? And why not invade Lebanon again? According to the logic of Obama's past positions, one would expect him to hop aboard the "Clean Break" express and ride it all the way to World War III (or is that IV?). But I guess we won't know until war breaks out and he gets that 3 a.m. call – from his campaign manager.
None of this is inevitable, of course. We don't have to wind up in a proxy war with Iran in the Levant, a conflict that could escalate until the entire region is aflame. Public pressure on Congress to hold hearings regarding the looming Lebanon intervention, including an inquiry into U.S. covert meddling in Lebanon's internal politics, would focus attention on the issue. We also need to pressure the candidates to at least issue statements on this rapidly developing situation.
I suppose we'll have to wait until the media declares this an official "crisis," but by that time the shooting will have already started – far too late to do anything about it. Which suits Obama and Clinton just fine – and, ultimately, serves McCain best of all.
Hizbullah slams deployment of US warships off coast
Moussa visits Damascus ahead of arab summit
By Hussein Abdallah, The Daily Star - Lebanon, March 01, 2008
BEIRUT: A US deployment of warships off the coast of Lebanon further sharpened tensions in the crisis-plagued country on Friday, as Hizbullah condemned the move and the Lebanese government said it did not ask for the ships to be sent. Hizbullah on Friday denounced Washington's dispatch of the USS Cole and two other vessels to waters off Lebanon as military interference.
Hizbullah's condemnation came as pro-government newspapers in Beirut said the deployment was a clear signal to Syria, which is accused by the ruling coalition of blocking a presidential vote in Beirut.
A senior Hizbullah official, Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, told The Daily Star on Friday that the US decision to send the warships was an "unhelpful" one.
"It is not the first time the US uses such tactics. It seems they have not learned the lessons of the past," he said, hinting at the attacks on US targets that followed the naval shelling of Lebanese areas during the Civil War.
"The US failed to take over the region despite its occupation of Iraq. Sending warships would not change anything," Abu Zeinab added.
The United States acknowledged on Thursday that it had sent the guided-missile destroyer and two other ships to the waters off Lebanon, which has been embroiled in a paralyzing political crisis for months.
It is "a show of support for regional stability" because of "concern about the situation in Lebanon," a US official said on condition of anonymity, declining to say whether the show of force was aimed at Syria or Iran.
The US also played down Hizbullah's criticism of the deployment, insisting that the show of force was meant to promote stability.
"On Hizbullah's concerns, I would express some of our own concerns with Hizbullah's actions. So I'll just leave it at that," White House national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters.
Johndroe sidestepped questions about comments from Lebanese Premier Fouad Siniora, who said Friday that his government did not ask Washington to send warships to the area.
"We have regular consultations with Prime Minister Siniora and his government, as well as our allies, both in the immediate region, as well as in Europe on the situation in Lebanon," said the spokesman.
"There's constant communication at various levels. But let's be clear: The purpose of the US Navy ships in the Eastern Mediterranean is a show of support for regional stability," amid Lebanon's political crisis," Johndroe said.
"I know we share with Prime Minister Siniora a desire for the situation in Lebanon to be resolved, and resolved by the Lebanese people," he added.
Siniora, whose government is backed by the West and most Arab countries, had stressed earlier during a meeting with Arab ambassadors that Beirut did not ask for the warships and had summoned a top US diplomat for "clarifications."
"We did not ask anyone to send warships," Siniora said, adding that no US warship was in "Lebanese waters."
Earlier, Siniora summoned US Charge d'Affaires Michel Sison "to ask her to clarify the presence of the USS Cole" in the Mediterranean, a government source told AFP.
"Mrs. Sison assured him that the warship was in international waters and had been dispatched to guarantee regional stability," the source added.
Meanwhile, a media officer for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, Neeraj Singh, said on Friday that UNIFIL forces had not been informed of the United States' sudden move.
Elias Hanna, retired general and political science professor at the Notre Dame University, told The Daily Star on Friday that some reactions to the US move were extremely exaggerated.
"The move is not more than a political message," he said.
"If the US wants to go to war, the deployment would be followed up by other escalatory military measures. We need to watch the buildup before we can make any judgment," he added.
As the deployment stirred new tensions in Lebanon, the country was still waiting to receive an official invitation to take part in the upcoming Arab summit in Damascus.
Midnight Friday was the deadline for receiving invitations to take part in the summit, scheduled for March 29 and 30. No invitation was reported to have been received by the time The Daily Star went to press.
Well-informed sources said the invitation might be handed over to Lebanon's representative in the Arab League, since Syria is unlikely to invite Siniora. Normally, an invitation would be delivered to the president, but the Siniora government has assumed presidential powers since former Emile Lahoud left office last November and no replacement was elected.
Arab League chief Amr Moussa headed to Damascus on Friday to meet President Bashar Assad and make some arrangements for the summit.
"Inter-Arab relations are very tense ahead of the upcoming summit," Moussa said before heading to the Syrian capital. - With agencies
By Hussein Abdallah, The Daily Star - Lebanon, March 01, 2008
BEIRUT: A US deployment of warships off the coast of Lebanon further sharpened tensions in the crisis-plagued country on Friday, as Hizbullah condemned the move and the Lebanese government said it did not ask for the ships to be sent. Hizbullah on Friday denounced Washington's dispatch of the USS Cole and two other vessels to waters off Lebanon as military interference.
Hizbullah's condemnation came as pro-government newspapers in Beirut said the deployment was a clear signal to Syria, which is accused by the ruling coalition of blocking a presidential vote in Beirut.
A senior Hizbullah official, Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, told The Daily Star on Friday that the US decision to send the warships was an "unhelpful" one.
"It is not the first time the US uses such tactics. It seems they have not learned the lessons of the past," he said, hinting at the attacks on US targets that followed the naval shelling of Lebanese areas during the Civil War.
"The US failed to take over the region despite its occupation of Iraq. Sending warships would not change anything," Abu Zeinab added.
The United States acknowledged on Thursday that it had sent the guided-missile destroyer and two other ships to the waters off Lebanon, which has been embroiled in a paralyzing political crisis for months.
It is "a show of support for regional stability" because of "concern about the situation in Lebanon," a US official said on condition of anonymity, declining to say whether the show of force was aimed at Syria or Iran.
The US also played down Hizbullah's criticism of the deployment, insisting that the show of force was meant to promote stability.
"On Hizbullah's concerns, I would express some of our own concerns with Hizbullah's actions. So I'll just leave it at that," White House national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters.
Johndroe sidestepped questions about comments from Lebanese Premier Fouad Siniora, who said Friday that his government did not ask Washington to send warships to the area.
"We have regular consultations with Prime Minister Siniora and his government, as well as our allies, both in the immediate region, as well as in Europe on the situation in Lebanon," said the spokesman.
"There's constant communication at various levels. But let's be clear: The purpose of the US Navy ships in the Eastern Mediterranean is a show of support for regional stability," amid Lebanon's political crisis," Johndroe said.
"I know we share with Prime Minister Siniora a desire for the situation in Lebanon to be resolved, and resolved by the Lebanese people," he added.
Siniora, whose government is backed by the West and most Arab countries, had stressed earlier during a meeting with Arab ambassadors that Beirut did not ask for the warships and had summoned a top US diplomat for "clarifications."
"We did not ask anyone to send warships," Siniora said, adding that no US warship was in "Lebanese waters."
Earlier, Siniora summoned US Charge d'Affaires Michel Sison "to ask her to clarify the presence of the USS Cole" in the Mediterranean, a government source told AFP.
"Mrs. Sison assured him that the warship was in international waters and had been dispatched to guarantee regional stability," the source added.
Meanwhile, a media officer for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, Neeraj Singh, said on Friday that UNIFIL forces had not been informed of the United States' sudden move.
Elias Hanna, retired general and political science professor at the Notre Dame University, told The Daily Star on Friday that some reactions to the US move were extremely exaggerated.
"The move is not more than a political message," he said.
"If the US wants to go to war, the deployment would be followed up by other escalatory military measures. We need to watch the buildup before we can make any judgment," he added.
As the deployment stirred new tensions in Lebanon, the country was still waiting to receive an official invitation to take part in the upcoming Arab summit in Damascus.
Midnight Friday was the deadline for receiving invitations to take part in the summit, scheduled for March 29 and 30. No invitation was reported to have been received by the time The Daily Star went to press.
Well-informed sources said the invitation might be handed over to Lebanon's representative in the Arab League, since Syria is unlikely to invite Siniora. Normally, an invitation would be delivered to the president, but the Siniora government has assumed presidential powers since former Emile Lahoud left office last November and no replacement was elected.
Arab League chief Amr Moussa headed to Damascus on Friday to meet President Bashar Assad and make some arrangements for the summit.
"Inter-Arab relations are very tense ahead of the upcoming summit," Moussa said before heading to the Syrian capital. - With agencies
Bush imposes new sanctions on Syria
AP, Feb. 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - President Bush has authorized new sanctions against Syria because of that country's alleged interference in Iraq and Lebanon.
Bush signed an executive order Wednesday to expand sanctions that block the property of senior Syrian government officials and their associates who are deemed to be responsible for — or have engaged in — public corruption.
Bush said the Syrian government undermines efforts to stabilize Iraq. He also said Syria continues to undermine Lebanon's sovereignty and democracy, imprisons democracy activists, curtails human rights and sponsors and harbors terrorists.
WASHINGTON - President Bush has authorized new sanctions against Syria because of that country's alleged interference in Iraq and Lebanon.
Bush signed an executive order Wednesday to expand sanctions that block the property of senior Syrian government officials and their associates who are deemed to be responsible for — or have engaged in — public corruption.
Bush said the Syrian government undermines efforts to stabilize Iraq. He also said Syria continues to undermine Lebanon's sovereignty and democracy, imprisons democracy activists, curtails human rights and sponsors and harbors terrorists.
Israel seeks support for more military repression in Gaza
Israel seeks international backing for Gaza campaign
By Adam Entous, Reuters, Feb. 13, 2008
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel drove nearly 70 foreign ambassadors to its border with the Gaza Strip on Wednesday as part of a campaign seeking international support for tougher action against the enclave's Hamas Islamist rulers.
Israel took the ambassadors to the Erez crossing with the Hamas-controlled enclave, where they were briefed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and military commanders.
Type the rest of your post here."It's important that the international community know what we are facing and what dangers are created by Hamas," Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said of the briefing.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has so far been wary of launching a major ground operation that could cause heavy casualties, arguing there were no "overnight solutions" to daily rocket fire from Gaza that has inflamed Israeli public opinion.
But he faces growing domestic pressure after Hamas claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in southern Israel last week and an 8-year-old Israeli boy lost part of his leg to a rocket strike on Saturday. Olmert says Israel is at "war".
Israel says it can maintain parallel tracks with the Palestinians, one aimed at breaking Hamas's hold on Gaza, and the other aimed at reaching a statehood agreement with West Bank-based Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Western-backed forces were defeated by Hamas in Gaza last year.
The rockets have sparked debate inside and outside Olmert's government, with top ministers calling for the army to assassinate Hamas political as well as military leaders and to flatten those areas in Gaza where the rockets are launched.
AUTHOR'S APPEAL
Prize-winning Israeli author Amos Oz, in a letter published on the front page of the mass circulation daily Yedioth Aronoth, appealed to Israeli leaders to think through the implications.
"The number of casualties from a land invasion into Gaza will be much greater than the number of casualties from 7 years of Qassams," the noted peace campaigner said of the rockets.
Frequent Israeli air strikes and ground incursions into the Gaza Strip have killed some 300 Palestinians in the past year, including dozens of civilians, but failed to prevent rocket fire, which killed two Israelis in the same time period.
Israeli leaders are preparing the ground internationally for a stepped up Israeli military campaign aimed at weakening Hamas's hold on power, officials say.
Shunned by the West for refusing to renounce violence after beating Abbas's Fatah faction in a parliamentary election two years ago, Hamas say it would cease fire if Israel stopped its military operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Hamas is also demanding an end to an Israeli-led blockade that has cut supplies to the coastal territory.
Although Abbas's Fatah faction remains deeply hostile to Hamas following its seizure of the Gaza Strip in June, the president and his West Bank-based government have publicly criticized Israel for stepping up its military action and threats to kill Hamas leaders.
Israel denied involvement on Wednesday in the killing in Damascus of Imad Moughniyah, a senior commander in the Lebanese Hezbollah movement which has links with Hamas. Hezbollah and Hamas blamed Israel and Hamas warned it would retaliate if Israel assassinated any of its leaders in Gaza.
(Reporting by Adam Entous; Editing by Keith Weir)
By Adam Entous, Reuters, Feb. 13, 2008
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel drove nearly 70 foreign ambassadors to its border with the Gaza Strip on Wednesday as part of a campaign seeking international support for tougher action against the enclave's Hamas Islamist rulers.
Israel took the ambassadors to the Erez crossing with the Hamas-controlled enclave, where they were briefed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and military commanders.
Type the rest of your post here."It's important that the international community know what we are facing and what dangers are created by Hamas," Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said of the briefing.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has so far been wary of launching a major ground operation that could cause heavy casualties, arguing there were no "overnight solutions" to daily rocket fire from Gaza that has inflamed Israeli public opinion.
But he faces growing domestic pressure after Hamas claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in southern Israel last week and an 8-year-old Israeli boy lost part of his leg to a rocket strike on Saturday. Olmert says Israel is at "war".
Israel says it can maintain parallel tracks with the Palestinians, one aimed at breaking Hamas's hold on Gaza, and the other aimed at reaching a statehood agreement with West Bank-based Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Western-backed forces were defeated by Hamas in Gaza last year.
The rockets have sparked debate inside and outside Olmert's government, with top ministers calling for the army to assassinate Hamas political as well as military leaders and to flatten those areas in Gaza where the rockets are launched.
AUTHOR'S APPEAL
Prize-winning Israeli author Amos Oz, in a letter published on the front page of the mass circulation daily Yedioth Aronoth, appealed to Israeli leaders to think through the implications.
"The number of casualties from a land invasion into Gaza will be much greater than the number of casualties from 7 years of Qassams," the noted peace campaigner said of the rockets.
Frequent Israeli air strikes and ground incursions into the Gaza Strip have killed some 300 Palestinians in the past year, including dozens of civilians, but failed to prevent rocket fire, which killed two Israelis in the same time period.
Israeli leaders are preparing the ground internationally for a stepped up Israeli military campaign aimed at weakening Hamas's hold on power, officials say.
Shunned by the West for refusing to renounce violence after beating Abbas's Fatah faction in a parliamentary election two years ago, Hamas say it would cease fire if Israel stopped its military operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Hamas is also demanding an end to an Israeli-led blockade that has cut supplies to the coastal territory.
Although Abbas's Fatah faction remains deeply hostile to Hamas following its seizure of the Gaza Strip in June, the president and his West Bank-based government have publicly criticized Israel for stepping up its military action and threats to kill Hamas leaders.
Israel denied involvement on Wednesday in the killing in Damascus of Imad Moughniyah, a senior commander in the Lebanese Hezbollah movement which has links with Hamas. Hezbollah and Hamas blamed Israel and Hamas warned it would retaliate if Israel assassinated any of its leaders in Gaza.
(Reporting by Adam Entous; Editing by Keith Weir)
A Strike in the Dark
What did Israel bomb in Syria?
by Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2008 edition
Israel and the U.S. have avoided comment on press reports about a nuclear facility.
Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border. The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war. But in the immediate aftermath nothing was heard from the government of Israel. In contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.
Within hours of the attack, Syria denounced Israel for invading its airspace, but its public statements were incomplete and contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some munitions in an unpopulated area after being challenged by Syrian air defenses, “which forced them to flee.” Four days later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said during a state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no casualties or property damage. It was not until October 1st that Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an interview with the BBC, acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes had hit their target, which he described as an “unused military building.” Assad added that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments were muted.
Despite official silence in Tel Aviv (and in Washington), in the days after the bombing the American and European media were flooded with reports, primarily based on information from anonymous government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed a nascent nuclear reactor that was secretly being assembled in Syria, with the help of North Korea. Beginning construction of a nuclear reactor in secret would be a violation of Syria’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.
The evidence was circumstantial but seemingly damning. The first reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear coöperation came on September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four points: the Israeli intelligence community had learned of a North Korean connection to a construction site in an agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before the bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean; satellite imagery strongly suggested that the building under construction was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be stopped. There were also reports—by ABC News and others—that some of the Israeli intelligence had been shared in advance with the United States, which had raised no objection to the bombing.
The Israeli government still declined to make any statement about the incident. Military censorship on dispatches about the raid was imposed for several weeks, and the Israeli press resorted to recycling the disclosures in the foreign press. In the first days after the attack, there had been many critical stories in the Israeli press speculating about the bombing, and the possibility that it could lead to a conflict with Syria. Larry Derfner, a columnist writing in the Jerusalem Post, described the raid as “the sort of thing that starts wars.” But, once reports about the nuclear issue and other details circulated, the domestic criticism subsided.
At a news conference on September 20th, President George W. Bush was asked about the incident four times but said, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements became part of the story. “The silence from all parties has been deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but the message to Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected of pursuing a nuclear weapon—“is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy them.”
It was evident that officials in Israel and the United States, although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for the news media to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli intelligence approached me, with a version of the standard story, including colorful but, as it turned out, unconfirmable details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the moment it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective gear as they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence monitoring trucks from the docks to the target site. On October 3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of the same information, published an overheated account of the September 6th raid, claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating threat,” and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had warned, “If people had known how close we came to World War Three that day there’d have been mass panic.”
However, in three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”
Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told me, “Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing. There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political.” Cirincione castigated the press corps for its handling of the story. “I think some of our best journalists were used,” he said.
A similar message emerged at briefings given to select members of Congress within weeks of the attack. The briefings, conducted by intelligence agencies, focussed on what Washington knew about the September 6th raid. One concern was whether North Korea had done anything that might cause the U.S. to back away from ongoing six-nation talks about its nuclear program. A legislator who took part in one such briefing said afterward, according to a member of his staff, that he had heard nothing that caused him “to have any doubts” about the North Korean negotiations—“nothing that should cause a pause.” The legislator’s conclusion, the staff member said, was “There’s nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”
Morton Abramowitz, a former Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research, told me that he was astonished by the lack of response. “Anytime you bomb another state, that’s a big deal,” he said. “But where’s the outcry, particularly from the concerned states and the U.N.? Something’s amiss.”
Israel could, of course, have damning evidence that it refuses to disclose. But there are serious and unexamined contradictions in the various published accounts of the September 6th bombing.
The main piece of evidence to emerge publicly that Syria was building a reactor arrived on October 23rd, when David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, a highly respected nonprofit research group, released a satellite image of the target. The photograph had been taken by a commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe, of Longmont, Colorado, on August 10th, four weeks before the bombing, and showed a square building and a nearby water-pumping station. In an analysis released at the same time, Albright, a physicist who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that the building, as viewed from space, had roughly the same length and width as a reactor building at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear facility. “The tall building in the image may house a reactor under construction and the pump station along the river may have been intended to supply cooling water to the reactor,” Albright said. He concluded his analysis by posing a series of rhetorical questions that assumed that the target was a nuclear facility:
When I asked Albright how he had pinpointed the target, he told me that he and a colleague, Paul Brannan, “did a lot of hard work”—culling press reports and poring over DigitalGlobe imagery—“before coming up with the site.” Albright then shared his findings with Robin Wright and other journalists at the Post, who, after checking with Administration officials, told him that the building was, indeed, the one targeted by the Israelis. “We did not release the information until we got direct confirmation from the Washington Post,” he told me. The Post’s sources in the Administration, he understood, had access to far more detailed images obtained by U.S. intelligence satellites. The Post ran a story, without printing the imagery, on October 19th, reporting that “U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the aftermath of the attack” had concluded that the site had the “signature,” or characteristics, of a reactor “similar in structure to North Korea’s facilities”—a conclusion with which Albright then agreed. In other words, the Albright and the Post reports, which appeared to independently reinforce each other, stemmed in part from the same sources.
Albright told me that before going public he had met privately with Israeli officials. “I wanted to be sure in my own mind that the Israelis thought it was a reactor, and I was,” he said. “They never explicitly said it was nuclear, but they ruled out the possibility that it was a missile, chemical-warfare, or radar site. By a process of elimination, I was left with nuclear.”
Two days after his first report, Albright released a satellite image of the bombed site, taken by DigitalGlobe on October 24th, seven weeks after the bombing. The new image showed that the target area had been levelled and the ground scraped. Albright said that it hinted of a coverup—cleansing the bombing site could make it difficult for weapons inspectors to determine its precise nature. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” he told the Times. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.” This assessment was widely shared in the press. (In mid-January, the Times reported that recent imagery from DigitalGlobe showed that a storage facility, or something similar, had been constructed, in an obvious rush, at the bombing site.)
Proliferation experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency and others in the arms-control community disputed Albright’s interpretation of the images. “People here were baffled by this, and thought that Albright had stuck his neck out,” a diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is headquartered, told me. “The I.A.E.A. has been consistently telling journalists that it is skeptical about the Syrian nuclear story, but the reporters are so convinced.”
A second diplomat in Vienna acidly commented on the images: “A square building is a square building.” The diplomat, who is familiar with the use of satellite imagery for nuclear verification, added that the I.A.E.A. “does not have enough information to conclude anything about the exact nature of the facility. They see a building with some geometry near a river that could be identified as nuclear-related. But they cannot credibly conclude that is so. As far as information coming from open sources beyond imagery, it’s a struggle to extract information from all of the noise that comes from political agendas.”
Much of what one would expect to see around a secret nuclear site was lacking at the target, a former State Department intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for the Congress said. “There is no security around the building,” he said. “No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex.” Jeffrey Lewis, who heads the non-proliferation program at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, told me that, even if the width and the length of the building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to extract the control rods, an essential step in the operation of the reactor; nor was there evidence in the published imagery of major underground construction. “All you could see was a box,” Lewis said. “You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It’s just a box.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, said, “We don’t have any proof of a reactor—no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence.” Some well-informed defense consultants and former intelligence officials asked why, if there was compelling evidence of nuclear cheating involving North Korea, a member of the President’s axis of evil, and Syria, which the U.S. considers a state sponsor of terrorism, the Bush Administration would not insist on making it public.
When I went to Israel in late December, the government was still maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some current and former officials and military officers were willing to speak without attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had been accurate. “Don’t you write that there was nothing there!” a senior Israeli official, who is in a position to know the details of the raid on Syria, said, shaking a finger at me. “The thing in Syria was real.”
Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, who served as deputy national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced that there was a threat. “It may have been a perception of a conviction, but there was something there,” Brom said. “It was the beginning of a nuclear project.” However, by the date of our talk, Brom told me, “The question of whether it was there or not is not that relevant anymore.”
Albright, when I spoke to him in December, was far more circumspect than he had been in October. “We never said ‘we know’ it was a reactor, based on the image,” Albright said. “We wanted to make sure that the image was consistent with a reactor, and, from my point of view, it was. But that doesn’t confirm it’s a reactor.”
The journey of the Al Hamed, a small coastal trader, became a centerpiece in accounts of the September 6th bombing. On September 15th, the Washington Post reported that “a prominent U.S. expert on the Middle East” said that the attack “appears to have been linked to the arrival . . . of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.” The article went on to cite the expert’s belief that “the emerging consensus in Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment.” Other press reports identified the Al Hamed as a “suspicious North Korean” ship.
But there is evidence that the Al Hamed could not have been carrying sensitive cargo—or any cargo—from North Korea. International shipping is carefully monitored by Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit, which relies on a network of agents as well as on port logs and other records. In addition, most merchant ships are now required to operate a transponder device called an A.I.S., for automatic identification system. This device, which was on board the Al Hamed, works in a manner similar to a transponder on a commercial aircraft—beaming a constant, very high-frequency position report. (The U.S. Navy monitors international sea traffic with the aid of dedicated satellites, at a secret facility in suburban Washington.)
According to Marine Intelligence Unit records, the Al Hamed, which was built in 1965, had been operating for years in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with no indication of any recent visits to North Korea. The records show that the Al Hamed arrived at Tartus on September 3rd—the ship’s fifth visit to Syria in five months. (It was one of eight ships that arrived that day; although it is possible that one of the others was carrying illicit materials, only the Al Hamed has been named in the media.) The ship’s registry was constantly changing. The Al Hamed flew the South Korean flag before switching to North Korea in November of 2005, and then to Comoros. (Ships often fly flags of convenience, registering with different countries, in many cases to avoid taxes or onerous regulations.) At the time of the bombing, according to Lloyd’s, it was flying a Comoran flag and was owned by four Syrian nationals. In earlier years, under other owners, the ship seems to have operated under Russian, Estonian, Turkish, and Honduran flags. Lloyd’s records show that the ship had apparently not passed through the Suez Canal—the main route from the Mediterranean to the Far East—since at least 1998.
Among the groups that keep track of international shipping is Greenpeace. Martini Gotjé, who monitors illegal fishing for the organization and was among the first to raise questions about the Al Hamed, told me, “I’ve been at sea for forty-one years, and I can tell you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was nothing—in rotten shape. You wouldn’t be able to load heavy cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.”
If the Israelis’ target in Syria was not a nuclear site, why didn’t the Syrians respond more forcefully? Syria complained at the United Nations but did little to press the issue. And, if the site wasn’t a partially built reactor, what was it?
During two trips to Damascus after the Israeli raid, I interviewed many senior government and intelligence officials. None of President Assad’s close advisers told me the same story, though some of the stories were more revealing—and more plausible—than others. In general, Syrian officials seemed more eager to analyze Israel’s motives than to discuss what had been attacked. “I hesitate to answer any journalist’s questions about it,” Faruq al-Shara, the Syrian Vice-President, told me. “Israel bombed to restore its credibility, and their objective is for us to keep talking about it. And by answering your questions I serve their objective. Why should I volunteer to do that?” Shara denied that his nation has a nuclear-weapons program. “The volume of articles about the bombing is incredible, and it’s not important that it’s a lie,” he said.
One top foreign-ministry official in Damascus told me that the target “was an old military building that had been abandoned by the Syrian military” years ago. But a senior Syrian intelligence general gave me a different account. “What they targeted was a building used for fertilizer and water pumps,” he said—part of a government effort to revitalize farming. “There is a large city”— Dayr az Zawr—“fifty kilometres away. Why would Syria put nuclear material near a city?” I interviewed the intelligence general again on my second visit to Damascus, and he reiterated that the targeted building was “at no time a military facility.” As to why Syria had not had a more aggressive response, if the target was so benign, the general said, “It was not fear—that’s all I’ll say.” As I left, I asked the general why Syria had not invited representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the bombing site and declare that no nuclear activity was taking place there. “They did not ask to come,” he said, and “Syria had no reason to ask them to come.”
An I.A.E.A. official dismissed that assertion when we spoke in Vienna a few days later. “The I.A.E.A. asked the Syrians to allow the agency to visit the site to verify its nature,” the I.A.E.A. official said. “Syria’s reply was that it was a military, not a nuclear, installation, and there would be no reason for the I.A.E.A. to go there. It would be in their and everyone’s interest to have the I.A.E.A. visit the site. If it was nuclear, it would leave fingerprints.”
In a subsequent interview, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to Washington, defended Syria’s decision not to invite the I.A.E.A. inspectors. “We will not get into the game of inviting foreign experts to visit every site that Israel claims is a nuclear facility,” Moustapha told me. “If we bring them in and they say there is nothing there, then Israel will say it made a mistake and bomb another site two weeks later. And if we then don’t let the I.A.E.A. in, Israel will say, ‘You see?’ This is nonsense. Why should we have to do this?”
Even if the site was not a nuclear installation, it is possible that the Syrians feared that an I.A.E.A. inquiry would uncover the presence of North Koreans there. In Syria, I was able to get some confirmation that North Koreans were at the target. A senior officer in Damascus with firsthand knowledge of the incident agreed to see me alone, at his home; my other interviews in Damascus took place in government offices. According to his account, North Koreans were present at the site, but only as paid construction workers. The senior officer said that the targeted building, when completed, would most likely have been used as a chemical-warfare facility. (Syria is not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and has been believed, for decades, to have a substantial chemical-weapons arsenal.)
The building contract with North Korea was a routine business deal, the senior officer said—from design to construction. (North Korea may, of course, have sent skilled technicians capable of doing less routine work.) Syria and North Korea have a long-standing partnership on military matters. “The contract between Syria and North Korea was old, from 2002, and it was running late,” the senior officer told me. “It was initially to be finished in 2005, and the Israelis might have expected it was further along.”
The North Korean laborers had been coming and going for “maybe six months” before the September bombing, the senior officer said, and his government concluded that the Israelis had picked up North Korean telephone chatter at the site. (This fit the timeline that Israeli officials had given me.) “The Israelis may have their own spies and watched the laborers being driven to the area,” the senior officer said. “The Koreans were not there at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to the site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and the Israelis may have concluded that even if there was a slight chance”—of it being a nuclear facility—“we’ll take that risk.”
On the days before the bombing, the Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might have added to their determination.
The attack was especially dramatic, the Syrian senior officer said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium illumination flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw the lights and the bombing, they thought there would be a commando raid,” the senior officer said. The building was destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that there were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had been on the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior officer said, “they found only cement.”
A senior Syrian official confirmed that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said, that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout Syria—“all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”
Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.
It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official, the network reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States and received satellite help and targeting information in response. At one point, it was reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.
Yet officials I spoke to in Israel heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in planning the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this story.)
There is evidence to support this view. The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in Syria.
Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but, according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said. “I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack, why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?
Last fall, aerospace industry and military sources told Aviation Week & Space Technology, an authoritative trade journal, that the United States had provided Israel with advice about “potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th attack, and monitored the radar as the mission took place. The magazine reported that the Israeli fighters, prior to bombing the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian radar facility near the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission and permitting them to complete their mission without interference.
The former U.S. senior intelligence official told me that, as he understood it, America’s involvement in the Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the Defense Intelligence Agency came to believe that Syria was installing a new Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system that was similar to the radar complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian airspace would trigger those defenses and expose them to Israeli and American exploitation, yielding valuable information about their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the idea of overflights, the former senior intelligence official said, because “it would stick it to Syria and show that we’re serious about Iran.” (The Vice-President’s office declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence official said that Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly, without retaliation from Syria. At the time, the former senior intelligence official said, the focus was on radar and air defenses, and not on any real or suspected nuclear facility. Israel’s claims about the target, which emerged later, caught many in the military and intelligence community—if not in the White House—by surprise.
The senior Israeli official, asked whether the attack was rooted in his country’s interest in Syria’s radar installations, told me, “Bullshit.” Whatever the Administration’s initial agenda, Israel seems to have been after something more.
The story of the Israeli bombing of Syria, with its mixture of satellite intelligence, intercepts, newspaper leaks, and shared assumptions, reminded some American diplomats and intelligence officials of an incident, ten years ago, involving North Korea. In mid-1998, American reconnaissance satellites photographed imagery of a major underground construction project at Kumchang-ri, twenty-five miles northwest of Yongbyon. “We were briefed that, without a doubt, this was a nuclear-related facility, and there was signals intelligence linking the construction brigade at Kumchang-ri to the nuclear complex at Yongbyon,” the former State Department intelligence expert recalled.
Charles Kartman, who was President Bill Clinton’s special envoy for peace talks with Korea, told me that the intelligence was considered a slam dunk by analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency, even though other agencies disagreed. “We had a debate going on inside the community, but the D.I.A. unilaterally took it to Capitol Hill,” Kartman said, forcing the issue and leading to a front-page Times story.
After months of negotiations, Kartman recalled, the North Koreans agreed, under diplomatic pressure, to grant access to Kumchang-ri. In return, they received aid, including assistance with a new potato-production program. Inspectors found little besides a series of empty tunnels. Robert Carlin, an expert on North Korea who retired in 2005 after serving more than thirty years with the C.I.A. and the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told me that the Kumchang-ri incident highlighted “an endemic weakness” in the American intelligence community. “People think they know the ending and then they go back and find the evidence that fits their story,” he said. “And then you get groupthink—and people reinforce each other.”
It seems that, as with Kumchang-ri, there was a genuine, if not unanimous, belief by Israeli intelligence that the Syrians were constructing something that could have serious national-security consequences. But why would the Israelis take the risk of provoking a military response, and perhaps a war, if there was, as it seems, no smoking gun? Mohamed ElBaradei, expressing his frustration, said, “If a country has any information about a nuclear activity in another country, it should inform the I.A.E.A.—not bomb first and ask questions later.”
One answer, suggested by David Albright, is that Israel did not trust the international arms-control community. “I can understand the Israeli point of view, given the history with Iran and Algeria,” Albright said. “Both nations had nuclear-weapons programs and, after being caught cheating, declared their reactors to be civil reactors, for peacetime use. The international groups, like the U.N. and the I.A.E.A, never shut them down.” Also, Israel may have calculated that risk of a counterattack was low: President Assad would undoubtedly conclude that the attack had the support of the Bush Administration and, therefore, that any response by Syria would also engage the U.S. (My conversations with officials in Syria bore out this assumption.)
In Tel Aviv, the senior Israeli official pointedly told me, “Syria still thinks Hezbollah won the war in Lebanon”—referring to the summer, 2006, fight between Israel and the Shiite organization headed by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. “Nasrallah knows how much that war cost—one-third of his fighters were killed, infrastructure was bombed, and ninety-five per cent of his strategic weapons were wiped out,” the Israeli official said. “But Assad has a Nasrallah complex and thinks Hezbollah won. And, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ This led to an adventurous mood in Damascus. Today, they are more sober.”
That notion was echoed by the ambassador of an Israeli ally who is posted in Tel Aviv. “The truth is not important,” the ambassador told me. “Israel was able to restore its credibility as a deterrent. That is the whole thing. No one will know what the real story is.”
There is evidence that the preëmptive raid on Syria was also meant as a warning about—and a model for—a preëmptive attack on Iran. When I visited Israel this winter, Iran was the overriding concern among political and defense officials I spoke to—not Syria. There was palpable anger toward Washington, in the wake of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded, on behalf of the American intelligence community, that Iran is not now constructing a nuclear weapon. Many in Israel view Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat; they believe that military action against Iran may be inevitable, and worry that America may not be there when needed. The N.I.E. was published in November, after a yearlong standoff involving Cheney’s office, which resisted the report’s findings. At the time of the raid, reports about the forthcoming N.I.E. and its general conclusion had already appeared.
Retired Major General Giora Eiland, who served as the national-security adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told me, “The Israeli military takes it as an assumption that one day we will need to have a military campaign against Iran, to slow and eliminate the nuclear option.” He added, “Whether the political situation will allow this is another question.”
In the weeks after the N.I.E.’s release, Bush insisted that the Iranian nuclear-weapons threat was as acute as ever, a theme he amplified during his nine-day Middle East trip after the New Year. “A lot of people heard that N.I.E. out here and said that George Bush and the Americans don’t take the Iranian threat seriously,” he told Greta Van Susteren, of Fox News. “And so this trip has been successful from the perspective of saying . . . we will keep the pressure on.”
Shortly after the bombing, a Chinese envoy and one of the Bush Administration’s senior national-security officials met in Washington. The Chinese envoy had just returned from a visit to Tehran, a person familiar with the discussion told me, and he wanted the White House to know that there were moderates there who were interested in talks. The national-security official rejected that possibility and told the envoy, as the person familiar with the discussion recalled, “‘You are aware of the recent Israeli statements about Syria. The Israelis are extremely serious about Iran and its nuclear program, and I believe that, if the United States government is unsuccessful in its diplomatic dealings with Iran, the Israelis will take it out militarily.’ He then told the envoy that he wanted him to convey this to his government—that the Israelis were serious.
“He was telling the Chinese leadership that they’d better warn Iran that we can’t hold back Israel, and that the Iranians should look at Syria and see what’s coming next if diplomacy fails,” the person familiar with the discussion said. “His message was that the Syrian attack was in part aimed at Iran.” ♦
by Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2008 edition
Israel and the U.S. have avoided comment on press reports about a nuclear facility.
Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border. The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war. But in the immediate aftermath nothing was heard from the government of Israel. In contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.
Within hours of the attack, Syria denounced Israel for invading its airspace, but its public statements were incomplete and contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some munitions in an unpopulated area after being challenged by Syrian air defenses, “which forced them to flee.” Four days later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said during a state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no casualties or property damage. It was not until October 1st that Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an interview with the BBC, acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes had hit their target, which he described as an “unused military building.” Assad added that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments were muted.
Despite official silence in Tel Aviv (and in Washington), in the days after the bombing the American and European media were flooded with reports, primarily based on information from anonymous government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed a nascent nuclear reactor that was secretly being assembled in Syria, with the help of North Korea. Beginning construction of a nuclear reactor in secret would be a violation of Syria’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.
The evidence was circumstantial but seemingly damning. The first reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear coöperation came on September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four points: the Israeli intelligence community had learned of a North Korean connection to a construction site in an agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before the bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean; satellite imagery strongly suggested that the building under construction was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be stopped. There were also reports—by ABC News and others—that some of the Israeli intelligence had been shared in advance with the United States, which had raised no objection to the bombing.
The Israeli government still declined to make any statement about the incident. Military censorship on dispatches about the raid was imposed for several weeks, and the Israeli press resorted to recycling the disclosures in the foreign press. In the first days after the attack, there had been many critical stories in the Israeli press speculating about the bombing, and the possibility that it could lead to a conflict with Syria. Larry Derfner, a columnist writing in the Jerusalem Post, described the raid as “the sort of thing that starts wars.” But, once reports about the nuclear issue and other details circulated, the domestic criticism subsided.
At a news conference on September 20th, President George W. Bush was asked about the incident four times but said, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements became part of the story. “The silence from all parties has been deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but the message to Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected of pursuing a nuclear weapon—“is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy them.”
It was evident that officials in Israel and the United States, although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for the news media to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli intelligence approached me, with a version of the standard story, including colorful but, as it turned out, unconfirmable details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the moment it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective gear as they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence monitoring trucks from the docks to the target site. On October 3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of the same information, published an overheated account of the September 6th raid, claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating threat,” and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had warned, “If people had known how close we came to World War Three that day there’d have been mass panic.”
However, in three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”
Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told me, “Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing. There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political.” Cirincione castigated the press corps for its handling of the story. “I think some of our best journalists were used,” he said.
A similar message emerged at briefings given to select members of Congress within weeks of the attack. The briefings, conducted by intelligence agencies, focussed on what Washington knew about the September 6th raid. One concern was whether North Korea had done anything that might cause the U.S. to back away from ongoing six-nation talks about its nuclear program. A legislator who took part in one such briefing said afterward, according to a member of his staff, that he had heard nothing that caused him “to have any doubts” about the North Korean negotiations—“nothing that should cause a pause.” The legislator’s conclusion, the staff member said, was “There’s nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”
Morton Abramowitz, a former Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research, told me that he was astonished by the lack of response. “Anytime you bomb another state, that’s a big deal,” he said. “But where’s the outcry, particularly from the concerned states and the U.N.? Something’s amiss.”
Israel could, of course, have damning evidence that it refuses to disclose. But there are serious and unexamined contradictions in the various published accounts of the September 6th bombing.
The main piece of evidence to emerge publicly that Syria was building a reactor arrived on October 23rd, when David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, a highly respected nonprofit research group, released a satellite image of the target. The photograph had been taken by a commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe, of Longmont, Colorado, on August 10th, four weeks before the bombing, and showed a square building and a nearby water-pumping station. In an analysis released at the same time, Albright, a physicist who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that the building, as viewed from space, had roughly the same length and width as a reactor building at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear facility. “The tall building in the image may house a reactor under construction and the pump station along the river may have been intended to supply cooling water to the reactor,” Albright said. He concluded his analysis by posing a series of rhetorical questions that assumed that the target was a nuclear facility:
How far along was the reactor construction project when it was bombed? What was the extent of nuclear assistance from North Korea? Which reactor components did Syria obtain from North Korea or elsewhere, and where are they now?He was later quoted in the Washington Post saying, “I’m pretty convinced that Syria was trying to build a nuclear reactor.”
When I asked Albright how he had pinpointed the target, he told me that he and a colleague, Paul Brannan, “did a lot of hard work”—culling press reports and poring over DigitalGlobe imagery—“before coming up with the site.” Albright then shared his findings with Robin Wright and other journalists at the Post, who, after checking with Administration officials, told him that the building was, indeed, the one targeted by the Israelis. “We did not release the information until we got direct confirmation from the Washington Post,” he told me. The Post’s sources in the Administration, he understood, had access to far more detailed images obtained by U.S. intelligence satellites. The Post ran a story, without printing the imagery, on October 19th, reporting that “U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the aftermath of the attack” had concluded that the site had the “signature,” or characteristics, of a reactor “similar in structure to North Korea’s facilities”—a conclusion with which Albright then agreed. In other words, the Albright and the Post reports, which appeared to independently reinforce each other, stemmed in part from the same sources.
Albright told me that before going public he had met privately with Israeli officials. “I wanted to be sure in my own mind that the Israelis thought it was a reactor, and I was,” he said. “They never explicitly said it was nuclear, but they ruled out the possibility that it was a missile, chemical-warfare, or radar site. By a process of elimination, I was left with nuclear.”
Two days after his first report, Albright released a satellite image of the bombed site, taken by DigitalGlobe on October 24th, seven weeks after the bombing. The new image showed that the target area had been levelled and the ground scraped. Albright said that it hinted of a coverup—cleansing the bombing site could make it difficult for weapons inspectors to determine its precise nature. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” he told the Times. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.” This assessment was widely shared in the press. (In mid-January, the Times reported that recent imagery from DigitalGlobe showed that a storage facility, or something similar, had been constructed, in an obvious rush, at the bombing site.)
Proliferation experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency and others in the arms-control community disputed Albright’s interpretation of the images. “People here were baffled by this, and thought that Albright had stuck his neck out,” a diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is headquartered, told me. “The I.A.E.A. has been consistently telling journalists that it is skeptical about the Syrian nuclear story, but the reporters are so convinced.”
A second diplomat in Vienna acidly commented on the images: “A square building is a square building.” The diplomat, who is familiar with the use of satellite imagery for nuclear verification, added that the I.A.E.A. “does not have enough information to conclude anything about the exact nature of the facility. They see a building with some geometry near a river that could be identified as nuclear-related. But they cannot credibly conclude that is so. As far as information coming from open sources beyond imagery, it’s a struggle to extract information from all of the noise that comes from political agendas.”
Much of what one would expect to see around a secret nuclear site was lacking at the target, a former State Department intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for the Congress said. “There is no security around the building,” he said. “No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex.” Jeffrey Lewis, who heads the non-proliferation program at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, told me that, even if the width and the length of the building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to extract the control rods, an essential step in the operation of the reactor; nor was there evidence in the published imagery of major underground construction. “All you could see was a box,” Lewis said. “You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It’s just a box.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, said, “We don’t have any proof of a reactor—no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence.” Some well-informed defense consultants and former intelligence officials asked why, if there was compelling evidence of nuclear cheating involving North Korea, a member of the President’s axis of evil, and Syria, which the U.S. considers a state sponsor of terrorism, the Bush Administration would not insist on making it public.
When I went to Israel in late December, the government was still maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some current and former officials and military officers were willing to speak without attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had been accurate. “Don’t you write that there was nothing there!” a senior Israeli official, who is in a position to know the details of the raid on Syria, said, shaking a finger at me. “The thing in Syria was real.”
Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, who served as deputy national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced that there was a threat. “It may have been a perception of a conviction, but there was something there,” Brom said. “It was the beginning of a nuclear project.” However, by the date of our talk, Brom told me, “The question of whether it was there or not is not that relevant anymore.”
Albright, when I spoke to him in December, was far more circumspect than he had been in October. “We never said ‘we know’ it was a reactor, based on the image,” Albright said. “We wanted to make sure that the image was consistent with a reactor, and, from my point of view, it was. But that doesn’t confirm it’s a reactor.”
The journey of the Al Hamed, a small coastal trader, became a centerpiece in accounts of the September 6th bombing. On September 15th, the Washington Post reported that “a prominent U.S. expert on the Middle East” said that the attack “appears to have been linked to the arrival . . . of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.” The article went on to cite the expert’s belief that “the emerging consensus in Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment.” Other press reports identified the Al Hamed as a “suspicious North Korean” ship.
But there is evidence that the Al Hamed could not have been carrying sensitive cargo—or any cargo—from North Korea. International shipping is carefully monitored by Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit, which relies on a network of agents as well as on port logs and other records. In addition, most merchant ships are now required to operate a transponder device called an A.I.S., for automatic identification system. This device, which was on board the Al Hamed, works in a manner similar to a transponder on a commercial aircraft—beaming a constant, very high-frequency position report. (The U.S. Navy monitors international sea traffic with the aid of dedicated satellites, at a secret facility in suburban Washington.)
According to Marine Intelligence Unit records, the Al Hamed, which was built in 1965, had been operating for years in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with no indication of any recent visits to North Korea. The records show that the Al Hamed arrived at Tartus on September 3rd—the ship’s fifth visit to Syria in five months. (It was one of eight ships that arrived that day; although it is possible that one of the others was carrying illicit materials, only the Al Hamed has been named in the media.) The ship’s registry was constantly changing. The Al Hamed flew the South Korean flag before switching to North Korea in November of 2005, and then to Comoros. (Ships often fly flags of convenience, registering with different countries, in many cases to avoid taxes or onerous regulations.) At the time of the bombing, according to Lloyd’s, it was flying a Comoran flag and was owned by four Syrian nationals. In earlier years, under other owners, the ship seems to have operated under Russian, Estonian, Turkish, and Honduran flags. Lloyd’s records show that the ship had apparently not passed through the Suez Canal—the main route from the Mediterranean to the Far East—since at least 1998.
Among the groups that keep track of international shipping is Greenpeace. Martini Gotjé, who monitors illegal fishing for the organization and was among the first to raise questions about the Al Hamed, told me, “I’ve been at sea for forty-one years, and I can tell you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was nothing—in rotten shape. You wouldn’t be able to load heavy cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.”
If the Israelis’ target in Syria was not a nuclear site, why didn’t the Syrians respond more forcefully? Syria complained at the United Nations but did little to press the issue. And, if the site wasn’t a partially built reactor, what was it?
During two trips to Damascus after the Israeli raid, I interviewed many senior government and intelligence officials. None of President Assad’s close advisers told me the same story, though some of the stories were more revealing—and more plausible—than others. In general, Syrian officials seemed more eager to analyze Israel’s motives than to discuss what had been attacked. “I hesitate to answer any journalist’s questions about it,” Faruq al-Shara, the Syrian Vice-President, told me. “Israel bombed to restore its credibility, and their objective is for us to keep talking about it. And by answering your questions I serve their objective. Why should I volunteer to do that?” Shara denied that his nation has a nuclear-weapons program. “The volume of articles about the bombing is incredible, and it’s not important that it’s a lie,” he said.
One top foreign-ministry official in Damascus told me that the target “was an old military building that had been abandoned by the Syrian military” years ago. But a senior Syrian intelligence general gave me a different account. “What they targeted was a building used for fertilizer and water pumps,” he said—part of a government effort to revitalize farming. “There is a large city”— Dayr az Zawr—“fifty kilometres away. Why would Syria put nuclear material near a city?” I interviewed the intelligence general again on my second visit to Damascus, and he reiterated that the targeted building was “at no time a military facility.” As to why Syria had not had a more aggressive response, if the target was so benign, the general said, “It was not fear—that’s all I’ll say.” As I left, I asked the general why Syria had not invited representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the bombing site and declare that no nuclear activity was taking place there. “They did not ask to come,” he said, and “Syria had no reason to ask them to come.”
An I.A.E.A. official dismissed that assertion when we spoke in Vienna a few days later. “The I.A.E.A. asked the Syrians to allow the agency to visit the site to verify its nature,” the I.A.E.A. official said. “Syria’s reply was that it was a military, not a nuclear, installation, and there would be no reason for the I.A.E.A. to go there. It would be in their and everyone’s interest to have the I.A.E.A. visit the site. If it was nuclear, it would leave fingerprints.”
In a subsequent interview, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to Washington, defended Syria’s decision not to invite the I.A.E.A. inspectors. “We will not get into the game of inviting foreign experts to visit every site that Israel claims is a nuclear facility,” Moustapha told me. “If we bring them in and they say there is nothing there, then Israel will say it made a mistake and bomb another site two weeks later. And if we then don’t let the I.A.E.A. in, Israel will say, ‘You see?’ This is nonsense. Why should we have to do this?”
Even if the site was not a nuclear installation, it is possible that the Syrians feared that an I.A.E.A. inquiry would uncover the presence of North Koreans there. In Syria, I was able to get some confirmation that North Koreans were at the target. A senior officer in Damascus with firsthand knowledge of the incident agreed to see me alone, at his home; my other interviews in Damascus took place in government offices. According to his account, North Koreans were present at the site, but only as paid construction workers. The senior officer said that the targeted building, when completed, would most likely have been used as a chemical-warfare facility. (Syria is not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and has been believed, for decades, to have a substantial chemical-weapons arsenal.)
The building contract with North Korea was a routine business deal, the senior officer said—from design to construction. (North Korea may, of course, have sent skilled technicians capable of doing less routine work.) Syria and North Korea have a long-standing partnership on military matters. “The contract between Syria and North Korea was old, from 2002, and it was running late,” the senior officer told me. “It was initially to be finished in 2005, and the Israelis might have expected it was further along.”
The North Korean laborers had been coming and going for “maybe six months” before the September bombing, the senior officer said, and his government concluded that the Israelis had picked up North Korean telephone chatter at the site. (This fit the timeline that Israeli officials had given me.) “The Israelis may have their own spies and watched the laborers being driven to the area,” the senior officer said. “The Koreans were not there at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to the site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and the Israelis may have concluded that even if there was a slight chance”—of it being a nuclear facility—“we’ll take that risk.”
On the days before the bombing, the Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might have added to their determination.
The attack was especially dramatic, the Syrian senior officer said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium illumination flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw the lights and the bombing, they thought there would be a commando raid,” the senior officer said. The building was destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that there were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had been on the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior officer said, “they found only cement.”
A senior Syrian official confirmed that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said, that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout Syria—“all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”
Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.
It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official, the network reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States and received satellite help and targeting information in response. At one point, it was reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.
Yet officials I spoke to in Israel heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in planning the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this story.)
There is evidence to support this view. The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in Syria.
Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but, according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said. “I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack, why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?
Last fall, aerospace industry and military sources told Aviation Week & Space Technology, an authoritative trade journal, that the United States had provided Israel with advice about “potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th attack, and monitored the radar as the mission took place. The magazine reported that the Israeli fighters, prior to bombing the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian radar facility near the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission and permitting them to complete their mission without interference.
The former U.S. senior intelligence official told me that, as he understood it, America’s involvement in the Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the Defense Intelligence Agency came to believe that Syria was installing a new Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system that was similar to the radar complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian airspace would trigger those defenses and expose them to Israeli and American exploitation, yielding valuable information about their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the idea of overflights, the former senior intelligence official said, because “it would stick it to Syria and show that we’re serious about Iran.” (The Vice-President’s office declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence official said that Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly, without retaliation from Syria. At the time, the former senior intelligence official said, the focus was on radar and air defenses, and not on any real or suspected nuclear facility. Israel’s claims about the target, which emerged later, caught many in the military and intelligence community—if not in the White House—by surprise.
The senior Israeli official, asked whether the attack was rooted in his country’s interest in Syria’s radar installations, told me, “Bullshit.” Whatever the Administration’s initial agenda, Israel seems to have been after something more.
The story of the Israeli bombing of Syria, with its mixture of satellite intelligence, intercepts, newspaper leaks, and shared assumptions, reminded some American diplomats and intelligence officials of an incident, ten years ago, involving North Korea. In mid-1998, American reconnaissance satellites photographed imagery of a major underground construction project at Kumchang-ri, twenty-five miles northwest of Yongbyon. “We were briefed that, without a doubt, this was a nuclear-related facility, and there was signals intelligence linking the construction brigade at Kumchang-ri to the nuclear complex at Yongbyon,” the former State Department intelligence expert recalled.
Charles Kartman, who was President Bill Clinton’s special envoy for peace talks with Korea, told me that the intelligence was considered a slam dunk by analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency, even though other agencies disagreed. “We had a debate going on inside the community, but the D.I.A. unilaterally took it to Capitol Hill,” Kartman said, forcing the issue and leading to a front-page Times story.
After months of negotiations, Kartman recalled, the North Koreans agreed, under diplomatic pressure, to grant access to Kumchang-ri. In return, they received aid, including assistance with a new potato-production program. Inspectors found little besides a series of empty tunnels. Robert Carlin, an expert on North Korea who retired in 2005 after serving more than thirty years with the C.I.A. and the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told me that the Kumchang-ri incident highlighted “an endemic weakness” in the American intelligence community. “People think they know the ending and then they go back and find the evidence that fits their story,” he said. “And then you get groupthink—and people reinforce each other.”
It seems that, as with Kumchang-ri, there was a genuine, if not unanimous, belief by Israeli intelligence that the Syrians were constructing something that could have serious national-security consequences. But why would the Israelis take the risk of provoking a military response, and perhaps a war, if there was, as it seems, no smoking gun? Mohamed ElBaradei, expressing his frustration, said, “If a country has any information about a nuclear activity in another country, it should inform the I.A.E.A.—not bomb first and ask questions later.”
One answer, suggested by David Albright, is that Israel did not trust the international arms-control community. “I can understand the Israeli point of view, given the history with Iran and Algeria,” Albright said. “Both nations had nuclear-weapons programs and, after being caught cheating, declared their reactors to be civil reactors, for peacetime use. The international groups, like the U.N. and the I.A.E.A, never shut them down.” Also, Israel may have calculated that risk of a counterattack was low: President Assad would undoubtedly conclude that the attack had the support of the Bush Administration and, therefore, that any response by Syria would also engage the U.S. (My conversations with officials in Syria bore out this assumption.)
In Tel Aviv, the senior Israeli official pointedly told me, “Syria still thinks Hezbollah won the war in Lebanon”—referring to the summer, 2006, fight between Israel and the Shiite organization headed by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. “Nasrallah knows how much that war cost—one-third of his fighters were killed, infrastructure was bombed, and ninety-five per cent of his strategic weapons were wiped out,” the Israeli official said. “But Assad has a Nasrallah complex and thinks Hezbollah won. And, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ This led to an adventurous mood in Damascus. Today, they are more sober.”
That notion was echoed by the ambassador of an Israeli ally who is posted in Tel Aviv. “The truth is not important,” the ambassador told me. “Israel was able to restore its credibility as a deterrent. That is the whole thing. No one will know what the real story is.”
There is evidence that the preëmptive raid on Syria was also meant as a warning about—and a model for—a preëmptive attack on Iran. When I visited Israel this winter, Iran was the overriding concern among political and defense officials I spoke to—not Syria. There was palpable anger toward Washington, in the wake of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded, on behalf of the American intelligence community, that Iran is not now constructing a nuclear weapon. Many in Israel view Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat; they believe that military action against Iran may be inevitable, and worry that America may not be there when needed. The N.I.E. was published in November, after a yearlong standoff involving Cheney’s office, which resisted the report’s findings. At the time of the raid, reports about the forthcoming N.I.E. and its general conclusion had already appeared.
Retired Major General Giora Eiland, who served as the national-security adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told me, “The Israeli military takes it as an assumption that one day we will need to have a military campaign against Iran, to slow and eliminate the nuclear option.” He added, “Whether the political situation will allow this is another question.”
In the weeks after the N.I.E.’s release, Bush insisted that the Iranian nuclear-weapons threat was as acute as ever, a theme he amplified during his nine-day Middle East trip after the New Year. “A lot of people heard that N.I.E. out here and said that George Bush and the Americans don’t take the Iranian threat seriously,” he told Greta Van Susteren, of Fox News. “And so this trip has been successful from the perspective of saying . . . we will keep the pressure on.”
Shortly after the bombing, a Chinese envoy and one of the Bush Administration’s senior national-security officials met in Washington. The Chinese envoy had just returned from a visit to Tehran, a person familiar with the discussion told me, and he wanted the White House to know that there were moderates there who were interested in talks. The national-security official rejected that possibility and told the envoy, as the person familiar with the discussion recalled, “‘You are aware of the recent Israeli statements about Syria. The Israelis are extremely serious about Iran and its nuclear program, and I believe that, if the United States government is unsuccessful in its diplomatic dealings with Iran, the Israelis will take it out militarily.’ He then told the envoy that he wanted him to convey this to his government—that the Israelis were serious.
“He was telling the Chinese leadership that they’d better warn Iran that we can’t hold back Israel, and that the Iranians should look at Syria and see what’s coming next if diplomacy fails,” the person familiar with the discussion said. “His message was that the Syrian attack was in part aimed at Iran.” ♦
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