Syria planned to supply Iran with nuclear fuel, Israel says
If there is one thing that simply never changes it is the ridiculous claims made by the US and Israel regarding what Israel's enemies appear to be getting up to in the nuclear arena.
Late last year Israel invaded Syrian airspace and dropped bombs on what she later claimed was a nuclear facility, at the time she claimed nothing at all officially and both the US and Israel were remarkably coy about just what exactly had taken place.
Now the Israelis are telling us a different and even more ridiculous story:
Notice how many of both Israel's and the US's enemies they manage to bring into this fantasy. Syria was doing this to aid the Iranians according to the Israelis, but the Americans have previously claimed that North Korea were helping the Syrians to build this reactor.Israel believes that Syria was planning to supply Iran with spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium from the site it bombed last September, and which is currently being inspected by the UN's nuclear watchdog.
The claim from an adviser to Israel's national security council, came yesterday as speculation mounts about a possible Israeli attack on Iran. The Israeli government officially backs UN sanctions to force Tehran to halt its uranium enrichment but has little faith they will succeed.
Details about the alleged Syrian reactor and the Israeli raid remain shrouded in secrecy. Syria denies it has or had a covert nuclear weapons programme and insists the Israelis hit an ordinary military structure being built at al-Kibar, in the country's north-eastern desert.
The US claimed in April that Syria had almost completed the plant with the help of North Korea, which evaded the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) checks and tested a nuclear device in 2006. Officials in Damascus accused the US of fabricating evidence in collusion with Israel, which unlike Syria and Iran is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and is the Middle East's only nuclear power. Washington did not mention any link to Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Now, were Syria to have actually been doing what Israel and the US claim, wouldn't it have been more sensible for Israel and the US to have notified the IAEA and alerted the whole world to this Syrian duplicity?
The IAEA would have gone in immediately and none of us would be under any doubt about what had been taking place in Syria. But they didn't choose that path. They chose to attack a Syrian facility, which many of us think was simply a warning to show the Iranians how easily their airspace could be invaded, and they then chose to make no public statement regarding what they had just done.
They had several underlings leak stories regarding nuclear facilities and the like but, strangely, neither the Israeli nor the US government would go on the record and state what had just happened.
The IAEA put Syria on its proliferation watch-list in April after receiving intelligence photographs from the US, said to show a reactor that could have yielded plutonium. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of IAEA, condemned the Israeli raid and criticised the US for failing to share intelligence on Syria sooner. Last week ElBaradei cast doubt on his inspectors' ability to establish the nature of the site. "It is doubtful that we will find anything there now, assuming there was anything there in the first place," he said.ElBaredei's cynicism perfectly matches my own. Now that it is almost impossible to verify what actually took place there, the Israelis come out with their story. Indeed, it is notable that neither Israel or the US have ever provided the world with a post strike satellite image showing evidence of a reactor at this facility. They have shown us evidence of a clean up and asked that we draw conclusions from this, but we have never seen any images between the date of the strike and the cleaned up facility. Why not? Obviously, in my opinion, because the images taken after the strike do not show evidence of a reactor. If they did, you can bet your bottom dollar that they would be public by now.
It would have better suited both US and Israeli interests to have the IAEA inspect the facility and inform the world that the Syrians were engaged in nuclear activity, if that was, indeed, what they were up to.
The fact that they didn't do so, and the fact that - at the time - they refused to even confirm what had or hadn't taken place, makes me highly suspicious of any ridiculous claim that they now try to peddle.
Remember, had Israel taken a different path this could all now be a matter of undisputed fact. But it's not. It's murky and asks that we rely on Israel's interpretation of what took place, an interpretation that she is only now supplying months after the event.
And this latest bullshit is still not officially coming from the Israeli government, it is coming from "an adviser to Israel's national security council". Nothing about this story - from start to finish - has ever been on the record.
I'm sorry. It's horseshit, and I'm not buying it.
Click title for full article.
No comments:
Post a Comment