Black News for Black Friday--The Syrian Bomb

About ten weeks ago, Israel carried out a precision bombing raid on what everyone has (publicly) presumed was a nuclear reactor under construction. One thing set my internal alarms off was the near complete absence of protest. The Syrians were quiet, even the United Nations were relatively quiet on this one.

I presumed it was because of the ease with which Israel penetrated the best Missile Radar Defense Systems that Russia could provide, the same systems that Iran was boasting about that would prevent Israel or the USA from attacking Iran's own nuclear production facilities.

(If you are a Lefty, and don't read military stuff...check out Aviation Week for some of the details and speculation).

Now, some details are emerging that suggest that North Korea has been exporting it's own nuclear bomb-making material to Syria (where else, one might wonder? thanks to Democrats hampering President Bush at every step) where things were going swingingly, that is until they were destroyed by a more effective method than any possible UN action...bombs wielded by Freedom-Loving People!

What reinforces Even's suspicion that the structure attacked in Syria was in fact a bomb assembly plant is the fact that the satellite photos taken after the bombing clearly show that the Syrians made an effort to bury the entire site under piles of earth. "They did so because of the lethal nature of the material that was in the structure, and that can be plutonium," he said. That may also be the reason they refused to allow IAEA inspectors to visit the site and take samples of the earth, which would give away their secret.

Another piece of information crucial for reinforcing Even's assumption is the scant attention paid in the Israeli media to an op-ed published last month in The Wall Street Journal by two members of the U.S. Congress, Peter Hoekstra and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Hoekstra is the senior Republican member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Ros-Lehtinen is the senior Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. They expressed their anger at the fact that the Bush administration "has thrown an unprecedented veil of secrecy around the Israeli airstrike. It has briefed only a handful of very senior members of Congress, leaving the vast majority of foreign relations and intelligence committee members in the dark. We are among the very few who were briefed, but we have been sworn to secrecy on this matter."

They write in the article that Syria received "nuclear expertise or material" from North Korea, and in the same breath they mention Iran, without explaining why. They claim that the administration leaks are intentionally vague: to justify the Israeli attack but also to blur North Korea's part in the affair.

The two Congressmen have a clear agenda: They want the administration to remove the cloak of secrecy and tell the members of Congress and the public the truth about what happened, in the belief that such information will lead the majority in Congress to understand that the negotiations with North Korea should be stopped.

North Korea's consent to shut down the Yongbyon reactor and to allow renewed international monitoring of it (although it is not clear what will happen to the fissionable material in its possession - enriched plutonium and uranium), was achieved after exhausting contacts that lasted for about five years, with China, Russia, the U.S., Japan and South Korea. In exchange, North Korea will receive economic assistance and fuel. Hoekstra and Ros-Lehtinen are apparently aware that revealing the truth about North Korea's role will lead to pressure on the U.S. administration to discontinue the contacts with the regime in Pyongyang. But for exactly the same reason, the administration is not interested in doing so, particularly not at this sensitive time when it is trying to prevent Iran's nuclear program.

Source: Ha'aretz

Which brings me to remember this parody wasn'ty that far off the mark, despite GOP's lack of spine in not running this on TV: