What kind of country have we become?
The International Atomic Energy Agency - the United Nations nuclear watchdog - has not been able to conduct an investigation into the events surrounding the Sept. 6 Israeli bombing of a Syrian military installation because neither the Bush administration nor Israel are cooperating.
A diplomatic source close to the Vienna based IAEA told Raw Story that both the United States and Israel have been approached by the organization requesting supporting evidence of a nuclear reactor which media sources have cited, based on anonymous sources in both governments, as the reason for the Israeli strike.
The source also explained that the satellite footage, which the IAEA obtained through commercial channels for lack of any “credible evidence,” does not show a nuclear reactor in the early construction phase.
Full article at Raw Story
Still not sure what happened here. Was there a nuclear facility? Things are not what they seem….or what they’d like us to believe.
The UN nuclear watchdog stated Monday it had no information about any “undeclared nuclear facility in Syria” and it was investigating media reports that such a site had been the target of an Israeli air strike last month. The International Atomic Energy Agency “has no information about any undeclared nuclear facility in Syria and no information about recent reports,” spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said, according to AFP.
“We would obviously investigate any relevant information coming our way. The IAEA Secretariat expects any country having information about nuclear-related activities in another country to provide that information to the IAEA.”
The IAEA was “in contact with the Syrian authorities to verify the authenticity of these reports,” Fleming added.
According to The New York Times, Israel bombed a site in Syria last month that Israeli and US intelligence believe was a partly built nuclear reactor possibly modeled after one in North Korea.
Source
Juan Coles take on it:
The NYT has been pushing the story that the Israeli air strike on Syria on September 6 came in response to intelligence that Syria was building a nuclear reactor at the site with clandestine North Korean help. There are reasons to question the accuracy of the Israeli story, which at some points has included allegations that there was evidence of enriched nuclear material at the site; such material could only be produced at the end of a long research and construction project, not at the beginning. The Israelis are trigger-happy and their intelligence on the Arab world is most often sloppy (the then head of Mossad is still insisting that Iraq had WMD), so one cannot assume there was anything to their apprehensions. In the absence of any inspection of the bombed site, one cannot assume there wasn’t, either. Some analysts think the site was just run of the mill anti-aircraft batteries newly bought from the Russians. The strike probably killed the November peace process summit that Condi Rice had been working toward; Syria says it won’t attend.
Retired CIA analyst of Arab affairs Ray Close tells us what he thinks about it all:
“This is my Monday morning (speculative) analysis of the mysterious Israeli air attack on Syria on September 6, 2007 . . :
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