US Intelligence: Bush Admin, Israel Lied About Syrian Raid

US Intelligence: Bush Admin, Israel Lied About Syrian Raid

So then ... what was the true purpose of this illegal Act of Aggression?

This appears to have been a 'back door' attack on Iran, since Syria and Iran

have mutual defense agreements.

If action isn't taken against the Extremists in the Knesset, they WILL

plunge us all into a destructive war, from which we may never recover.

US intelligence does not show Syrian nuclear weapons program, officials say

Larisa Alexandrovna

Published: Thursday October 18, 2007

Cheney hand seen behind leaks of 'misleading' stories

Allegations that a Syrian envoy admitted during a United Nations meeting

Oct. 17 that an Israeli air strike hit a nuclear facility in September are

inaccurate and have raised the ire of some in the US intelligence community,

who see the Vice President's hand as allegedly being behind the

disinformation.

A United Nations press release discussing the General Assembly's Disarmament

Committee meeting mistranslated comments ascribed to an unnamed Syrian

diplomat as saying that Israel had on various occasions "taken action

against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria."

The UN has since gone through the tape recordings of the meeting and found

that there was no mention of the word "nuclear" at all. According to the UN,

the error was one of translation, involving several interpreters translating

the same meeting.

Recent news articles, however, continue to make allegations and suggest that

a nuclear weapons facility was hit -- something that the Syrian government

has denied, the Israeli government has not officially confirmed and US

intelligence does not show.

According to current and former intelligence sources, the US intelligence

community has seen no evidence of a nuclear facility being hit.

US intelligence "found no radiation signatures after the bombing, so there

was no uranium or plutonium present," said one official, wishing to remain

anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject.

"We don't have any independent intelligence that it was a nuclear

facility -- only the assertions by the Israelis and some ambiguous satellite

photography from them that shows a building, which the Syrians admitted was

a military facility."

Their statements come as officials claim Syria has begun to 'disassemble'

the site. An article today quotes former Administration hawk and onetime

Bush United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who links Syria's alleged action

with Iran.

Israel has not spoken publicly about the air raid, other than to confirm

that it happened. The confirmation came nearly a month after the Sept. 6

bombing, and provided only that "Israeli officials said the strike took

place deep inside Syria."

"'Radiation signatures' are just the particular type of radiation that some

activity would give off," Dr. Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear weapons expert at the

Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told

RAW STORY. "For example, a nuclear bomb would produce a lot of radioactivity

and a nuclear reactor explosion would produce a lot of radioactivity but if

you measure it carefully so you can tell, not just that it is radioactive,

but exactly what particular isotopes are contributing, then it is easy to

tell the difference.

"If a reactor explodes or is blown up then I can, with careful measurements

of the particular types of radiation, tell what the fuel was for the reactor

and how long the reactor had been running when it was hit," Oelrich added.

"It gets complicated because you have to take into account how different

species are transported in the air, how fast they decay, etc. but it can be

done."

An earlier report by Raw Story cited Vincent Cannistraro, Director of

Intelligence Programs for the National Security Council under President

Ronald Reagan and Chief of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency's

Counterterrorism Center under President George H. W. Bush, as saying that

what the Israelis hit was "absolutely not a nuclear weapons facility."

The Central Intelligence Agency, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

Administration said to leak stories to press

One US intelligence source familiar with the events expressed concern about

recent news reports describing Syria as having a functioning nuclear weapons

program and cautioned against attributing those reports to the US

intelligence community.

"The allegations that North Korea was helping to build a nuclear reactor

have not been substantiated by US intelligence," said this intelligence

official, adding, " but that hasn't stopped Dick Cheney and his minions at

the NSC, Elliot Abrams and Steve Hadley, from leaking the information [to

the press], which appears to be misleading in the extreme."

Requests for comment to the National Security Council went unanswered.

Elliot Abrams, who currently serves as the Deputy National Security Adviser

for Global Democracy Strategy, was convicted during the Iran-Contra scandal

for withholding information from Congress. He was pardoned by President

George H. W. Bush along with other Iran-Contra players, some of whom have

reappeared in the current Bush administration.

Iran Contra was a criminal scandal in which the Reagan-Bush White House sold

weapons to Iran - an avowed enemy of the United States - then funneled the

money to extremist anti-Communist group of guerrilla fighters called the

Contras, who were fighting the democratically elected government of

Nicaragua.

A failed coup in 2002 against Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, is also

attributed to the approval of Abrams, according to an investigation by the

UK Guardian.

Prior to the Iraq war, now-National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was an

integral part of misleading intelligence dissemination and approved

clandestine meetings between Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and

members of a secretive cabal inside the Department of Defense's

controversial Office of Special Plans.

During a 2006 interview with neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen, Raw

Story was able to obtain the first on the record confirmation of the trips

having been approved by the National Security Council, including the then

National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice:

"Obviously Hadley did not unilaterally do anything. The Pentagon paid for

the expenses of the two DOD officials, and the American ambassador in Rome

was fully briefed both before and after the meetings," Ledeen said.

What concerns intelligence officials is what appears to be manipulation of

the press and strategic leaks to the public of false information,

undercutting professional intelligence analysis, similar to what occurred

before the Iraq war in an apparent effort to bolster support for engaging

Iran.

Larisa Alexandrovna is managing editor of investigative news for Raw Story

and regularly reports on intelligence and national security stories. Contact

her at larisa (at) rawstory.com.

rawstory.com/news/2007/US_Intelligence_does_not_show_Syrian_1018.html

So much for Israel's claim that they bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, and

that the building of that facility was assisted by North Korea!

UN: Action to be taken against interpreter for false report that Syria has a

nuclear facility

The Associated PressPublished: October 17, 2007

----

UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations said Thursday action would be taken

against the interpreter responsible for an erroneous report that Syria has a

nuclear facility.

Syria denied that one of its representatives told the U.N. General

Assembly's committee that deals with disarmament on Tuesday that Israel had

attacked a Syrian nuclear facility. It said the representative was

misquoted, demanded a correction, and insisted that "such facilities do not

exist in Syria."

After more than seven hours of investigation Wednesday, U.N. officials

agreed the Syrian delegate was misquoted. "There was an interpretation

error," U.N. associate spokesman Farhan Haq said. "There was no use of the

word nuclear."

The U.N. expressed regret for the incident.

The mistake made headlines in the Middle East and heightened concerns over

Damascus' nuclear ambitions. Those ambitions were under scrutiny following a

Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike on an unknown target in northeastern Syria near

the border with Turkey. Widespread reports say it may have been a nascent

nuclear facility, a claim Syria has denied.

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The incident started Tuesday night with a U.N. press summary in English of

the disarmament committee's proceedings that paraphrased the Syrian

representative as saying, "Israel was the fourth largest exporter of weapons

of mass destruction and a violator of other nations' airspace, and it had

taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in

Syria."

The Syrian representative spoke in Arabic, but Haq said Thursday the problem

was not the translation from Arabic. An interpreter who worked from Arabic

into French was fairly accurate, he said.

The problem occurred when interpreter translated the statement into English

from French, Haq said.

"Action will be taken against that freelance interpreter to the fullest

extent of the U.N. rules and regulations," Haq said, refusing to comment

further on what that action might be.

Other U.N. staffers familiar with the rules said the freelance interpreter

likely works on some kind of contract with the U.N. translation service that

will not be renewed. The staffers spoke on condition of anonymity because

they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Earlier Thursday, U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas told reporters: "We regret

the error and the department that deals with General Assembly affairs is

looking further into the incident."

She confirmed that the Syrian Mission had discussed the matter with the

Department of General Assembly and Conference Management. She added that any

reporter who spoke Arabic and listened to the original tape recording of the

Syrian delegate would realize the mistake.

According to the corrected text, the Syrian representative said: "...the

(entity) that is ranking number four among the exporters of lethal weapons

in the world; that which violates the airspace of sovereign states and

carries out military aggression against them, like what happened on Sept. 6

against my country, such entity with all those characteristics and even

more, has no right for its representative to go on lying without shame..."

The Syrian representative was replying to a speech to the committee on

Monday by Israeli Ambassador Miriam Ziv, deputy director general for

strategic affairs in the Foreign Ministry, who accused Syria of continuing

to transfer weapons to Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/18/news/UN-GEN-UN-Syria-Israel.php

It appears that the US and Israel are responsible for most of the weapons

being shipped into Lebanon.

actually your own story shows it was a French to English translator

translating something originally said in Arabic, translated to French,

then translated to English. Interpretation errors have caused wars in

the past. However most are caught just before hostilities.