In the early hours of a September morning, shortly after midnight, Israeli fighter jets leveled an installation inside Syria that the Israelis claimed was a nascent nuclear reactor modeled after a North Korean facility. The silence from Syria was deafening. There was no major protest – at least not while the Syrians were cleaning up the evidence. New satellite images taken of the site seem to bear out the allegations.
New commercial satellite photos show that a Syrian site believed to have been attacked by Israel last month no longer bears any obvious traces of what some analysts said appeared to have been a partly built nuclear reactor.
Two photos, taken Wednesday from space by rival companies, show the site near the Euphrates River to have been wiped clean since August, when imagery showed a tall square building there measuring about 150 feet on a side.
The Syrians reported an attack by Israel in early September; the Israelis have not confirmed that. Senior Syrian officials continue to deny that a nuclear reactor was under construction, insisting that Israel hit a largely empty military warehouse.
But the images, federal and private analysts say, suggest that the Syrian authorities rushed to dismantle the facility after the strike, calling it a tacit admission of guilt.
Pretty obvious indeed. The “tacit admission of guilt” also includes slips of the tongue and the stealth surrounding the incident. If the site was not, in fact, a nuclear reactor – then it was obviously something that the Syrians were keeping secret from the rest of the world.
Any attempt by Syrian authorities to clean up the site would make it difficult, if not impossible, for international weapons inspectors to determine the exact nature of the activity there. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna have said they hoped to analyze the satellite images and ultimately inspect the site in person. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that released a report on the Syrian site earlier this week, said the expurgation of the building was inherently suspicious.
“It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” Albright said in an interview. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.”
Exactly! Of course I am bewildered by the logic put forth by one “expert.”
“It’s clearly very suspicious,” said Joseph Cirincione, an expert on nuclear proliferation at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “The Syrians were up to something that they clearly didn’t want the world to know about.”
Cirincione said the photographic evidence “tilts toward a nuclear program” but does not prove that Syria was building a reactor. Besides, he said, even if it was developing a nuclear program, Syria would be years away from being operational, and thus not an imminent threat.
I am sick of this “imminent threat” BS. So what? Isn’t it better to be proactive about a potential Syrian nuclear threat now than later? How does it make the Israeli action any less important? It kind of makes you want to throw up your arms (or your dinner) and crawl into a bunker. If we had hit Iran at this stage, we wouldn’t have half of the problems we now face. Of course, Syria is keeping a stiff upper lip.
Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to the United States, denied in an interview last week with The Dallas Morning News that his country was trying to build a reactor.
“There is no Syrian nuclear program whatsoever,” he said. “It’s an absolutely blatant lie.”
Later in the interview, he said, “We understand that if Syria even contemplated nuclear technology, then the gates of hell would open on us.”
Mr. Ambassador, you don’t understand or fear anything evidently. You haven’t seen the gates of hell yet. Don’t play us like fools. The Israelis, at least, are on to your game.
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steveflesher
Philip
Mel Maguire
Mark Ciavola
