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Occupation of Iraq is 37 years old plan
4 February 2008

While those Iraqi Engineers should be tried for their CIA links, this news is another proof that USA knew very well that there were no MDW in Iraq.

Hussain Kamil earlier in 1995 informed them too with tons of documentations in Jordan.

All that proves the following:

1 - Occupation of Iraq is an old aim of USA ( First time annouced in 1970 by Nixon)
2 - Bush is just a puppet employee who presents the Geoplotical Protesant Zionist Corporate Crimes Syndicate.


The CIA operation that should have prevented the Iraq war
(AFP)

4 February 2008

AMMAN - When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 -- and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state — Tawfiq’s television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door — waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

“When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost,” Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Now in his fifties, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored the results.

From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq’s weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows — that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Nevertheless in March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq to disarm Saddam of this non-existent arsenal and in the process triggered the effective collapse of the Iraqi state, plunging it into chaos and bringing thousands of deaths.

Saad Tawfiq’s role in this drama began in June 2002 with calls from his sister Sawsan, a doctor who lives with her husband Ali in Moreland Hills, a pleasant suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in the mid-western United States.

“Our Abu Mahmuds are putting pressure on me,” she told him, using the nickname they shared for Saad’s secret police minder as a makeshift code for the US intelligent agent who had contacted her, ”Chris.”

“Chris was very nice, very polite,” Sawsan, a small energetic woman, told AFP. Chris wanted Sawsan’s help to discover the status of Saddam’s weapons programme, and in particular his efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

She joined one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to penetrate Saddam’s Iraq, a programme dreamt up by agency veteran Charlie Allen to target Iraqi weapons technicians through their relatives.

The scientists were well known to the UN weapons inspectors who had been keeping tabs on Iraq’s arms plants since 1991, and the Americans were able to draw up a list of 30 who had relatives in the United States.

The American relatives were to be sent to Iraq and ask about weapons.

“I was nervous, and we even discussed with Ali what to do if something happened to me,” Sawsan said. “It was a very emotional visit back home, because I had not been there for years and I had not seen my brother for years.”

Sawsan was right to be nervous. Saddam’s notorious secret police dealt with spies mercilessly. She was taking a risk with her life and that of her brother, but was determined to help rid her original homeland of a tyrant.

The CIA provided her with a detailed questionnaire about Iraq’s weapons programmes. Fearing she would forget it, Sawsan disguised it in sketches and crosswords in a kind of homemade code.

Tawfiq picked his sister up from Baghdad airport on September 9, 2002. Her homecoming was emotional, but the pair had work to do. They met secretly at night in the family garden and took walks together in the city.

The weapons engineer was astonished by the CIA’s questions, which he thought showed the depths of the agency’s ignorance about events in his country.

“I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: ’They know you have a programme,’ and I was saying: “There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing’,” Tawfiq said.

“She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: “No, no, no...’ I kept swearing on the grave of my mother.”

According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.

“I was Saddam’s scientist,” Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. “In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!”

Sawsan dutifully gathered this information and returned to the United States to pass it on to her handlers. But the CIA was unimpressed.

“Saad told me there was nothing left,” she told AFP. “That everything had been either destroyed or dismantled by the UN and the regime has abandoned its nuclear programme. And he begged me to explain all that back in the States.

“I went back and I reported what he had told me in full detail. I even went personally to Washington. In the beginning they listened to me but then they told me that my brother was lying,” she said.

Of course Tawfiq and other colleagues approached by the CIA were telling the truth, as the United States would discover after it had launched a bloody war that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time of the operation to question Tawfiq, said weapons scientists had not been ignored, but had been contradicted by other sources.

“To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an effect in Washington, it probably was not because the effort came too late but instead because there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying, and that suggested Iraqi unconventional weapons programmes were continuing,” he told AFP.

But as Saddam’s scientist lamented five years later: “You don’t have to destroy a country for that.”
http://tinyurl.com/282vyv

Iran Oil Bourse to deal blow to dollar
Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:45:41

The long-awaited Iranian Oil Bourse, a place for trading oil, petrochemicals and gas in various non-dollar currencies, will soon open.

Iran's Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari told reporters the bourse will be inaugurated during the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution (February 1-11) at the latest.

"All preparations have been made to launch the bourse; it will open during the Ten-Day Dawn (the ceremonies marking the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran)," he said.

The Minister had earlier stated that the Oil Bourse is located on the Persian Gulf island of Kish.

Some expert opinions hold inauguration of the bourse cold significantly devalue the greenback. MK/JG/RE/HAR
(yahoo.group)

US political establishment lines up behind Barack Obama
By Patrick Martin
4 February 2008

As the contests for the presidential nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties head into the potentially decisive primary voting on February 5, there has been a pronounced shift in favor of the campaign of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, reflected in a surge in opinion polls, large turnouts at campaign rallies, a flood of campaign contributions, and a series of high-profile political and media endorsements.

The past week has seen a significant intervention by the ruling elite to promote the Obama campaign, acting through its political representatives—particularly Senator Edward Kennedy, longtime leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party—and through the corporate-controlled mass media.

Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama was a devastating blow to the Clinton campaign, signaling that Obama, far from representing an insurgency, was becoming the consensus candidate of the Democratic Party establishment. This was followed by a slew of newspaper endorsements, including 34 in California, among them the Los Angeles Times and La Opinion, the most widely read Spanish-language daily.

Opinion polls published Saturday and Sunday found Obama essentially tied with the longtime frontrunner in the Democratic nominating contest, Senator Hillary Clinton, both nationally and in the critical state of California. That state is among the 22 voting Tuesday and awards the largest single number of delegates, more than ten percent of the total, to the Democratic National Convention.

If Obama wins California and gains a majority of delegates chosen in the “Super Tuesday” primaries and caucuses, he would become the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination and face the presumptive Republican candidate, Arizona Senator John McCain.

The Obama surge is undoubtedly a significant political event, but like any phenomenon in American politics, it has to be analyzed from two standpoints—what it reveals about changes in mass consciousness, and what it reveals about the ongoing policy discussions and political struggles taking place within the ruling elite.

For millions of voters, and particularly for young people, the response to Obama’s campaign reflects both a deep-going desire for significant social and political change, as well as widespread illusions—fostered assiduously by the media—that the election of the first black president would represent a fundamental break with an old and discredited political order in the United States.

Obama is not, however, the product of the civil rights struggles against racial oppression, nor is he associated with any popular movement from below. His career has far more in common with those of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, individuals selected and groomed by the American ruling class to carry out its policies. Like them, he is being used to put a new face on fundamentally reactionary policies and institutions.

In policy terms, there is little to distinguish Obama from Clinton, although her 2002 vote in the US Senate to authorize the war in Iraq has served as a lead weight around her neck throughout the campaign. The war is overwhelmingly unpopular among the American people as a whole, and among young people and Democratic primary voters in particular.

While Obama has never presented himself explicitly as an “antiwar” candidate, he has sought to take advantage of Clinton’s record of support for the war, and his own early criticism of it, arguing that he would be a more effective opponent against McCain, a diehard advocate of the war.

It is necessary to distinguish sharply between the political shift among working people and youth, a movement to the left which presages the outbreak of mass social and political struggles, and the efforts of the ruling elite to manipulate popular sentiments, manufacture illusions, and disarm the masses politically.

The Obama campaign is not the vehicle of a leftward movement in the United States—as proclaimed by liberal groups such as MoveOn.org and publications like The Nation. It is a preemptive attack by the ruling class against such a movement. Its function is to delude the American people and divert their growing opposition to war, economic crisis and attacks on democratic rights back into the dead-end of the Democratic Party.

While the American people will cast ballots on November 4, the real decisions are made long before then, in the selection of candidates and framing of the election by the media and the corporate bosses and billionaires who finance and politically screen the candidates.

It was millions in “startup money” from wealthy backers that made it possible for a very junior senator from Illinois, a man who four years ago was serving in the Illinois state legislature and unknown nationally, to become a viable presidential candidate.

The largely flattering treatment of the Obama campaign, not only in the liberal sections of the media but in the right-wing press as well—Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post endorsed him in the February 5 primary in that state—demonstrates a broader agreement in the ruling elite that some sort of new departure in US politics may be required. This, of course, will be a cosmetic and not a fundamental shift.

Virtually all sections of the US ruling elite have now drawn the conclusion that the Bush administration is a disastrous failure. The world standing of America has declined catastrophically, while the base for imperialist policies has eroded within the United States itself, as the vast majority of the American people rejects the war in Iraq and opposes its extension into Iran, Syria, Pakistan or other potential targets.

The president who enters the White House in January 2009 will face immense crises both at home and abroad. To address these crises from the standpoint of the needs of the financial aristocracy will require the imposition of unprecedented sacrifices on the American people. That in turn will require a new political approach—a turn to the Democratic Party, which has always been relied upon by big business to use its image as the “party of the people” to defend the profit system.

The huge swing to the Democratic Party in campaign contributions from big business reflects this emerging consensus. According to recent financial reports to the Federal Election Commission, investment bankers have tilted their financial support overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party, giving roughly equal amounts to Clinton and Obama. In total contributions, both Clinton and Obama collected more than $100 million apiece in 2007, more than twice the largest amount raised by any Republican, while Obama raised an additional $32.6 million in January 2008 alone.

Among those backing the Obama campaign are such pillars of the US political establishment as Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and an arch-Cold Warrior; retired Air Force General Merrill McPeak and a host of other retired military brass; billionaire Warren Buffett, the second-richest man in America; and an array of Wall Street and corporate executives, none of whom could be suspected of any sympathy for radical social change.

Important sections of the ruling elite have concluded that, particularly for the overseas interests of American imperialism, a President Obama would provided important advantages. He would at one stroke put a “new face” on American foreign policy, and make it more likely that Washington could overcome the international isolation and global hostility created by the arrogant unilateralism of the Bush White House and its failed intervention in Iraq. And it may well require a Democrat in the White House to reinstate the draft and provide the manpower required to sustain and expand the US drive for military domination of the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.

An argument along these lines is made in Sunday’s editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the most widely read newspaper in California. The Times has not made an endorsement in a presidential primary contest since 1972, but broke with that tradition to back Obama in the Democratic primary and McCain among the Republicans.

The Times editorial says Obama “electrifies young voters ... because he embodies the desire to move to the next chapter of the American story.” It praises his early opposition to the war in Iraq, while noting approvingly his “understanding that some liberal orthodoxies developed during the last 40 years have been overtaken by history.” This last indicates that Obama has reassured the ruling elite that there will be no return to policies of liberal reform or expensive government social programs.

Then comes the meat of the argument: “An Obama presidency would present, as a distinctly American face, a man of African descent, born in the nation’s youngest state [Hawaii], with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims. No public relations campaign could do more than Obama’s mere presence in the White House to defuse anti-American passion around the world...”

The Los Angeles Times, owned by Tribune Corporation, one of the giant US media monopolies, is not here declaring any opposition to the principle of US world domination embraced by all sections of the moneyed elite. It is rather voicing the desire to turn away from an exclusive reliance on the use of military force alone to sustain that dominance.

A sizeable section of the US ruling class recognizes, in the wake of the Bush debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it is necessary to revive methods of diplomacy, political propaganda, economic penetration and the use of alliances to promote imperialist interests. It should go without saying that this “soft power” is to be employed in combination with, not as a substitute for, military force.

An Obama presidency (or a Clinton presidency, should her campaign ultimately prevail), would thus represent a fine-tuning or adjustment in American foreign policy, but no let-up in American imperialism’s drive to war and conquest, which arises not out of the brains of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, but out of the historical crisis of American and world capitalism.

Obama is merely the product of an effective marketing campaign which has utilized media outlets ranging from Rupert Murdoch to The Nation to sell this new version of a very old product—the Democratic Party “friend of the people,” previously incarnated in the “insurgent” candidacy of Jimmy Carter in 1976, then in the “man from Hope,” Bill Clinton himself, in 1992. An Obama presidency would no more represent a fundamental change in American politics than the election of Carter and Clinton did, and if Murdoch & Co. feared it would, he would never have been allowed anywhere near the White House.

The typical Obama speech is a mass of nebulous phrases about uniting America, without the slightest acknowledgement that social and economic interests of working people, the vast majority of Americans, are diametrically opposed to those of the corporate and financial elite. In perhaps his most noteworthy comment, after the South Carolina primary, he explicitly rejected the notion that the wealthy don’t care about the condition of ordinary people.

Obama’s mantra of bringing everyone together may appeal to the naïve illusions of youth who are making their first political experiences, but Obama and the Wall Street bankers and media moguls who are promoting him know exactly what they are doing. Theirs is a conscious policy of blurring social and political differences and denying class divisions in a society more deeply divided along economic lines than ever before in its history.

The World Socialist Web Site opposes all those who seek to bolster the shattered credibility of the Democratic Party. The only road to progressive social change in the United States is the road of the political independence of the working class, through a break with the Democratic Party and the whole structure of capitalist politics, and the building of a mass political movement based on a socialist and internationalist perspective.
http://tinyurl.com/284bhy

Suicide Bomber at Dimonah, Israel, the Nuclear Ammunition Dump

At least 3 dead in suicide attack in Israel
From the Associated Press
11:16 AM PST, February 4, 2008
DIMONA, Israel -- A suicide bomber blew himself up today at a shopping center in the southern town that houses Israel's secretive nuclear reactor complex, killing an Israeli woman and wounding nine. Police said they killed a second attacker before he could detonate his explosives belt.

It was the first suicide attack in Israel in a year, and officials were investigating whether the attackers came in through Egypt after Palestinian militants breached the Gaza-Egypt border last month.

An offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the attack, complicating recently revived peace talks. Militants said other attackers were already inside Israel, poised to carry out further assaults.

Abbas, whose government is based in the West Bank, condemned the attack on Dimona. But in the Gaza Strip, gunmen fired in the air and mourners passed out sweets to celebrate the bombing.

Hours after the bombing, Israeli aircraft struck a car in northern Gaza, killing a top wanted militant.

Israeli government officials dismissed the notion that the heavily guarded Dimona nuclear reactor was the suicide attackers' target. The explosion took place in a shopping area about six miles from the reactor site.

Dimona is home to Israel's nuclear research center, and it is widely believed atomic weapons were developed at the plant. Israel neither admits nor denies having nuclear arms.

Ambulances and a large contingent of soldiers, rescue workers and police rushed to the scene of the bombing, the first in the working class town of 37,000.

One attacker managed to detonate his explosives belt, but the second was injured by the blast before he could set off his bomb. TV footage showed officers shooting the second attacker dead as he lay on the pavement. The severed head of the successful bomber lay in a pool of blood next to his shot comrade.

Dr. Michael Sherf, director of Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, where the wounded were treated, said the bomb was packed with ball bearings, making the impact more potent.

David Dahan, a 58-year-old man disabled by a hip injury, had just finished his morning cup of coffee at a cafe when the blast went off about six feet away.

"There was a great explosion and a great ball of fire came toward me," said Dahan, who uses a walker. "I saw him (the bomber) fall. I was hit, but I held on to my walker. ... My clothes were covered with his flesh."

Dahan's eye was covered with bloody bandages, and ball bearings were lodged inside his chest and the swollen left side of his face. He also had wounds in a leg and arm.

Dr. Baruch Mandelzweig said he was at his nearby clinic when he heard the blast. He and his nurses rushed out and saw body parts "strewn around everywhere."

They spotted a critically wounded man and began to treat him before realizing he was the second attacker. "We saw an explosive belt," Mandelzweig said. "We ran away."

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the attack "presents an additional painful reminder that we have to stay alert at all times and on all fronts."

"There is a war between us and the terror groups that continues uninterrupted, an ongoing, relentless war. We shall hit all those involved in terrorism and anyone who tries to harm Israeli citizens," Olmert told a meeting of his Kadima Party.

Shortly after the bombing, Israeli aircraft killed a senior commander in the Hamas-affiliated Popular Resistance Committees in the Gaza Strip, the militant group said. The military confirmed an attack on a PRC activist in Beit Lahiya, a town used by Palestinian extremists to fire rockets into southern Israel.

Southern Israel has been on alert against militant attacks since the Gaza Strip's Islamic Hamas rulers breached the territory's walled-off border with Egypt on Jan. 23, allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to cross into Egypt unchecked over 12 days.

Egypt managed to reseal the border only on Sunday. Egyptian officials had no immediate comment on the Dimona bombing.
http://tinyurl.com/2e2qjc


Israel bombs tunnel after Palestinian suicide attack kills 3
Updated 1/29/2007 10:49 PM ET

EILAT, Israel (AP) — A Palestinian suicide bomber killed three Israelis at a bakery Monday in the first such attack inside the country in nine months, and the two radical groups that claimed to have sent him said they were trying to end weeks of Palestinian infighting by taking aim at Israel instead.

Israel's first response came early Tuesday. The army said its aircraft bombed a tunnel dug by Palestinians near the Gaza-Israel border that it said was intended for use by militants for an attack against Israel. No casualties were reported.

Israel has observed a truce with the Palestinians in Gaza since late November. But the airstrike signaled that the Eilat bombing put that cease-fire in danger.

The bombing was praised by the Palestinians' governing Hamas movement as legitimate resistance — a position that was sure to hurt efforts to end a crippling economic boycott imposed by the international community.

It was the first suicide bombing in this Red Sea resort of 50,000 at Israel's southern tip near the Jordanian and Egyptian borders. The town is a popular getaway for Israelis because it has been insulated from Israeli-Palestinian violence by its distance from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Shattered glass, body parts and blood-splattered pastries were strewn on the sidewalk outside the bakery. Two of the victims were the owners of the bakery.

VIDEO: Grim scene at bakery

A relative identified the third victim as Yisrael Zalmalloa, who emigrated to Israel from Peru. The relative, who would give only her first name, Norma, said his parents live in Miami but had no other details. U.S. Embassy officials in Tel Aviv had no information.

"It was awful — there was smoke, pieces of flesh all over the place," said Benny Mazgini, a 45-year-old witness.

Eilat resident Yossi Voltinski said he picked up the attacker, who was hitchhiking on the edge of town, shortly before the attack. But he quickly grew suspicious because the man was dressed in heavy clothing on a warm day.

"He was wearing a coat closed tightly and was wearing a hat. He didn't speak Hebrew. He was very irritable," Voltinski said. "I then understood that without a doubt this was a hostile person."

He said he dropped the man off on a side road with few people and quickly alerted authorities. "From when I called the police until the explosion, no more than a few minutes elapsed," he told Channel 10 TV.

Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades claimed joint responsibility. Both militant groups said they hoped to encourage warring Palestinian factions to end weeks of clashes.

"The operation has a clear message to the Palestinian rivals. It is necessary to end the infighting and point the guns toward the occupation that has hurt the Palestinian people," a posting on the Islamic Jihad website said.

Early Tuesday, officials from the rival Fatah and Hamas movements announced a new cease-fire. Negotiated by the two sides with Egyptian mediators at a midnight meeting, the agreement was supposed to end bloodshed that has left over 60 Palestinians dead since early December.

But fighting continued in downtown Gaza after the truce was supposed to have taken effect. Several earlier truce agreements have broken down.

Arriving in Cairo, Abbas denounced the Eilat bombing, according to the Palestinian WAFA news agency.

Islamic Jihad identified the bomber as Mohammed Siksik, 20, from the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. Relatives said Siksik was unemployed and despondent over the death of a newborn daughter from disease, and was driven to avenge his best friend's killing in fighting with Israel.

Dozens of neighbors celebrated the bombing at the family's home. Children held up pictures of Siksik brandishing an assault rifle, and a crowd chanted slogans praising him as a martyr.

Siksik's mother, Rowayda, said he left home three days ago and proudly told reporters that she knew of the attack in advance.

"He told me: Meeting God is better for me than this whole world," she said.

Underscoring the divisions in Palestinian society, gunmen from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and Islamic Jihad got into a loud argument, each side claiming Siksik as their own.

The attack was the second suicide bombing in Israel since Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections a year ago. Labeled a terrorist group in the West for its anti-Israel ideology, it came under heavy criticism for making statements in support of a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv restaurant shortly after it took power.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, called Monday's attack a "natural response" to Israeli military policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "So long as there is occupation, resistance is legitimate," he said.

He also said attacks on Israel were preferable to the recent Palestinian infighting.

"The right thing is for Fatah weapons to be directed toward the occupation not toward Hamas," Barhoum said.

Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema called the bombing "barbaric," and the White House said it held the Hamas-led government accountable.

"Failure to act against terror will inevitably affect relations between that government and the international community and undermine the aspirations of the Palestinian people for a state of their own," the White House said.

The U.S. and European Union have been enforcing a boycott on financial aid to the Palestinian government since Hamas took office. They have demanded the group renounce violence and recognize Israel's right to exist — conditions Hamas rejects.

Israel has been trying to bolster Abbas in his standoff with Hamas. But a renewal of suicide bombings — which are sharply down from their height four years ago — could derail efforts to revive peace talks.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades is linked to Fatah. However, Fatah spokesman Ahmad Abdul Rahman condemned the violence.

"We are against any operation that targets civilians, Israelis or Palestinians," he said.

There was some disagreement over the route used by the bomber.

Islamic Jihad said he entered Eilat from Jordan. But Jordan, which has good relations with Israel, said the man had never been in the kingdom.

Israeli officials said the bomber traveled from Gaza into Egypt, and then crossed through the long, largely unguarded desert border into Israel on a route frequently used by smugglers. Israel TV reported he used one of the tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border used for smuggling weapons into Gaza.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
http://tinyurl.com/yoafeb

Sy Hersh confirms: Syrian facility bombed by Israel was not nuclear
02/03/2008 @ 12:49 pm
Filed by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

After Israel bombed a Syrian military facility last September, the United States and Israel both claimed the target had been a Syrian nuclear facility under construction.

RAW STORY's Larisa Alexandrovna was alone at the time in reporting that the actual target was a cache of North Korean No-Dong missiles, dating back to the 1990's, which Syria was converting for use as chemical warheads.

In a follow-up report, Alexandrovna added that Vice President Dick Cheney was suspected of being behind leaks to the press of misleading claims of a nuclear basis for the incident.

A third story in Alexandrovna's series reported that the US and Israel were refusing to cooperate with an attempted investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but that the IAEA had concluded on the basis of satellite imagery that the target was unlikely to have been nuclear.

However, the US/Israeli version continued to dominate most accounts of the incident. As recently as December, the Sunday Times was still insisting that "Israel's top-secret air raid on Syria in September destroyed a bomb factory assembling warheads fuelled by North Korean plutonium."

Now veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has weighed in on the matter. Hersh appeared on CNN's Late Edition on Sunday to discuss his upcoming article, "A Strike in the Dark," which will appear in the Feb. 11 issue of the New Yorker.

Hersh writes in that article, "Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture -- or with nuclear reactors -- but much to do with Syria's defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th bombing."

"This is a wonderful sort of a complicated story," Hersh told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "Here Israel bombs another country, basically an act of war. ... They don't say anything publicly about it. The Israeli great ally, the United States, says nothing. Syria doesn't say much about it. They complain, but they're very muted too. ... Nobody talks about it."

Hersh went on to say that even though nobody was talking publicly, "there was tremendous sotto voce stuff. In other words, the Israeli government, the American government were leaking, telling newspaper people, particularly in America, but also in Europe, all sorts of wonderful, grandiose details about what happened."

Hersh finally concluded as a result of his investigation that the claims that "when you began to look at each part... they sort of fall apart." He is not even convinced the plant was a chemical warfare facility but believes it may have been a missile plant. "Israel may indeed have some evidence that's overwhelming," Hersh stated. "But without that sort of evidence, what they've done is, they've simply bombed another country."

Hersh's best guess as to the motivation of the bombing is that it was partly Israeli politics and partly "a message for the Iranians that we're coming."
http://tinyurl.com/35h3ye