Report: U.S., Israel Shared Data about Syrian Site
Well, it looks like the recent speculation that Israel conducted a raid in Syria because of possible nuclear activity there might have been on the money. The Washington Post reports that Israel decided to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear site after sharing information with the United States that indicated North Korean nuclear personnel were in Syria.
Ultimately, however, the United States is believed to have provided Israel with some corroboration of the original intelligence before Israel proceeded with the raid, which hit the Syrian facility in the dead of night to minimize possible casualties, the sources said.
But some proliferation experts have doubts about the intelligence that precipitated Israel's strike, the Post reports. They say Syria showed no interest in nuclear weapons in the past and it's possible North Korea was just unloading what it didn't need. North Korea denied this week that it was giving the country any nuclear aid.
Simon Tisdall of The Guardian writes that this "nuclear spectre has been conjured largely by American officials, some of whom famously misdirected similar WMD allegations at Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq." He says another explanation for the attack seems more plausible: that Israel was targeting Iranian arms on their way to Hezbollah. While Iran says it only provides financial support to the Lebanese organization, Tisdall writes, there are "persistent, credible reports" that Iranian weapons are making their way through Syria from northern Iraq.
10:17 AM ET | 09-21-2007 | permalink
