Thank You Israel
As we mark Israel’s 60th birthday today (May 14), people across the world can, once again, breathe a collective sigh of relief thanks to the Jewish State. Last September, a handful of Israeli fighter jets conducted a pre-dawn raid in which they destroyed what the Israelis claimed was a nuclear facility in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria close to the Turkish border. Recently, CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the facility, termed Al Kibar, was mere weeks away from being operational and could have, in the first year of operation, “produced enough plutonium for one or two weapons.”
A few months prior to the strike, the Israelis had managed to acquire aerial and ground-based photographs of the facility, a video of North Korean scientists inside, and a sample of some of the nuclear material. According to various sources, in July 2007 when the material was tested and confirmed to have come from North Korea, the Israelis took all of the evidence to their American allies. Condoleezza Rice’s State Department responded to the overwhelming proof of a NK-assisted nuclear weapons program in Syria by deliberately trying to downplay the value of the data.
U.S. officials told to the World Tribune that the CIA and State Department claimed that the nuclear facility “was years away from bring completed or even tested.” The officials also admitted that the State Department, particularly Secretary Rice herself, “sought to play down the Israeli evidence” and specifically “recruited CIA analysts who asserted the Syrian facility was not designed for a bomb.” This was all done because Rice and Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill believed “that any determination of a North Korean nuclear facility in Syria would torpedo U.S.-led negotiations for Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.”