Administration renews claims of Syrian nuclear weapons program

U.S. intelligence officials on Thursday were showing members of Congress a videotape and other evidence supporting their case that Syria was building a nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance before it was bombed by Israeli planes last year. Intelligence officials who have seen the evidence consider it "extremely compelling," a US official said, adding that it was gleaned from a variety of sources, not just Israeli intelligence.

Syria has denied the administration's allegations, and the videotape apparently was just a collection of still photos from inside the facility.

The administration's presentation represents a renewal of claims about an alleged Syrian nuclear weapons program which were widely reported in the mainstream media last fall, following the Israeli bombing. Those allegations were never substantiated, and although new evidence appears to have been added to strengthen the case, skepticism remains strong.

Political commentator Steve Clemons suggests that "[Vice President] Cheney's minions are pushing Congress to sponge up Israeli intelligence assessments about purported Syria-North Korea cooperation on a now destroyed, alleged nuclear site. There are many who doubt Israel's assessments in the U.S. intelligence community. A consensus has built that North Korea and Syria were cooperating on some machine tool operation to retrofit increasingly sophisticated short range missiles with new capacity, perhaps air burst capacity that could potentially deliver biological or chemical agents."

Last September, RAW STORY's Larisa Alexandrovna was the first to report that the Syrians had been engaged in attempting to add chemical warheads to their stock of "older generation" North Korean missiles and quoted former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro as saying that the building which was bombed was "absolutely not a nuclear weapons facility."

In a follow-up article, Alexandrovna added that several of her sources saw Dick Cheney's hand behind behind the leak of stories about a Syria nuclear program, stories which were not supported by the intelligence community. According to one official, "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.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, also told Alexandrovna, " I do not believe that the real story, if it is ever known, will have anything at all to do with nuclear weapons." Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has expressed skepticism towards the story as well.

The pattern of selective leaks, which appears to be typical of Cheney's operations, is as apparent with the new evidence as it was last fall. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Middle East subcommittee, accuses the Bush administration of "bizarre behavior" in giving information to reporters who lack security clearances while restricting what it presents to Congress. "This is the selective control of information that led us to war in Iraq," Ackerman stated.

The renewal of claims about the Syrian facility come as the Bush administration is pressuring North Korea to acknowledge its alleged nuclear proliferation as part of a disarmament agreement reached last year. However, Steve Clemons points out that Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be trying to build a case against Syria, as well.

"A source reported to me yesterday that in the last two weeks, Cheney held forth at a meeting on Iraq WMDs and insisted that they were real and still out there," Clemons reveals. "Cheney believes that Syria has them -- and has been watching closely intelligence streams from a secret 'black SIGINT base' that the US has placed in the mountains near the intersection of the Syrian, Turkish, and Iraqi borders." Raw Story