The United Nations nuclear agency claims it has detected a previously unknown complex in Syria that leads the International Atomic Energy Agency to believe the Assad regime worked with the so-called father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, A.Q. Khan.
In 2007, the Israelis claimed to have bombed a nuclear plant in Syria.Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program was green-lighted by the United States in the 1980s. At the time, the U.S. was working closely with Pakistani intelligence to recruit and arm the Afghan Mujahideen who were fighting Soviet troops in the country.
Asked for his views on Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, Ronald Reagan replied “I just don’t think it’s any of our business,” Andrew Cockburn reported in 2009.
“During the years that the infamous A.Q. Khan was peddling his uranium enrichment technology around the place, his shipping manager was a CIA agent, whose masters seem to have had little problem with allowing the trade to go forward,” Cockburn writes.
Now that Syria is slated to be the next domino to fall following the destruction of Libya and the assassination of its leader, its alleged nuclear program will increasingly be viewed as a serious problem.
Details of a collaboration between Khan and Syria are now being leaked via the establishment media in preparation of an attack on the country. “Details of the Syria-Khan connection were provided to the AP by a senior diplomat with knowledge of IAEA investigations and a former U.N. investigator. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue,” the Associated Press reports today.
In question is a complex located in the city of al-Hasakah. According to the AP, it appears to be a cotton-spinning plant and investigators have found no sign that it was ever used for nuclear production. “But given that Israeli warplanes destroyed a suspected plutonium production reactor in Syria in 2007, the unlikely coincidence in design suggests Syria may have been pursuing two routes to an atomic bomb: uranium as well as plutonium,” the AP notes.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
“Are the wonderful mainstream media, who gave us Saddam’s mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction, lying to us again? The answer is yes,” wrote John W. Farley in April of 2008 following the much publicized attack.
Farley quoted Joseph Cirincione, director of nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, who said: “In attacking Dair el Zor in Syria on Sept. 6, the Israeli air force wasn’t targeting a nuclear site but rather one of the main arms depots in the country. Dair el Zor houses a huge underground base where the Syrian army stores the long and medium-range missiles it mostly buys from Iran and North Korea. The attack by the Israeli air force coincided with the arrival of a stock of parts for Syria’s 200 Scud B and 60 Scud C weapons.”
Cirincione noted that Syria has a small nuclear research program, which has been around for 40 years and is going nowhere. “It is a basic research program built around a tiny 30 kilowatt reactor that produced a few isotopes and neutrons. It is nowhere near a program for nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel,” he said. More than a dozen countries have helped Syria develop its nuclear program, including Belgium, Germany, Russia, China and even the United States, by way of training of scientists, he explained.
Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons program was also supplied by the West prior to the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The US Department of Commerce licensed 70 biological exports to Iraq between 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax, I wrote in September, 2002, before the U.S. invasion. Phillips Petroleum, Unilever, Alcolac, Allied Signal, the American Type Culture Collection, and Teledyne supplied materials that would later be used as stage props in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s theatrical presentation before the United Nations Security Council in February of 2003.
Syria’s intransigence following the Israel bombing of what appears to be a non-nuclear military facility – a violation of Syria’s notional sovereignty and also a violation of international law – will now be used to claim the Assad regime is attempting to hide a secretive nuclear weapons program.
“What is at stake here is the nuclear history of that facility,” Mark Hibbs, an analyst at the nuclear policy program at the globalist Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the AP. “People want to know what did they intend to do there, and Syria has provided no information.”
The step-by-step demonization of Syria prior to a military attack will unfold in predictable fashion. Following the IEAE allegations, the U.S. will call for sanctions and Hillary Clinton’s State Department will denounce Assad and his cronies as a threat to peace in the region. An ominous nuclear threat – despite the fact Syria does not have a bomb (and Israel does – and has shown its willingness to attack its neighbors) – will be added to sketchy reports of human rights abuses in the country and will be used to prepare another NATO “humanitarian” intervention.
No comments:
Post a Comment