Remember the 06 September airstrike on Syria?:
It appears that the Syrian nuclear program came as a surprise to both the Israelis and the Americans. Neither had previously acted or spoken as though Syria had nuclear ambitions, and both acted awfully peculiar after the air strike. This would explain Israeli silence, namely that Syria had been working on it for years and the Israelis had not noticed until very recently. It would also explain the complete incoherence of the US leakint in the weeks after the event. If the US had already had a file on the place, the place name would have come out pretty fast, along with a coherent explanation for what it was, but this was not the case. The sequence of events in the news coverage suggests that the US took the better part of September and October to figure out what was going on and figure out how they missed it.
Syria said its air defences reportedly opened fire on Israeli warplanes flying over the northeast of the country in the early hours of Thursday 06 September 2007. Very few facts are known about the alleged incident. Local residents were reported to have claimed to have heard the sound of five or more planes above the Tal al-Abiad area on Syria’s border with Turkey, around 160 km (100 miles) north of the Syrian city of Rakka. One Syrian official was quoted by Reuters on 07 September 2007 as saying: “They dropped bombs on an empty area while our air defenses were firing heavily at them.”
The Syrian official news agency SANA stated that Israeli aircraft had “infiltrated Syrian airspace through the northern border coming from the direction of the Mediterranean and headed towards northeastern territory, breaking the sound barrier. … The Syrian Arab Republic warns the government of the Israeli enemy and reserves the right to respond according to what it sees fit…” Syria warned that it was weighing its response to the Israeli “aggression”. Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal told Al-Jazeera television that his country was “giving serious consideration to its response… to this aggression … This shows that Israel cannot give up aggression and treachery”.
On 08 September 2007 Turkey asked Israel for clarification after finding two fuel tanks on its territory near the Syrian border allegedly belonging to Israeli warplanes. The jettisoned fuel tanks were discovered late on Thursday 06 September 2007 in the Turkish provinces of Hatay and Gaziantep, near the Syrian border. This came a few hours after Damascus had accused Israel of bombing its territory.
The Israeli government and military initially remained silent about the incident. The Israeli military spokesman’s said in a statement: “It is not our custom to respond to these kinds of reports.” But the office typically has commented on such reports. In October 2003 Israeli warplanes bombed an empty Palestinian militant training camp in Syria. And in June 2006, Israeli warplanes flew over a palace in northern Syria while President Bashar al-Assad was inside, in what Damascus condemned as an “act of piracy”. These operations were confirmed by the Israeli military. It appeared the government imposed a news blackout on the issue. A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated that there would be no comment beyond the military statement.
Analysts were initially divided over whether the [unconfirmed] flight was a tactic of intimidation, or a reconnaissance mission of some sort, or operation intending to test Syrian air defense systems. Other hypotheses have posited that Israel was on an intelligence-gathering mission, scouting an air corridor for a future strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
On 10 September 2007 a [background source] started pitching a story that the air strike had destroyed a uranium pilot enrichment plant that Syria had obtained from North Korea. As far as can be detected, this story did not have legs at that time and no news organization moved it. Michael Corleone [From the Godfather] observed: “it insults my intelligence — and makes me very angry.”
On 11 September 2007 a US government official confirmed [on background] that Israeli warplanes were targeting weapons from Iran and destined for Hizballah militants in Lebanon. On 12 September 2007 Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper in The New York Times reported that “Officials in Washington said that the most likely targets of the raid were weapons caches that Israel’s government believes Iran has been sending the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah through Syria. Iran and Syria are Hezbollah’s primary benefactors, and American intelligence officials say a steady flow of munitions from Iran runs through Syria and into Lebanon.”
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/070906-airstrike.htm
Al-Jazeera is spinning it like this:
The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a suspected nuclear site under construction.
The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.
The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.
At the beginning of October, Israel’s military censor began to allow the local media to report on the raid without attributing their report to foreign sources. Nevertheless, details of the strike have remained clouded in mystery.
……On October 17, Syria denied that one of its representatives to the United Nations told a panel that an Israeli air strike hit a Syrian nuclear facility and added that “such facilities do not exist in Syria.”
A UN document released by the press office had provided an account of a meeting of the First Committee, Disarmament and International Security, in New York, and paraphrased an unnamed Syrian representative as saying that a nuclear facility was hit by the raid.
However, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA said media reports, apparently based on a UN press release, misquoted the Syrian diplomat.
Link: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1192380718519&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
If we had dropped a nuke they’d be glowing in the dark right now, and the “perpetually outraged” MSM would be all over it like stink on camel shit. The mission was a good, coordinated effort between Israel and the U.S. Everyone is mum on the subject except the Syrians, who are *shocked* that anyone would suspect them of producing nukes for anything other than “peaceful” purposes….like Iran.