Free Republic

Syria has resumed construction at the site bombed by IAF jets in September 2007, a New York Times report said on Saturday morning. In a satellite image released by private Colorado company, DigitalGlobe, the original main building appears to be in the process of reconstruction with the only difference being the shape of the roof. The photograph was taken on Wednesday, said the report. The unspecified "military target" had been struck deep inside Syrian territory, while foreign reports claimed the site was a military installation containing nuclear material and technology supplied to Syria by North Korea. Syria has denied this...

The puzzling site in Syria that Israeli jets bombed in September grew more curious on Friday with the release of a satellite photograph showing new construction there that resembles the site’s former main building. After the attack, the Syrians wiped the area clean, with some analysis calling the speed of the cleanup a tacit admission of guilt. The barren site is on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, 90 miles north of the Iraqi border. Given the international uproar that unfolded after the bombing, “we can assume it’s not a reactor,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science...

"At the beginning of 2001, someone brought us a letter from a certain Khan. We did not know if the letter was genuine or a forgery by Israel to lure us into a trap. In any case, we rejected [the approach]. We were not interested in having nuclear weapons or a nuclear reactor. We never met Khan." Abdul Qadeer Khan masterminded Pakistan's nuclear program, and has admitted selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Regarding Syria's response to the September 6 Israeli attack on an unidentified target in its area, Assad said that Syria has a right to...

Israelis hit Syrian ‘nuclear bomb plant’ Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv and Michael Sheridan in Seoul ISRAEL’S top-secret air raid on Syria in September destroyed a bomb factory assembling warheads fuelled by North Korean plutonium, a leading Israeli nuclear expert has told The Sunday Times. Professor Uzi Even of Tel Aviv University was one of the founders of the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, the source of the Jewish state’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. “I suspect that it was a plant for processing plutonium, namely, a factory for assembling the bomb,” he said. “I think the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of...

Ten weeks have passed since the Israel Air Force attacked in Syria, and there is still no reliable information about the precise target that was destroyed, or about the importance and necessity of the attack. Since Israel keeps maintaining its veil of secrecy, Everything that is known comes from leaks by anonymous U.S. administration officials to several of the major American media outlets. What is almost certain, judging from the leaks, are the following facts: A nuclear site built by the Syrians was attacked, and there was some connection to know-how and technology transferred from North Korea. The prevailing assumption...

It was two months ago tomorrow that Israeli warplanes bombed what Israel and the United States believed was a nascent Syrian nuclear complex along the shore of the Euphrates River. But the political shock waves that should have accompanied that remarkable event -- which was both an audacious act of preemption and a revelation of an apparent Syrian bomb program-- have been bottled up by the decisions of the Israeli government and the Bush administration not to speak publicly about the strike. Now Israeli and U.S. officials are quietly debating whether to go on the record and allow those shock...

..."The businessman, who asked not to be identified, told the Island.Net that the process was the participation of two strategic bombers Americas sticking small tactical nuclear bombs, aircraft squadron. They were accompanied "Israeli" F-15, F-16, took responsibility for control and protection."

UN nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei Sunday accused the Israelis of taking "the law into their own hands" with a mysterious raid on Syria last month and demanded more information about what was hit. Neither Israel nor the United States has furnished "any evidence at all" to prove that the Syrian site bombed in early September was a secret nuclear facility, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency told CNN. "That to me is very distressful because we have a system: if countries have information that the country is working on a nuclear-related program, they should come to us. We...

Yet Another Photo of Site in Syria, Yet More Questions By WILLIAM J. BROAD and MARK MAZZETTI The mystery surrounding the construction of what might have been a nuclear reactor in Syria deepened yesterday, when a company released a satellite photo showing that the main building was well under way in September 2003 — four years before Israeli jets bombed it. The long genesis is likely to raise questions about whether the Bush administration overlooked a nascent atomic threat in Syria while planning and executing a war in Iraq, which was later found to have no active nuclear program. A...

JERUSALEM: In the closest that Israel has come to confirming a mysterious air raid in Syria, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged to his Cabinet on Sunday that Turkish airspace might have been violated during the operation.

(Great Photos of Bulldozing & Complete building removal within) - ISIS has obtained commercial satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe taken on Oct 24, 2007 that shows the suspected reactor construction building completely removed and the Ground Scraped (Fig 2). - ISIS released a report on Oct 23, 2007 that featured DigitalGlobe imagery from Aug 10, 2007 showing the suspected reactor construction site of the Sept 6, 2007 Israeli raid inside Syria. - A comparison of these two images effectively confirms that this site was indeed the target of the Israeli raid (Fig 1-6). The pump house and secondary structure still remain...

New commercial satellite photos show that a Syrian site believed to have been attacked by Israel last month no longer bears any obvious traces of what some analysts said appeared to have been a partly built nuclear reactor.

Independent experts have pinpointed what they believe to be the Euphrates River site in Syria that was bombed by Israel last month, and satellite imagery of the area shows buildings under construction roughly similar in design to a North Korean reactor capable of producing nuclear material for one bomb a year, the experts say. Photographs of the site taken before the secret Sept. 6 airstrike depict an isolated compound that includes a tall, boxy structure similar to the type of building used to house a gas-graphite reactor. They also show what could have been a pumping station used to supply...

Two influential Republican members of the U.S. House have castigated the Bush administration for failing to brief Congress on Israeli bombing of a suspected nuclear facility in Syria last month. In an op-ed piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, senior GOP member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the senior Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote: “[The Bush administration] has thrown an unprecedented veil of secrecy around the Israeli air strike. It has briefed only a handful of very senior members of Congress, leaving the...

Over the last few weeks, State Department officials have reported major diplomatic breakthroughs that will roll back North Korea's nuclear weapons program, allow Pyongyang to be removed from the U.S. state sponsors of terror list, and normalize relations between our two countries. North Korea reportedly has agreed to disable its nuclear facilities and has, as it has done many times before, promised to give a full accounting of its nuclear program. The latest deadline is Dec. 31, 2007. Congress has been asked to support this agreement, which State Department officials claim will benefit our nation and promote regional stability. Then,...

Israel obtained detailed photographs from inside an alleged Syrian nuclear facility prior to carrying out an air strike on September 6, ABC News reported over the weekend. An unnamed senior source in the US told the news network that the Mossad had discovered in the summer that Syria was constructing a nuclear facility and proceeded to either place a mole inside the plant or convince one of the workers to supply Israel with intelligence. Through the mole, the source said, Israel received pictures from the ground that showed a large cylindrical structure, trucks, and a pumping station - all of...

If people had known how close we came to World War III that day there would have been mass panic. That is how a very senior British ministerial source recently characterized Israel’s September raid on what was apparently a Syrian nuclear installation. Whether matters were quite that grave is an open question. Yet it does seem clear that the full story of the Israeli raid has not been told, nor its full significance recognized. Now two key members of Congress have raised an alarm about this event, thereby throwing our nuclear agreement with North Korea into question. Briefings Peter Hoekstra...

DAMASCUS, Syria — A high-ranking Syrian official confirmed that Israel's airstrike last month in northern Syria hit a nuclear facility, according to a document obtained Wednesday by FOX News. "Israel was the fourth-largest exporter of weapons of mass destruction and a violator of other nations' airspace, and it had taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria," Syrian representative Bassam Darwish is quoted in the document as saying.

In its first official admission by a state official, Syria confirmed that an air raid carried out by Israeli fighter jets deep in Syrian territory on September 6 was, indeed, an attack on a Syrian nuclear facility, Israel Radio reported Wednesday morning. A Syrian envoy disclosed the nature if the target during a meeting of a UN committee where Israeli envoys were also present. A senior source in the Foreign Ministry confirmed the statement made in New York by the Syrian official. Since first announcing on September 6 that an incursion into Syrian airspace by IAF jets took place, Syria...