Cheney lying again: Israel DID NOT bomb a Syrian nuclear facility -- another Cheney lie

Cheney hand seen behind leaks of 'misleading' stories

Allegations that a Syrian envoy admitted during a United Nations
meeting Oct. 17 that an Israeli air strike hit a nuclear facility in
September are inaccurate and have raised the ire of some in the US
intelligence community, who see the Vice President's hand as allegedly
being behind the disinformation.

A United Nations press release discussing the General Assembly's
Disarmament Committee meeting mistranslated comments ascribed to an
unnamed Syrian diplomat as saying that Israel had on various occasions
"taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack
in Syria."

The UN has since gone through the tape recordings of the meeting and
found that there was no mention of the word "nuclear" at all.
According to the UN, the error was one of translation, involving
several interpreters translating the same meeting.

Recent news articles, however, continue to make allegations and
suggest that a nuclear weapons facility was hit -- something that the
Syrian government has denied, the Israeli government has not
officially confirmed and US intelligence does not show.

According to current and former intelligence sources, the US
intelligence community has seen no evidence of a nuclear facility
being hit.

US intelligence "found no radiation signatures after the bombing, so
there was no uranium or plutonium present," said one official, wishing
to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject.

"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."

Their statements come as officials claim Syria has begun to
'disassemble' the site. An article today quotes former Administration
hawk and onetime Bush United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who links
Syria's alleged action with Iran.

Israel has not spoken publicly about the air raid, other than to
confirm that it happened. The confirmation came nearly a month after
the Sept. 6 bombing, and provided only that "Israeli officials said
the strike took place deep inside Syria."

"'Radiation signatures' are just the particular type of radiation that
some activity would give off," Dr. Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear weapons
expert at the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American
Scientists, told RAW STORY. "For example, a nuclear bomb would produce
a lot of radioactivity and a nuclear reactor explosion would produce a
lot of radioactivity but if you measure it carefully so you can tell,
not just that it is radioactive, but exactly what particular isotopes
are contributing, then it is easy to tell the difference.

"If a reactor explodes or is blown up then I can, with careful
measurements of the particular types of radiation, tell what the fuel
was for the reactor and how long the reactor had been running when it
was hit," Oelrich added. "It gets complicated because you have to take
into account how different species are transported in the air, how
fast they decay, etc. but it can be done."

An earlier report by Raw Story cited Vincent Cannistraro, Director of
Intelligence Programs for the National Security Council under
President Ronald Reagan and Chief of Operations at the Central
Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center under President George
H. W. Bush, as saying that what the Israelis hit was "absolutely not a
nuclear weapons facility."

The Central Intelligence Agency, through a spokesman, declined to
comment.

Administration said to leak stories to press
One US intelligence source familiar with the events expressed concern
about recent news reports describing Syria as having a functioning
nuclear weapons program and cautioned against attributing those
reports to the US intelligence community.

"The allegations that North Korea was helping to build a nuclear
reactor have not been substantiated by US intelligence," said this
intelligence official, adding, " but that hasn't stopped *** Cheney
and his minions at the NSC, Elliot Abrams and Steve Hadley, from
leaking the information [to the press], which appears to be misleading
in the extreme."

Requests for comment to the National Security Council went unanswered.

Elliot Abrams, who currently serves as the Deputy National Security
Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy, was convicted during the Iran-
Contra scandal for withholding information from Congress. He was
pardoned by President George H. W. Bush along with other Iran-Contra
players, some of whom have reappeared in the current Bush
administration.

Iran Contra was a criminal scandal in which the Reagan-Bush White
House sold weapons to Iran - an avowed enemy of the United States -
then funneled the money to extremist anti-Communist group of guerrilla
fighters called the Contras, who were fighting the democratically
elected government of Nicaragua.

A failed coup in 2002 against Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, is
also attributed to the approval of Abrams, according to an
investigation by the UK Guardian.

Prior to the Iraq war, now-National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley
was an integral part of misleading intelligence dissemination and
approved clandestine meetings between Iranian arms dealer Manucher
Ghorbanifar and members of a secretive cabal inside the Department of
Defense's controversial Office of Special Plans.

During a 2006 interview with neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen,
Raw Story was able to obtain the first on the record confirmation of
the trips having been approved by the National Security Council,
including the then National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice:

"Obviously Hadley did not unilaterally do anything. The Pentagon paid
for the expenses of the two DOD officials, and the American ambassador
in Rome was fully briefed both before and after the meetings," Ledeen
said.

What concerns intelligence officials is what appears to be
manipulation of the press and strategic leaks to the public of false
information, undercutting professional intelligence analysis, similar
to what occurred before the Iraq war in an apparent effort to bolster
support for engaging Iran.

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