A lot more was/is going on behind the scenes with Israeli stike inside Syria

[Christians4LessGvt]

US Acts to Curb Nuclear Proliferation

Israel's Syria Air Raid Used to Twist Nuclear Arms in Tehran, Damascus and Pyongyang

The Israeli air strike in northern Syria of Wednesday night Sept. 6 was not the big deal presented in most reports, hyped up as they were by the shroud of official secrecy drawn over the event by Jerusalem, Damascus and Washington.

Military and Middle East experts have told sources that the Israeli warplanes surgically targeted a small area, a facility disguised as an agriculture research center at Bir al-Harj on the Euphrates River near the Turkish border, which Israel believes is used for testing new weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological.


Syria's Vulnerability Immobilized by American-Israeli Cyber War Tactics

Three groups of air defense and early warning systems experts are hard at work in Damascus. Syrian president Bashar Assad has ordered them to find out why Syria's two early warning stations for protecting its skies against air and missile intrusion failed to detect or identify an Israeli air force raid on Sept. 6.

The Syrian group was handpicked by a very worried president. It is assisted by Russian experts, who are anxious to find out what caused the failure of the electronic systems and the radar of the Pantsyr S1-E air defense missile batteries purchased from Moscow.

A third group is made up of Iranian air force and missile corps officers who badly need to know what went wrong with the Russian early warning systems installed in both Iran and Syria.

Military sources report that the Syrian early warning station, positioned at Marj as Sulta, 15 km east of Damascus and north of the Syrian air base at the international airport, is there to secure the Syrian capital and monitor Israeli air or missile activity on the Golan and from northern Israel.

The Shinshar station south of Homs, near the small Syrian air base of Al Qusayr Shayrat, is located opposite northern Lebanon. Its function is to sound the alarm if airplanes, missiles or warships approach Syria from Lebanese territory of from the eastern Mediterranean.

When the early warning stations in Syria were silenced, some communications systems, computers and cell phones were also knocked out in neighboring Lebanon evidence that Syria had been bested in a cyber war against its electronic and radar systems.

Syrian war planners were blinded and left groping for answers to several questions:

1. From which did direction did the warplanes enter Syria airspace ? the Mediterranean, Israel or Turkey?

2. Were the trespassers Israeli or American air force jets or both? Damascus suspects they operated under an air umbrella provided by American aircraft flying in from Iraq or a US carrier in the Mediterranean.


The Turks refuse to cooperate with Damascus

3. The removal of markings from the ammunition and disposal fuel tanks dropped on both sides of the Syrian-Turkish border has left the Syrians uncertain about the identity of the planes which attacked them. All they could deduce was that meticulously planning must have gone into the attack for these telltale traces to have been removed.

4. Turkey sharply dismissed Syrian appeals for cooperation in getting some of these mysteries solved. On Sept. 13, Assad sent his foreign minister Walid Mualam to Ankara with this request. He found that the Americans and Israelis had got there first, posting high-ranking military delegations in the Turkish capital from the beginning of the week.

Sources were able to extract very little about this from a very high-placed Turkish military source, who would only say: We saw what they showed us and those images and explanations convinced us to continue to stay mum.?

Our intelligence sources assume that the Americans and Israelis showed Turkish officials the satellite images of the targeted Syrian facility, convincing them that it posed a danger to Turkey as well.

According to military sources, the three groups looking for answers in Damascus have made little if any progress in cracking the mystery, because two weeks after the initial attack, the United States-Israeli cyber war tactics against Syria are still going strong. Unknown forces, which none of those groups have been able to trace or identify, continue to jam Syria?s electronic networks, including air force computers, radar and early warning stations, with only very brief occasional letups.

The waves were powerful enough to disrupt Israeli satellite television broadcasts this week. Commercial firms complained and ran a notice to viewers that the cause of the trouble was being investigated with the assistance of defense specialists.

Western military experts comment that never before has a military cyber war been conducted at this level and for this length of time.

Our military sources account for its duration by two considerations:

One: To deter President Assad from any attempt at reprisal against Israeli or American targets in the Middle East. He is given to understand that hostile cyber activity against Syria can be intensified still further, blacking out all of Syria?s strategic and military facilities and endangering his regime.

Two: The electronic warfare systems employed against Syria proved to have a small loophole. While jamming the larger early warning and radar systems, a small Syrian electronic station managed to detect the Israeli air raid over northern Syria and alert the president and military command to the intrusion.

While Syrian, Russian and Iranian experts delve into the mysterious immobilization of Syria's main systems, the Americans and Israelis are curious to find out more about the small gap in their cyber offensive.

North Korean experts are known to visit the facility from time to time and assist in the experiments, although probably not on the night of the Israeli raid, while Iranian engineers are to be found everywhere in Syria?s military industry.

The number of Israeli air force planes which carried out the operation is not known, but they included F-15s, as attested to by the falling ammunition fragments picked up on the Syria and Turkish sides of the border.

According to Washington sources, the Israeli air force was harnessed for a US campaign larger than a single Syrian WMD facility: scare tactics to frighten Tehran and Damascus into backing away from their nuclear weapons ambitions and from black market purchases of elements of Pyongyang's dismantled program.

US officials now fear that the massive proliferation generated by Iran's steady progression towards a nuclear bomb and North Korea's renunciation of nuclear weapons has begun to run out of control in the Middle East and parts of Asia.

The first to jump into the nuclear race were Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and even Libya. Each wants to own a national nuclear program and an autonomous uranium enrichment capability. Nuclear fever has also infected Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.


Israel air force employed as scare tactic for Syria, Iran and North Korea

Yet the Americans refrained from intercepting, halting or searching the vessel before it docked on Sept. 3.

Our sources in Washington and Vienna have not learned from any American official why this was not done. But instead, the Israeli air force was deployed to attack the Bir al Harj facility three days after "the cement" was offloaded inTartus port.

Israeli intelligence had for years closely monitored the phony Syrian agricultural station on the Euphrates, keeping a wary eye on the development there of various weapons of mass destruction. Recently, they picked up unusually frequent visits by Iranian and North Korean scientists and engineers.

Israel clearly welcomed the opportunity to destroy a Syrian facility engaged in developing nuclear weapons. The advantage lay not only in aborting a potential threat, but also possibly ensuring that Syria would not think of resorting to nuclear arms against Israel for a very long time.

The attack served the United States as an unambiguous warning to Pyongyang to call off its roaring trade of bits and pieces of its nuclear program, as well as issuing a tangible caution to Syrian president Bashar Assad that he is now in Washington's military sights, direct or indirect.

This caution is addressed equally to Damascus and its strategic ally, Tehran.

A senior American source said that the episode which centered on the Israeli air attack is part of a comprehensive campaign which has only just begun.

This is no one-shot exercise against a Syrian target involving Iran and North Korea. The Bush administration has embarked on a course of unrelenting pressure on Pyongyang, Damascus and Tehran, targeting the Syrian regime as the first object for punishment.

Assad can look forward to more surprise operations like the one which caught him napping at Bir al Harj.

Syria and Iran's vulnerability to Israel air and missile attack was demonstrated in that operation when the Pantsyr-S1E air defense missile systems they purchased from Russia were jammed without downing the invading Israeli jets.

{source:e-mail}

[sirs]

Friday, September 21, 2007

On Sept. 6, something important happened in northern Syria. Problem is, no one knows exactly what. Except for those few who were involved, and they're not saying.

We do know that Israel carried out an airstrike. How do we know it was important? Because in Israel, where leaking is an art form, even the best-informed don't have a clue. They tell me they have never seen a better-kept secret.

Which suggests that whatever happened near Dayr az Zawr was no accidental intrusion into Syrian airspace, no dry run for an attack on Iran, no strike on some conventional target such as an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base or a weapons shipment on its way to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Circumstantial evidence points to this being an attack on some nuclear facility provided by North Korea.

Three days earlier, a freighter flying the North Korean flag docked in the Syrian port city of Tartus with a shipment of "cement." Long way to go for cement. Within days, a top State Department official warned that "there may have been contact between Syria and some secret suppliers for nuclear equipment." Three days later, the six-party meeting on dismantling North Korea's nuclear facilities scheduled for Sept. 19 was suddenly postponed, officially by China, almost certainly at the behest of North Korea.

Apart from the usual suspects -- Syria, Iran, Libya and Russia -- only two countries registered strong protests to the Israeli strike: Turkey and North Korea. Turkey we can understand. Its military may have permitted Israel an overflight corridor without ever having told the Islamist civilian government. But North Korea? What business is this of North Korea's? Unless it was a North Korean facility being hit.

Which raises alarms for many reasons. First, it would undermine the whole North Korean disarmament process. Pyongyang might be selling its stuff to other rogue states or perhaps just temporarily hiding it abroad while permitting ostentatious inspections back home.

Second, there are ominous implications for the Middle East. Syria has long had chemical weapons -- on Monday, Jane's Defence Weekly reported on an accident that killed dozens of Syrians and Iranians loading a nerve-gas warhead onto a Syrian missile -- but Israel will not tolerate a nuclear Syria.

Tensions are already extremely high because of Iran's headlong rush to go nuclear. In fending off sanctions and possible military action, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has chosen a radically aggressive campaign to assemble, deploy, flaunt and partially activate Iran's proxies in the Arab Middle East:

(1) Hamas launching rockets into Israeli towns and villages across the border from the Gaza Strip. Its intention is to invite an Israeli reaction, preferably a bloody and telegenic ground assault.

(2) Hezbollah heavily rearmed with Iranian rockets transshipped through Syria and preparing for the next round of fighting with Israel. The third Lebanon war, now inevitable, awaits only Tehran's order.

(3) Syria, Iran's only Arab client state, building up forces across the Golan Heights frontier with Israel. And on Wednesday, yet another anti-Syrian member of Lebanon's parliament was killed in a massive car bombing.

(4) The al-Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard training and equipping Shiite extremist militias in the use of the deadliest IEDs and rocketry against American and Iraqi troops. Iran is similarly helping the Taliban attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Why is Iran doing this? Because it has its eye on a single prize: the bomb. It needs a bit more time, knowing that once it goes nuclear, it becomes the regional superpower and Persian Gulf hegemon.

Iran's assets in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq are poised and ready. Ahmadinejad's message is this: If anyone dares attack our nuclear facilities, we will fully activate our proxies, unleashing unrestrained destruction on Israel, moderate Arabs, Iraq and U.S. interests -- in addition to the usual, such as mining the Strait of Hormuz and causing an acute oil crisis and worldwide recession.

This is an extremely high-stakes game. The time window is narrow. In probably less than two years, Ahmadinejad will have the bomb.

The world is not quite ready to acquiesce. The new president of France has declared a nuclear Iran " unacceptable." The French foreign minister warned that "it is necessary to prepare for the worst" -- and "the worst, it's war, sir."

Which makes it all the more urgent that powerful sanctions be slapped on the Iranian regime. Sanctions will not stop Ahmadinejad. But there are others in the Iranian elite who might stop him and the nuclear program before the volcano explodes. These rival elites may be radical, but they are not suicidal. And they believe, with reason, that whatever damage Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic folly may inflict upon the region and the world, on Crusader and Jew, on infidel and believer, the one certain result of such an eruption is Iran's Islamic republic buried under the ash.


Middle East Volcano