Dr. Shmuel Bar, director of studies at the Institute of Policy and Strategy, an Israeli think-tank based in Herzliya, has been caught lying over US involvement in the bombing of Syria’s so-called nuclear reactor in 2007.
A report in a BBC online news article yesterday stated the following:
Shmuel Bar points out that Israel did not inform the US in advance of the attack on Osirak or its alleged attack on the Syrian reactor, and may take the same approach in attacking Iran, as a way of side-stepping a potential "red light" from the US altogether.
Shmuel Bar is flat out lying with regard to the Israeli attack on the Syrian ‘reactor’.
Not only were the US informed of the pending attack but, according to Elliott Abrams who was deputy National Security Advisor at the time and who handled the matter, the attack was carefully and jointly planned over a period of months. Abrams wrote a detailed article on the Syrian reactor affair in last months Commentary magazine in which he said – and I apologise for the lengthy quote:
In the middle of May 2007, we received an urgent request to receive Mossad chief Meir Dagan at the White House. Olmert asked that he be allowed to show some material to Bush personally. We headed that off with a suggestion that he first reveal whatever he had to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and to me; I was then the deputy national-security adviser in charge of the Middle East portfolio on the National Security Council. Vice President Dick Cheney joined us in Hadley’s office for Dagan’s presentation. What Dagan had was astonishing and explosive: He showed us intelligence demonstrating that Syria was constructing a nuclear reactor whose design was supplied by North Korea, and doing so with North Korean technical assistance. Dagan left us with one stark message: All Israeli policymakers who saw the evidence agreed that the reactor had to go away.
There then began a four-month process of extremely close cooperation with Israel about the reactor, called al-Kibar. As soon as our own intelligence had confirmed the Israeli information and we all agreed on what we were dealing with, Hadley established a process for gathering further information, considering our options, and sharing our thinking with Israel. This process was run entirely out of the White House, with extremely limited participation to maintain secrecy. The effort at secrecy succeeded and there were no leaks—an amazing feat in Washington, especially when the information being held so tightly was as startling and sexy as this.
Faced with the overwhelming evidence from a senior US official that Israel did not bomb the Syrian ‘reactor’ unilaterally, one needs to ask why Shmuel Bar feels the need to practice such obvious deceit. The answer, of course, lays in the present day circumstances in which, as Shmuel Bar himself asserts, Israel may be able to launch an attack against Iran without a “red light” from the US.
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