Syria : CIA fabricated 'reactor' pictures April 25, 2008
Syria's ambassador to the United States said Friday that the CIA fabricated pictures allegedly taken inside a secret Syrian nuclear reactor and predicted that in coming weeks the US story about the site would "implode from within."
"The photos presented to me yesterday were ludicrous, laughable," Ambassador Imad Moustapha told reporters at his Washington residence.
He refused to say what the building in the remote eastern desert of Syria was used for before IAF jets bombed it in September 2007.
Senior US intelligence officials said Thursday they believe it was a secret nuclear reactor meant to produce plutonium, which can be used to make high-yield nuclear weapons. They alleged that North Korea aided in the design, construction and outfitting of the building.
Syria bulldozed the building's ruins a month after it was bombed and constructed a new, larger building in its place, leaving little or no evidence of what had been on the site.
Moustapha would not explain the purpose of the new building. But he said the lack of military checkpoints, air defenses or barbed wire fences around either building should show that it was not a sensitive facility.
So far, Syria has not allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the area.
Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja'afari, pledged on Friday to cooperate with the IAEA and suggested that "the main target of the American CIA allegations against Syria is to justify the Israeli attack against the Syrian side."
In a message to employees, CIA Director Michael Hayden praised the agency's "outstanding" work, calling it "a case study in rigorous analytic tradecraft, skillful human and technical collection."
But some outside nuclear experts were questioning some of the CIA's analysis, though not disputing its conclusions.
David Albright, president of the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security, analyzed commercial satellite imagery of the bombed facility last fall and surmised then it was a nuclear reactor. He questioned the intelligence agencies' conclusion that the reactor was within months or weeks of completion.
"It's not clear-cut it was ready to turn on," Albright said.
He also took issue with the Bush administration's assertion that the reactor was solely intended to support a nuclear weapons program. Officials said Thursday the reactor was ill-suited for electrical generation, lacking distribution wires or substations, and did not bear the hallmarks of a research reactor. They concluded the plutonium was therefore meant for weapons but acknowledged they had no direct evidence of that.
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The New York Times nytimes.com
April 27, 2008
Editorial
Laura Berg’s Letter
The PEN American Center , the literary organization committed to free expression, is honoring an American most people in this country have never read or even heard of: Laura Berg. She is a psychiatric nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital who was threatened with a sedition investigation after she wrote a letter to the editor denouncing the Bush administration’s bungling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war.
That’s right, sedition: inciting rebellion against the government. We suppose nothing should surprise us in these days of government zealotry. But the horror and the shame of that witch hunt should shock everyone.
Ms. Berg identified herself as a V.A. nurse when, soon after Katrina’s horrors, she sent her impassioned letter to The Alibi, a paper in Albuquerque . “I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” she wrote. “We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.”
Her superiors at the hospital soon alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and impounded her office computer, where she keeps the case files of war-scarred veterans she treats. Then she received an official warning in which a Veterans Affairs investigator intoned that her letter “potentially represents sedition.”
It took civil rights litigators and Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico to “act forcefully” in reminding the government of the Constitution and her right to free speech. The Department of Veterans Affairs retreated then finally apologized to the shaken Ms. Berg.
Even then, she noted, one superior told her it was preferred that she not identify herself as a V.A. nurse in any future letter writing. “And so I am saying I am a V.A. nurse,” Ms. Berg soon boomed out in a radio broadcast. “And some of my fire in writing this about Katrina and Iraq is from my experience as a V.A. nurse.” Thus declared Ms. Berg, well chosen to receive the new PEN/Katherine Anne Porter First Amendment Award.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center , 325 E. 25th St. , Baltimore , MD 21218 . Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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