White House says North Korea gave Syria nuclear help

http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNew...22257920080424

Thu Apr 24, 2008 11:50pm BST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is convinced that North Korea helped Syria build a secret nuclear reactor, the White House said on Thursday in an accusation that may complicate its diplomacy both on the Korean Peninsula and in the Middle East.

"We are convinced, based on a variety of information, that North Korea assisted Syria's covert nuclear activities," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement.

"We have good reason to believe that reactor, which was damaged beyond repair on September 6 of last year, was not intended for peaceful purposes," she said.

The statement was issued after intelligence officials briefed U.S. lawmakers about the Syrian nuclear facility that was destroyed by Israel last year.

The United States did not give Israel any "green light" to strike the suspected nuclear reactor, a U.S. official said.

Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha denied the U.S. charge. "This is a fantasy," he told CNN after being briefed by the U.S. State Department on the U.S. intelligence.

"I hope the truth will be revealed to everybody," Moustapha said. "This will be a major embarrassment to the U.S. administration for a second time -- they lied about Iraqi WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) and they think they can do it again."

Washington's main justification for the 2003 U.S.-led invasion was that Iraq had stockpiles of WMDs. Such weapons have not been found.

'COVERT NUCLEAR REACTOR'
The White House statement, which did not mention Israel, said Syria had been building a "covert nuclear reactor" in its eastern desert that was capable of producing plutonium.

The U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency was not informed about the construction and after it was destroyed, Syria "moved quickly to bury evidence of its existence," the White House said.

A U.S. official, who asked not to be named, said that among the intelligence the United States has was an image of what appeared to be people of Korean descent at the facility.

However, the official stressed this image was only part of a wider array of information gathered from multiple sources on the suspected cooperation between Syria and North Korea.

The U.S. charges come several months after North Korea missed a December 31 deadline to make a declaration of its nuclear programs in a deal over its nuclear programs with the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea.

Under the deal North Korea promised to disclose all of its nuclear programs and, ultimately, to abandon them and any nuclear weapons it may have.

U.S. President George W. Bush has lost the support of some fellow Republicans on the North Korea deal, but the Democrats who control Congress by and large appear to be more supportive of the path he is following.

A U.S. official who spoke on condition he not be named said the administration had told North Korea that the disclosures were coming and argued that they increased the pressure on Pyongyang to produce a complete declaration.

'DESTABILIZING'
The United States has long been "seriously concerned" about North Korea's nuclear weapons program and its proliferation activities and Pyongyang's cooperation with Syria was a "dangerous manifestation" of those activities, the White House said.

"The construction of this (Syrian) reactor was a dangerous and potentially destabilizing development for the region and the world," Perino said.

That development also underscored the international community was right to be concerned about the nuclear activities of Iran and "must take further steps" to confront that challenge, she said.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House of Representatives intelligence committee, bluntly said after a briefing on the issue that the administration had lost the trust of many lawmakers.

"This administration has no credibility on North Korea," he told Reuters. "A lot of us are beginning to become concerned that the administration is moving away from getting a solid policy solution to 'let's make a deal' -- regardless of how bad it may be."

(Additional Reporting by Paul Eckert and Jeremy Pelofsky; Editing by Patricia Wilson and Frances Kerry)

Administration renews claims of Syrian nuclear weapons program

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Admini...lear_0424.html

Muriel Kane
Published: Thursday April 24, 2008

U.S. intelligence officials on Thursday were showing members of Congress a videotape and other evidence supporting their case that Syria was building a nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance before it was bombed by Israeli planes last year. Intelligence officials who have seen the evidence consider it "extremely compelling," a US official said, adding that it was gleaned from a variety of sources, not just Israeli intelligence.

Syria has denied the administration's allegations, and the videotape apparently was just a collection of still photos from inside the facility.

The administration's presentation represents a renewal of claims about an alleged Syrian nuclear weapons program which were widely reported in the mainstream media last fall, following the Israeli bombing. Those allegations were never substantiated, and although new evidence appears to have been added to strengthen the case, skepticism remains strong.

Political commentator Steve Clemons suggests that "[Vice President] Cheney's minions are pushing Congress to sponge up Israeli intelligence assessments about purported Syria-North Korea cooperation on a now destroyed, alleged nuclear site. There are many who doubt Israel's assessments in the U.S. intelligence community. A consensus has built that North Korea and Syria were cooperating on some machine tool operation to retrofit increasingly sophisticated short range missiles with new capacity, perhaps air burst capacity that could potentially deliver biological or chemical agents."

Last September, RAW STORY's Larisa Alexandrovna was the first to report that the Syrians had been engaged in attempting to add chemical warheads to their stock of "older generation" North Korean missiles and quoted former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro as saying that the building which was bombed was "absolutely not a nuclear weapons facility."

In a follow-up article, Alexandrovna added that several of her sources saw Dick Cheney's hand behind behind the leak of stories about a Syria nuclear program, stories which were not supported by the intelligence community. According to one official, "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.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, also told Alexandrovna, " I do not believe that the real story, if it is ever known, will have anything at all to do with nuclear weapons." Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has expressed skepticism towards the story as well.

The pattern of selective leaks, which appears to be typical of Cheney's operations, is as apparent with the new evidence as it was last fall. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Middle East subcommittee, accuses the Bush administration of "bizarre behavior" in giving information to reporters who lack security clearances while restricting what it presents to Congress. "This is the selective control of information that led us to war in Iraq," Ackerman stated.

The renewal of claims about the Syrian facility come as the Bush administration is pressuring North Korea to acknowledge its alleged nuclear proliferation as part of a disarmament agreement reached last year. However, Steve Clemons points out that Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be trying to build a case against Syria, as well.

"A source reported to me yesterday that in the last two weeks, Cheney held forth at a meeting on Iraq WMDs and insisted that they were real and still out there," Clemons reveals. "Cheney believes that Syria has them -- and has been watching closely intelligence streams from a secret 'black SIGINT base' that the US has placed in the mountains near the intersection of the Syrian, Turkish, and Iraqi borders."