by CKR
Given President Bush’s speech to the Israeli Knesset last week, in which he warned against appeasing Hitler nations he doesn’t like, I’m currently leaning toward the theory that the motivation for releasing the intelligence information on the Syrian site that Israel bombed last year was to discourage the Israelis from negotiating with Hitler Syria, with perhaps a frisson of fear to inject into the US presidential campaign.
Today, Gabriel Schoenfeld, associate editor of Commentary, accuses Joe Cirincione, president of the Plowshares Foundation and author of Bomb Scare, of not being “worth his boron” in criticizing that intelligence information.
Schoenfeld’s previous claim to fame is an article in which he wondered whether the New York Times should be prosecuted for releasing national security secrets in reporting on illegal administration electronic surveillance practices. We can see from the outcome of that article that Schoenfeld wasn’t worth his electrons on that one.
And, of course, it is the crew at Commentary that has been beating the drums for attacking Iran and all that other fun war stuff.
I’m looking forward to what Cirincione will have to say, but in the meanwhile, here’s my take.
It’s pretty clear that Schoenfeld doesn’t know much about loose nuclear materials. The Obama statement he quotes refers to the programs to secure those materials in Russia and for reactors using enriched uranium that the Soviet Union and the United States made available to a number of nations. His counterexample is the Syrian whatever. He says it’s a reactor.
My concern is that the evidence that has been made public does not support that claim. The intelligence release of a few weeks back, which I took some time to analyze, show overhead photos (in scrambled orientations), modified overhead and ground-level photos of a building, and photos of a reactor under construction.
The provenance of the photos was not provided, and we have no way of knowing that the building in the overhead photos is the building in the ground-level photos, or that the reactor is inside those buildings.
I’m being deliberately obtuse. David Albright, whose work and integrity I respect, is willing to believe that all those photos are of the same building and that that reactor is inside that building. But the publicly available evidence does not support that conclusion. Albright claims to have additional information.
So I will continue to maintain that the case has not been made publicly. My analysis finds some sloppiness and a lack of clarity in presentation of the evidence that could be deliberately deceptive, or maybe not. My analysis doesn’t negate the story presented with the evidence, but it does raise questions about the integrity of the presentation.
Schoenfeld is much more positive in his evaluation.
Thanks to materials made public by the U.S. on April 24, we now know that the facility at Al Kibar wasa nuclear reactor and that it had been built with North Korean assistance.He doesn’t say why he is so positive. He also, without explanation, finds this to be evidence that arms control “has failed utterly.”
Over to you, Joe.