Occupying 20 degrees of latitude on
the southeast edge of the moon, this tangle of walled valleys, craters, and
high peaks has escaped discovery for many years, chiefly because nobody looked
there carefully enough until now. Commenting on Mr. Wilkins' discovery, Dr.
Walter Goodacre, acting director of the British Astronomical Society,
recommended further observations of the moon's edges, which may lead to
additional discoveries.
In the 1967 film classic The Graduate,
a businessman corners Benjamin Braddock at a cocktail party and gives him a bit
of career advice. "Just one word…plastics."
Although Benjamin didn't heed that
recommendation, plenty of other young graduates did. Today, the planet is awash
in products spawned by the plastics industry. Residues of plastics have become
ubiquitous in the environment—and in our bodies.
A federal government study now reports
that bisphenol A (BPA)—the building block of one of the most widely used
plastics—laces the bodies of the vast majority of U.S. residents young and old.
Manufacturers link BPA molecules into
long chains, called polymers, to make polycarbonate plastics. All of those
clear, brittle plastics used in baby bottles, food ware, and small kitchen
appliances (like food-processor bowls) are made from polycarbonates. BPA-based
resins also line the interiors of most food, beer, and soft-drink cans. With
use and heating, polycarbonates can break down, leaching BPA into the materials
they contact. Such as foods.
And that could be bad if what happens
in laboratory animals also happens in people, because studies in rodents show
that BPA can trigger a host of harmful changes, from reproductive havoc to
impaired blood-sugar control and obesity (SN: 9/29/07, p. 202).
For the new study, scientists analyzed
urine from some 2,500 people who had been recruited between 2003 and 2004 for
the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Roughly 92
percent of the individuals hosted measurable amounts of BPA, according to a
report in the January Environmental Health Perspectives. It's the first study
to measure the pollutant in a representative cross-section of the U.S.
population.
Typically, only small traces of BPA
turned up, concentrations of a few parts per billion in urine, note chemist
Antonia M. Calafat and her colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. However, with hormone-mimicking agents like BPA, even tiny
exposures can have notable impacts.
Overall, concentrations measured by
Calafat's team were substantially higher than those that have triggered
disease, birth defects, and more in exposed animals, notes Frederick S. vom
Saal, a University of Missouri-Columbia biologist who has been probing the
toxicology of BPA for more than 15 years.
The BPA industry describes things
differently. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
Although Calafat's team reported urine concentrations of BPA,
in fact they assayed a breakdown product—the compound by which BPA is excreted,
notes Steven G. Hentges of the American Chemistry Council's Polycarbonate/BPA
Global Group. As such, he argues, "this does not mean that BPA itself is
present in the body or in urine."
On the other hand, few people have
direct exposure to the breakdown product.
Hentges' group estimates that the
daily BPA intake needed to create urine concentrations reported by the CDC
scientists should be in the neighborhood of 50 nanograms per kilogram of
bodyweight—or one millionth of an amount at which "no adverse
effects" were measured in multi-generation animal studies. In other words,
Hentges says, this suggests "a very large margin of safety."
No way, counters vom Saal. If one
applies the ratio of BPA intake to excreted values in hosts of published animal
studies, concentrations just reported by CDC suggest that the daily intake of
most Americans is actually closer to 100 micrograms (µg) per kilogram
bodyweight, he says—or some 1,000-fold higher than the industry figure.
Clearly, there are big differences of
opinion and interpretation. And a lot may rest on who's right.
Globally, chemical manufacturers
produce an estimated 2.8 million tons of BPA each year. The material goes into
a broad range of products, many used in and around the home. BPA also serves as
the basis of dental sealants, which are resins applied to the teeth of children
to protect their pearly whites from cavities (SN: 4/6/96, p. 214). The
industry, therefore, has a strong economic interest in seeing that the market
for BPA-based products doesn't become eroded by public concerns over the
chemical.
And that could happen. About 2 years
after a Japanese research team showed that BPA leached out of baby bottles and
plastic food ware (see What's Coming Out of Baby's Bottle?), manufacturers of
those consumer products voluntarily found BPA substitutes for use in food cans.
Some 2 years after that, a different group of Japanese scientists measured
concentrations of BPA residues in the urine of college students. About half of
the samples came from before the switch, the rest from after the period when
BPA was removed from food cans.
By comparing urine values from the two
time periods, the researchers showed that BPA residues were much lower—down by
at least 50 percent—after Japanese manufacturers had eliminated BPA from the
lining of food cans.
Concludes vom Saal, in light of the
new CDC data and a growing body of animal data implicating even low-dose BPA
exposures with the potential to cause harm, "the most logical thing"
for the United States to do would be to follow in Japan's footsteps and
"get this stuff [BPA] out of our food."
Kids appear most exposed
Overall, men tend to have
statistically lower concentrations of BPA than women, the NHANES data indicate.
But the big difference, Calafat says, traces to age. "Children had higher
concentrations than adolescents, and they in turn had higher levels than
adults," she told Science News Online.
This decreasing body burden with older
age "is something we have seen with some other nonpersistent
chemicals," Calafat notes—such as phthalates, another class of
plasticizers.
The spread between the average BPA
concentration that her team measured in children 6 to 11 years old (4.5
µg/liter) and adults (2.5 µg/L) doesn't look like much, but proved reliably
different.
The open question is why adults tended
to excrete only 55 percent as much BPA. It could mean children have higher
exposures, she posits, or perhaps that they break it down less efficiently.
"We really need to do more research to be able to answer that
question."
Among other differences that emerged
in the NHANES analysis: urine residues of BPA decreased with increasing
household income and varied somewhat with ethnicity (with Mexican-Americans
having the lowest average values, blacks the highest, and white's values in
between).
There was also a time-of-day
difference, with urine values for any given group tending to be highest in the
evening, lowest in the afternoon, and midway between those in the morning.
Since BPA's half-life in the body is only about 6 hours, that temporal
variation in the chemical's excretion would be consistent with food as a major
source of exposure, the CDC scientists note.
In the current NHANES paper, BPA
samples were collected only once from each recruit. However, in a paper due to
come out in the February Environmental Health Perspectives, Calafat and
colleagues from several other institutions looked at how BPA excretion varied
over a 2-year span among 82 individuals—men and women—seen at a fertility
clinic in Boston.
In contrast to the NHANES data, the
upcoming report shows that men tended to have somewhat higher BPA
concentrations than women. Then again both groups had only about one-quarter
the concentration typical of Americans.
The big difference in the Boston group
emerged among the 10 women who ultimately became pregnant. Their BPA excretion
increased 33 percent during pregnancy. Owing to the small number of
participants in this subset of the study population, the pregnancy-associated
change was not statistically significant. However, the researchers report,
these are the first data to look for changes during pregnancy and ultimately
determining whether some feature of pregnancy—such as a change in diet or
metabolism of BPA—really alters body concentrations of the pollutant could be
important. It could point to whether the fetus faces an unexpectedly high
exposure to the pollutant.
If it does, the fetus could face a
double whammy: Not only would exposures be higher during this period of organ
and neural development, but rates of detoxification also would be diminished,
vom Saal says.
Indeed, in a separate study, one due
to be published soon in Reproductive Toxicology, his team administered BPA by
ingestion or by injection to 3-day-old mice. Either way, the BPA exposure
resulted in comparable BPA concentrations in blood.
What's more, that study found, per
unit of BPA delivered, blood values in the newborns were "markedly
higher" than other studies have reported for adult rodents exposed to the
chemical. And that makes sense, vom Saal says, because the enzyme needed to
break BPA down and lead to its excretion is only a tenth as active in babies as
in adults. That's true in the mouse, he says, in the rat—and, according to some
preliminary data, in humans.
Vom Saal contends that since studies
have shown BPA exhibits potent hormonelike activity in human cells at the
parts-per-trillion level, and since http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
the new CDC study finds that most
people are continually exposed to concentrations well above the
parts-per-trillion ballpark, it's time to reevaluate whether it makes sense to
use BPA-based products in and around foods.
LETTER FROM POLAND about novelist
Krystian Bala and the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski. Writer describes the
discovery of Janiszewski’s body in the Oder River in December, 2000.
Janiszewski had run a small advertising firm in the city of Wroclaw. He had no
apparent enemies and no criminal record. After six months, the investigation
was dropped. Tells about police detective Jacek Wroblewski taking an interest
in the Janiszewski case in 2003. In cold cases the key to solving the crime is
often an overlooked clue in the original file. The file detailed a series of
calls to Janiszewski’s cell phone on the day of the murder, some from a phone
booth down the street from his office. Yet the cell phone had never been found.
Wroblewski and a colleague traced the cell phone, which had been sold on an
Internet auction site four days after Janiszewski disappeared. The seller,
investigators learned, was a thirty-year old Polish intellectual named Krystian
Bala. Bala had recently published a sadistic, pornographic, creepy novel called
“Amok.” The book featured a murder not unlike Janiszewski’s and a narrator
named Chris, the English version of Bala’s first name. Discusses Bala’s
interest in postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, and
Michel Foucault. Bala constructed myths about himself so that friends often had
trouble distinguishing his real character from the one he had invented. Bala
married his high-school sweetheart, Stasia, in 1995; they had a son in 1997. To
support his family, he left the university and started a cleaning business,
which went bankrupt in 2000. His marriage also collapsed. He left Poland,
traveling widely, and worked on his novel, finishing the book in 2002. The book
came out in 2003 but it did not sell well. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
Describes Wroblewski using the book as
a guide to his investigation of Bala’s possible involvement in the murder and
discusses similarities between events in the book and Bala’s life. When Bala
returned to Poland, he was arrested. Bala claims that he was violently beaten
during the interrogation, a claim Wroblewski denies. Bala took a polygraph test
but the results were inconclusive. Further investigation revealed a darker
picture of the years during which Bala’s business and marriage failed (and
during which Janiszewski was murdered). Investigators were able to connect Bala
to the card that was used to make calls to Janiszewski’s cell phone on the day
he was murdered. A friend of Bala’s ex-wife then told Wroblewski that, in the
summer of 2000, Stasia had met Janiszewski at a night club. Bala had then
confronted Stasia in a jealous rage. Tells about Bala’s trial and conviction
for the murder. He was sentenced to twenty-five years. Writer visits Bala in
prison. Bala tells him about a new novel he is working on called “De Liryk.”
Sometime after midnight on September
6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into
Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the
Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border. The seemingly
unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between
Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along
the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war. But in the
immediate aftermath nothing was heard from the government of Israel. In
contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak
nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing
reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely
interviewed.
Within hours of the attack, Syria
denounced Israel for invading its airspace, but its public statements were
incomplete and contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military
spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some munitions in an
unpopulated area after being challenged by Syrian air defenses, “which forced
them to flee.” Four days later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister,
said during a state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live
ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no casualties or
property damage. It was not until October 1st that Syrian President Bashar
Assad, in an interview with the BBC, acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes
had hit their target, which he described as an “unused military building.”
Assad added that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments were
muted.
Despite official silence in Tel Aviv
(and in Washington), in the days after the bombing the American and European media
were flooded with reports, primarily based on information from anonymous
government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed a nascent nuclear
reactor that was secretly being assembled in Syria, with the help of North
Korea. Beginning construction of a nuclear reactor in secret would be a
violation of Syria’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
and could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.
The evidence was circumstantial but
seemingly damning. The first reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear
coöperation came on September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of
October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four points: the
Israeli intelligence community had learned of a North Korean connection to a
construction site in an agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before
the bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had arrived at
the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean; satellite imagery strongly
suggested that the building under construction was designed to hold a nuclear
reactor when completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded
as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be stopped. There
were also reports—by ABC News and others—that some of the Israeli intelligence
had been shared in advance with the United States, which had raised no
objection to the bombing.
The Israeli government still declined
to make any statement about the incident. Military censorship on dispatches
about the raid was imposed for several weeks, and the Israeli press resorted to
recycling the disclosures in the foreign press. In the first days after the
attack, there had been many critical stories in the Israeli press speculating
about the bombing, and the possibility that it could lead to a conflict with
Syria. Larry Derfner, a columnist writing in the Jerusalem Post, described the
raid as “the sort of thing that starts wars.” But, once reports about the
nuclear issue and other details circulated, the domestic criticism subsided.
At a news conference on September
20th, President George W. Bush was asked about the incident four times but
said, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements
became part of the story. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
“The silence from all parties has been
deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but the message to
Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected of pursuing a nuclear
weapon—“is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate
air defenses to destroy them.”
It was evident that officials in
Israel and the United States, although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for
the news media to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the
Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli intelligence approached
me, with a version of the standard story, including colorful but, as it turned
out, unconfirmable details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the
moment it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective gear as
they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence monitoring trucks from the
docks to the target site. On October 3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of
the same information, published an overheated account of the September 6th
raid, claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating threat,”
and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had warned, “If people had
known how close we came to World War Three that day there’d have been mass
panic.”
However, in three months of reporting
for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence,
diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid
evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that
Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush
Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This
process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war
in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring
compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who
have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this
building was a nuclear facility.” http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Joseph Cirincione, the director for
nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think
tank, told me, “Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial
ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue
for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we
investigate and there’s nothing. There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat
from Syria. This is all political.” Cirincione castigated the press corps for
its handling of the story. “I think some of our best journalists were used,” he
said.
A similar message emerged at briefings
given to select members of Congress within weeks of the attack. The briefings,
conducted by intelligence agencies, focussed on what Washington knew about the
September 6th raid. One concern was whether North Korea had done anything that
might cause the U.S. to back away from ongoing six-nation talks about its
nuclear program. A legislator who took part in one such briefing said
afterward, according to a member of his staff, that he had heard nothing that
caused him “to have any doubts” about the North Korean negotiations—“nothing
that should cause a pause.” The legislator’s conclusion, the staff member said,
was “There’s nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”
Morton Abramowitz, a former Assistant
Secretary of State for intelligence and research, told me that he was
astonished by the lack of response. “Anytime you bomb another state, that’s a
big deal,” he said. “But where’s the outcry, particularly from the concerned
states and the U.N.? Something’s amiss.”
Israel could, of course, have damning
evidence that it refuses to disclose. But there are serious and unexamined
contradictions in the various published accounts of the September 6th bombing.
The main piece of evidence to emerge
publicly that Syria was building a reactor arrived on October 23rd, when David
Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, a highly
respected nonprofit research group, released a satellite image of the target.
The photograph had been taken by a commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe,
of Longmont, Colorado, on August 10th, four weeks before the bombing, and
showed a square building and a nearby water-pumping station. In an analysis
released at the same time, http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
Albright, a physicist who served as a
weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that the building, as viewed from space, had
roughly the same length and width as a reactor building at Yongbyon, North
Korea’s main nuclear facility. “The tall building in the image may house a
reactor under construction and the pump station along the river may have been
intended to supply cooling water to the reactor,” Albright said. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
He concluded his analysis by posing a
series of rhetorical questions that assumed that the target was a nuclear
facility:
How far along was the reactor
construction project when it was bombed? What was the extent of nuclear
assistance from North Korea? Which reactor components did Syria obtain from
North Korea or elsewhere, and where are they now?
He was later quoted in the Washington
Post saying, “I’m pretty convinced that Syria was trying to build a nuclear
reactor.”
When I asked Albright how he had
pinpointed the target, he told me that he and a colleague, Paul Brannan, “did a
lot of hard work”—culling press reports and poring over DigitalGlobe
imagery—“before coming up with the site.” Albright then shared his findings
with Robin Wright and other journalists at the Post, who, after checking with
Administration officials, told him that the building was, indeed, the one
targeted by the Israelis. “We did not release the information until we got
direct confirmation from the Washington Post,” he told me. The Post’s sources
in the Administration, he understood, had access to far more detailed images
obtained by U.S. intelligence satellites. The Post ran a story, without
printing the imagery, on October 19th, reporting that “U.S. and foreign
officials familiar with the aftermath of the attack” had concluded that the
site had the “signature,” or characteristics, of a reactor “similar in
structure to North Korea’s facilities”—a conclusion with which Albright then
agreed. In other words, the Albright and the Post reports, which appeared to
independently reinforce each other, stemmed in part from the same sources.
Albright told me that before going
public he had met privately with Israeli officials. “I wanted to be sure in my
own mind that the Israelis thought http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
it was a reactor, and I was,” he said.
“They never explicitly said it was nuclear, but they ruled out the possibility
that it was a missile, chemical-warfare, or radar site. By a process of
elimination, I was left with nuclear.”
Two days after his first report,
Albright released a satellite image of the bombed site, taken by DigitalGlobe
on October 24th, seven weeks after the bombing. The new image showed that the
target area had been levelled and the ground scraped. Albright said that it
hinted of a coverup—cleansing the bombing site could make it difficult for
weapons inspectors to determine its precise nature. “It looks like Syria is
trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” he told
the Times. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it
was doing.” This assessment was widely shared in the press. (In mid-January,
the Times reported that recent imagery from DigitalGlobe showed that a storage
facility, or something similar, had been constructed, in an obvious rush, at
the bombing site.)
Proliferation experts at the
International Atomic Energy Agency and others in the arms-control community
disputed Albright’s interpretation of the images. “People here were baffled by
this, and thought that Albright had stuck his neck out,” a diplomat in Vienna,
where the I.A.E.A. is headquartered, told me. “The I.A.E.A. has been
consistently telling journalists that it is skeptical about the Syrian nuclear
story, but the reporters are so convinced.”
A second diplomat in Vienna acidly
commented on the images: “A square building is a square building.”
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/The
diplomat, who is familiar with the use of satellite imagery for nuclear
verification, added that the I.A.E.A. “does not have enough information to
conclude anything about the exact nature of the facility. They see a building
with some geometry near a river that could be identified as nuclear-related.
But they cannot credibly conclude that is so. As far as information coming from
open sources beyond imagery, it’s a struggle to extract information from all of
the noise that comes from political agendas.”
Much of what one would expect to see
around a secret nuclear site was lacking at the target, a former State
Department intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for the
Congress said. “There is no security around the building,” he said. “No
barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex.” Jeffrey Lewis,
who heads the non-proliferation program at the New America Foundation, a think
tank in Washington, told me that, even if the width and the length of the
building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient
to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to extract the
control rods, an essential step in the operation of the reactor; nor was there
evidence in the published imagery of major underground construction. “All you
could see was a box,” Lewis said. “You couldn’t see enough to know how big it
will be or what it will do. It’s just a box.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence
official, who has access to current intelligence, http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
said, “We don’t have any proof of a reactor—no signals intelligence, no human
intelligence, no satellite intelligence.” Some well-informed defense
consultants and former intelligence officials asked why, if there was
compelling evidence of nuclear cheating involving North Korea, a member of the
President’s axis of evil, and Syria, which the U.S. considers a state sponsor
of terrorism, the Bush Administration would not insist on making it public.
When I went to Israel in late
December, the government was still maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some
current and former officials and military officers were willing to speak
without attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had been
accurate. “Don’t you write that there was nothing there!” a senior Israeli
official, who is in a position to know the details of the raid on Syria, said,
shaking a finger at me. “The thing in Syria was real.”
Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom,
who served as deputy national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak,
told me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced that there
was a threat. “It may have been a perception of a conviction, but there was
something there,” Brom said. “It was the beginning of a nuclear project.”
However, by the date of our talk, Brom
told me, “The question of whether it was there or not is not that relevant
anymore.”
Albright, when I spoke to him in
December, was far more circumspect than he had been in October. “We never said
‘we know’ it was a reactor, based on the image,” Albright said. “We wanted to
make sure that the image was consistent with a reactor, and, from my point of
view, it was. But that doesn’t confirm it’s a reactor.”
The journey of the Al Hamed, a small
coastal trader, became a centerpiece in accounts of the September 6th bombing.
On September 15th, the Washington Post reported that “a prominent U.S. expert
on the Middle East” said that the attack “appears to have been linked to the
arrival . . . of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.”
The article went on to cite the expert’s belief that “the emerging consensus in
Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment.” Other press reports identified
the Al Hamed as a “suspicious North Korean” ship.
But there is evidence that the Al
Hamed could not have been carrying sensitive cargo—or any cargo—from North Korea.
International shipping is carefully monitored by Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence
Unit, which relies on a network of agents as well as on port logs and other
records. In addition, most merchant ships are now required to operate a
transponder device called an A.I.S., for automatic identification system. This
device, which was on board the Al Hamed, works in a manner similar to a
transponder on a commercial aircraft—beaming a constant, very high-frequency
position report. (The U.S. Navy monitors international sea traffic with the aid
of dedicated satellites, at a secret facility in suburban Washington.)
According to Marine Intelligence Unit
records, the Al Hamed, which was built in 1965, had been operating for years in
the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with no indication of any recent
visits to North Korea. The records show that the Al Hamed arrived at Tartus on
September 3rd—the ship’s fifth visit to Syria in five months. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
(It was one of eight ships that
arrived that day; although it is possible that one of the others was carrying
illicit materials, only the Al Hamed has been named in the media.) The ship’s
registry was constantly changing. The Al Hamed flew the South Korean flag
before switching to North Korea in November of 2005, and then to Comoros.
(Ships often fly flags of convenience, registering with different countries, in
many cases to avoid taxes or onerous regulations.) At the time of the bombing,
according to Lloyd’s, it was flying a Comoran flag and was owned by four Syrian
nationals. In earlier years, under other owners, the ship seems to have
operated under Russian, Estonian, Turkish, and Honduran flags. Lloyd’s records
show that the ship had apparently not passed through the Suez Canal—the main
route from the Mediterranean to the Far East—since at least 1998.
Among the groups that keep track of
international shipping is Greenpeace. Martini Gotjé, who monitors illegal
fishing for the organization and was among the first to raise questions about
the Al Hamed, told me, “I’ve been at sea for forty-one years, and I can tell
you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was nothing—in rotten shape. You wouldn’t
be able to load heavy cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.”
If the Israelis’ target in Syria was
not a nuclear site, why didn’t the Syrians respond more forcefully? Syria
complained at the United Nations but did little to press the issue. And, if the
site wasn’t a partially built reactor, what was it?
During two trips to Damascus after the
Israeli raid, I interviewed many senior government and intelligence officials.
None of President Assad’s close advisers told me the same story, though some of
the stories were more revealing—and more plausible—than others. In general,
Syrian officials seemed more eager to analyze Israel’s motives than to discuss
what had been attacked. “I hesitate to answer any journalist’s questions about
it,” Faruq al-Shara, the Syrian Vice-President, told me. “Israel bombed to
restore its credibility, and their objective is for us to keep talking about
it. And by answering your questions I serve their objective. Why should I
volunteer to do that?” Shara denied that his nation has a nuclear-weapons
program. “The volume of articles about the bombing is incredible, and it’s not
important that it’s a lie,” he said.
One top foreign-ministry official in
Damascus told me that the target “was an old military building that had been
abandoned by the Syrian military” years ago. But a senior Syrian intelligence
general gave me a different account. “What they targeted was a building used
for fertilizer and water pumps,” he said—part of a government effort to
revitalize farming. “There is a large city”— Dayr az Zawr—“fifty kilometres
away. Why would Syria put nuclear material near a city?” I interviewed the
intelligence general again on my second visit to Damascus, and he reiterated that
the targeted building was “at no time a military facility.” As to why Syria had
not had a more aggressive response, if the target was so benign, the general
said, “It was not fear—that’s all I’ll say.” As I left, I asked the general why
Syria had not invited representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency
to visit the bombing site and declare that no nuclear activity was taking place
there. “They did not ask to come,” he said, and “Syria had no reason to ask
them to come.”
An I.A.E.A. official dismissed that
assertion when we spoke in Vienna a few days later. “The I.A.E.A. asked the
Syrians to allow the agency to visit the site to verify its nature,” the
I.A.E.A. official said. “Syria’s reply was that it was a military, not a
nuclear, installation, and there would be no reason for the I.A.E.A. to go
there. It would be in their and everyone’s interest to have the I.A.E.A. visit
the site. If it was nuclear, it would leave fingerprints.”
In a subsequent interview, Imad
Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to Washington, defended Syria’s decision not
to invite the I.A.E.A. inspectors. “We will not get into the game of inviting
foreign experts to visit every site that Israel claims is a nuclear facility,”
Moustapha told me. “If we bring them in and they say there is nothing there,
then Israel will say it made a mistake and bomb another site two weeks later.
And if we then don’t let the I.A.E.A. in, Israel will say, ‘You see?’ This is
nonsense. Why should we have to do this?”
Even if the site was not a nuclear
installation, it is possible that the Syrians feared that an I.A.E.A. inquiry
would uncover the presence of North Koreans there. In Syria, I was able to get
some confirmation that North Koreans were at the target. A senior officer in
Damascus with firsthand knowledge of the incident agreed to see me alone, at
his home; my other interviews in Damascus took place in government offices.
According to his account, North Koreans were present at the site, but only as
paid construction workers. The senior officer said that the targeted building,
when completed, would most likely have been used as a chemical-warfare
facility. (Syria is not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and has
been believed, for decades, to have a substantial chemical-weapons arsenal.)
The building contract with North Korea
was a routine business deal, the senior officer said—from design to
construction. (North Korea may, of course, have sent skilled technicians
capable of doing less routine work.) Syria and North Korea have a long-standing
partnership on military matters. “The contract between Syria and North Korea
was old, from 2002, and it was running late,” the senior officer told me. “It
was initially to be finished in 2005, and the Israelis might have expected it
was further along.”
The North Korean laborers had been
coming and going for “maybe six months” before the September bombing, the
senior officer said, and his government concluded that the Israelis had picked
up North Korean telephone chatter at the site. (This fit the timeline that
Israeli officials had given me.) “The Israelis may have their own spies and
watched the laborers being driven to the area,” the senior officer said. “The
Koreans were not there at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to
the site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and the Israelis
may have concluded that even if there was a slight chance”—of it being a
nuclear facility—“we’ll take that risk.”
On the days before the bombing, the
Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of
the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North
Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the
possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might
have added to their determination.
The attack was especially dramatic,
the Syrian senior officer said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium
illumination flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly
turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw the lights and
the bombing, they thought there would be a commando raid,” the senior officer
said. The building was destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that
there were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had been on
the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior officer said, “they
found only cement.”
A senior Syrian official confirmed
that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that
the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said,
that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its
nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to
be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout
Syria—“all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of
missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone
asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles
that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting
the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”
Whatever was under construction, with
North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with
nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military
relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the
Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.
It is unclear to what extent the Bush
Administration was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of
coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official,
the network reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States
and received satellite help and targeting information in response. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
At one point, it was reported, the
Bush Administration considered attacking Syria itself, but rejected that
option. The implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear
threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.
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