NY Times Faults Bush on Syrian Nuke Program

Just harken back to 2003 for a minute. Suppose George W. Bush called a press conference and told the world he had evidence Syria was building a covert nuclear facility and the United States was prepared to take action.

What do you suppose the reaction would have been from the media?

Well, now we know for sure they indeed were building such a facility and, thankfully, the Israelis took it out.

Yet here we now have the New York Times pointing the finger at the admiistration, taking them to task for not doing something.

Just imagine the reaction if we leveled the place four years ago.

Yet Another Photo of Site in Syria, Yet More Questions

To their credit, the Times manages to hold off until the second paragraph before taking Bush to task.

The mystery surrounding the construction of what might have been a nuclear reactor in Syria deepened yesterday, when a company released a satellite photo showing that the main building was well under way in September 2003 — four years before Israeli jets bombed it.

The long genesis is likely to raise questions about whether the Bush administration overlooked a nascent atomic threat in Syria while planning and executing a war in Iraq, which was later found to have no active nuclear program.

A senior American intelligence official said yesterday that American analysts had looked carefully at the site from its early days, but were unsure then whether it posed a nuclear threat.

In the time before the Iraq war, President Bush and his senior advisers sounded many alarms about Baghdad’s reconstituting its nuclear program. But they have never publicly discussed what many analysts say appears to have been a long-running nuclear effort next door.

If Bush came out on national television holding up satellite images of what he said was a Syrian nuke plant, the New York Times and the nutroots would have gone wild, accused him of doctoring photos.

You just cannot win with these people.

Of course, back in 2003, John Bolton raised the specter of Syria developing nukes, but was dismissed by some in the intelligence community.

Apparently, he was right all along.

The progress of the site in late 2003 also raises new questions about a disagreement at the time between intelligence analysts and John R. Bolton, then the State Department’s top arms control official.

In the summer of 2003, Mr. Bolton’s testimony on Capitol Hill was delayed after a dispute erupted in part over whether Syria was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. Some intelligence officials said Mr. Bolton overstated the Syrian threat.

“There was disagreement about what Syria was interested in and how much we should be monitoring it,” Mr. Bolton said in an interview yesterday. “There was activity in Syria that I felt was evidence that they were trying to develop a nuclear program.”

I wonder who those intelligence officials are and whether they're man enough to step up and apologize to Bolton?