Israel Bombing Raid on Syria Affair

The Malibu wildfires preempted regular Sunday programming on KFI in Los Angeles, which meant John Batchelor's show was bumped, and technical problems at WABC shortened John's Sunday show in New York to 90 minutes. If you cast out the segments on Antarctica, Politics of Heaven, and the riveting discussion of the credit crunch and Citibank's problems, the rest could be dubbed the Very Odd Show.

Yes, very odd indeed, the Bhutto assassination attempt, the Olmert assassination plot, and Israel's bombing in Syria. Batchelor mentioned the last at the very end of the show, saying strongly that he "didn't like" all the reports he'd heard about the reasons for the bombing.

So there might be sparks tonight when Batchelor co-hosts the John Loftus Report, given that Loftus seems to be sticking to one of the more prevalent reports, which is that the bombing raid was to take out a nuke facility.

The second half of Loftus's show will feature nuclear arms control expert Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, who on October 18 presented this interesting factoid:

Yongbyon is a sensational reference point from a news perspective, but the North Korean reactor is itself derived from the Calder Hall magnox reactors developed by Britain. Comparing the Syrian reactor to Yongbyon, without mentioning Calder Hall, leaves the reader thinking the reactor design could not have been supplied by any another state and was certainly not indigenous.

But Syria might have chosen the Calder Hall design for the same reasons as North Korea — the reactor is a relatively simple design that is extensively described in the open literature and does not require difficult to acquire heavy water or enriched uranium.

Read more.

However, all this is neither here nor there, when it comes to parsing announcements and speculations about why Israel bombed Syria.

Pundita doesn't like the reports, either, although I'm falling back on instinct rather than any facts I've uncovered. Facts in this affair are very hard to come by. Yet the very odd story takes on fresh importance in light of Vice President Dick Cheney's remarks on Sunday. Cheney's observations about Iran were in many ways an echo of statements he made about Iraq two months prior to the US invasion.

The Loftus Report airs on Talkline Communications radio from about 11:00 PM to 12 PM eastern time. The show can also be heard live on the internet via a link at Talkline. I see that Talkline still hasn't gotten around to listing Loftus's show in their schedule.)

If you have trouble with the Talkline streaming link, you can try the link at The Loftus Report or John Batchelor Show websites.