“These blast points — too accurate for sandpeople. Only imperial stormtroopers are so precise.” – Star Wars.
It’s all over the news, of course, Israel wakes up in the morning and bombs Syria whenever it wants. Stuff goes boom, pictures of precise targeting come out and somebody in the White House gleefully calls all his pals in the news and tells the world that Israel did it.
Here are some pictures from the Long War Journal and Israeli TV news showing some careful “remodelling” carried out by someone at Damascus Airport.
It’s clear this wasn’t the work of amateurs. It’s clear it wasn’t the Americans: they had their moment to go in and in line with the character of their president, they wavered, dithered and decided to mess about building a website that doesn’t work.
Varda Epstein wrote at The Times of Israel yesterday about the specifics of Obama’s leaky plumbing.
There is another aspect of this, however, that isn’t well explored. The most recent reports of mysterious explosions at an airbase in Syria (not shown in the pictures above) were first reported by The Times of Israel in this piece: Huge explosion reported at Syrian air defense base.
This came out very quickly and it’s clear it was based on social media reports from the area of the hit. The reporter responsible clearly had some sort of run in with the Israeli military censor over this:
We have a military censor in Israel: the press is in constant friction with it which is a sign of a healthy press and democracy. Where to draw the line between what can and can’t be reported and when it should be reported is always going to have doubt attached to it.
What’s interesting is that unaccredited bloggers, like us here at Israellycool, don’t have access to the censor. I’m not sure if we’d hear from them if we unknowingly published something sensitive. Had any of us been watching the right Twitter or Facebook feeds from Syria that night (Judge Dan does this from time to time) we could have spotted it.
So even before anyone in Washington took it upon themselves to confirm this was Israeli action, Israeli press was defying the military censor just to report explosions in Syria with only speculation there was Israeli involvement.
Though once reports are appearing all over Syrian web sites and social media, perhaps the Israeli military censor needs to shut up completely: they can’t control those sources or Israeli sources which report on them.
There’s no right or wrong answer here: I know I wouldn’t knowingly defy the Israeli military censor. And for sure, when the US government confirms Israeli action it is incredibly stupid.
