In a preview of corps coverage for 2008, we get this from Murdoch’s Times of London:

Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear cache’
Secret raid on Korean shipment

Gee, I guess Bush must have butchered the negotations with Dear Leader after all. Incredible.

Anyhow, that’s the headline. But if you read the details, there are a lot of questions about the crucial details that would lend substance to the headline. Which I imagine the self-correcting wankosphere is busy filling in right now. Gee, it’s almost like they’re trying to keep us in a constant state of shock, isn’t it?

The Israeli government was not saying…. The Syrians were also keeping mum…. Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, and added that there were a “number of foreign technicians” in the country. … But intelligence sources suggested it was a highly successful Israeli raid on nuclear material supplied by North Korea.

Of course, from Whitewater and Iraq onward, we’ve seen plenty of disinformation take root in Fleet Street, and then spread to WaPo and the Times, so color me skeptical. (And the 101st Fighting Keyboards are, naturally, creaming themselves.)

The Observer’s coverage is a little less breathless:

But despite the heavy inference, no official so far has offered an outright accusation. Instead they have hedged their claims in ifs and buts, assiduously avoiding the term ’weapons of mass destruction’.

Kinda like the boy who cried “Wolf!” now crying “Large predatory animal only I can see!”

And whaddaya know! Unlike Murdoch’s rag, the Observer actually quotes gives a “he said” to the “she said”:

There has also been deep scepticism about the claims from other officials and former officials familiar with both Syria and North Korea. They have pointed out that an almost bankrupt Syria has neither the economic nor the industrial base to support the kind of nuclear programme described, adding that Syria has long rejected going down the nuclear route.

The scepticism was reflected by Bruce Reidel, a former intelligence official at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Centre, quoted in the Post. ’It was a substantial Israeli operation, but I can’t get a good fix on whether the target was a nuclear thing,’ adding that there was ’a great deal of scepticism that there’s any nuclear angle here’ and instead the facility could have been related to chemical or biological weapons.

And here, to my mind, is the money paragraph:

The opaqueness surrounding the nature of what may have been hit in Operation Orchard has been compounded by claims that US knowledge over the alleged ’agricultural site’ has come not from its own intelligence and satellite imaging, but from material supplied to Washington from Tel Aviv over the last six months, material that has been restricted to just a few senior officials under the instructions of national security adviser Stephen Hadley, leaving many in the intelligence community uncertain of its veracity.

Gosh, why ever would that be? Somehow, I have the feeling that sixteen words beginning “the Israeli government has learned…” would be a good deal less persuasive even than sixteen words beginning “the British government has learned.

So Operation Orchard can be seen as a dry run, a raid using the same heavily modified long-range aircraft, procured specifically from the US with Iran’s nuclear sites in mind. It reminds both Iran and Syria of the supremacy of its aircraft and appears to be designed to deter Syria from getting involved in the event of a raid on Iran - a reminder, if it were required, that if Israel’s ground forces were humiliated in the second Lebanese war its airforce remains potent, powerful and unchallenged.

At this point, I think we have to assume that any information coming from a publication Murdoch controls is disinformation. As Digby points out:

Thanks to the Bush Supreme Court, corporations are now free to give unlimited money right up to Election Day on persuasion ads. Several magic words cannot be used. As a general rule, major corporations do not like Democrats controlling the White House and the Congress. So imagine one industry group, the insurers and drug companies under the GOPs current Medicare drug benefit and privatization schemes. The 10-year estimate from all of us transfering to these industries is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. So if they spend 1% to maintain this cash flow, it amounts to a rounding error. Halliburton and the rest of the war profiteers certainly have a vested interest in the GOPs theory of war without end. The oil and coal industries have similarly large stakes. So one should expect a great deal of independent spending during the year knocking down the Democratic nominee and it will be difficult to trace the origin of much of the money until later. Some spending will be done by make believe trade associations, others by newly created 527s.

But how much less expensive—and how much more effective—to build on the success of the White House Iraq Group, but cut out the middleman, and plant stories in media properties that you yourself own.

NOTE I’m not saying that there are no threats in the world. What I am saying is that we should assume that all suchs stories are planted disinformation, unless proven otherwise. By this point, we know the drill.

NOTE Random thought: Has it occurred to anyone that corporations are traitors by definition, because they have, and can have, no loyalty to anything but their own financial success?