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Even Sy Hersh Doesn’t Know What the Israelis Bombed in Syria

Seymour Hersh, who cover’s the spooks and cloak-and-dagger beat for The New Yorker, has spent the past three months trying to figure out what exactly it was that Israeli warplanes bombed in the Syrian desert in that mysterious raid back in September.

And he still doesn’t know the answer.

He doesn’t seem to think it was a nuclear facility, as many have surmised. And he does seem favorably disposed to the idea that the Israelis were sending a lesson to the Iranians. Beyond that, his lengthy article in the latest issue of The New Yorker still leaves plenty of questions unanswered.

The Israelis who Hersh spoke to, however, were adamant that they had, in fact, hit something of significance.

Hersh writes:

“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.”

Exactly what it was, however, remains a mystery — even to a super-sleuth like Hersh.

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