A note about Israel's strike in Syria

The target for Israel's pre-emption was indeed an Islamic Jihad training camp and Israel claims that its intelligence is rock-solid.

Beyond suspicion is this fact that although the White House is in anti-leak mode, U.S. officials let it be known that U.S. satellite surveillance has confirmed the Israeli finding and was the factual basis for President Bush's strong public support for the cross-border strike.

There are widely circulated reports that Syria has offered safe haven and training camps to groups such as the Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

Don't forget too that a majority of the Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam terrorists and suicide bombers who have turned up in Iraq have been killers who entered from Syria.

One source of amusement is Syria's current membership on the U.N. Counter-Terrorism Committee.

The U.N. Security Council decided that states are no longer at liberty to serve as a landlord or a supply house in aiding terrorist groups. Under Security Council Resolution 1373, they must shut down terrorist financing and training, and arrest or exclude the actors who seek to maim and kill civilians as a political technique.

However, Syria who doesn't respect its obligations as a neighbor nation or as a member of the Security Council, announced in a September 2002 Counter-Terrorism Committee filing, that it could not regard as terrorism any acts committed in a "legitimate struggle against foreign occupation."

Evidently Kofi and the other henchmen member nations at the U.N. agree which is why there is no U.N. resolution to end Syria's occupation of Lebanon, an occupation that no one ever reprimands.