Readers of the New York Times may mistakenly get the impression that the Obama administration has confirmed Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that Wednesday’s attack on Israeli tourists was conducted by Hezbollah.

American officials on Thursday identified the suicide bomber responsible for a deadly attack on Israeli vacationers here as a member of a Hezbollah cell that was operating in Bulgaria and looking for such targets, corroborating Israel’s assertions and making the bombing a new source of tension with Iran.

That’s what I’d call a slimy piece of journalism. The key word in this sentence is “identified” and the Times reporters and editors are I believe quite consciously using this word in a way that is intended to deceive readers.

In a further indication that deception is the name of the game here, the Times uses two headlines — one online the other in print: “Hezbollah Is Blamed for Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria” and “Bus Bombing Is Attributed To Hezbollah.” Note that neither headline indicates who is doing the blaming or attribution.

Suppose someone goes missing and there are suspicions that they might have been abducted and perhaps murdered. A few days later a body is found. News reports say that the body has been “identified” and it is indeed the missing person. Everyone understands that “identified” is unequivocal. It’s not the same as the police saying that this appears to be the missing person and they are continuing their investigation in order to establish whether that is the case. If the body has been identified, then the identity is no longer in question.

Consider, for instance, today’s news of the shooting in Colorado. Early reports said that a gunman had opened fire in a movie theater killing twelve people. The gunman has now been identified. His name is James Eagan Holmes and he is 24 years old. Imagine the reaction of press reporters if a police spokesman had said: “We’ve identified the gunman. We’re now trying to find out his name.”

So, back to the report on the Bulgaria bombing. Citing an unnamed American official we are told about the “current American intelligence assessment” of the bombing. “Current intelligence assessment” is a fancy way of saying, this is currently our best guess about who did it and why, based on the limited amount of information we now have.

Readers need to get all the way to paragraph eight before they are told that the bomber’s name and nationality are unknown. Neither can any information be provided revealing what types of intelligence led analysts to conclude that the bomber was a member of Hezbollah.

In other words, a report which began by saying that the bomber had been identified does not in the end establish whether the current American intelligence assessment is based on any hard evidence whatsoever!

While the New York Times claims that the bomber has been identified as belonging to Hezbollah, what they should be reporting is that unnamed U.S. officials claim that this is the case but have yet to provide any information backing up this claim.

At this time, the Bulgaria bomber’s identity remains unknown. For as long as that is the case it is probably premature for anyone to assert what his motive was or what organization, if any, he might have been affiliated with.

Ian Black writes: On a ridge high above the Golan plateau, the telltale antennae and golfball radomes of an Israeli surveillance station point north-east towards Damascus. In the valley below, minefields, barbed wire fences and a blue UN flag mark the frontline between the two most powerful armies in the Middle East. Behind it is a country in the throes of civil war.

Round the clock, from its perch on Mount Avital, the Israeli army’s unit 8200 eavesdrops on Syria, a former bastion of stability that is now crumbling along with other old certainties about the region. It is simple enough, say, to monitor the communications of an armoured division or track a MiG fighter squadron, but far harder to understand the calculations going on in Bashar al-Assad’s head. “Tanks are the easiest thing to follow,” says a veteran intelligence officer in Tel Aviv.

Ora Peretz lives in a kibbutz founded when Israel conquered the Golan Heights in 1967 and runs a cafe selling cherries, coffee and cold drinks. “We see terrible things on TV about what is happening in Syria,” she said, as a group of tourists peered across no-man’s land at the ruins of Quneitra. “But it’s quiet here. People say Assad might try to do something desperate. But I know we are ready if he does.”

The potential fallout from a disintegrating Syria is not Israel’s only worry. Last month’s election victory for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and jitters about unrest in Jordan have raised troubling questions about the country’s peace treaties with two of its immediate neighbours. In Lebanon, the third neighbour, Hezbollah – armed by Iran and Syria – is seen as a permanent challenge to Israel’s regional dominance. Israel’s once close relations with Turkey are in ruins.

Official discourse in Israel frowns on the romantic phrase “the Arab spring“. The reference point is more Tehran 1979 than Berlin 1989. In government offices the preferred terms are “awakening” or plain “unrest”.

Politicians do use a seasonal metaphor, but a far chillier one. “For us it is an Islamist winter,” says Ronnie Bar-On, chairman of the Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee. A colour photograph of Auschwitz above his desk is a bleak reminder of what still makes many Israelis tick.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud prime minister, likes to describe the Middle East as a “tough neighbourhood”. Ehud Barak, his defence minister, once compared Israel to a “villa in the jungle” – a phrase that smacked of colonialism and racism. In recent months both have warned of the danger of Iran going nuclear and hinted at a pre-emptive attack to stop it – and maintain Israel’s atomic supremacy. But developments closer to home are deeply unsettling. Israel’s relations with the Arab world and its strategic position in the Middle East have reached “a new low”, in the words of Itamar Rabinovich, a leading historian of the Middle East and a former ambassador to the US. [Continue reading…]

Karl Vick writes: In the absence of firm evidence, the strongest argument for Iranian involvement in the bombing of a busload of Israeli tourists at a Bulgarian airport is this: The blast came 18 years to the day after the car bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, an attack Argentine authorities traced to Iran and Hizballah, the proxy force it established in Lebanon.

Arguing against Iranian involvement: The Bulgaria bombing actually occurred.

Despite its notorious reputation as a state sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran has not been much in the terror business for more than a decade. And its recent efforts to return to operational form have been less than impressive. The world was incredulous that a terror mastermind of Tehran’s renown could be traced by a bank transfer to the effort of a Corpus Christi car salesman to enlist a Mexican drug gang to bomb the Saudi ambassador at a Washington restaurant. Since then, Iranian agents have been tracked and arrested plotting in Georgia, Azerbaijan, India, Cyprus, Kenya and Thailand, where things did not go well at all. There, a Thai prostitute’s cell phone would produce a photo of the plotters posing with girls in their arms and water pipes at their sides a week before the bomb they were making blew the roof off their Bangkok apartment. One of the suspects lost a leg when the explosives he was carrying fell at his feet and exploded, not far from where he’d chucked another charge at a taxi after the driver refused to pick him up.

“All signs point towards Iran,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said two hours after Wednesday’s attack, though those signs remain entirely circumstantial, and the circumstances girdle the globe. Consider, for instance, that the bomb that exploded in the Iranians’ Bangkok flat was the “sticky” kind, attached to a magnet that Thai officials said the conspirators planned to affix to the passing car of an Israeli diplomat. That’s what Iranian agents managed to do a day earlier in New Delhi, injuring the wife of a defense attaché as she went to pick up her kids at school. Significantly, sticky is the kind of bombs that Israeli agents have used in Tehran, where at least three Iranian nuclear specialists have been killed in covert operations that Western intelligence sources have told TIME are, in fact, conducted by the Mossad.

Still, like the anniversary of the Buenos Aires attack, which killed 85 people, what actually links Iran to the Bulgaria bombing is supposition. “It’s very hard to say. Right now we have no clues, no information,” a senior Israeli intelligence official tells TIME. “By process of elimination, we exclude Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They aren’t capable of such an operation so far away [from the Palestinian territories]. There’s also Al Qaeda, but they’re preoccupied with other arenas at the moment. Low chance.

“So it leaves us with the probability of Hizballah alone, or Iran alone, or a joint operation. Which makes sense.”

As an indication of the rip-roaring speed of speculation, the Times of Israel and Bulgarian media have already published photographs and the name of the suspect — a Swedish citizen and former Guantanamo detainee. But Carol Rosenberg from the Miami Herald says that Swedish security services and foreign ministry both say Mehdi Ghezali is not the bomber.

In an interview on MSNBC, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren claimed that Israel has hard evidence about who is behind the bombing, but when pressed on whether they know the identity of the bomber he hedged. They know for sure who did it, but they don’t know exactly who did it.

Hezbollah has denied any involvement in the attack, which begs the question: if they are lying, why would they have seemingly implicated themselves by timing the attack on the anniversary of the Buenos Aires bombing? The choice of that date might seem much more attractive to some entity — identity as yet unknown — that wants this to look like a Hezbollah operation.