Yet More Syria Nonsense

By Cernig

Yet more crapola from the London Times' Uzi Mahnaimi about the Israli attack on a big box in the Syrian desert back in September. It wasn't a reactor after all, he says, it was a bomb factory:

ISRAEL’S top-secret air raid on Syria in September destroyed a bomb factory assembling warheads fuelled by North Korean plutonium, a leading Israeli nuclear expert has told The Sunday Times.

Professor Uzi Even of Tel Aviv University was one of the founders of the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, the source of the Jewish state’s undeclared nuclear arsenal.

“I suspect that it was a plant for processing plutonium, namely, a factory for assembling the bomb,” he said. “I think the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] transferred to Syria weapons-grade plutonium in raw form, that is nuggets of easily transported metal in protective cans. I think the shaping and casting of the plutonium was supposed to be in Syria.”

Blowing up such a facility would scatter uniquely identifiable radioactive debris into the atmosphere, something Mahnaimi's expert concedes - yet at the time US officials confirmed that no such debris had been detected.

And what happened to Mahnaimi's last story about the Big Box? The one where he said Israeli commandos had even been inside and seized materials. Surely that would make the current story irrelevant. Could it be that Mahnaimi is just a serial liar?

Dave Schuler writes:

The facts as we know them (and as ably summarized at GlobalSecurity) are that on September 6, 2007 Israeli warplanes attacked a site in Syria and that some time subsequent to that the Syrians completely levelled the site. That’s about it. Everything else we’ve heard are statements about the facts.

We need more facts. Short of that it’s just keeping the ball in the air. To what purpose?

Well, Dave, no rightwing pundit or politician ever lost money or votes from hyping fear of war with the neighbours. And I continue to believe there's a very useful element of "look, over there!" involved for Irsael, which is the subject of a push by Egypt and Syrian at the IAEA to allow inspections of its own nuclear facilities by the nuke watchdogs.