Rumors have been circulating for years that some or Iraq's unaccounted-for WMDs - the ones that everybody talked about throughout the Clinton years - ended up in Syria. Most recently John Loftus released a comprehensive report based on captured Iraqi documents:

As Loftus summarized, "The gist of the new evidence is this: Roughly one-quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990s. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid-to-late-1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam's entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans' noses."

That makes the new analysis of the site that Israel hit in Operation Orchard particularly curious:

Yossi Melman, a respected investigative journalist, reports in Haaretz Thursday, that the Israeli air strike in early September may not have been against a nuclear reactor under construction but something more sinister: a facility for a much later stage in the nuclear production process. Melman cites Prof. Uzi Even of Tel Aviv University as being the first to public challenge this assumption. "On the basis of an analysis of the same satellite photos, which have been published in the media and on Web sites and are accessible to everyone, he believes that the structure that was attacked and destroyed was not a nuclear reactor."... "In my estimation this was something very nasty and vicious, and even more dangerous than a reactor," says Even. "I have no information, only an assessment, but I suspect that it was a plant for processing plutonium, namely a factory for assembling the bomb."

Reasons to be skeptical: if Israel offered the Bush Administration intel showing that Iraqi WMDs ended up in Syria, that might be something they'd appreciate. Reasons to be skeptical of said skepticism: the alternative is that Israel offered the Bush Administration intel showing that North Korea is cheating on its denuclearization promises, which you'd also think the Bush Administration would appreciate. And yet.

Either way, there's general agreement that the site was nuclear: the Syrian rush to bury it underground, the Israeli willingness to risk a large scale operation to take it out, and the global silence about the operation. So then the question becomes whether it could have been a reactor or something a lot worse - and the new analysis by Even et al seems at least somewhat compelling that it couldn't have been a reactor.

References:
* Our World: From AMIA to Armageddon [JPost]
* xpert: Syrian target was nuclear bomb assembly factory, not reactor [Israel Insider]
* Syria's Been Building Their Nuclear Reactor Since 2003 And The State Department Still Tried To Stop Israel From Taking It Out (Plus: Awesome IDF Bombing Raid Just Got Filled With Even More Awesome) [MR]

Previously:
* IAEA: "What Syrian Nuclear Program?"
* Olmert: Let's Give Assad Tons Of Land Because He's Too Weak To Be A Threat (Plus: Syria Building New Generation Of Russian Anti-Aircraft Weapons)
* State Department Gets Bright Idea: Let's Screw Israel Even More By Bundling Syria Into The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process