What Are They Up To Now?

Greg Miller and Paul Richter write in the Los Angeles Times: "The evidence left several questions unanswered, such as how Damascus would fuel the plant or manufacture bombs, and was greeted with skepticism by some nuclear experts and foreign officials.

"U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that they had not obtained evidence indicating Syria was working on nuclear weapons designs and had not identified a source of nuclear material for the facility. . . .

"Such a reactor requires a large volume of nuclear fuel, said David Albright, a physicist and former weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. The Americans' inability to identify any source of fuel 'raises questions about when the reactor could have operated, despite evidence that it was nearing completion at the time of the attack.'

"He also said the United States and Israel weren't able to identify any Syrian facilities to separate plutonium from reactor fuel, a step necessary to build nuclear weapons. The lack of a processing plant 'gives little confidence that the reactor was part of an active nuclear weapons program.'

"A diplomat in Vienna close to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. watchdog group, quoted Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei's comment in October that countries claiming to have evidence of illicit nuclear activity 'should bring it forward, not bomb first and ask questions later.'"

Opinion Watch

The New York Times editorial board writes: "It is more than a little suspicious that the ever-secretive Bush administration has suddenly decided to go public with what it knows about North Korea's nuclear connection with Syria. . . .

"It is another example of this administration insisting that information be withheld for national security reasons -- until there is a political reason to release it.

"So why now? It is no secret that Republican hard-liners are outraged over a State Department-negotiated deal intended to eventually shut down North Korea's nuclear weapons program. They are desperate to stop it, either by getting President Bush to pull back or provoking the easily provoked North Koreans into doing something stupid, like walking out of the talks.

"Thursday's presentation to certain Congressional committees will also make it harder to win approval for aid to dismantle North Korean nuclear facilities -- an essential part of the agreement."

Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon that "there is no value -- and much potential harm -- in having media outlets simply amplify Government accusations with little or no critical scrutiny. . . .

"There are all sorts of reasons beyond those for extreme skepticism here. After flamboyantly announcing that they had actual video of North Korean nuclear scientists inside the Syrian building, it turned out that the 'video' was merely a compilation of rather unrevealing still photographs patched together, in Colin-Powell-at-the-UN fashion, with ominous narration making accusations with a level of certainty completely unmatched by the 'evidence' itself. . . .

"[T]here are all sorts of motives for the administration to exaggerate or outright fabricate these accusations."