what exactly israel bombed in eastern syria last september remains elusive. the bush administration is now clearly trying to claim that it was a nuclear facility built with north korean assistance. the problem is that their case gets weaker the more you look at it, the facts don't seem to be quite as conclusive as the administration's sweeping sound bites. like that the admission that they have only "medium confidence" that north koreans were involved. and the intelligence community's "low confidence" that the facility could have been used to produce a nuclear weapon, because that would require a plutonium processing facility which apparently doesn't exist in syria.
which, of course, triggers all kinds of wild theories about what the bush administration's current presentation really means. is the bush administration trying to lay the groundwork for another war? is it an attempt by hardliners within the administration to undermine the pending deal with north korea? is it an attempt to deep-six israel's secret peace talks with syria? or something else?
last september, i went through some of the wild theorizing i came across in the weeks after the attack. seven months later, the theorizing has changed a little bit, but there's still a lot of it going on. the biggest mystery to me is why u.s. and israeli officials were so hush-hush about the attack for so many months, and why they suddenly are putting on this show now.
