SATELLITE PHOTO REVEALS SYRIA BEGAN BUILDING SITE IN 2003 - was it nuclear, or did it hold Saddam's WMD?

NYTIMES - VIA HOT AIR:

The mystery surrounding the construction of what might have been a nuclear reactor in Syria deepened yesterday, when a company released a satellite photo showing that the main building was well under way in September 2003 — four years before Israeli jets bombed it.

The long genesis is likely to raise questions about whether the Bush administration overlooked a nascent atomic threat in Syria while planning and executing a war in Iraq, which was later found to have no active nuclear program.

A senior American intelligence official said yesterday that American analysts had looked carefully at the site from its early days, but were unsure then whether it posed a nuclear threat.

In the time before the Iraq war, President Bush and his senior advisers sounded many alarms about Baghdad’s reconstituting its nuclear program. But they have never publicly discussed what many analysts say appears to have been a long-running nuclear effort next door.

• FIRST, if this really was a nuclear site, then it points out that our intelligence services REALLY SUCK - especially the traitorous VALERIE PLAME whose specific responsibility this was. (It also UNDENIABLY proves how difficult it is to ever know with certainty what a tyrannical regime wants to keep secret. Tyrannical regimes like IRAN - who should realize that they are going to get the same treatment sooner rather than later).

• SECOND, maybe this was not a nuclear site. Maybe this site was constructed to house SADDAM'S WMD - which many authoritative sources argue were transported into Syria before the war. (See HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE). It is reasonable to assume that IF Assad "took in" Saddam's WMD that he'd have to build a place to keep them. Maybe this was the complex he built to house Saddam's WMD.

• International teams should be allowed into Syria at once to inspect the site.