Implicating Syria: A Notion

Joshua Landis posts a bit by Trish Schuh, a reporter who actually went to check out the area Israel attacked. This paragraph is important:

"Several days ago, after the attack on Syria's 'nuclear program', I spoke to western oil company officials in Deir Ez Zor. One technician told me they routinely monitor radiation as part of the refining process. They registered no heightened levels of nuclear residue in the area as there would have been if the Israelis had hit a North Korean atomic stockpile. Operations and technical foremen put it this way: 'The nuclear claims against Syria are pure bullsh*t.'

I really don't buy the idea of a Syrian nuclear program. I was, however, unsure why Israeli military and intelligence sources would want to implicate North Korea. It's quite possible, however, that I missed an obvious point: They could want to implicate Syria, possibly as part of the Olmert government's ongoing efforts to avoid negotiations with Damascus that would result in pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights. The Israeli government actually has a great deal of deniability over what the world has chosen to make of all this, and their own silence and the intense censorship to which they've subjected the Israel-based media is definitely what allowed John Bolton, et al to fill the gap. The North Korea theorists, incidentally, were very quick off the mark, and probably had indications that an incident would occur.

Like every other theory, this is just unsupported speculation.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)