‘Where there is smoke there is fire,’ the saying goes. But in theaters, movies and international politics smoke is sometimes created to simply pretend the existance of fire.

Such is likely the case with the illegal Israeli air attack on Syria that some ‘interested sides’ camouflaged as ‘independent experts’ peddle as having been targeted on something ‘nuclear.’

Famed reporter Robin Wright writes in today’s WaPo: Photographs Said to Show Israeli Target Inside Syria

Independent experts have pinpointed what they believe to be the Euphrates River site in Syria that was bombed by Israel last month, and satellite imagery of the area shows buildings under construction roughly similar in design to a North Korean reactor capable of producing nuclear material for one bomb a year, the experts say.

Photographs of the site taken before the secret Sept. 6 airstrike depict an isolated compound that includes a tall, boxy structure similar to the type of building used to house a gas-graphite reactor. They also show what could have been a pumping station used to supply cooling water for a reactor, say experts David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).

Hmmm – independent experts … well … Paul Brannan got his BA in Government(!) in 2004 and is working at ISIS since then. ISIS itself has some four employees and its website doesn’t reveal how it finances itself.

Brannan, of ISIS, combed through a huge amount of satellite imagery to find a site along the Euphrates that matches a reactor’s specifications as well as descriptions of the attack site.

The ISIS analysis of the picture Mr. Brannan found is now available (pdf). It includes an aerial  photograph of some building half a mile from the Euphrates that distinguishes itself by having approximately the same outer dimensions as the building that houses the North Korean Yongbyon reactor. That, and only that, is the big find the ISIS folks have. They note though that the Syrian building somehow has a smaller roof?

They also find some other slight differences like the unexplained lack of a reactor vessel that should be visible during the multiyear construction of such a site. But they assert that there are roads and a few trucks and signs of recent use of earth moving machines. There is also water pumped from the Euphrat and a few miles away something that might be a dirt airstrip. I am certain that is all very significant.

But topping all of this the experts Msr. Albright and Brennan also assert:

North Korean
reactor construction is based on an old Russian model …

But the Yongbyon reactor, which these experts compare the Syrian site to, is a copy of the British Magnox design and certainly not based on anything Russian. Experts???

But indeed, Robin Wright tells us that these are ‘very serious people’ and certainly independent experts on reactor design issues.

The site ISIS claims to have found is quite in the middle of eastern Syria, some 80 miles south of the Turkish-Syrian boarder. A month ago some Robin Wright wrote in another WaPo piece on the issue:

The target of Israel’s attack was said to be in northern Syria, near the Turkish border.

She of course doesn’t make any attempt to solve the contradiction from her old to the newest ‘report’. Not that anybody would care. Nobody is looking for fire here. Lots of smoke is all that’s needed.

But just in case you live in a "tall, boxy structure similar to the type of building used to house a gas-graphite reactor," please beware of U.S./Israeli F-16s.