Wiped clean

via memeorandum

The New York Times reports that – commercially available – satellite photographs confirm what the Washington Post reported a few days ago: Syria has cleaned up the target of Israel’s September raid.

“It’s a magic act — here today, gone tomorrow,” said a senior intelligence official. “It doesn’t lower suspicions, it raises them. This was not a long-term decommissioning of a building, which can take a year. It was speedy. It’s incredible that they could have gone to that effort to make something go away.”Any attempt by Syrian authorities to clean up the site would make it difficult, if not impossible, for international weapons inspectors to determine that exact nature of the activity there. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna have said they hoped to analyze the satellite images and ultimately inspect the site in person. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that released a report on the Syrian site earlier this week, said the expurgation of the building was inherently suspicious.

“It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” Mr. Albright said in an interview. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.”

(Question: The photographs were available commercially. So why didn’t the IAEA obtain them instead of waiting for someone to give them photographs? Just what we need a passive-aggressive watchdog agency!)

Q & O notes

Seems to me if it was an empty building the Israelis took out, the Syrians would milk it for every bit of propaganda value possible (hopefully more skillfully that Saddam’s “Baby Milk Factory”). Instead we have what looks like a scrubbed site.

Bits Blog adds some observations about the terrain.

The building that you see in one picture and don’t see in the other, is in a bit of a valley. That valley, gravity drains into the river. It’s also apparently deep enough, to make it a serious problem for anyone trying to do an air strike unless you’re coming at it from the west. The topo of the neighborhood suggests a drop off of about 150ft. below average terrain. This would be consistent, to my mind with a nuclear installation, not as I say an aspirin factory. I’m not sure how tall the building was, but it seems reasonable to assume that the site was picked and possibly re-landscaped slightly… so as to hide the roof below the average terrain.

The Washington Post reports:

Under IAEA guidelines, construction of any part of a nuclear reactor without formal, advance notice would violate the nation’s obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.Officials of the watchdog agency have declined comment on the new photos. The IAEA has acquired its own commercial satellite photographs of the Syrian site but has not completed its analysis, an IAEA official said.

On Friday, the IAEA had gotten pictures from the U.S. government but hadn’t finished analyzing them. Now, nearly a week later they have commercial pictures and haven’t finished analyzing them. Damn, they’re efficient.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.