To admit that the intelligence presented on the Syrian reactor is convincing is to say nothing about Israel’s decision to bomb the facility. By doing that, they undermined the credibility of their claims about what Syria was up to, and they undermined the foundation of the IAEA. Israel can and frequently does wrong and it did so this time.

He says the evidence is convincing if not incontrovertible. He then goes on to say, “Rather than serving as the tip of the iceberg for a nuclear weapons programme, it seems more likely that the Syrian facility was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.”

If what US intelligence claims to have been a nuclear reactor under construction was no such thing, why would Ritter be suggesting that the facility was “intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy”?

What most serious observers are now acknowledging is that the Syrians really were constructing a Magnox-type nuclear reactor. The US intelligence itself asserts no more than “low confidence” that Syria had a nuclear weapons program. They posit the existence of such a program on the basis that there was no evidence that the reactor was being constructed for power generation or that it was suited for research. In other words, in the absence of a more plausible explanation about the purpose for constructing the reactor, they infer that it was being constructed in order to produce plutonium for weapons production. Even it that was the goal, in the absence of the other elements of such a program – reprocessing and so forth – they were clearly no where near being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

As Arms Control Wonk points out, the Al Kibar reactor would only have been able to produce 1kg of plutonium a year compared with 5-7kg from the N Korean Yongbyon reactor.

Isn’t this a double negative? There’s no reason to doubt that it (US Intelligence) is not (accurate). Misstated or not he would seem to be saying that there IS reason to doubt the accuracy of the US Intelligence.