Unsubstantiated claims and more missing "intelligence" reports? I'm going to be a little harder to sell than that.
I don't mind keeping an open mind and seeing what develops, but it seems that if there were even a shred of truth to it, bushco would be all over it. They've certainly explained away bigger mistakes and remained unruffled, I can't see why they wouldn't be publishing something that would vindicate them all over the world, if there were any merit to it at all. I'm pretty skeptical.
It's a very unsatisfactory article. There's no corroboration of any of the claims. If these huge bunkers were under the Euphrates, they'll still be there. Even if they were demolished, there should be huge chunks of reinforced concrete there. The advanced countries have radar which could spot such remnants easily. So, are they there, or not? No word.
The info about the radiation is not too useful. If someone was stockpiling radioactive waste, with some vague plan to eventually make a radiological bomb (a convention bomb wrapped in radioisotopes, but not an atomic bomb), that could be all that the radioactive traces show. Radioactive wastes are much "hotter" than the fissionables used in bombs, for technical reasons which I won't get into at the moment. Either is possible.
I'm not at all sure how photos from spy satellites can show that centrifuges are operating in Syria. The Manhattan Project used six different techniques for concentrating U235 - they'd thought of six, and decided to develop them all. Germany tried only one, gas diffusion of uranium hexafluoride, and the problems of handling fluorine gas were just too discouraging. Fluorine does annoying things, like eat through glass. The centrifuge method is one of the preferred modern techniques. The details are still classified, or were last time I looked. It's not actually a centrifuge, like the little things in high school chemistry labs, but a mass centrifuge, which is more like a cyclotron or particle accellerator. But in any case, these things would normally just be put in a big building, and one big building looks much like another from space. A real particle accelerator can be huge, and that would be visible. They're conventionally buried in concrete tunnels under, say, cow pastures, as the leakage radiation doesn't bother cows as much as it would bother suburbanites. But although buried, construction of such a thing would have been visible. But again, we get no solid information from the article.
Nevertheless, the logical puzzle remains.
If the story is substantially correct - and as yet there's little reason to believe that - we could expect both right- and left-wingers to start acting like jumping beans. But which way will each jump? That's no more obvious to me than it was to the article's writer.
