A headlined story on MSNBC today, reprinted from the WP:

'Photos said to show Israeli target in Syria : Satellite imagery shows buildings similar in design to North Korean reactor'

By Robin Wright and Joby Warrick
The Washington Post,  Oct 24, 2007

"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)." (...) "I'm pretty convinced that Syria was trying to build a nuclear reactor," Albright said in an interview. He said the project would represent a significant departure from past policies. ISIS, a nonprofit research group, tracks nuclear weapons and stockpiles around the world." (...)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21429796/



Flashback to Nov. 2004, from a piece by Justin Raimundo of Antiwar.com, describing the promotion of some very dubious allegations of an Iranian program that came out of the demented Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK):



"Speaking of the MEK's Western supporters, there was a "briefing" given on Capitol Hill the other day, in which Kenneth Pollack and David Albright lectured U.S. lawmakers on the alleged necessity of either proving or disproving the MEK's allegations by forcing Pakistan to allow the interrogation of the notorious A. Q. Khan, accused of running a lucrative black market in nukes and a key figure in the MEK's meta-fictional narrative detailing Iran's nuclear ambitions." (...) "Albright, physicist and former arms inspector, is described in the above-linked report as now heading up "a Washington-based anti-nuclear group." This "anti-nuclear group" is the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), which early on championed the lies of Iraqi "defectors" such as Dr. Khidhir Hamza – another "walk-in" – who presented U.S. intelligence agencies with phony evidence of Saddam's "secret" nuclear program."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4031



Folks here will likely remember how "expert" Kenneth Pollack got into the news last summer under similar circumstances. From a piece by Norman Solomon:



"If Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack didn't exist, they'd have to be invented. The duo's op-ed piece Monday in the New York Times, under the headline "A War We Just Might Win," was boilerplate work from elite foreign-policy technicians packaging themselves as "two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq." A recent eight-day officially guided tour led them to conclude that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms."
Both men have always been basic supporters of the Iraq war." (...) "The media maneuvers of recent days are eerily similar to scams that worked so well for the Bush administration during the agenda-setting for the invasion. Vice President Cheney and his top underlings kept leaking disinformation about purported Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda – while the New York Times and other key media outlets breathlessly reported the falsehoods as virtual facts. Then Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and other practitioners of warcraft quickly went in front of TV cameras and microphones to cite the "reporting" in the Times and elsewhere that they had rigged in the first place" (...)
http://www.antiwar.com/solomon/?articleid=11387