Told you so

Well, there's good reason I was leaning towards the "FAUX propaganda" option concerning the "UN confirms Syrian nuclear plant" "confession" the other day - it was, indeed, BS:

A U.N. press release on a meeting of the General Assembly's Disarmament Committee held on Tuesday quoted an unnamed Syrian diplomat as charging that Israel had "taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria." For good measure, the release got the month wrong.

When incredulous journalists asked whether Syria was confirming Western reports that Israel may have hit a partially built atomic reactor, U.N. officials retrieved a tape recording of the meeting and said the diplomat had said no such thing.

I have to point out that FAUX did indeed report on the reaction to the "error":

The Syrian representative spoke in Arabic, but Haq said Thursday the problem wasn't the result of the interpretation from Arabic. An interpreter who worked from Arabic into French was fairly accurate, he said.

The problem occurred because of another interpreter, who was listening to the French and then interpreting into English, Haq said.

...however the initial (false) story and the followup are on the FAUX.com equivalent of page A49 and can only be found if you specifically search for them, while stories like "Report: Israeli Jets Destroyed Syrian Nuclear Plant Last Month" and "Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton Says Israel's Target in Syria Was 'High Value'" still remain on the list of "LATEST MIDDLE EAST NEWS" headlines.

Odd, that.

Meanwhile there's this story from rawstory.com which suggests that there might well have been more to this than an innocent translator's error:

One US intelligence source familiar with the events expressed concern about recent news reports describing Syria as having a functioning nuclear weapons program and cautioned against attributing those reports to the US intelligence community.

“The allegations that North Korea was helping to build a nuclear reactor have not been substantiated by US intelligence,” said this intelligence official, adding, “ but that hasn't stopped Dick Cheney and his minions at the NSC, Elliot Abrams and Steve Hadley, from leaking the information [to the press], which appears to be misleading in the extreme.”

I realize the history of third-hand translation is not exactly an auspicious one, but its' just a little too convenient, in my mind, that the "nuclear facility" aspect seems to have snuck into the translation, almost as if it was intended to be there.

Odd, again.