Israeli warplanes bombed a building - That secret nuclear facility in Syria? It’s a textile factory, researchers say in new report

[Washingtonpost] After a four-year search for hidden atomic facilities in Syria, U.N. officials appeared this week to have finally struck gold: News reports linked a large factory in eastern Syria to a suspected clandestine effort to spin uranium gas into fuel for nuclear bombs.

But after further probing by private researchers, Syria’s mystery plant is looking far less mysterious. A new report concludes that the facility and its thousands of fast-spinning machines were intended to make not uranium, but cloth — a very ordinary cotton-polyester.

The reports, citing Western diplomats and former U.N. officials, said aerial images of the factory were being intensely studied by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been scouring Syria for evidence of other hidden atomic facilities.

The engineer appeared mystified by the accounts suggesting that the al-Hasakah plant was originally designed to make enriched uranium. “He burst out, ‘I built that thing!’ ” recalled Lewis’s colleague, German journalist Paul-Anton Krueger, who interviewed the man.

To Lewis, the episode underscores the difficulties of ferreting out nuclear secrets using computers and satellite imagery, but it hardly lets Syria off the hook. The search for hidden nuclear sites continues, he said.

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