Nutty September Sixth Airstrike Rumor of the Day

The September 6 airstrike on a Syrian facility continues to generate lots of rumors, but this one takes the cake.

Al Jazeera claims that it was the US Air Force that struck the facility, and they used tactical nuclear weapons to do so, reports the Jerusalem Post.

The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two strategic US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a nuclear site under construction.

The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.

The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.

At the beginning of October, Israel's military censor began to allow the local media to report on the raid without attributing their report to foreign sources. Nevertheless, details of the strike have remained clouded in mystery.

This is completely batty. If the US had sent in strategic jets to take out the site, they would not have needed to be accompanied by Israeli fighters. US stealth bombers, the B-2, do not need anyone to accompany them to target, and would be far superior to the B-1 or B-52 in this kind of mission. They are stealth aircraft that are designed to penetrate enemy defense systems without the need for accompanying aircraft, which unless they themselves are stealth aircraft, would become targets for air defense systems. Not only that, all US strategic bombers have standoff capabilities enabling them to hit targets over the horizon.

Also, if a nuclear weapon was used on the Syrian facility, you could be sure that Syria would not have been quiet about it - and they wouldn't be busy trying to bury the evidence of their facility. They'd be pulling out all the stops to show how the US had used nuclear weapons on their country - an act of war.

Besides, if the raid on the Syrian facility was done with a tactical nuclear weapon, there would be signs of that attack in the damage and blast pattern. Curiously, we have no evidence that such events happened. All we do have is the Syrians busily removing all traces of the facility's existence.

No, all we get is a bunch of unnamed sources, who are most likely propagandists who have nothing better to do than to come up with fanciful reasons for why the Syrians got whacked on September 6 and how they couldn't defend the site from attack. Teenagers hanging out in their parents' basements could do better.

HT: dentate at LGF.

UPDATE:
Note that this isn't the al Jazeera cable news network, but rather the al Jazeera website, which is unrelated (and apparently unrelated to reality).

UPDATE:
Hot Air has more on this, and reading through the comments, this "story" makes sense only if you're trying to float an explanation for why there is residual radiation coming from the site. Blame the Americans for the radiation, and not the Syrian nuclear facility that no longer exists thanks to the Israeli raid.

UPDATE:
Seems that this might be tracked back to some wild rumors/conspiracy nonsense posted on the Islam Memo site (an Islamist site). The Jawa Report has the details.