IAEA Chief: Iran Threat "Hyped" - The Leaking Game
CBC, CounterPunch | 05.09.2009 22:49 | Anti-militarism | World
Great to hear him weigh in on the issue.
He also said any attack on Iran would be "an act of Madness" that would enflame the entire region, if not the world.
"Western nations and others worry Iran is moving toward development of nuclear warheads."
No they don't. Their own intelligence services have said there is no such program in existence, nor does Iran show a desire to move towards weaponization.
The ONLY people claiming otherwise, entirely without evidence, are the Israeli, American, and British Extremists who plotted to attack the oil-rich regional rival, long before Ahmadinejad or the atomic energy program were issues.
These are the same people who lied to us about the threat posed by Iraq's non-existent arsenal of WMD, in order to scare us all into a nightmare of a war and occupation.
He also said any attack on Iran would be "an act of Madness" that would enflame the entire region, if not the world.
"Western nations and others worry Iran is moving toward development of nuclear warheads."
No they don't. Their own intelligence services have said there is no such program in existence, nor does Iran show a desire to move towards weaponization.
The ONLY people claiming otherwise, entirely without evidence, are the Israeli, American, and British Extremists who plotted to attack the oil-rich regional rival, long before Ahmadinejad or the atomic energy program were issues.
These are the same people who lied to us about the threat posed by Iraq's non-existent arsenal of WMD, in order to scare us all into a nightmare of a war and occupation.
ElBaradei calls Iran nuclear threat 'hyped'
The threat posed by Iran's nuclear program has been exaggerated, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has said.
The comments by Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the UN agency, appear in the online magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
ElBaradei said the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, has not seen "concrete evidence" that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program.
"But, somehow, many people are talking about how Iran's nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world. In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped," ElBaradei said in the interview, released late Tuesday.
"We still have outstanding questions that are relevant to the nature of Tehran's program, and we still need to verify that there aren't undeclared activities taking place inside of the country. But the idea that we'll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn't supported by the facts that we have seen."
Western nations and others worry Iran is moving toward development of nuclear warheads. But Iranian leaders say the country only seeks reactors to produce electricity.
ElBaradei urged countries concerned over Iran to keep the dialogue going, and said for its part, Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community.
In its latest report, the IAEA says it has pressed Iran to clarify the purpose of its uranium enrichment activities and reassure the world that it's not trying to build an atomic weapon. The agency also acknowledges that Iran has been producing nuclear fuel at a slower rate and has allowed UN inspectors broader access to its main nuclear complex, in the southern city of Natanz, and to a reactor in Arak.
On Wednesday, officials from the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany were to meet at an undisclosed location near Frankfurt to talk about their concerns over Iran's nuclear program.
No official announcements are expected.
On Tuesday, Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, told reporters his country will present new proposals and will open talks "in order to ease common concerns in the international arena."
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/09/02/elbaradei-iran.html#socialcomments
August 26, 2009
Planted News Stories Show New Bid by West to Say Iran Seeks Nuclear Weapons
The Leaking Game
By GARETH PORTER
Western officials are leaking stories to the Associated Press and Reuters aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA report due out this week.
The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.
The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that "several" officials from those states had said the IAEA has "credible information" suggesting that the U.S. intelligence estimate was "incorrect".
The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran's nuclear program in early September.
The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published Aug. 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue.
Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons.
Charbonneau referred without further analysis to U.S. and Israeli accusations that ElBaradei has deliberately underplayed the case against Iran to "undermine the U.S. sanctions drive".
Jahn explained ElBaradei's refusal to publish the intelligence summary as the result of his eagerness to "avoid moves that could harden already massive Iranian intransigence on cooperating with the agency" and his worry that it would increase the chances of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear sites.
He also suggested ElBaradei had made "barely disguised criticisms of U.S. policy" in the past and that some of his statements on Israel and Gaza were viewed by the West as "overtly political".
In fact, however, the tensions between ElBaradei and the George W. Bush administration were directly related to ElBaradei's public declaration in March 2003 that the documents on alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger - later known as the "Niger forgeries" - were not authentic, after he received no response from Washington to an earlier private warning to the White House.
Charbonneau quoted a "senior Western diplomat" as confirming that some of the information the four Western countries want published in the coming IAEA report relate to intelligence documents concerning an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research program, which the IAEA has referred to as "alleged studies".
What the anti-ElBaradei coalition is now demanding, as Charbonneau's report confirms, is that ElBaradei attach a report prepared by the IAEA safeguards department which reflects the slant of the quartet and Israel on the issue, as an "annex" to the coming report.
What AP and Reuters failed to report, however, is that there has long been a deep division within the IAEA between those who support the "alleged studies" documents, led by safeguards department chief Olli Heinonen, and those who have remained sceptical about their authenticity.
The doubts of the sceptics were reinforced, moreover, when new evidence came to light last year suggesting that some of the key documents were fabricated or doctored to support the accusation that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.
A Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA confides that the reason ElBaradei has never endorsed the "alleged studies" documents is that they have not met his rigorous standards of evidence.
The United States and other governments refused to give the documents to the IAEA, because ElBaradei had insisted that all the "alleged studies" documents should be shared with Iran and should be authenticated. U.S. officials, supported by Israel, argued that allowing Iran to study the documents carefully would compromise intelligence "sources and methods", according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the matter.
The most important such document to be denied to the IAEA and Iran is a one-page letter from an Iranian engineering firm to an Iranian private company, Kimia Maadan, which is identified as having participated in the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons project.
The letter reportedly had handwritten notes on it referring to studies on the redesign of a missile reentry vehicle, and is thus a primary piece of evidence for the claim that the missile reentry documents were genuine.
However, Iran turned over to the IAEA a copy of the same May 2003 letter with no handwritten notes on it, as Heinonen confirmed in a February 2008 briefing for member states.
That suggested that the copy of the letter with handwriting on it was a fabrication done by an outside intelligence agency in order to prove that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.
There were other problems with the one-page flowsheets showing a plan for a "green salt" conversion facility, which were attributed to Kima Maadan and said to be part of the military-run nuclear weapons project.
According to a Feb. 22, 2008 IAEA report, Iran submitted documentary evidence to the IAEA showing that Kimia Maadan had been created in 2000 solely to plan and construct a uranium ore processing facility under contract with Iran's civilian atomic energy agency, and that it was in financial difficulty when it closed its doors in 2003.
The IAEA, which had been investigating whether the company was working for the Iranian military, as charged by the United States and other Western countries, declared in its February 2008 report that it "considers this question no longer outstanding at this stage".
Furthermore, Iran pointed out that the flowsheets for a "green salt" conversion facility portrayed in the documents as done by Kimia Maadan have "technical errors", and IAEA safeguards director Heinonen conceded that point in his February 2008 briefing.
Questions had also been raised about the technical quality of the alleged Iranian designs for a missile reentry vehicle that was apparently aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon. Experts at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico who ran computer simulations on the studies determined none of them would have worked, according to Washington Post investigative reporter Dafna Linzer in February 2006.
After the new information surfaced, some IAEA officials, including experts involved in the investigation, argued privately that the agency should now state publicly that it could not authenticate the documents, according to a Vienna-based source close to the IAEA.
The AP's Jahn cited as further evidence of Iran's intention to manufacture nuclear weapons its alleged refusal to cooperate on IAEA demands for more cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility. "Iran's stonewalling of the agency on increased monitoring," he wrote, "has raised agency concerns that its experts might not be able to make sure that some of the enriched material produced at Natanz is not diverted for potential weapons use."
Unfortunately for that argument, however, IAEA officials revealed Aug. 20 that Iran had already agreed the previous week to allow increased IAEA monitoring of the Natanz enrichment facility through additional cameras.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
http://www.counterpunch.org/porter08262009.html
The threat posed by Iran's nuclear program has been exaggerated, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has said.
The comments by Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the UN agency, appear in the online magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
ElBaradei said the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, has not seen "concrete evidence" that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program.
"But, somehow, many people are talking about how Iran's nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world. In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped," ElBaradei said in the interview, released late Tuesday.
"We still have outstanding questions that are relevant to the nature of Tehran's program, and we still need to verify that there aren't undeclared activities taking place inside of the country. But the idea that we'll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn't supported by the facts that we have seen."
Western nations and others worry Iran is moving toward development of nuclear warheads. But Iranian leaders say the country only seeks reactors to produce electricity.
ElBaradei urged countries concerned over Iran to keep the dialogue going, and said for its part, Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community.
In its latest report, the IAEA says it has pressed Iran to clarify the purpose of its uranium enrichment activities and reassure the world that it's not trying to build an atomic weapon. The agency also acknowledges that Iran has been producing nuclear fuel at a slower rate and has allowed UN inspectors broader access to its main nuclear complex, in the southern city of Natanz, and to a reactor in Arak.
On Wednesday, officials from the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany were to meet at an undisclosed location near Frankfurt to talk about their concerns over Iran's nuclear program.
No official announcements are expected.
On Tuesday, Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, told reporters his country will present new proposals and will open talks "in order to ease common concerns in the international arena."
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/09/02/elbaradei-iran.html#socialcomments August 26, 2009
Planted News Stories Show New Bid by West to Say Iran Seeks Nuclear Weapons
The Leaking Game
By GARETH PORTER
Western officials are leaking stories to the Associated Press and Reuters aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA report due out this week.
The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.
The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that "several" officials from those states had said the IAEA has "credible information" suggesting that the U.S. intelligence estimate was "incorrect".
The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran's nuclear program in early September.
The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published Aug. 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue.
Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons.
Charbonneau referred without further analysis to U.S. and Israeli accusations that ElBaradei has deliberately underplayed the case against Iran to "undermine the U.S. sanctions drive".
Jahn explained ElBaradei's refusal to publish the intelligence summary as the result of his eagerness to "avoid moves that could harden already massive Iranian intransigence on cooperating with the agency" and his worry that it would increase the chances of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear sites.
He also suggested ElBaradei had made "barely disguised criticisms of U.S. policy" in the past and that some of his statements on Israel and Gaza were viewed by the West as "overtly political".
In fact, however, the tensions between ElBaradei and the George W. Bush administration were directly related to ElBaradei's public declaration in March 2003 that the documents on alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger - later known as the "Niger forgeries" - were not authentic, after he received no response from Washington to an earlier private warning to the White House.
Charbonneau quoted a "senior Western diplomat" as confirming that some of the information the four Western countries want published in the coming IAEA report relate to intelligence documents concerning an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research program, which the IAEA has referred to as "alleged studies".
What the anti-ElBaradei coalition is now demanding, as Charbonneau's report confirms, is that ElBaradei attach a report prepared by the IAEA safeguards department which reflects the slant of the quartet and Israel on the issue, as an "annex" to the coming report.
What AP and Reuters failed to report, however, is that there has long been a deep division within the IAEA between those who support the "alleged studies" documents, led by safeguards department chief Olli Heinonen, and those who have remained sceptical about their authenticity.
The doubts of the sceptics were reinforced, moreover, when new evidence came to light last year suggesting that some of the key documents were fabricated or doctored to support the accusation that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.
A Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA confides that the reason ElBaradei has never endorsed the "alleged studies" documents is that they have not met his rigorous standards of evidence.
The United States and other governments refused to give the documents to the IAEA, because ElBaradei had insisted that all the "alleged studies" documents should be shared with Iran and should be authenticated. U.S. officials, supported by Israel, argued that allowing Iran to study the documents carefully would compromise intelligence "sources and methods", according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the matter.
The most important such document to be denied to the IAEA and Iran is a one-page letter from an Iranian engineering firm to an Iranian private company, Kimia Maadan, which is identified as having participated in the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons project.
The letter reportedly had handwritten notes on it referring to studies on the redesign of a missile reentry vehicle, and is thus a primary piece of evidence for the claim that the missile reentry documents were genuine.
However, Iran turned over to the IAEA a copy of the same May 2003 letter with no handwritten notes on it, as Heinonen confirmed in a February 2008 briefing for member states.
That suggested that the copy of the letter with handwriting on it was a fabrication done by an outside intelligence agency in order to prove that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.
There were other problems with the one-page flowsheets showing a plan for a "green salt" conversion facility, which were attributed to Kima Maadan and said to be part of the military-run nuclear weapons project.
According to a Feb. 22, 2008 IAEA report, Iran submitted documentary evidence to the IAEA showing that Kimia Maadan had been created in 2000 solely to plan and construct a uranium ore processing facility under contract with Iran's civilian atomic energy agency, and that it was in financial difficulty when it closed its doors in 2003.
The IAEA, which had been investigating whether the company was working for the Iranian military, as charged by the United States and other Western countries, declared in its February 2008 report that it "considers this question no longer outstanding at this stage".
Furthermore, Iran pointed out that the flowsheets for a "green salt" conversion facility portrayed in the documents as done by Kimia Maadan have "technical errors", and IAEA safeguards director Heinonen conceded that point in his February 2008 briefing.
Questions had also been raised about the technical quality of the alleged Iranian designs for a missile reentry vehicle that was apparently aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon. Experts at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico who ran computer simulations on the studies determined none of them would have worked, according to Washington Post investigative reporter Dafna Linzer in February 2006.
After the new information surfaced, some IAEA officials, including experts involved in the investigation, argued privately that the agency should now state publicly that it could not authenticate the documents, according to a Vienna-based source close to the IAEA.
The AP's Jahn cited as further evidence of Iran's intention to manufacture nuclear weapons its alleged refusal to cooperate on IAEA demands for more cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility. "Iran's stonewalling of the agency on increased monitoring," he wrote, "has raised agency concerns that its experts might not be able to make sure that some of the enriched material produced at Natanz is not diverted for potential weapons use."
Unfortunately for that argument, however, IAEA officials revealed Aug. 20 that Iran had already agreed the previous week to allow increased IAEA monitoring of the Natanz enrichment facility through additional cameras.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
http://www.counterpunch.org/porter08262009.html
CBC, CounterPunch
