Another Quarter, Another Iran Report, Another NYT Spin Cycle

By Steve Hynd

Ho-hum. The latest new IAEA report on Iran is out (h/t Kat).

Here's the spin according to The NYT's team of William Broad and David "Judy In Drag" Sanger:

A week before Iran�s presidential election, atomic inspectors reported Friday that the country has sped up its production of nuclear fuel and increased its number of installed centrifuges to 7,200 � more than enough, weapon experts said, to make fuel for up to two nuclear weapons a year, if the country decided to use its facilities for that purpose.

...The report, one of a series made quarterly to the agency�s board, described how the pace of enrichment and the installation of new centrifuges is accelerating at an enormous underground bunker in the desert at Natanz. It said that nearly 4,920 centrifuges were currently enriching uranium, and that 2,300 more were ready to go. That represents an increase of 30 percent in the total number of installed centrifuges since a February report.

Campaigning for re-election next week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed that he will never bend to demands from the West or the United Nations that Iran halt its uranium enrichment. His political opponents have largely agreed, but have urged a more cooperative attitude.

Meanwhile, Israel is constantly assessing Iran�s capability of producing a nuclear weapon. Last year, it asked the Bush administration for the equipment needed in case it decided to take unilateral military action against Iran. Mr. Bush declined to provide the equipment.

Sure, extra centrifuges have been installed - but they're not being used, and neither are some of those that were already there.

On 31 May 2009, 4920 centrifuges were being fed with UF6; 2132 centrifuges were installed and under vacuum, and an additional 169 centrifuges were installed but not under vacuum.

And, from the last report in February, when there were a total of 5,537 centrifuges (which means 12% of those centrifuges are still not productive):

On 1 February 2009, 3936 centrifuges were being fed with UF6; 1476 centrifuges were installed and under vacuum, and an additional 125 centrifuges were installed but not under vacuum.

That's a 25% rise in actual operating capacity and the number installed but not operating is up from 29% to 32% of capacity. We might speculate on this admittedly thin statistical evidence that the Iranians are building faster than they can operate them and that therefore maybe there's something still a bit awry with their feedstock or they're still having technical problems with their cascades.

Finally, there's the most important bit the NYT's illustrious pairing doesn't mention:

The Agency believes that it has provided Iran with sufficient access to documentation in its possession to permit Iran to respond substantively to the questions raised by the Agency. However, the Director General urges Member States which have provided documentation to the Agency to work out new modalities with the Agency so that it could share further information with Iran since the Agency�s inability to share additional information with Iran, and to provide copies or, if possible, originals, is making it difficult for the Agency to progress further in its verification.

I'll refer readers to Gareth Porter's latest article on the dodgy provenance of the documents from the Laptop of Death, which the US won't give verification copies of to Iran.

The unnamed Israeli intelligence officer's statement that the "blueprints for a nuclear warhead" - meaning specifications for a missile re-entry vehicle - were identical to "designs his agency had obtained from other sources in Iran" suggests that the documents collection which the IAEA has called "alleged studies" actually originated in Israel.

A US-based nuclear weapons analyst who has followed the "alleged studies" intelligence documents closely says he understands that the documents obtained by US intelligence in 2004 were not originally stored on the laptop on which they were located when they were brought in by an unidentified Iranian source, as US officials have claimed to US journalists.

The analyst, who insists on not being identified, says the documents were collected by an intelligence network and then assembled on a single laptop.

The anonymous Israeli intelligence official's claim, cited in the committee report, that the "blueprints" in the "alleged studies" collection matched documents his agency had gotten from its own source seems to confirm the analyst's finding that Israeli intelligence assembled the documents.

German officials have said that the Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the Iranian resistance organization, brought the laptop documents collection to the attention of US intelligence, as reported by IPS in February 2008. Israeli ties with the political arm of the MEK, the National Committee of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), go back to the early 1990s and include assistance to the organization in broadcasting into Iran from Paris.

The NCRI publicly revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility in August 2002. However, that and other intelligence apparently came from Israeli intelligence. The Israeli co-authors of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran, Yossi Melman and Meir Javeanfar, revealed that "Western" intelligence was "laundered" to hide its actual provenance by providing it to Iranian opposition groups, especially NCRI, in order to get it to the IAEA.

Ron mentioned that article the other day, and we at Newshoggers have been writing about the laptop's position as the highly dubious cornerstone of fearmongering about Iran's nuclear program for some time as have others. Broad and Sanger - having repeated the Israeli spin that a re-entry vehicle is the same as a warhead and been upbraided by no less than David Albright, president of ISIS,for doing so - remain silent on the source of their spin.

Meanwhile, "the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran." That was true back in February too, when the media ran around like headless chickens to declaim that Iran had  "enough atoms" for a bomb.