Political Gamesmanship And Iran's Nuclear Program

By Steve Hynd

IAEA head Mohammed El Baradei says that the UN atom watchdog is in a "stalemate" with Iran over its nuclear activities.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the group�s 35-nation board that Iran had not stopped enriching uranium or answered lingering questions about its nuclear program. He urged Iran to �substantively re-engage� with the nuclear agency, and to �respond positively to the recent U.S. initiative� on a dialogue about nuclear issues.

But what the Western media, and the U.S. media in particular, aren't giving much space to is that the U.S. is at least as responsible for that stalemate as Iran. The NPT treaty allows enrichment of uranium for civilian purposes by right and at the time the U.S. strongarmed the UNSC into passing a resolution banning Iran from doing so there was no evidence had a current nuclear weapons program. There still isn't, as El Baradei confirmed recently in an interview with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists noted by CASMII:

Nobody is sitting in Iran today developing nuclear weapons. Tehran doesn�t have an ongoing nuclear weapons program. But somehow, everyone in the West is talking about how Iran�s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world. In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped.

Yes, there�s concern and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA. We still have outstanding questions about some of the research they�ve conducted, 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 crazy. We just haven�t seen any indication of that.

Unresolved questions about weaponization activities date those activities back to 2003, no later, and rely entirely upon documents from the so-called Laptop of Death, which came into U.S. custody by dubious routes and which the Iranian government has stated categorically is a total fraud. Others have questioned the authenticity of the data the laptop contains too, wondering why all that usually-compartmentalized secret information might be on a mobile item like a laptop and asking hard questions about the laptop's electronic data trails which strongly suggest some agency put various disaparate elements together into a cohesive whole, adding made-up elements as needed, at some point after 2003. The favorite candidates for that agency are the terrorist MKK anti-Iran group, Mossad or the CIA, either singly or in some combination.

The trouble is, the U.S. has steadfastly refused to allow Iran to "face its accuser" by examining the original documents and laptop and thus perhaps provide substantial evidence of fakery. All the U.S. has ever provided to Iran are copies. And it is unclear whether even the IAEA has seen originals. Recent IAEA reports have all said that documents provided by the U.S. "seem" authentic and "seem" to be from disaparate sources. The IAEA has repeatedly said that it cannot authenticate the documents. If even the atom watchdog hasn't seen original documentation, then that casts the narrative in a very different light. Even nuclear experts who follow the issue closely that I've spoken to are unsure whether the IAEA has had sight of original and full documentation or is simply working from copies. Newshoggers friend Gareth Porter is currently in Vienna on assignment and will be talking to IAEA officials, perhaps he can throw some light on this.

But given all this, and despite how odious he might be personally, it's possible to see why President Ahmadinejad has a case when he says that while Iran is open to wide negotiations with the U.S. and the West, it considers its nuclear case "closed" and has no intention of ever giving up the enrichment activities it is allowed as an NPT right.

Meanwhile, Israel and its allies continue pressuring the IAEA and El Baradei is getting upset. It turns out that the French neoliberal interventionist foreign minister was behind recent leaked accusations that the IAEA was hiding data on Iran, first reported in the Israeli press:

In a rare public dispute at the normally discrete IAEA's discussions, Mr ElBaradei lashed out at certain members which he did not name.

"I am dismayed by the allegations of some member states, which have been fed to the media, that information has been withheld from the Board.

"These allegations are politically motivated and totally baseless," he said at the opening of the regular IAEA governors' meeting in Vienna.

"Such attempts to influence the work of the (IAEA's non-proliferation inspectorate) and undermine its independence and objectivity are in violation of... the IAEA Statute and should therefore cease forthwith."

...A week earlier French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the UN watchdog had delayed publication of "important" annexes about enrichment in its most recent report.

Israel said that the latest IAEA report did not reflect all the agency knew, in respect of Iranian concealment and deception.

After Mr ElBaradei's rejection of this in Vienna, France's foreign ministry spokeswoman Christine Pages said: "France attended a technical briefing at the agency. All of this information was not reflected in the report."  

Thats GOT to be Olli Heinonen�s infamous March 2008 briefing on stuff culled from the Laptop of Death, set up by George Schulte so that he could then leak the details to the press,  establishing a stage of plausiblity between himself and the information. However, the information given at that briefing was public knowledge even in 2005 and still only referred to possible pre-2004 weaponization activities.

The scary narrative of the bulk of the Obama administration and other Western governments (D.N.I. Blair excepted), as pushed by the mainstream media, is a web of disinformation built entirely around the dodgy Laptop of Death. Buyer beware.