The Man-Judys Of The N.Y. Times

By Steve Hynd

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article by William Broad and David Sanger which stated that the IAEA atom watchdog has a document, one it has deliberately kept secret, which shows that Iran already has �sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable� atom bomb.

Broad and Sanger, both of whom worked closely with infamous Iraq WMD shill Judith Miller, have here a story that is 100% recycled news. Only a few weeks ago, Associated Press was talking about leaks concerning a "secret annex" that the IAEA refused to publish. The IAEA were quick to push back, saying "With respect to a recent media report, the IAEA reiterates that it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapons program in Iran."

Unresolved questions about Iran's possible 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 MeK anti-Iran group, Mossad or the CIA, either singly or in some combination.

What Broad and Sanger fail to bring to their readers' attention is that the secret report isn't really a report at all. It's simply a list of the many allegations contained in the so-called Laptop of Death and other documents since brought to the IAEA's attention with likewise doubtful provenance.

Broad and Sanger bury the real story about these documents. They quote previous official IAEA reports on Iran as saying:

�the information contained in that documentation appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran with a view to removing the doubts�

But then utterly misrepresent the meaning of that by saying that IAEA staff "staff concluded that the evidence of Iran�s alleged military activity was probably genuine". It's quite the reverse. In the language of the atom watchdog's official reports, "appears" is a word used to denote something over which there is considerable doubt. IAEA head el-Baradei makes that explicit in their tenth paragraph - in a truly unbiased examination of this "secret annex" his words would have been the lede.

Last month, the agency issued an unusual statement cautioning it �has no concrete proof� that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms, much less to perfect a warhead. On Saturday in India, Dr. ElBaradei was quoted as saying that �a major question� about the authenticity of the evidence kept his agency from �making any judgment at all� on whether Iran had ever sought to design a nuclear warhead.

This is entirely in keeping with other statements on the subject by the IAEA director general. He has also said:

If this information is real, there is a high probability that nuclear weaponization activities have taken place. But I should underline 'if' three times.'

and:

�It�s alleged (studies), the whole question is about accuracy, whether this is real � that is the $64,000 question. That is where we are stuck, we have a limited ability to authenticate.�

Crucially, and always unmentioned in reports by Broad and Sanger, the IAEA have never been allowed to keep copies of the documentation upon which the "secret annex" is built so that they can attempt to determine authenticity. IAEA officials confirmed to Gareth Porter on his recent trip to Vienna that they've been shown the originals once, and since then have had to rely upon sanitised copies provided by the intelligence agencies which produced them. Nor has Iran been provided with enough data on the contents of the Laptop and other allegations to be able to offer definitive rebuttals.

Yet again we have hyperventilating pretending to be unbiased journalism. The same can be seen in the shameless recent lying Broad and Sanger did about the German BND intelligence agency's appraisal of Iran's likely nuclear research. Or hyperventilating over the Qom site, which even the Obama administration admits wasn't anywhere near being able to go into production. Or in coverage of Iran hawk 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 most spectaclar allegations in the "secret annex" all come from Heinonen's people, and are all based upon Laptop documents that many others in the IAEA think are fraudulent.

Finally, as for the contention that Iran already has the technical know-how to build a nuke. Well yes - tell us something that isn't obvious. There are Brazilian books explaining the process in detail. The Bush administration inadvertently published the entire corpus of Iraqi research on the web back in 2006. And in 2004 a clumsy CIA effort to give Iran faulty bomb plans backfired when the faults were spotted, handing Iran valuable information on US bomb-making techniques, according to James Risen.

The knowledge has been pretty much open-source for years. The really important part is intent and the US intelligence community is still sticking by its assessment that, at worst, Iran wishes a "virtual" deterrent; the capability to build a bomb and mount it on a missile quickly should it be attacked.

Update: Gregg Carlstrom notes the many difficulties with relying on the Laptop of Death.

Update 2: The CSM reports:

According to the Sunday New York Times, a secret International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report says that Iran has "sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable" atom bomb.

US National Security Adviser James Jones, however, disputed the IAEA's findings. Asked on CNN's "State of the Union" if Iran has the data to make a nuclear bomb, he said: "No, we stand by the reports that we've put out."

Describing the unrealeased IAEA report as "the IAEA's findings" is woefully incorrect. What Jones has denied is the hype around the "secret annex" - as typified by the Man-Judys of the NYT. The IAEA itself says the annex proves nothing as they cannot vouch for, indeed positively doubt, the authenticity of any of the allegations behind it.