Friedman Fabricates, Others Fact Check

By Steve Hynd

Thomas Friedman is, as Matt Taibi famously wrote, "an anti-ear...a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse", but his latest column is going to go down as a famously incompetent and lying one, even by his standards.

The short version: telling lies and banging war drums about Iran's nuclear program is justified on human rights grounds.

The column has been pounced upon by several fans of "the most important columnist in America" today, but Robert Naiman points to Friedman's biggest and most dangerous lie:

Friedman writes:

Under the May 17 deal, it has supposedly agreed to send some 2,640 pounds from its stockpile to Turkey for conversion into the type of nuclear fuel needed to power Tehran's medical reactor - a fuel that cannot be used for a bomb. But that would still leave Iran with a roughly 2,200-pound uranium stockpile, which it still refuses to put under international inspection and is free to augment and continue to reprocess to the higher levels needed for a bomb. Experts say it would only take months for Iran to again amass sufficient quantity for a nuclear weapon.

2,640 pounds is 1,200 kilograms (to use the units that everyone else is using.) So, in attacking this provision of the deal (that is, the amount of LEU transferred), Friedman is attacking a provision that was explicitly endorsed by President Obama a week before the deal was signed - although, to be fair, you wouldn't know that if you were relying on the New York Times for your information.

Friedman claims that Iran refuses to put its (low-enriched) uranium stockpile under IAEA inspection, but this assertion is verifiably false - and the New York Times should publish a correction.

From the International Atomic Energy Agency's February 18, 2010 report:

The nuclear material at FEP [i.e. the Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz] (including the feed, product and tails), as well as all installed cascades and the feed and withdrawal stations, are subject to Agency containment and surveillance.

Indeed, as International Herald Tribune/New York Times columnist Roger Cohen recently wrote, in a column supporting the fuel swap and criticizing the Obama Administration for summarily dismissing it:

Speaking of facts, I must get a little technical here. Iran has been producing, under International Atomic Energy Agency inspection, LEU (enriched to about 5 percent)."

Since the process is under IAEA inspection, it's fundamentally untrue to claim that Iran is "free to augment and continue to reprocess to the higher levels needed for a bomb." Since this material is under supervision, either 1) the IAEA would know that Iran was doing this, and therefore the world would know, or 2) Iran would have to remove the material from IAEA supervision in order to do this, and the world would know that it had done so.

Then there's the human rights hypocrisy and lies, well covered by Jim Naureckas at FAIR:

Asks Friedman, "Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?" And he answers himself: "No, that's about as ugly as it gets."

Friedman quotes a source complaining that Iran had just executed "political prisoners who were tortured into confessions," but "didn't mention a word about human rights."  Friedman presumably is aware that the U.S., too, has prisoners that it has tortured into confessions, and that it maintains the right to execute such captives.  Should Lula have said a word about those human rights issues as well, or would that just be an attempt to "tweak the U.S."?

And Daniel Larison does sterling work eviscerating Friedman too:

Where exactly did Turkey and Brazil �sell out other democrats�? In fact, they did nothing of the sort. It�s true, they didn�t engage in the useless posturing that Iran hawks have insisted the President engage in over the last year, but frankly that is to their credit rather than their shame. They offered the beginning of a way to settle the Iranian nuclear issue, which would, if successful, reduce the international pressure on Iran that provides Iran�s authoritarian government with unearned political capital that it can use to strengthen its position at home. That can only help the opposition. The deal would have permitted Iran to develop a nuclear program that most of its people support, and it could have avoided the continued pursuit of additional sanctions that the Iranian opposition clearly opposes. If Iran hawks got the sanctions they wanted imposed, Iran�s opposition would probably wither and disappear. Nothing could be more useful to Iran�s authoriarians than the constant outside vilification directed at Iran on account of its nuclear program. It is laughable that Friedman thinks he is �on the side of the angels� by endorsing Washington�s current confrontational course, which will do no more to delay Iran�s possible acquisition of a bomb than the deal Turkey and Brazil proposed. Instead, it will almost certainly hasten the day when Iran�s government believes it has no choice but to build nuclear weapons.

In the meantime, this confrontational course will create the crisis atmosphere in which a repressive government thrives and a peaceful democratic opposition suffocates. It is not Lula and Erdogan that have sold out Iran�s democrats. On the contrary, it has been their short-sighted enthusiasts in the West who offer them nothing but lip service and then turn around and pursue the policies that will badly weaken or even destroy their chances at realizing peaceful political change.

None of this is particularly difficult - and at the very least the massive lie Friedman promulgates about IAEA supervision of Iran's uranium stockpile should have been caught by the NYT's editors and fact checkers. But the important thing is that all the fact checkers have quieter "voices" in the public debate than Friedman does. He's syndicated over several newspapers and feted by the D.C. "Serious" set as a brilliant, multi-Pullitzer winning author. So Friedman helps tip the scales towards the confrontation that same D.C. set long ago decided was inevitable, they just needed to put some masquerade of negotiations on first to cover all the bases. How depressing.