Did Robert Gates Manufacture the Iran Crisis?--Huffington Post--Beeman

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Did Robert Gates Manufacture the Iran Crisis?

Posted: 03/24/2014 1:27 pm EDT Updated: 03/24/2014 1:27 pm EDT

Gareth Porter has been the most conscientious follower of the purported danger of Iran's purported "nuclear weapons program." In his new, meticulously documented book, Manufactured Crisis (New York: Just World Books, 2014) he exposes the many lies and half-truths that have been promulgated over more than two decades to try and convince the American public and the world that Iran is the chief danger to international peace through its nuclear program.

One of Porter's surprising implications is that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates may have been the prime mover in the 20-year-old attack on Iran based on unsubstantiated claims that Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons.

Before plunging into the details of Porter's book or his information about Mr. Gates, let me state the book's conclusions unequivocally: Iran has never been proven to have a nuclear weapons program. Any claim to the contrary is absolutely false. The attempt to claim that such a weapons program exists was the result of a decades long effort on the part of American neoconservatives allied with right-wing forces in Israel to legitimize hostile actions against Iran designed to effect regime change there.

Porter's overall account of the evolution of consensus about the threat of Iran's nuclear program is fascinating and appalling reading. It is fascinating because he has created a compelling narrative showing how the framework for attacking Iran compounded lies and misinformation over many years. It appears in this account that Robert Gates had a continuing central role.

Robert Gates had been employed by the CIA since college. He was witness to the Iran-Contra affair under President Reagan, and was called to give testimony about his knowledge of the affair. Despite continual questions about the conduct of the CIA during the 1980's and early 1990's in which he had a central role, Gates rose through the ranks of the intelligence community. He served as Deputy National Security Adviser (1989-1991) -- a promotion from his role as Deputy Director of National Intelligence (1986-1989), and finally became Director of Central Intelligence in 1991 after contentious hearings

One of the most telling episodes in Porter's book concerns President George H.W. Bush. In 1989 he was willing to improve relations with Iran eliminating sanctions that had been in place since the Revolution of 1978-79. At that time American hostages were being held by Shi'a forces in Lebanon. Then Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati intervened, and all American prisoners were released. Bush was grateful and was supported by his National Security Advisor, Brent Snowcroft but suddenly his administration reversed course.

This is the point at which Robert Gates becomes a major player in the attacks against Iran. As Porter describes it, though Snowcroft and Bush wanted improved relations, everyone else on the National Security team -- and one assumes that this includes Gates -- insisted that Iran was "deeply engaged in other acts of terrorism that made it very, very difficult to improve the relationship" (p. 87). Porter goes on to demonstrate that these "other acts of terrorism" were unsubstantiated. Essentially the decision not to go forward with improved relations with Iran was a political one and not based on any proven Iranian actions.

After Gates became CIA Director, the disinformaton about Iran continued. Porter documents that in 1992 it was Gates who first declared in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on March 27, with no hard evidence, that "Iran is developing a capability to produce weapons of mass destruction," and was "seeking to acquire a nuclear weapons capability." The phrase "nuclear weapons capability" likely originated here.

In this way the juggernaut against Iran was launched. Although the National Intelligence estimate for 1992 declared that Iran would not seriously threaten U.S. interests, Gates' estimate became gospel for the balance of the Bush administration, carrying forward into the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. Gates' influence was indeed extremely telling.

After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration was dominated by neo-conservatives who had been active since the administration of his father and were anxious to see regime change throughout the Middle East. They ignored the fact that the Iranian nuclear energy program had started in earnest during the last years of the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and declared that Iran had been undertaking "secret" nuclear developments. In fact, these were not at all secret, and had been governed by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which Iran and the United States (but not Israel, Pakistan, India or North Korea) were signatories, and which guaranteed Iran the "inalienable right" to the peaceful development of nuclear power.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was charged with carrying out inspections of Iran's nuclear program (and indeed, the nuclear programs of all signatories to the Treaty). They never once found the slightest evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program or had diverted any nuclear material for military use.

Still Gates' 10-year old assertion that Iran was seeking to acquire a "nuclear weapons capability," though completely unproven, was seized upon by the neoconservatives who wanted to bring down the Iranian regime.

As Porter documents, the IAEA quickly became politicized. Its head, Mohammad elBaradei was excoriated by the George W. Bush administration who tried to get him fired because he would not assert that Iran was building nuclear weapons. His eventual successor Yukio Amano was more compliant. Though still not able to say that Iran had a demonstrable nuclear weapons program, IAEA reports after he took office used convoluted language to suggest that they "could not eliminate the possibility" that Iran might be building nuclear weapons. Several attempts on Iran's part during the Bush administration to negotiate over misunderstandings of its program were rebuffed by Washington, partially due to those same neoconservatives in his administration, notably John Bolton who served as United Nations Ambassador on a recess appointment during a the crucial period from 2005-2006 and made it his mission to attack Iran with falsehoods at every turn.

Porter presents example after example of the U.S. Press, notably the New York Times, distorting the facts about Iran's nuclear activities. Every action and decision was placed under a microscope, and though Iran had only completed one reactor in development since before the Revolution, and was far from completing any facility for additional generation of nuclear power, the hyperbole in the press made it seem that Iran would have a bomb tomorrow. Lobbying groups such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) influenced these writings and lobbied the U.S. Congress for more stringent sanctions on Iran with the aim of completely dismantling Iran's forty-year old nuclear program. They also supported military action against Iran either by the United States or by Israel. Porter's book features the famous picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointing to a picture of a Warner Brothers cartoon bomb and inveighing against Iran.

In 2006 President George W. Bush nominated Robert Gates to be secretary of defense. Gates had been serving as president of Texas A&M University, and was persuaded to leave that post to return to national service. He was retained by President Obama after the 2008 election. It is notable that although President Obama had pledged to engage Iran diplomatically, in his first term, no serious diplomatic efforts were undertaken. To the contrary, increased rhetoric claiming that Iran had a nuclear weapons program issued from the White House and the Department of Defense. It was only after then Secretary Gates left office that the Obama administration began to engage in serious diplomatic talks with Iran. This process was aided by the election of Hassan Rowhani as president of Iran and the appointment of Javad Zarif, American educated former Iranian U.N. Ambassador, as Minister of Foreign Relations.

Aside from the intriguing clues to Robert Gates' probable role in constructing a false picture of the Iranian nuclear danger, Porter's book is essential reading for all Americans wary of manufactured paths to war that have become a major theme in U.S. foreign relations after World War II. Porter shows how ideology can distort facts, and be used as a weapon to sway public opinion in directions that are inimical to world interests. As talks with Iran in Vienna over its nuclear program proceed, Porter notes that the Obama administration, only after ridding itself of the extended influence of Robert Gates and his ilk, has finally made attempts to wind down the two decades of baseless attacks on Iran to try and forge a rapprochement. The question remains whether war mongers in Washington, Israel and some nations in Europe will come to their senses and let this happen.

Follow William O. Beeman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/wbeeman

A Tale of Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing--Review of Manufactured Crisis by Gareth Porter (Beeman)

http://womenagainstmilitarymadness.org/newsletter/2014/030414/tale.html A Tale of Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing: Iran’s Nukes Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare by Gareth Porter (New York: Just World Books, 2014)

Reviewed by William O. Beeman

Gareth Porter has been the most conscientious follower of the fantasy danger of Iran’s purported “nuclear weapons program.” In this new, meticulously documented book, he exposes the many lies and half-truths that have been promulgated over more than two decades to try and convince the American public and the world that Iran is the chief danger to international peace. Before plunging into the details of the book, let me state its conclusions unequivocally: Iran has never been proven to have a nuclear weapons program. Any claim to the contrary is absolutely false. The attempt to claim that such a weapons program exists was the result of a decades-long effort on the part of American neoconservatives allied with right-wing forces in Israel to legitimize hostile actions against Iran designed to effect regime change there. Porter’s account is fascinating and appalling reading. It is fascinating because he has created a compelling narrative showing how the framework for attacking Iran in this way evolved over decades. One of the most telling episodes in the book concerns President George H.W. Bush. In 1989 he was willing to improve relations with Iran eliminating sanctions that had been in place since the revolution of 1978-79. At that time American hostages were being held by Shi’a forces in Lebanon. Then Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati intervened, and all American prisoners were released. Bush was grateful and was supported by his national security advisor, Brent Snowcroft, but suddenly his administration reversed course. As Porter describes it, though he and Bush wanted improved relations, everyone else on the national security team insisted that Iran was “deeply engaged in other acts of terrorism that made it very, very difficult to improve the relationship” (p. 87). Porter goes on to demonstrate that these “other acts of terrorism” were unsubstantiated. Essentially the decision not to go forward with improved relations was a political one and not based on any proven Iranian actions. After Robert Gates, who had served on the National Security Council, became CIA director, the disinformaton about Iran continued. Porter documents that in 1992 it was Gates who first declared, with no hard evidence at all, that “Iran is developing a capability to produce weapons of mass destruction,” and was “seeking to acquire a nuclear weapons capability.” In this way the juggernaut against Iran was launched. Although the national intelligence estimate for that year declared that Iran would not seriously threaten U.S. interests, Gates’ estimate became gospel for the balance of the Bush administration, carrying forward into the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Gates’ influence was indeed extremely telling. After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration was dominated by neoconservatives who had been active since the administration of his father and were anxious to see regime change throughout the Middle East. They ignored the fact that the Iranian nuclear energy program had started in earnest during the last years of the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and declared that Iran had been undertaking “secret” nuclear developments. In fact, these were not at all secret, and had been governed by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which Iran and the United States (but not Israel, Pakistan, India, or North Korea) were signatories, and which guaranteed Iran the “inalienable right” to the peaceful development of nuclear power. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was charged with carrying out inspections of Iran’s nuclear program (and indeed, the nuclear programs of all signatories to the treaty). They never once found the slightest evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program or had diverted any nuclear material for military use. Still Gates’ 10-year-old assertion that Iran was seeking to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, though completely unproven, was seized upon by the neoconservatives who wanted to bring down the Iranian regime. As Porter documents, the IAEA quickly became politicized. Its head, Mohamed ElBaradei, was excoriated by the George W. Bush administration, who tried to get him fired because he would not assert that Iran was building nuclear weapons. His eventual successor, Yukio Amano, was more compliant. Though still not able to say that Iran had a demonstrable nuclear weapons program, IAEA reports after he took office used convoluted language to suggest that they “could not eliminate the possibility” that Iran might be building nuclear weapons. Several attempts on Iran’s part during the Bush administration to negotiate over misunderstandings of its program were rebuffed by Washington, partially due to those same neoconservatives in his administration, notably John Bolton, who served as United Nations ambassador on a recess appointment during the crucial period from 2005-2006 and made it his mission to attack Iran with falsehoods at every turn. Porter presents example after example of the U.S. media, most notably The New York Times, distorting the facts about Iran’s nuclear activities. Every action and decision was placed under a microscope, and though Iran had only completed one reactor in development since before the revolution, and was far from completing any facility for additional generation of nuclear power, the hyperbole in the press made it seem that Iran would have a bomb tomorrow. Lobbying groups such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) influenced these writings and lobbied the U.S. Congress for more stringent sanctions on Iran with the aim of completely dismantling Iran’s 40-year-old nuclear program. They also supported military action against Iran either by the United States or by Israel. Porter’s book features the famous picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointing to a picture of a Warner Brothers cartoon bomb and inveighing against Iran. Porter’s book is essential reading for all Americans wary of the manufactured path to war. It shows how ideology can distort facts, and can be used as a weapon to sway public opinion in directions that are inimical to world interests. As talks with Iran in Vienna over its nuclear program proceed, Porter notes that the Obama administration, only after ridding itself of the extended influence of Robert Gates, has finally made attempts to wind down the two decades of baseless attacks on Iran to try and forge a rapprochement. The question remains whether warmongers in Washington, Israel, and some nations in Europe will come to their senses and let this happen. William O. Beeman is professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He has conducted research in Iran for over 40 years, and is author of The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.

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William O. Beeman and Gareth Porter critique Joby Warrick's Washington Report on Iranian assassination plots

William O. Beeman writes: 

Joby Warrick's Washington Post story on supposed Iranian assassination plots all over the place has all the hallmarks of a hoax. (see below:"U.S. officials among the targets of Iran-linked assassination plots" http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-officials-among-the-targets-of-iran-linked-assassination-plots/2012/05/27/gJQAHlAOvU_print.html )

There isn't a single attribution in the story--not even the origin of the "cable traffic" in November. There is no specific target for these assassination attempts mentioned in the story. The "plots" are possibly carried out by Hezbollah, possibly by the Qods force--in short no one knows anything, and there is no evidence that the "plots" even exist. And at the end, the writer and his informants must conclude there is nothing that ties this ephemeral set of accusations to the Iranian government. When one understands that Azerbaijan is virtually an American and Israeli client state these days, the possibility of a hoax becomes even more apparent. I am perfectly prepared to believe that Iranian forces, angry at the assassinations that have actually taken place inside Iran, are interested in retaliating, but this piece of "journalism" is complete garbage. It doesn't substantiate anything real. Warrick is serving as someone's cats-paw in putting out this baseless report.

The piece is clearly suspect for another reason--it follows a pattern: finding some way to denigrate Iran after some rapprochement with the West has occurred.  Iran has actually concluded a set of talks with the West. While the talks were disappointing and inconclusive, they are a watershed, being the first time there have been a series of sustained face-to-face talks in this manner. Now a third set is scheduled for Moscow. Instant success is not to be expected in negotiations like this, but the longer people talk, the better the chances. There are forces all over the place--Iran, Israel and the United States that want these talks to stop, or better yet, blow up. What better way than to cook up a bogey-man international assassination conspiracy out of whole cloth.

I won't believe any of this until there is some real evidence, and people willing to put their names to their claims.

Bill Beeman
University of Minnesota

Historian and Analyst Gareth Porter writes:

This article is one of many recent instances of a news outlet letting itself be used to promote a story relating to Iran representing the propaganda line of a government without acknowledging that fact.  The government, of course, is Israel.  Alert readers will have noticed the reference to "Middle Eastern officials" throughout the article, which is an obvious device to avoid admitting that the article is based overwhelmingly on information from Israel.  Providing a shield for Israel to put out information that is extremely dubious without even having to be accountable for it is a journalistic scandal, but is apparently perfectly acceptable to the Post and Joby Warrick.

The "report" that is referenced in the Post article presents a propaganda theme paralleling the one that Israel circulated in the January-February period about a widespread Iranian terrorist campaign in multiple countries, supposedly linked to the anniversary of Imad Mugniyah's assassination in Lebanon in February 12, 2008.

The whole idea that Iran and Hezbollah would launch a campaign that would be at the same time covert and deniable but done to coincide with a date that would identify it as an Iranian operation should set off all kinds of red lights in the minds of serious analysts.  But

there are other details in the article, reflecting the report in question, that mirror Israeli statements about the Delhi bombing and the bombs found in Bangkok that both give away the provenance of the report and which are inaccurate.  Specifically the claim that the bombs were the same in both cases was not supported by the information released by the investigators in the two capitals, as I pointed out in my own article on the Delhi bombing in AlJazeera.

On the purported plot in Azerbaijan, the Post article fails to reflect the fact that there is a patron-client relationship between Israeli and Azerbaijani intelligence agencies, as pointed out by an article published by WINEP March 30, 2005, ("Good Relations between Azerbaijan and Israel"). Israeli intelligence not only train Azerbaijani intelligence personnel but provide constant briefings to the Azerbaijan intelligence agency on Iranian activities.  

In fact, Azerbaijan has been regularly claiming similar terrorist plots by Iran for years involving the supposed intention to kill local Jews as well as U.S. diplomats, and those plots have been invoked to arrest people regarded as pro-Iranian in Baku and elsewhere. It happened in 2000 and again in 2007, as Alexander Murinson observed in article for the Begin-Sadat Center in Israel in 2010.

Furthermore, as the internet-based Azerbaijani news outlet "Contact", supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, reported at the time, the mother of one of those who publicly confessed to being part of the plot said he was given a statement that he had to read.  The whole idea that Iran was hiring locals to kill Jews in Baku in order to revenge the killing of Mugniyah goes well beyond bizarre to ludicrous.  

And Balargardash Dadashov the alleged kingpin of the plot (whose name is misspelled in the Post article) did not confess that the alleged plot was to be revenge for the killing to Mugniyah, and in fact was never arrested, because as pointed out by "Contact" in January, he has long lived in Iran. As stated in reports from Baku at the time, this was the story that one of the people under arrest provided to police.

Best,

Gareth

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-officials-among-the-targets-of-iran-linked-assassination-plots/2012/05/27/gJQAHlAOvU_print.html
Washington Post

U.S. officials among the targets of Iran-linked assassination plots

By Joby Warrick, Published: May 27

In November, the tide of daily cable traffic to the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan brought a chilling message for Ambassador Matthew Bryza, then the top U.S. diplomat to the small Central Asian country. A plot to kill Americans had been uncovered, the message read, and embassy officials were on the target list.

The details, scant at first, became clearer as intelligence agencies from both countries stepped up their probe. The plot had two strands, U.S. officials learned, one involving snipers with silencer-equipped rifles and the other a car bomb, apparently intended to kill embassy employees or members of their families.

Both strands could be traced back to the same place, the officials were told: Azerbaijan’s southern neighbor, Iran.

The threat, many details of which were never made public, appeared to recede after Azerbaijani authorities rounded up nearly two dozen people in waves of arrests early this year. Precisely who ordered the hits, and why, was never conclusively determined. But U.S. and Middle Eastern officials now see the attempts as part of a broader campaign by Iran-linked operatives to kill foreign diplomats in at least seven countries over a span of 13 months. The targets have included two Saudi officials, a half-dozen Israelis and — in the Azerbaijan case — several Americans, the officials say.

In recent weeks, investigators working in four countries have amassed new evidence tying the disparate assassination attempts to one another and linking all of them to either Iran-backed Hezbollah militants or operatives based inside Iran, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern security officials. An official report last month summarizing the evidence cited phone records, forensic tests, coordinated travel arrangements and even cellphone SIM cards purchased in Iran and used by several of the would-be assailants, said two officials who have seen the six-page document.

Strikingly, the officials noted, the attempts halted abruptly in early spring, at a time when Iran began to shift its tone after weeks of bellicose anti-Western rhetoric and threats to shut down vital shipping lanes. In March, Iranian officials formally accepted a proposal to resume negotiations with six world powers on proposals to curb its nuclear program.

“There appears to have been a deliberate attempt to calm things down ahead of the talks,” said a Western diplomat briefed on the assassination plots, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the intelligence. “What happens if the talks fail — that’s anyone’s guess.”

Less clear is whether the attempts were ordered by government officials or perhaps carried out with the authorities’ tacit approval by intelligence operatives or a proxy group such as Hezbollah. Many U.S. officials and Middle East experts see the incidents as part of an ongoing shadow war, a multi-sided, covert struggle in which Iran also has been the victim of assassinations. Four scientists tied to Iran’s nuclear program have been killed by unknown assailants in the past three years, and the country’s nuclear sites have been hobbled by cyberattacks. Iran has accused the United States and Israel of killing its scientists, but it has repeatedly denied any role in plots to assassinate foreign diplomats abroad.

The Obama administration has declined to directly link the Azerbaijan plot to the Iranian government, avoiding what could be an explosive accusation at a time when the two governments are engaged in negotiations on limiting Iran’s nuclear program. U.S. officials say they are less convinced that top Iranian and Hezbollah leaders worked together to coordinate the attempted hits, noting that both groups have a long history of committing such acts on their own, and for their own purposes.

“The idea that Iran and Hezbollah might have worked together on these attempts is possible,” said a senior U.S. official who has studied the evidence, “but this conclusion is not definitive.”

‘Walking a fine line’

Attacks directly targeting American diplomats are rare but not unknown. In 2002, Laurence Foley, a senior official at the U.S. Embassy in Jordan, was fatally shot by suspected Islamist extremists outside his home in Amman, and other diplomats have been killed in recent years in Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq. U.S. intelligence officials believe that Americans would probably have been killed if an alleged Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington last year had succeeded.

In Azerbaijan, however, embassy officials have been alerted to plots against employees at least three times in the past two years. In each case, the alleged planners were discovered and the threats quietly put down by Azerbaijani authorities, working closely with American counterterrorism officials, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern officials familiar with the incidents. Azerbaijan, a majority-Muslim country of 9 million, has had a troubled history with its much larger neighbor to the south, but it publicly seeks to maintain friendly relations with Iran, whose population is 16 percent ethnic Azerbaijani.

Embassy employees were told little about the threats. Bryza, the ambassador at the time, worked with embassy security officers to quietly tighten procedures while officials in Washington tried to assess the seriousness of the threats, the officials said. Bryza, who left the State Department this year after the Senate blocked confirmation of his re-nomination to the ambassador’s post, declined to comment about the events.

“They were walking a fine line, trying to avoid panic while taking the necessary precautions,” said a former State Department official who dealt regularly with the embassy. “There was a constant operational concern during that time.”

The most recent threat came to light after a foreign spy agency intercepted electronic messages that appeared to describe plans to move weapons and explosives from Iran into Azerbaijan. Some of the messages were traced to an Azerbaijani national named Balagardash Dashdev, a man with an extensive criminal background and, according to a Middle East investigator involved in the case, deep ties to a network of intelligence operatives and militant groups based inside Iran.

Working from inside Iran, officials said, Dashdev in late October began coordinating the shipment of explosives, weapons and cash to Azerbaijani contacts, including relatives and former criminal associates. As U.S. and Middle Eastern intelligence deepened their surveillance, they began to discern what the Middle Eastern investigator described as a “jumble of overlapping plans,” some specifically aimed at Azerbaijan’s small Jewish community and others targeting diplomats and foreign-owned businesses in Baku, the country’s sprawling capital on the Caspian Sea.

During the late fall and early winter, the weapons were smuggled into the country along with at least 10 Iranian nationals recruited to help carry out the plot, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials said.

The Azerbaijani participants had been paid a cash advance and were beginning to conduct surveillance on a list of targets — including a Jewish elementary school, a U.S.-owned fast-food restaurant, an oil company office and “other objects in Baku,” according to a brief statement issued by the Azerbaijani government after a series of raids in which about two dozen alleged accomplices were arrested between January and early March.

The Obama administration acknowledged in March that the U.S. Embassy may have been among the intended targets. But in the months since then, the suspects under questioning revealed extensive details about the “other objects in Baku” that had been on the target list, confirming that the would-be assassins intended to go beyond attacks on buildings.

“They were going after individuals,” said the former State Department official who worked closely with the embassy in Baku. “They had names [of employees]. And they were interested in family members, too.”

The alleged plot leader, Dashdev, would tell investigators that the planned attacks were intended as revenge for the deaths of the Iranian nuclear scientists, attacks that Iran has publicly linked to Israel and the United States. Iran vehemently denied involvement in any assassination plot inside Azerbaijan, and the Iranian Embassy in Baku suggested in a statement that the plot was fiction.

“We believe that the glorious people of Azerbaijan understand that this part of the script of Iranophobia and Islamophobia is organized by the Zionists and the United States,” the statement read. Attempts to contact Iranian officials for additional comments for this article were unsuccessful. Dashdev, who confessed to his role in a videotaped message broadcast on Azerbaijani television, remains in custody and could not be reached for comment. Baku officials have repeatedly accused Iran of stirring up unrest among pro-Iranian extremists to drive a wedge between Azerbaijan’s population and its government, which cooperates closely and openly with Western counterterrorism agencies.

“What we are trying to do is build a strong, independent nation that is a responsible actor,” Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Washington, said in an interview. “We have told all our friends and neighbors that expressing disagreement in a civilized way is more beneficial than resorting to terrorism or promoting radicalization.”

String of foiled attacks

U.S. and Middle Eastern officials say the Azerbaijan plot fits a pattern seen in numerous other recent attempts linked to Iran. The foiled assassination of Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington involved a similar plan to hire criminal gangs — in this case, members of a Mexican drug cartel — to kill a senior diplomat in a public setting, U.S. intelligence officials note.

The report presented to U.S. officials last month asserts extensive links between attempted assassinations of diplomats in five other countries: India, Turkey, Thailand, Pakistan and the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Each attempt was carried out by operatives with direct ties to Iran or Hezbollah and directed against diplomats from countries hostile to Iran, the reports states.

Israeli and Indian officials have described substantial Iranian links to a car bombing in February that seriously wounded the wife of an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi. In that Feb. 13 attack, an assailant on a motorcycle attached a magnet bomb to a diplomatic car in which the woman was riding, injuring her and her driver. Indian police have charged an Indian man — a free-lance journalist working for Iranian news organizations — with organizing the attack with the help of three Iranian nationals who had entered the country.

The next day, an alleged plot to kill Israeli diplomats in Bangkok was thwarted when a bomb being assembled exploded prematurely.

The car bombs prepared for use in both attacks were virtually identical, with a magnetic outer shell that was smuggled into the two countries, to be combined later with C4 military explosives obtained from a still-unknown source. Two of the Iranian nationals allegedly involved in the Bangkok attempt were captured, and they, like the suspects in Azerbaijan, are continuing to provide clues to investigators.

The suspects, thought to be low-level operatives, either do not know or will not say who ordered the attacks, leaving investigators to speculate about how far up within Iran’s government the plots may have originated.

“There is not yet a smoking gun,” said the Western diplomat briefed on the evidence. “But the pattern is clear, and each day the volume of evidence grows.”

Riding A Misinformation Train to War (Thomas Wark)

http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com/
Friday, April 20, 2012
Riding a Misinformation Train to War

by Thomas Wark

Commentary by William O. Beeman: Thomas Wark provides a compendium of press mistakes, distortions and misinformation about Iran's nuclear program. The largest media outlets in the nation are regularly engaged in this activity, bringing the United States ever closer to disastrous conflict in the Middle East. 
 
As a body politic, citizens of the United States are among the most misinformed in the world.

More Americans seek information from Fox TV, whose contempt for truth is self-evident,  than from any other source.  What's far worse, though, is that other sources, including some once held to be virtually unimpeachable, can no longer be trusted. American media, as an entity, have betrayed the mission for which their First Amendment shield was written.

Now, as a result, Americans are once again wallowing toward war in a pigsty of distortion, misunderstanding, ignorance and falsehood. Even as useful bilateral talks continue between the so-called P5+1and Iran, Americans are subject to new rounds of misinformation and misinterpretation. (P5+1 stands for the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- France, the United Kingdom, the United States, China and Russia-- plus Germany.) A new report from Media Matters  finds that the broadcast news networks — NBC Nightly News, ABC’s World News and CBS’s Evening News — “frequently” distort or exaggerate key information regarding Iran’s nuclear program. “Two egregious misrepresentations in particular repeatedly came up,” the report says, “suggesting that Iran will imminently obtain the bomb and suggesting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has major influence over the country’s nuclear program.” Neither statement is true.

How can so many be so wrong about Iran? Let us count but some of the ways:

The Basics:  David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote that in a possible compromise, " Iran would agree to stop enriching uranium to the 20 percent level and to halt work at an underground facility near Qom built for higher enrichment. Iran would export its stockpile of highly enriched uranium for final processing to 20 percent, for use in medical isotopes. . . ."

Dr. Cyrus Safdari, Michigan State University's Middle East expert: First, Iran does not have a "stockpile of highly enriched uranium". It has a stockpile of low-enriched uranium. Twenty per cent is the upper limit of what is considered to be low-enriched. Second, Iran would not be exporting this stockpile for "final processing to 20%." It would be doing so for processing into nuclear fuel rods (a technology which, Iran has now started to develop indigenously, thus vitiating a need to export the stuff and probably making the issue a better bargaining chip for the Iranians...all thanks to the sanctions on a medical reactor that posed no proliferation threat in the first place.) And the 20% uranium is not "used in medical isotopes" but is instead used to power the reactor that makes isotopes. And I'm at loss as to how Ignatius concluded that Qom is "built for higher enrichment" than 20%. It is not.

The Serious Stuff:  The common line in U.S. media is that while Iran asserts that its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes, our leadership suspects that it's really intended to produce weapons.  The United States in fact does not suspect this.  Its intelligence agencies have said publicly, twice, that there is no evidence that Iran is preparing to build weapons.  The International Atomic Energy Agency said it has no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran "now or ever."

Even as the first "constructive and useful" P5+1 talks with Iran were being held,the New York Times published a piece by James Risen that was littered with fallacy and misinterpretation.  Quoting "some analysts," Risen wrote that Ayatollah Khamenei's denial that Iran wanted nuclear arms "has to be seen as part of a Shiite historical concept called taqiyya, or religious dissembling. For centuries an oppressed minority within Islam, Shiites learned to conceal their sectarian identity to survive, and so there is a precedent for lying to protect the Shiite community." As usual in this kind of Times piece, we aren't give a clue as to who these "analysts" are. But Juan Cole, one of the top Mideast scholars in the United States, points out that historically, taqiyya was not a license to lie about anything, but permission to conceal one's religious identity in the face of life-threatening sectarian prejudice. He also notes that, in the twentieth century, the tide of Shiite legal opinion ran against taqiyya, and that Imam Khomeini, who led the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, demanded that taqiyya be abandoned. Cole concludes by saying that the taqiyya argument is "just some weird form of Islamophobia."

Risen's article seemed designed to question Khameni's religious edict, or fatwa, banning the possession of nuclear weapons as a sin against Islam, just as top U.N. officials were meeting "constructively" with the Iranians.  Risen rehashed old arguments by Iran's adversaries and added some of his own.

Once again on the word of unnamed "analysts," Risen wrote that Khamenei's no-nukes posture was contradicted "by remarks he had made last year 'that it was a mistake for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya to give up his nuclear weapons program.'"

In fact, Khamenei's remarks referred to "all  his (Qaddafi's) nuclear facilities," and not to his nuclear weapons (as Risen reported). Khamenei was making a point that other Iranian leaders frequently make: merely having a nuclear program without nuclear weapons can be a deterrent to attack. They cite the Japanese model as one for Iran to emulate.

Risen wrote that Khamenei's predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, reversed his initial opposition to nuclear weapons as inconsistent with Islam in 1984, and "secretly decided to restart the nuclear weapons program." He cited no source for that sweeping accusation.

Gareth Porter, historian and investigative journalist, says he has encountered skeptics who doubt that the Khamenei fatwa even exists.  "But," he writes, "even Mehdi Khalaji of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy acknowledged in an essay published last September that Khamenei's oral statements are considered fatwas and are binding on believers."

Condi Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" threat from Iraq turned out to be thin blue smoke. But even the so-called "responsible" American media snuffed it up as the real thing.

Dare we let it happen again?

Porter--Iran Holds Up Access to Parchin for Better IAEA Deal (IPS)

Commentary by William O. Beeman: The recent IAEA inspection team in Iran declared that their mission had been a "failure" largely because they were not allowed to visit the Parchin military base. Historian and journalist Dr. Gareth Porter analyzes this incident pointing out that Parchin had been inspected before, that the IAEA exceeded its mission, and that, in general, this mission was very different than characterized by the IAEA. In short, the inability of the IAEA to get access to Parchin does NOT in any way prove that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.There is still no evidence whatever that Iran has a program to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Iran Holds Up Access to Parchin for Better IAEA Deal

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria. Credit:Sarajevo-x.com/public domain

WASHINGTON, Feb 23 (IPS) - The failure of a mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get Iranian permission to visit a military testing site mentioned in its latest report has been interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid the discovery of confirming evidence of past work on nuclear weapons.
But the history of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA on carrying out inspections at the Parchin military testing centre, as well as a previous IAEA-Iran work programme agreement, suggests that Iran is keeping permission for such a visit as bargaining leverage to negotiate a better deal with the agency.

The IAEA statement Wednesday emphasised the fact that the mission to Tehran had been denied permission to visit the site at Parchin. That prompted Associated Press correspondent in Vienna George Jahn to call Iran's refusal to agree to an IAEA visit to Parchin "stonewalling" and evidence of "hard line resistance" to international pressure on its nuclear programme.

International Herald Tribune blogger Harvey Morris wrote that Iran's strategy was to "play for time".

But access to Parchin was discussed as part of broader negotiations on what the IAEA statement called a "document facilitating the clarification of unresolved issues" in regard to "possible military dimensions" of Iran's nuclear program. The negotiations were focused on what cooperation the IAEA is demanding and what the agency is ready to offer in return for that cooperation.

Judging from past negotiations between Iran and the IAEA, Iran is ready to offer access to Parchin as well as other sites requested by the agency as part of an agreement under which the IAEA would stop accusing Iran of carrying out covert nuclear weapons experiments.

The IAEA's position in the negotiations was revealed by the AP's Jahn, who reported that the agency mission had hoped to get Iranian agreement to meetings with "scientists suspected of working on the alleged weapons program" and to "inspect documents related to nuclear weapons work".

The September 2008 IAEA report said the agency had "proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports (on the Shahab-3 missile) examining in detail modeling studies…."

Iran has rejected such demands as threatening its legitimate national security interests, in violation of the IAEA statute.

The scientists that the agency is demanding to see are publicly known officials of Iran's military research institutions. Even before Israel had begun assassinating Iranian scientists, Iran had made it clear it will not give the IAEA physical access to any individual scientists.

The IAEA wants to visit a specific site at Parchin because of information from an unnamed member state, cited in its November 2011 report, that Iran had "constructed a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments" – tests of nuclear weapons designs without the use of fissile material.

The report said the construction had been carried out at Parchin military complex in 2000 and that the IAEA had satellite imagery that was "consistent with" that information, meaning only that there were structures that could have housed such a vessel at Parchin in 2000.

The previous history of IAEA inspections at Parchin make it clear, however, that Iran knew it had nothing to hide at Parchin after 2000.

In 2004, John Bolton, the point man in the George W. Bush administration on Iran, who coordinated closely with Israel, charged that satellite imagery showed a bunker at Parchin appropriate for large-scale explosives tests such as those needed to detonate a bomb that would use a neutron trigger.

Bolton put heavy pressure on the IAEA to carry out an investigation at Parchin. A few months later, Tehran agreed to allow the agency to select any five buildings and their surroundings to investigate freely.

That gave U.S. and Israeli intelligence, as well as IAEA experts, an opportunity for which they would not have dreamed of asking: they could scan satellite imagery of the entire Parchin complex for anything that could possibly suggest work on a nuclear weapon, including a containment vessel for hydrodynamic testing, and demand to inspect that building and the grounds around it at their leisure.

In January 2005, an IAEA team visited Parchin and investigated the five areas they had chosen, taking environmental samples, but found nothing suspicious. In November 2005, Iran allowed the IAEA to do the same thing all over again on five more buildings of its own choice.

The Iranian military and nuclear establishment would never have agreed to such terms for IAEA inspection missions at Parchin - not once but twice - if they had been concealing a hydrodynamic test facility at the base.

Other information suggests that no such vessel ever existed at Parchin. The November report claimed the IAEA had obtained information on the dimensions of the containment vessel from the publication of a foreign expert identified as someone who worked "in the nuclear weapons program of the country of his origin".

That was a reference to Vlachyslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian scientist who has acknowledged having lectured in Iran on theoretical physics and having helped the country build a cylinder for production of nano-diamonds, which was his research specialty. However, Danilenko has firmly denied ever having done any work related to nuclear weapons.

The claim that the dimensions of the putative bomb test chamber at Parchin could be gleaned from a publication by Danilenko is implausible.

The report said the bomb containment chamber at Parchin was "designed to contain the detonation of 70 kilograms of high explosives". Danilenko's patented 1992 design for a cylinder for nano-diamond production, however, was built to contain only 10 kg of explosives.

Former IAEA weapons inspector and nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley has pointed out, moreover, that a container for only 70 kg of explosives could not possibly have been used for hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapon design.

The negotiations on a "framework" for Iran's cooperation with the IAEA recall the negotiation of a "work programme" in August 2007 aimed at resolving a series of issues on which the IAEA Safeguards Department suspected links to nuclear weapons. The issues included experiments involving the extraction of polonium-210, plutonium experiments and possible military control of the Gchine uranium mine.

In previous years, Iran had failed to provide sufficient information to overcome those suspicions. But after the negotiation of the "work programme", Iran began to move with dispatch to provide documentation aimed at clearing up the six remaining issues.

The IAEA acknowledged that all six of the issues had been effectively resolved in two reports in late 2007 and early 2008.

The reason for the dramatic change in cooperation was simple: the IAEA had pledged that, in return for Iran's resolving the six issues, "the implementation of safeguards in Iran will be conducted in a routine manner." That was seen as a significant step toward finally getting a clean bill of health from the agency.

But the IAEA instead then began focusing its questioning entirely on the purported Iranian documents of unknown origin and doubtful authenticity which the IAEA called the "alleged studies".

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist 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.

(END/2012)

U.S. Officials Peddle False Intel to Support Terror Plot Claims Analysis by Gareth Porter*

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105486

U.S. Officials Peddle False Intel to Support Terror Plot Claims
Analysis by Gareth Porter*

Commentary by William O. Beeman: Virtually no Iranian specialist fully believes the Obama administration's account of Iranian-American Mansour Arbabsiar's story of an assassination plot on the Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Both the FBI and the CIA (with new Iran detractor Petraeus at the helm) have issued questionable or false information about this case, especially their claims that Mr. Arbabsiar was being controlled or directed by Iran's Central authorities. President Obama, in my opinion, is making a huge error in embracing this questionable information.

WASHINGTON, Oct 17, 2011 (IPS) - Officials of the Barack Obama
administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based
on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation
that two higher- ranking officials from Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador
Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C.

The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention
from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official
Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the
broad claim being made by the administration.

But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC
News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and
misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a
former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other.

The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was
identified publicly by the Obama administration as a "deputy commander
in the Quds Force" of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai
had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds
Force's relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq.

The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian-
American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use
Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot.

U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar
claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.

In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an
individual "providing financial, material and technical support for
acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq" and
thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said
Shahlai had provided "material support" to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and
that he had "planned the Jan. 20, 2007 attack" by Mahdi Army "Special
Groups" on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in
Karbala, Iraq.

Arbabsiar's confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early
spring 2011 and asked him to find "someone in the narcotics business"
to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the
FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with
thousands of dollars for his expenses.

But Arbabsiar's charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar
had become the cornerstone of the administration's case against
Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.

There is no indication in the FBI account of the investigation that
there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar's claim of
Shahlai's involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.

The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a
terrorist past, and that it was therefore credible that he could be
part of an assassination plot.

Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury
Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along
with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the
head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being
"connected to" the assassination plot.

But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai
"had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack
that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government
officials and documents made public Tuesday afternoon".

Isikoff, who is called "National Investigative Correspondent" at NBC
News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as
a "terrorist" in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement
of the designation had not used the term "terrorist".

On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely
paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming
documentary proof of Shahlai's responsibility for the January 2007
attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai "was
known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric
Moqtada al Sadr", which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in
Karbala in January 2007.

Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the
"final approving and coordinating authority" for training Sadr's
militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of
involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it
would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the
Mahdi Army in Iraq.

Finn then referred to a "22-page memo that detailed preparations for
the operation and tied it to the Quds Force…." But he didn't refer to
any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the
operation.

In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala
attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in
the operation.

Talking with reporters about the memo on Apr. 26, 2007, several weeks
after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did
not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the
Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him whether there was
evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus
responded, "No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran
involvement in that particular case."

In a news briefing in Baghdad Jul. 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner
confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi
chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian
official.

Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth
Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December
2008 that the Karbala attack "was definitely an inside job".

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list
of those Iranian officials "linked" to the alleged terror plot,
because he "oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this
plot" , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a
Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two
wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to
a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the
assassination plot.

"While details are still classified," wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren
Bohan, "one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind
of hallmark indicating they were personally approved" by Soleimani.

But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers
could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire
transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign
country, according to the FBI's account. It would be impossible to
deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents.

"I have no idea what such a 'hallmark' could be," said Paul Pillar, a
former head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center who was also
National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement
in 2005.

Pillar told IPS that the "hallmark" notion "pops up frequently in
commentary after actual terrorist attacks,", but the concept is
usually invoked "along the lines of 'the method used in this attack
had the hallmark of group such and such'."

That "hallmark" idea "assumes exclusive ownership of a method of
attack which does not really exist," said Pillar. "I expect the same
could be said of methods of transferring money."

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist
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.
--
Gareth Porter
5552 Lee Highway
Arlington, VA 22207
H: 703 532-0124
C: 703 600-9057

Gareth Porter--Heinonen Pushed Dubious Iran Nuclear Weapons Intel (IPS)

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52043

 

Heinonen Pushed Dubious Iran Nuclear Weapons Intel Analysis by Gareth Porter* Commentary by William O. Beeman: This is a definitive report on the highly questionable information cooked up by IAEA Deputy Director Olli Heinonen on Iran's nuclear program. It explains quite a bit about the "shift" in tone at the IAEA. I emphasize that IAEA reports still clearly state that "no nuclear material has been diverted" for military use in Iran, i.e. there is no proof of a nuclear weapons program. Gareth Porter is a scrupulously honest and thorough investigator.  WASHINGTON, Jul 2, 2010 (IPS) - Olli Heinonen, the Finnish nuclear engineer who resigned Thursday after five years as deputy director for safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was the driving force in turning that agency into a mechanism to support U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran. Heinonen was instrumental in making a collection of intelligence documents showing a purported Iranian nuclear weapons research programme the central focus of the IAEA's work on Iran. The result was to shift opinion among Western publics to the view that Iran had been pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme. But his embrace of the intelligence documents provoked a fierce political struggle within the Secretariat of the IAEA, because other officials believed the documents were fraudulent. Heinonen took over the Safeguards Department in July 2005 - the same month that the George W. Bush administration first briefed top IAEA officials on the intelligence collection. The documents portrayed a purported nuclear weapons research programme, originally called the "Green Salt" project, that included efforts to redesign the nosecone of the Shahab-3 missile, high explosives apparently for the purpose of triggering a nuclear weapon and designs for a uranium conversion facility. Later the IAEA referred to the purported Iranian activities simply as the "alleged studies". The Bush administration was pushing the IAEA to use the documents to accuse Iran of having had a covert nuclear weapons programme. The administration was determined to ensure that the IAEA Governing Board would support referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council for action on sanctions, as part of a larger strategy to force Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment programme. Long-time IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei and other officials involved in investigating and reporting on Iran's nuclear programme were immediately sceptical about the authenticity of the documents. According to two Israeli authors, Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar, several IAEA officials told them in interviews in 2005 and 2006 that senior officials of the agency believed the documents had been "fabricated by a Western intelligence organisation". Heinonen, on the other hand, supported the strategy of exploiting the collection of intelligence documents to put Iran on the defensive. His approach was not to claim that the documents' authenticity had been proven but to shift the burden of proof to Iran, demanding that it provide concrete evidence that it had not carried out the activities portrayed in the documents. From the beginning, Iran's permanent representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, denounced the documents as fabrications. In Governing Board meetings and interviews, Soltanieh pointed to several indicators, including the absence of official stamps showing receipt of the document by a government office and the absence of any security markings. The tensions between Heinonen and the senior officials over the intelligence documents intensified in early 2008, when Iran provided detailed documentation to the agency disproving a key premise of the intelligence documents. Kimia Maadan, a private Iranian company, was shown in the intelligence documents as having designed a uranium conversion facility as part of the alleged military nuclear weapons research programme. Iran proved to the satisfaction of those investigating the issue, however, that Kimia Maadan had been created by Iran's civilian atomic energy agency solely to carry out a uranium ore processing project and had gone out of business before it fulfilled the contract. Senior IAEA officials then demanded that Heinonen distance the organisation from the documents by inserting a disclaimer in future agency reports on Iran that it could not vouch for the authenticity of the documents. Instead Heinonen gave a "technical briefing" for IAEA member countries in February 2008 featuring a diagram on which the ore processing project and the uranium processing project were both carried out by the firm and shared the same military numbering system. The IAEA report published just three days earlier established, however, that the ore processing project number -- 5/15 -- had been assigned to it not by the military but by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran. And the date on which it was assigned was August 1999 - many months before the purported nuclear weapons programme was shown to have been organised. Heinonen carefully avoided endorsing the documents as authentic. He even acknowledged that Iran had spotted technical errors in the one-page design for a small-scale facility for uranium conversion, and that there were indeed "technical inconsistencies" in the diagram. He also admitted Iran had provided open source publications showing spherical firing systems similar to the one depicted in the intelligence documents on alleged tests of high explosives. Heinonen suggested in his presentation that the agency did not yet have sufficient information to come to any firm conclusions about those documents. In the May 2008 IAEA report, however, there was no mention of any such caveats about the documents. Instead, the report used language that was clearly intended to indicate that the agency had confidence in the intelligence documents: "The documentation presented to Iran appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent." That language, on which Heinoen evidently insisted, did not represent a consensus among senior IAEA officials. One senior official suggested to IPS in September 2009 that the idea that documents came from different sources was not completely honest. "There are intelligence-sharing networks," said the official. It was possible that one intelligence organisation could have shared the documents with others, he explained. "That gives us multiple sources consistent over time," said the official. The same official said of the collection of intelligence documents, "It's not difficult to cook up." Nevertheless, Heinonen's position had clearly prevailed. And in the final year of ElBaradei's leadership of the agency, the Safeguards Department became an instrument for member states - especially France, Britain, Germany and Israel - to put pressure on ElBaradei to publish summaries of intelligence reports portraying Iran as actively pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. The active pressure of the United States and its allies on behalf of the hard line toward Iran was the main source of Heinonen's power on the issue. Those states have been feeding intelligence on alleged covert Iranian nuclear activities to the Safeguards Division for years, and Heinonen knew that ElBaradei could not afford to confront the U.S.-led coalition openly over the issue. The Bush administration had threatened to replace ElBaradei in 2004 and had reluctantly accepted his reelection as director-general in 2005. ElBaradei was not strong enough to threaten to fire the main antagonist over the issue of alleged studies. ElBaradei’s successor Yukio Amano is even less capable of adopting an independent position on the issues surrounding the documents. The political dynamics of the IAEA ensure that Heinonen's successor is certain to continue the same line on the Iran nuclear issue and intelligence documents as Heinonen's.

Iran's Conundrum

MIDDLE EAST TIMES (Cairo)

Iran's Conundrum
By CESAR CHELALA
Published: September 19, 2008

Commentary by William O. Beeman: The world is caught in distress over economics, but the danger of an armed attack on Iran continues. As Cesar Celala accurately points out, Iran poses no real danger to either the United States or Israel, but is itself under siege. Unfortunately Iran has become the universal bogeyman for American politicians in this election year--a matter that favors political extremists such as the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is relentless in its call for action against Iran. The likely new Israeli prime minister, Tzipi Livni, is more moderate than her predecessors, having last year confided in private talks that Iran was not an existential danger to Israel. In the course of the campaign for leadership of the Kadima Party, she became more hawkish in her public statements. Iranian presidential elections take place in 2009. With the leaders of the United States, Iran and Israel changing, a new day could dawn on Middle East relations, if only the world can survive the Bush/Cheney presidency.


The pressures for both the U.S. and Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities have received an additional impetus from two recent House and Senate resolutions. According to William O. Beeman, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, there is tremendous danger in two almost identical resolutions in the House and Senate calling upon U.S. President George W. Bush to "immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities."

While the House resolution calls for "stringent inspection requirements," the Senate resolution calls for an embargo of refined petroleum products to Iran, which lacks the facilities to process it itself. To achieve both goals would require a naval blockade, in itself an act of war. As Professor Beeman states, days before both resolution were introduced, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued a memo outlining the measures that should be taken to increase pressure on Iran in a language that mirrors both resolutions.

Russian government sources acknowledge that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has already approved the sale of the S-300 surface-to-air missile system to Iran. This only adds fuel to an already dangerous situation, since these missiles could greatly improve Iranian defenses against air strikes aimed at the country's strategically important sites, including its nuclear facilities.

One of the main alleged reasons for attacking Iran is that it threatens Israel's survival. However, neither Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nor Iran's leadership ignore that any Iranian attack on Israel would exact not only massive retaliation from Israel itself but also from the U.S. Such a massive counterattack would provoke huge losses in human lives and it would devastate Iran's infrastructure and its weapons' facilities, a fact that Iran's leaders cannot ignore. Are we to believe that their thinking is as sinister and irresponsible as to face those risks that threaten their country's own existence?

In addition, Thomas Fingar, a top U.S. government intelligence analyst, confirmed recently that Iran's work on the "weaponization portion" of its nuclear development program was in effect suspended in 2003, as indicated by the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007.

As aggressive as President Ahmadinejad is in his pronouncements against Israel, he is not the deciding voice in Iran. Scott Ritter, the United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq has pointed out, "Ahmadinejad does not make foreign policy decisions on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is the sole purview of the 'Supreme Leader,' the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In 2003 Khamenei initiated a diplomatic outreach to the United States inclusive of an offer to recognize Israel's right to exist. This initiative was rejected by the United States."

Ahmadinejad's irresponsible personal statements are no justification for the tremendous consequences of an attack on Iran. After all, irresponsible statements are not the unique domain of Iranians. President Bush labeling Iran part of an "axis of evil" is just one of many ugly -- and unnecessary -- characterizations of that country. Almost no week passes by without some unwarranted threat to Iran from a U.S. politician.

Recently, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, when informed that U.S. exports to Iran had grown more than tenfold during President Bush's years in office, including $158 million worth of cigarettes, commented, "Maybe that's a way of killing them." Although he was quick to add that he was joking, this is not a comment one would expect from a presidential candidate at a time of high tensions with that country.

And Barack Obama, not to be upstaged by Senator McCain, recently declared when asked about Iran's possession of nuclear weapons, "It's sufficient to say I would not take military action off the table and that I will never hesitate to use our military force in order to protect the homeland and the United States' interests."

The U.S. claim that Iran is a danger to its security and to the security of the world doesn't hold under scrutiny. The Iranian government states that it is the U.S., not them, that has acted aggressively, and point not only to the U.S. supporting Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war but to the U.S. actions to subvert democracy in their country. In 1953, the CIA engineered a coup d'etat that overthrew the government of one of Iran's greatest leaders, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, after he nationalized Iran's oil industry. As Ghasem Ebrahimian, an Iranian filmmaker told me recently in New York, "We Iranians are tired of war. We went through a terrible, unnecessary, wearing war with Iraq and the only thing we want is to live in peace with everybody."

Iran is now a country under siege, and it is reacting as such. It is surrounded by countries with nuclear weapons: Pakistan to the east, Russia to the north, Israel to the west and the U.S. in the Persian Gulf. This is not a situation that brings them a sense of security. The Bush administration has so far refused to offer Iran the possibility of improved relations or to provide that country with the security guarantees that Iran demands.

Although the initial talks with Iran intended to make Iran halt its nuclear program have ended in a stalemate, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said relations with the U.S. could be restored in the future. Rather than persisting on an antagonistic behavior, the U.S. should start to defuse tensions with that country, at a time when the world is desperate for peace and security.

--

Dr. Cesar Chelala, a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award, is the foreign correspondent for Middle East Times International (Australia.)