Iran Update (Expanded on February 25)

This is scary. It seems unbelievable that the United States would try the same moronic tricks that were exposed as fraud in Iraq, but it is clear that once more the Bush administration is supplying false “information” about Iran and ignoring what inspectors on the ground in Iran actually find or don’t find.

Remember how American “intelligence” sent inspectors racing around Iraq on wild goose chases for months? The U.S. said that the inspectors couldn’t find evidence of weapons of mass destruction because the bumbling inspectors weren’t thorough or aggressive enough, and because Iraq was shifting the WMDs around and hiding them in such places as private homes or palace bathrooms. Of course that was all American lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and yet Iraq’s fictitious “non-cooperation” with the inspectors became one of the excuses for a war to destroy the nonexistent WMDs.

The fact that we are going through the same farce with Iran is testimony not only to the mendacity of the American government but also its contempt for the brainpower of those to whom it tells its lies.

From the "Los Angeles Times", Feb 25:

'U.N. CALLS U.S. DATA ON IRAN's NUCLEAR AIMS UNRELIABLE
'Tips about supposed secret weapons sites and documents with missile designs haven't panned out, diplomats say.

'The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services had provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002,
Since 2002, "pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now" because "so little panned out."

'American officials privately acknowledge that much of their evidence on Iran's nuclear plans and programs remains ambiguous, fragmented and difficult to prove.'

There is no factual excuse, then, for Vice President Cheney's reiteration in Australia yesterday that "all options are on the table" (i.e., military action is contemplated) if Iran does not end its nuclear program. In any case, as Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit, said recently: "The Iranians are no threat to the United States unless we provoke them. They may be a threat to the Israelis. They‘re not a threat to the United States." Are the American people so conditioned to think irrationally of their country as the guardian of an oppressive Jewish religious state on the other side of the world that they will once more accept an American attack on an innocent country as a matter of course? Will they even recognize, when American corpses begin to come home, that those Americans died for Israel and not for their own country? Do they recognize it now, as the corpses are shipped home from Iraq?


The following are exerpts from a report in ”The Age” (Australia).

Julian Borger, Vienna
February 24, 2007
"MUCH of the intelligence on Iran's nuclear facilities provided to UN inspectors by American spy agencies has turned out to be unfounded, according to diplomatic sources in Vienna.

"The [claims] are reminiscent of the intelligence fiasco surrounding the Iraq war. At the heart of the debate are accusations by the US that Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons. But most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by atomic energy agency inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.

"'Most of it has turned out to be incorrect,' said a diplomat at the agency with detailed knowledge of the investigations. 'They gave us a paper with a list of sites. The inspectors did some follow-up, they went to some military sites, but there was no sign of (banned nuclear) activities. Now the inspectors don't go in blindly, only if it passes a credibility test.'

"One particularly contentious issue concerned records of plans to build a nuclear warhead, which the CIA said it found on a computer supplied by an informant inside Iran. In July 2005, US intelligence officials showed printed versions of the material to atomic energy agency officials, who judged it to be sufficiently specific to confront Iran. Tehran rejected the material as forged and there remain reservations about its authenticity, according to officials with knowledge of the internal debate inside the agency.

"'First of all, if you have a clandestine program, you don't put it on laptops which can walk away,' one official said. 'The data is all in English, which may be reasonable for some of the technical matters, but at some point you'd have thought there would be at least some notes in Farsi.'"