Economist's Iran bias on display, yet again

I must say I am absolutely fascinated how the western media completely "loses it" when covering Iran. This will make an interesting case study in the future & I hope some academic will publish on the issue. (Thankfully with the internet, the memory-hole effect is limited.)

For example, as evidence of "suspicion hanging over Iran's nuclear intentions" the Economist repeats a barrage of innuendo in its latest issue - so many that one single post cannot cover them all. However here's a representative selection below, and I leave it to readers to judge the quality of the reporage on their own:

=================
ECONOMIST:

"It took a tip-off from an Iranian opposition group to alert IAEA inspectors to the construction of a secret uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy-water reactor that produces plutonium at Arak. Since 2003, the IAEA has found multiple other breaches of Iran's nuclear safeguards."

FACTS:
First of all, it did NOT take a tip-off from the MEK to alert the IAEA to the existence of these sites. American intelligence sources had informed the IAEA about the coordinates of the sites several months before the MEK's infamous press conference, because the construction sites were visible to satellites and had been spotted reportedly about a year earlier (which would be about the time construction at the sites had started.) And, under the terms of Iran's safeguards agreement which was in effect at the time, Iran did not have to formally disclose the sites while they were still under construction (See: "U.S. Briefed Nuclear Suppliers Group in October on Suspected Iranian EnrichmentPlant" Nuclear Fuel December 23, 2002)

Iran's failure was not in maintaining "secret sites" but in failing to report otherwise legal activity consisting of the importation and experimentation with uranium and centrifuge components -- all of which the IAEA has repeatedly certified had no relationship to a weapons program (a fact conveniently excluded by the Economist.)

In fact, lets put this "secret enrichment" claim to rest once and for all:

Far from being secret, Iran's enrichment program is a continuation of a program that started under the Shah with the full support and encouragement of the United States and Europe. In fact France provided much of the facilities to set an enrichment research facility in Esfahan at ENTEC. Even after the revolution, Iran's development of an enrichment program was known to the IAEA decades prior to the 2002 MEK press conference: it was openly the subject of multiple international international agreements and radio broadcasts by Iran and was thwarted repeatedly by the US which forced the IAEA and other countries to stop cooperating with Iran's enrichment program (eventually forcing Iran to obtain some of its enrichment technology components from Pakistan.)

For example, the IAEA was planning to assist Iran in developing the fuel cycle, only to be thwarted by US pressure:

"Four years after the Islamic revolution, and two years after Iran's new leaders dusted off the nuclear program of the deposed Reza Shah Pahlevi, IAEA officials were keen to assist Iran in reactivating a research program to learn how to process U3O8 into UO2 pellets and then set up a pilot plant to produce UF6, according to IAEA documents obtained by NuclearFuel. Sources said that when in 1983 the recommendations of an IAEA mission to Iran were passed on to the IAEA's technical cooperation program, the U.S. government then ''directly intervened'' to discourage the IAEA from assisting Iran in production of UO2 and UF6. ''We stopped that in its tracks,'' said a former U.S. official..." (SOURCE: U.S. in 1983 stopped IAEA from helping Iran make UF6 by Mark Hibbs, Bonn Nuclear Fuel August 4, 2003 Vol. 28, No. 16; Pg. 12)

In 1992, the US pressured Argentina to drop its nuclear assistance to Iran's enrichment program, and in 1996 the US pressured China to back out of building a uranium conversion facility in Iran too.

However, the Iranians obtained the blueprints from China and informed the facility anyway, and IAEA inspectors visited the construction site of the conversion site (See Nuclear Fuel, Dec 30 1996.)

The IAEA was also aware for several years of uranium exploration projects in Iran, and IAEA officials had visited Iran's uranium mines (as well as several other facilities) in 1992 - more than a decade before the "exposure" of Iran's uranium enrichment project.

In fact the IAEA knew about Iran importing uranium from China before 1991 (See "Nuclear Commerce and Issue as Tehran Leans Westward" by Mark Hibbs, Nuclear Fuel Pg. 11 Dec 1991.)

And, the Iranians had openly announced their plans for enrichment on national radio as early as April 1979, despite temporarily stopping construction at Bushehr:

"Fereydun Sahabi, the Deputy Minister of Energy and Supervisor of the Atomic Energy Organization, in an interview with our correspondent... said that the Atomic Energy Organization's activities regarding prospecting and extraction of uranium would continue." (SOURCE: BBC Summary of World Broadcasts April 11, 1979)

The Iranians then reported the discovery of uranium --again on national radio:

"The Iranian nuclear energy organization has announced the discovery of huge uranium deposits in four places in Iran..."
(SOURCE: In Brief;Discovery of uranium BBC Summary of World Broadcasts December 21, 1981, Monday)

And again:

"The head of the Esfahan nuclear technology centre, Dr Sa'idi, said in Esfahan today that Iran was taking concrete measures for importing nuclear technology, while at the same time utilizing Iranian expertise in the field. He said the decision was made in the wake of discovery of uranium resources in the country and after Iran's capability for developing the industry had been established." (Source: BBC Summary of World Broadcasts March 30, 1982, Tuesday Copyright 1982)

And again:

"After three years of unsparing efforts made by the experts and workers of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation, deposits of more than 5,000 t of uranium have been discovered in the Saghand region of Yazd, central Iran...Mr Amrellahi [head of Iran's atomic energy organization] also expressed assurances that within the next two years the Saghand mine would be one of the biggest uranium mines in the Middle East region and would enable Iran to have part of the Nuclear industry at its disposal. He also stressed: the availability of uranium will be a big help to the economic infrastructure of the country..." (SOURCE BBC Summary of World Broadcasts January 22, 1985, Tuesday)

So much for a "hidden and secret" uranium enrichment program.

===============

ECONOMIST:

"Mr Ahmadinejad has never been able to explain convincingly why Iran is the first country to have built a uranium-enrichment plant without having a single civilian nuclear-power reactor that could burn its output"

FACTS:
This is purely innuendo. First of all, trying to link Iran's nuclear program to "Mr Ahamadinejad" is simply an attempt at smear-by-association. Iran's nuclear program pre-dates Ahmadinejad's arrival on the scene, and in fact the program goes back to the days of the Shah and ironically, the Economist had nothing to say about this very same nuclear program back then.

Secondly, in fact Iran has not "built a uranium-enrichment plant" -- yet. Thus far, it has barely managed to construct a plant that contains 3,000 out of the planned 50,000 centrifuges that any such plant would need to function at capacity to power a nuclear program. So the very premise of this paragraph is facially false.

Third, Iran has already announced its plans to construct additional nuclear reactors. A simple search of the Web (apparently fact-checking is taboo of at the Economist) would confirm that Iran announced plans to build two additional reactors in April 2007 (See this Bloomberg article)

====================
ECONOMIST:

"Under that [Aug 2007 Iran-IAEA "modalities"] plan Iran promised to answer the agency's outstanding questions by last December. Now it says it will divulge all by mid-February."

FACT:
The Aug 2007 modalities agreement between Iran and the IAEA did not set December as a deadline by which all outstanding questions would be answered. The document consists of a short 5 pages and it would have been quite easy to verify this assertion.

Indeed, by the time the IAEA's filed its November 2007 report, practically all outstanding issues had been closed -- precisely as scheduled in the modalities agreement. There were only 2 outstanding issues: additional traces of enriched uranium at one site (which I understand have been cleared up since then -- IAEA report is due soon) and the uncorroborated allegations allegedly obtained from the "Laptop of Death" -- a source whose authenticity is open to many questions that the Economist doesn't deign fit to to even note in passing.

Naturally, while going to extremes to manufacture innuendo justifying "suspicions" over Iran's nuclear program, the Economist does not bother to ask any questions regarding the NIE or this Laptop of Death, thus failing the most basic test of journalistic ethics: fairnes and even-handedness. No questions are asked about the 2006-2007 NIE's sudden about-face on the question of whether Iran has a nuclear program or not, or whether these conclusions match the IAEA's findings, or the fact that a 2005 bi-partisan Congressional investigation characterized the state of US intelligence on Iran's nuclear program as "scandalous"... No, instead the NIE's conclusion that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in 2003 "that could restarted" is simply treated as God's word, not open to any questions or "suspicions" (instead, the Economist sees fit to accuse the NIE authors of "sowing defeatism" for claiming that the program was stopped in 2003, and characterizes ElBaradei as an agenda-driven anti-war crusader of some sort who is "not doing his job" -- all the standard reactions to the NIE found in far-Right rags like the National Review.)

==================
ECONOMIST:

"But learning to enrich uranium—a hugely costly venture—still makes questionable economic sense for Iran, since it lacks sufficient natural uranium to keep them going and would have to import the stuff."

FACT:
Again, more innuendo. The Economist doesn't explain why "importing the stuff" necessarily makes the program uneconomical -- nor does it bother addressing the issue of whether economics alone is the sole criterion on which the viability/desirability of the Iranian nuclear program should be judged (note that the Iranians have asserted strategic concerns about energy source reliability, as well as sovereignty.) And again, the Economist seems simply dead-set on ignoring the findings the Foreign Select Committee of the British Parliament:

"[O]ther energy-rich countries such as Russia use nuclear power to generate electricity and we do not believe that the United States or any other country has the right to dictate to Iran how it meets its increasing demand for electricity."

(SOURCE: Select Committee on Foreign Affairs Third Report, 9 March 2004 )

=============
I won't address the rest of the faleshoods in this article, but in short it consists of a lot of baseless accusations and half-truths, all mixed in with a heavy dose of innuendo (and some smears)
... in other words, same-old same-old.

On the plus side, I should admit that the economist does not overtly refer to "Iranian nuclear weapons programme" as it did last month (instead settling for a drawing of a bomb with lit fuze) though I have yet to see the Economist ackowledge and retract its past erroneous assertions regarding Iran's nuclear program (ie, that Iran "could have built ten conventional plants of the same capacity, fired solely by the natural gas".)

Comments

[David]

What do you expect? The ECONOMIST is part of the same establishment media that sold us the "WMDs in Iraq" lie. This is just a plain example of the journalism of deference. You can't expect the Economist to show any backbone when it comes to challenging the veracity of official pronouncements. They're not journalists, they're spokesmen.

[CJ Harwood]

Oh. And to complete my defense of Tony Blair:

Surely too, in expectation of reward, Tony Blair did not endorse, sign-on, to the violent overthrow of the democratically elected Hamas government of the Palestinians, the prima facie criminal war of aggression against the Palestinians, the blockade of Gaza (blockade=war), the Fatah death-squads which provoked Hamas into their takeover from Fatah of their election mandate, the government of Gaza.

And surely too, in expectation of reward, Tony Blair does not insist, that Israel obey international law, withdraw its 460,000 Israel settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (a violent war crime), return the land Israel robbed for its settlements in that territory (a violent war crime).

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/ic-settlements.html

Surely, Tony Blair did, and does not, say and do, and omit to say and do, these things on the expectation, the promise, the wink, the nod, of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money, paid to him, by Israel, or the Israel lobby, as speaker fees and director fees.

Surely, Tony Blair has other motives, and a legal defense, to his complicity in these prima facie violent crimes.

[CJ Harwood]

What is the name of the person(s) who wrote this article? Who edited it? Who agreed to print it? What are their names?

The writer is anonymous, the hallmark of the Israel lobby.

Innuendo, supposition, conjecture, asserted as "fact," and unassailable fact, omission of material exonerating facts, these "lies" are also hallmarks of the Israel lobby.

And, there are surely others, not in the pay of the Israel lobby, who likewise lie like this. In this case, the entire campaign against Iran's enrichment program is a lie, based on lies, blatantly violating international law, and that campaign involves big name governments (U.S., U.K., France, Germany).

And that means plenty of officials who are not Jews and who are not in the pay of the Israel lobby have joined in.

But Tony Blair has demonstrated this: The lobby using that $3-billion annual slush find of U.S. taxpayer money, they can find a way to pay-off politicians and government officials, for services rendered.

But surely, that's not the source of Tony Blair's speaking fees, or his director's fees, routed through cut-outs. When Tony Blair asserts it to be a fact that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, surely he has irrefutable evidence to that effect which, for a very good reason, has not been shared with Russia, China, Jack Straw, the U.S. Congress, the top 4 officials on their two intelligence committees, or the IAEA.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/iran-nuclear-timeline-sources-links.html#seetonylie