The US and EU have continued threatening the IAEA over a pending report on Iran's nuclear program and are trying to pre-emptively kill the report which will show that Iran has resolved all outstanding issues over its nuclear program.
The New York Times writes that the French Foreign Minister has warned IAEA Director ElBaradei that the "credibility of his agency was at stake." The Associated Press reports that the US has demanded that Iran "must confess" to having had a nuclear weapons program or else:
The call by Gregory L. Schulte, chief U.S. delegate to the Vienna-based IAEA, appeared to set the bar insurmountably high for the investigation by the U.N. agency's chief, Mohamed ElBaradei...Britain, France and the United States have begun consulting on a resolution for the March meeting that would "draw a line in the sand" both for the IAEA chief and Iran, said a diplomat accredited to the agency.
They're running scared of the fact that the IAEA will report that the outstanding issues listed in the Aug 2007 -Iran-IAEA agreement have been resolved. The only outstanding issue is the "evidence" obtained by the US from some trumped-up "Laptop of Death" that the US has been peddling as proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Of course the media are treating this highly-questionable laptop as totally factual, with not even the slightest hedging or qualification. They repeatedly refer to it as "evidence", without any qualification.
But what's more interesting is that while the US has (only now, after more than 2 years) decided to selectively share some of this "evidence" with the IAEA, they weren't willing to let the Iranians to actually see any of this "evidence" against them. As David Sanger of the the NY Times reports that the Iranians will probably only be allowed to see a "sanitized presentation" of the evidence which they're somehow supposed to refute.
Trust the Bush administration to come up with something like that. This is after all the same administration that has allowed the use secret warrants to obtain secret evidence used at secret trials resulting in secret judgments against defendants whose identities are kept secret.
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