ElBaradei: spying on Iran's nuclear program for the US?

Is Elbaradei blackmailing Iran to disclose targetting intelligence, to be used by the  US for an attack on Iran?

David Albright of ISIS has written a piece in which he argues that any bombing of Iran's enrichment sites would be a hollow success since Iran could build more centrifuges and restart the program:

From the time that Iran halted the suspension of its centrifuge manufacturing efforts and its adherence to the Additional Protocol, the IAEA’s knowledge of Iran’s centrifuge manufacturing complex has degraded dramatically. Iran’s decision to disperse and keep secret several of its key sites further hinders the development of a full picture of its centrifuge complex. Considering the modular, replicable nature of centrifuge plants, we conclude that an attack on Iran’s nuclear program is unlikely to significantly degrade Iran’s ability to reconstitute its gas centrifuge program.

So simply destroying the working centrifuges themselves will not be sufficient to stop Iran's nuclear program, but the centrifuge-manufacturing capacity has to be targetted as well.

 I'd like to point out that this is probably precisely why IAEA director ElBaradei has been demanding that Iran, in addition to allowing inspections of the working centrifuge sites as required by its safeguards agreement, must show the location of their centrifuge-manufacturing facilities as well -- all under the guise of what Elbaradei has disingeniously labelled as "providing transparency". The May 2008 IAEA report on Iran, for example, reported:

On 2 April 2008, the Agency requested Iran to provide, as a transparency measure, access to additional locations related, inter alia, to the manufacturing of centrifuges, R&D on uranium enrichment, and uranium mining and milling. To date, Iran has not agreed to the Agency’s request.

And in the prevoius Feb 2006 IAEA report, ElBaradei defined what he meant by "transparency" in paragraph 54:

Without full transparency that extends beyond the formal legal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol — transparency that could only be achieved through Iran’s active cooperation — the Agency’s ability to reconstruct the history of Iran’s past programme and to verify the correctness and completeness of the statements made by Iran, particularly with regard to its centrifuge enrichment programme, will be limited, and questions about the past and current direction of Iran’s nuclear programme will continue to be raised.

And since then, ElBaradei has been widely quoted repeatedly saying that Iran has "failed to show transparency" -- leaving out the word "transparency" when used by ElBaradei really refers to inspections beyond  what Iran is legally required to provide (and the media, satisfied with this soundbite that falsely condemns Iran, never bothers to ask.)

In fact, Elbaradei has no legal right to impose his own personal disclosure standards on Iran, since under the terms of Iran's safeguards agreement, Iran is only required to allow the IAEA inspect the working centrifuges -- centrifuges which actually contain nuclear material. Iran is under no obligation to show the places where the centrifuges themselves are designed and built (even though it had voluntarily done so previously) since the IAEA's inspection powers are limited to places that contain or are meant to contain nuclear material, and not to everywhere else.

So here's the thing:

The centrifuge-manufacturing sites that Elbaradei is demanding to see are, according to Albright, precisely the sites that the US would have to include among its target lists of any successfeul bombing raid, to prevent Iran from simply rebuilding its enrichment program.

Do you suppose this is a coincidence?

Lets put this in context: we do know that international arms inspectors sent to Iraq were infiltrated by US/UK intelligence operatives. And the IAEA made no similar demands on Egypt or South Korea for inspections beyond their safeguards agreements when they were caught conducting secret nuclear experiments.

So, one has to ask: Is ElBaradei serving the same function of gathering tagetting information on Iran, under the guise of seeking "transparency" from Iran? Is Elbaradei trying to blackmail Iran into exposing the needed targetting information, by saying that "questions will continue to be raised" about Iran's nuclear program unless and until Iran provides this intelligence?

Note that the March 2008 IAEA report clarified all previous issues regarding Iran's nuclear program. So why does the IAEA insist on seeing things that fall outside of its authority?

Comments

[George Desnoyers]

Iran should not give in on the Transparency Issues in which information is solicited which is unrelated, or is only indirected related, to the uranium enrichment. A lot has been written about how the UNSCOM information collected in Iraq was shared with the U.S. military and used in targeting during Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. See http://www.endusmilitarism.org/UNSCOM_spying.html (the 5th article down in the list of six is probably the best).