Pierre Goldschmidt, formerly a high official of the IAEA, has criticized the organization for supposedly acting weak -- specifically, by not using the power of ordering "special inspections" in Iran and Syria.
Goldschmidt said the IAEA should reassert a right to impose mandatory "special inspections" in countries refusing to grant broad access to inspectors to resolve intelligence reports of stealthy work to weaponize nuclear materials.
What Goldschmidt apparently failed to mention is that had the US presented any actual evidence to the IAEA Board of Governors that Iran or Syria were engaged in clandestine nuclear activities at a particular site, then the IAEA would have had the legal right to demand such special inspections. But that didn't happen -- not because of Syrian or Iranian intransigence as the article claims, but because the US has never bothered to actually present the evidence to the IAEA Board in the first place.
In the case of Syria, the Israelis bombed the alleged "nuclear site" without giving the IAEA any information on the site, thus preventing the IAEA from ordering a special inspection and finding the actual evidence. ELBaradei specifically criticized Israel and the US for this.
The failures of cooperation are from the US not from Syria or Iran. In the case of Iran, the US is even now refusing to provide the IAEA with full access to the so-called "Laptop of Death" that the US says is proof positive of Iranian nuclear weapons research. Iran opened up non-nuclear sites such as Parchin to international inspections after David Albright at ISIS made a hue and cry about the site based on nothing more than innuendo and speculation -- and nothing was found there. IAEA officials complained publicly that none of the "secret" information provided by the US on Iran had panned out.
In fact, this whole criticism by Goldschmidt is way off the mark for another simple reason: The US accuses Iran not of having an existing secret nuclear weapons program, but instead of having the "intent to acquire the capability" to make the bomb at some indefinite point in the future -- which is something no amount of inspections can prove or disprove anyway since it is three degrees removed from an actual, existing, observable program.
So why this criticism of the IAEA? Because the IAEA has resisted going along with the US claims about Iraq, and now Iran - that's why.
Comments