So where to start?
Julian Borger of the Guardian has an article in which he goes over some of the criticisms against Amano for being biased in favor of the US. The problem is that he assures us -- without bothering to cite anyone or anything, just his opinion passed along as if it was news -- that "there is substantial evidence that the country had an organised [nuclear] weapons project up to 2003" -- which is not true (the only "evidence" is the Laptop of Death, which continues to be unverified, and Elbaradei specifically said so.) He fails to note that while Elbaradei and the IAEA welcomed the 2007 NIE conclusion that there was no active nuclear weapons program in Iran, the IAEA never endorsed the NIE's statement that there was once a nuclear weapons program in Iran prior to 2003. Quite the contrary, when the IAEA was being accused of "censoring" its reports on Iran in that regard, the IAEA issued astatement that said quite unequivocally:
With respect to a recent media report, the IAEA reiterates that it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon programme in Iran.
I have gone over this fact before. I guess Julian doesn't bother reading this blog, which is all the more pity since if the Diplomatic Editor of the Guardian was better informed he wouldn't publish an article which states that Iran "joined the NPT in 1998" (something which has since been corrected, thanks to Nima Shirazi pointing out the error to Borger. In fact Iran was a charter member of the NPT and signed the treaty when it was first drafted, back in 1968, and ratified it in 1970.) Also note that Borger completely ignores a major source of criticism leveled at Amano -- from the 120-nation Non Aligned Movement. Again, something I covered before but I guess for the Western media, NAM simply doesn't exist.
Sadly, Julian Borger's coverage of Iran has often bordered on the farcical, especially with his "the day after Iran first nuclear test will be a normal day" story in which he totally exaggerated a personal blog entry by someone in Iran into evidence that Iran was officially intent on making nukes.
Oh and Congressman King -- who has made a career out of scaremongering about Moslems in the US -- has said that hundreds of Hezbollah operatives are in the US who are planning an attack. And what's his proof? The New York Police Department (which has been exposed by the Associated Press in spying on 2nd and even 3rd generation Americans who simply happen to practice Islam -- in a bit of REAL JOURNALISM by the way) says that some Iranian UN officials was found photographing the Brooklyn Bridge and other tourist spots in New York. Gasp! How evil of them! (note that the commenators to this story on various sites have universally laughed out loud at these claims.)
So the Israelis came out and apparently said that they agree with the US NIE conclusion that there is no active nuclear weapons program in Iran. Not that this stopped the usual stream of drivel about the need to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program, no. That has a momentum all of its own and does not depend on any actual facts. Remember, when the 2007 NIE came out, it took the wind out of the Iran scaremongering (some NeoCons, Bush administration and Israeli officials were so peeved at the NIE that they openly called the NIE's conclusion an attempted coup d'etat by the intelligence services) and ever since then the Iran scaremongers have been trying to figure out what to do about the NIE. They spent some time pooh-poohing it, claiming it was just plain wrong. Now, the Iran scaremongers are instead trying to reconcile their narrative -- that Iran poses a nuclear threat -- with the conclusions of the "intelligence community" that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. In order to do that, they have to first conceed that point but then they can emphasize the alleged "pre-2003" nuclear weapons work in Iran, and then scaremonger about Iranian "intentions" and "capabilities" -- thus ending up where they want to be, namely, continuing to scaremongering about Iranian nuclear weapons without worry about being contradicted by the NIE. And if you want proof of this, here you go complete with the BS about how the MEK "unmasked" the "secret" facility at Natanz and Fordo etc. In short the NIE should no longer be seen as contradicting the scaremongering, since it has been subsumed and coopted.
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