Whipping Wisps Into Storm Clouds: Iran and the “Alleged Studies”
The premise . . . that the military would have taken responsibility for work on uranium conversion — is highly implausible. The work on a different technology had already been done by civilians under the AEOI [Atomic Energy Organization of Iran] over a period of more than a decade.
Also
The idea that Kimia Maadan [a private company] that had done nothing beyond completing a flow sheet outlining a process for uranium conversion would have been authorized to immediately begin making concrete plans for equipping such a facility without going through a lengthy stage of testing the technology depicted in the flow sheet. . . . is highly implausible.
Especially damning:
The fact that the IAEA does not know whether the original laptop documents had official stamps and security classification markings . . . . can be regarded as prima facie evidence of fraud.
As for who
According to the story, the files were smuggled out of Iran by the wife of an Iranian who had been recruited by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. . . . But there is evidence that the laptop documents were brought to the U.S. consulate in Turkey by someone affiliated with . . . the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) . . . a terrorist organization that had killed both Iranian and U.S. civilians in the past.
Israeli authors Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar reported, “A way to ‘launder’ information from Western intelligence to the IAEA was found so that agencies and their sources could be protected. Information is ‘filtered’ to the IAEA via Iranian opposition groups [such as MEK]. [Its] involvement . . in the laptop episode and Israel’s past use of the [MEK] for this purpose point to Israel as the original source of the documents.
Returning to Iraq, rote, dogged repetition in the service of war-mongering carried the day. One must pay grudging tribute to Israel as well. Its campaign against Iran, equal to that against Iraq in implausibility and even more slipshod, has been successful in turning public sentiment against Iran, if not yet in convincing American authorities of the need for hostilities.
Meanwhile, we all owe Gareth Porter a debt of gratitude for ripping the curtain on the pettiness of this deception. Shame on us if we allow such wisps carry us away on the winds of war.
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Paul Rosenberg:
March 14th, 2011 at 4:23 pm
If Not Fraud…
There is, of course, an alternative to the strong conclusion that these documents are outright frauds: a weaker conclusion that they could be from some relatively isolated, out-of-power clique. The Iranian equivalent of Gaffney and Rumsfeld during the Clinton years, reduced to ill-informed speculation with no pretense of official cover. Such a group might well be far enough out of the loop to account for the inconsistencies that Gareth meticulously works his way through.
Of course the possibility of this is relatively slight. But if it were the case, then there’s the further possibility that our willful misreading of these documents as part of the official Iranian military program could ironically turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy: our crazies and their crazies empowering one another to the detriment of everyone else concerned–not to mention hundreds of millions of innocent bystanders.