Whipping Wisps Into Storm Clouds: Iran and the “Alleged Studies”

Cross-posted from the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.

Donald Rumsfeld’s new book Known and Unknown dredged up bad memories of the false pretexts the United States employed to invade and occupy Iraq. Among those that Colin Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council were Curveball’s claim, which he recently admitted was a lie, that he worked on an Iraqi WMD program.

Then there were documents forged to show that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase “yellowcake” uranium from Niger. And who can forget the aluminum tubes, likely missile parts, passed off as  uranium centrifuge components. Speaking of Curveball, to use another sports cliché, far from a slam dunk, they were all airballs.

Yet the same method is being reprised to attribute WMDs to Iran as was used with Iraq. Though this time, the goal isn’t necessarily to grease the skids for a U.S. attack on Iran. Since that’s unlikely, the idea is to accustom the United States to the idea that it needs to come to Israel’s rescue when it attacks Iran and inevitably finds itself in over its head.

This unsavory process has been chronicled by investigative historian slash journalist Gareth Porter with far more depth than by anyone else. The product of his reporting on the subject over the years appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Middle East Policy (the Middle East Policy Council‘s publication) in the form of an article titled “The Iran Nuclear ‘Alleged Studies’ Documents: The Evidence of Fraud.”

The issues are technical, but what makes them even more daunting to follow are the machinations of those perpetrating the fraud. Since, in a demonstration of shortsightedness on the part of the publication considering how important it is, the article is behind a subscription wall, we’ll excerpt liberally.

You’re likely not familiar with the term “alleged studies” as it’s used in this context. They’re more popularly known, in the aggregate, as the laptop of death. (For instance, sese this Arms Control Wonk post). They have even been called the laptop of mass destruction, as in Asia Times Online’s headline to a 2008 article by Porter. In the MEP piece he begins:

For the past few years, a political consensus has formed in the United States that Iran is covertly pursuing a nuclear-weapons program under the cloak of a civilian nuclear-power program. That conclusion has been based largely on a set of supposedly purloined top-secret Iranian military documents describing just such a covert program during 2002-03. The documents have often been referred to as the “laptop documents,” but they include documents in both electronic and paper form and were called the “alleged studies” documents by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

They consist of

a pair of “flow sheets” showing a process for uranium conversion, a set of experiments . . . similar to that used on early designs for the U.S. atomic bomb, and studies on the redesign of the . . . nose cone, of the Shahab-3 missile to accommodate what appears to be a nuclear weapon.

While

. . . news media have portrayed the alleged-studies documents as credible evidence of a covert Iranian nuclear-weapons program [some] senior officials of the IAEA believed from the first, however, that the documents were “fabricated by a Western intelligence organization”

But, after former director Mohamed ElBaradei (and likely candidate for the Egyptian presidency) — considered a moderating influence on Western hostility toward Iran — left the agency

the IAEA said the material in the documents “is broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted, and the people and organizations involved.”

Okay, if that’s what they believed. The problem is that post-Baradei

Page 1 of 3 | Next page