If anyone had reason to suspect that representatives of the Bush administration would tell bald-faced lies in order to try to justify a war they had already decided to fight, we might have reason to take the following report from Reuters somewhat seriously. [my emphasis, here and below]
U.N. inspectors have protested to the U.S. government and a Congressional committee about a report on Iran's nuclear work, calling parts of it "outrageous and dishonest," according to a letter obtained by Reuters.We've been here before, haven't we? And we know what happens next, too. Don't we?
The letter recalled clashes between the IAEA and the Bush administration before the 2003 Iraq war over findings cited by Washington about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that proved false, and underlined continued tensions over Iran's dossier.
Sent to the head of the House of Representatives' Select Committee on Intelligence by a senior aide to International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, the letter said an August 23 committee report contained serious distortions of IAEA findings on Iran's activity.
The letter said the errors suggested Iran's nuclear fuel program was much more advanced than a series of IAEA reports and Washington's own intelligence assessments have determined.
It said the report falsely described Iran to have enriched uranium at its pilot centrifuge plant to weapons-grade level in April, whereas IAEA inspectors had made clear Iran had enriched only to a low level usable for nuclear power reactor fuel.
Never content to tell a single lie, they've been lying about more than uranium enrichment!
"Furthermore, the IAEA Secretariat takes strong exception to the incorrect and misleading assertion" that the IAEA opted to remove a senior safeguards inspector for supposedly concluding the purpose of Iran's program was to build weapons, it said.President Bush clearly doesn't care. He's taking his "incorrect and misleading", "outrageous and dishonest" case against Iran to the United Nations next week. And he's already started threatening the UN.
The letter said the congressional report contained "an outrageous and dishonest suggestion" that the inspector was dumped for having not adhered to an alleged IAEA policy barring its "officials from telling the whole truth" about Iran.
Diplomats say the inspector remains IAEA Iran section head.
...
"This (committee report) is deja vu of the pre-Iraq war period where the facts are being maligned and attempts are being made to ruin the integrity of IAEA inspectors," said a Western diplomat familiar with the agency and IAEA-U.S. relations.
Of course the mainstream media can't call it that. So instead they write it up like this:
US President George W. Bush said he would reaffirm his hard line on Iran at the United Nations next week.I find Gwynne Dyer's take on this issue quite a bit more realistic. And timely, too. He had all this figured out a couple of weeks ago.
Bush, who will make a speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, said he liked UN chief Kofi Annan personally but warned that many Americans were wary of the United Nations and that he sometimes shares that view.
Amid optimism from Europe about a new round of talks with Iran over it's nuclear program, Bush warned US partners not to waver in diplomacy to ensure the Islamic republic does not acquire atomic weapons.
"My concern is that, you know, they'll stall; they'll try to wait us out," he said in a wide ranging press conference in the White House Rose Garden. "So part of my objective in New York is to remind people that's stalling shouldn't be allowed."
"They need to understand we're firm in our commitment and that if they try to drag their feet or, you know, get us to look the other way, that we won't do that," said Bush.
The media love a crisis, but this one seriously lacks credibility. In June, John Negroponte, US Director of National Intelligence, told the BBC that Iran could have a nuclear bomb ready between 2010 and 2015. But he said “could,” not “will,” and only in five or 10 years’ time. So why are we having a crisis this autumn?Please read Dyer's entire column.
The US government’s explanation is that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened in May to “wipe Israel off the map,” and that nuclear weapons are the way he plans to do it. (Any that are left over would presumably be given to terrorists.) As proof of Iran’s evil ambitions, it points to the fact, revealed in 2003, that Iran had been concealing some parts of its so-called peaceful nuclear energy program from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for 18 years.
But there are a number of holes in this narrative, and the first is that Ahmadinejad never said he wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.” This is a strange and perhaps deliberate mistranslation of his actual words, a direct quote from the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the font of all wisdom in revolutionary Iran, who said some 20 years ago that “this regime occupying Jerusalem (ie Israel) must vanish from the page of time.”
It was a statement about the future (possibly the quite far future) as ordained by God. It was not a threat to destroy Israel. Attacking Israel has never been Iranian policy, and a few days later the man who really runs Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly stated that Iran “will not commit aggression against any nation.” While Ahmadinejad continues to say nasty things about Israel, he too has explicitly rejected accusations that Iran plans to attack it.
For more on this seemingly-fabricated crisis-to-be, see Chris Floyd: "History's Actors" Prepare for a Sequel or Kurt Nimmo: Neocon Iran Nuke Lies “Outrageous” and “Dishonest”.