Iran Questions IAEA’s Resolve and Impartiality
By Kaveh L. Afrasiabi | Middle East Online | March 3, 2012
PALO ALTO (California) – In their recent visit to Iran, the high-level officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) missed a golden opportunity to resolve one of the lingering questions about Iran’s nuclear program, due to the personal intervention of the IAEA Director-General, Yukiya Amano, whose reports have raised suspicion of a “possible nuclear dimension.”
According to a source close to the Iranian nuclear negotiation team in Iran, during the two-day visit on February 20-21, the IAEA team headed by Herman Nackaerts, the Deputy Director-General for Safeguards, was informed that even though the purpose of the visit was for discussion of a framework to resolve the “ambiguities,” they were invited to visit the site at Marivan, cited in the November 2011 IAEA report for suspected “high explosive” tests pertaining to nuclear weapons — a charge denied by Tehran. Instead of accepting this invitation, and thus putting to rest one of IAEA’s stated concerns, the IAEA team declined the offer after consulting with Mr. Amano in Vienna. Amano ordered the team to return to Vienna immediately.
According to sources in Tehran, if Amano had permitted his team to inspect the Marivan site, then he would have had to mention the agency’s finding in his report due next week. “By personally intervening to torpedo a chance to lay to rest a key IAEA suspicion about Iran, unfortunately once again Mr. Amano proved his bias,” maintains the Tehran source.
Mr. Amano has been criticized in the past as being supportive of U.S. interests regarding Iran’s nuclear activities. On his appointment as head of the IAEA, Mr. Amano was referred to by U.S. diplomats as being “a friend” to U.S. interests, according to secret diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in 2010.
In addition to failing to mention Iran’s offer to the IAEA inspection team to visit facilities at Marivan, Mr. Amano disingenuously complained of Iran’s failure to allow the IAEA team to inspect the military base at Parchin, despite the fact that in his own November 2011 report on Iran, he admits that the purpose of a visit would be “to discuss the issues identified.” This has led to Western media coverage describing Nackaerts’ trip as a “failure,” and blaming it on Iran’s “intransigence.”
Iranian witnesses suggest otherwise, indicating that the two sides made substantial progress on a six-step “draft modality” that would address the agency’s lingering concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. Although no final agreement was reached at the February meeting, Tehran insists that an agreement is still on the table and Iran is willing to implement it. The agreement includes a framework calling for “practical steps” to further Iran-IAEA cooperation, covering a future inspection of Parchin, which incidentally has been previously visited by the IAEA without ever finding anything “unusual.”
“We have had three rounds of negotiations with Mr. Nackaerts, twice in Tehran and once in Vienna, and we are getting very close to finalizing an agreement, barring any negative intervention by certain powers that manipulate the IAEA to perpetuate a crisis environment surrounding Iran’s peaceful nuclear program,” says a Tehran source on condition of anonymity.
Tehran has expressed its readiness to engage in a new round of nuclear talk with the representatives of the “5+1” nations (i.e., the UN Security Council’s Permanent Five plus Germany). From Iran’s perspective, for the coming talks to be successful the other side needs to be more attuned to Iran’s “confidence-building initiatives” such as the offer to IAEA to inspect a suspected site. Clearly, Mr. Amano must explain why he refused the offer and failed to make public Iran’s invitation.
According to recent admissions by various top US officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Paneta, the United States has no evidence that Iran is attempting to produce nuclear weapons. This means the Iran nuclear crisis is a “crisis of choice” rather than “necessity,” and its resolution requires dexterous diplomacy on the part of both sides.
This is not a time for military threat and intimidation. Given the admission by the IAEA, and reflected in its various reports, there is no evidence of military diversion in the development of nuclear material in Iran. All of Iran’s uranium enrichment activities — allowed under the articles of the Non-Proliferation Treaty — are covered by the IAEA’s routine inspections, as well as surveillance cameras. And Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has offered to suspend the 20 percent enrichment in return for an external supply of nuclear fuel for Iran’s medical reactor.
A prudent Western nuclear strategy toward Iran, one that would respect Iran’s nuclear rights, would continue to insist on Iran’s nuclear transparency, but refrain from threatening Iran with military strikes and or coercive “crippling sanctions.” Iran, like all other nations, has “inalienable rights” that are expressly recognized under the articles of the NPT.
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Kaveh Afrasiabi was an advisor to Iran’s Nuclear Negotiation Team (2004-2006), a former political science professor at Tehran University, and author of several books on Iran’s foreign and nuclear policies, including After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran’s Foreign Policy, Iran’s Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction, Iran’s Foreign Policy After September 11, and Iran Phobia and US Terror Plot, A Legal Deconstruction.
Copyright © 2012 Kaveh L. Afrasiabi
Related articles
- Amano’s New Report on Iran’s Nuclear Program (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Iran honestly cooperating with IAEA: Britain’s former IAEA envoy to Iran (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- How the Media Got the Parchin Access Story Wrong (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Nuclear experts reject IAEA Iran report (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Who was Behind the Delhi Bombing?
By Gareth Porter | Dissident Voice | March 3rd, 2012
The magnet bomb that exploded on an Israeli Embassy diplomat’s car in Delhi on February 13 seemed on the surface to be consistent with an Iranian-sponsored action.
It was carried out with same method by which Israel’s Iranian proxy, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, had assassinated an Iranian scientist in mid-January. It occurred on the anniversary of the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah operations chief Imad Mugniyeh, which Hezbollah had vowed to avenge. And it happened at the same time as what appeared to be attempted bombings in Bangkok and Tbilisi.
But a review of the evidence uncovered thus far makes the link to Iran begin to look very dubious. Instead, it points to the distinct possibility that the Israelis planned a carefully limited bomb attack that was not intended to cause serious injury to Israeli diplomatic personnel, but that would advance the larger Israeli narrative on the need to punish Iran.
The evidence surrounding that bomb itself indicates a series of decisions by the terrorist team that is fundamentally inconsistent with an Iranian-Hezbollah revenge bombing. The preliminary forensic analysis of the bomb itself had estimated it to be 250-300 grams of explosives, but sources in the investigation later reduced the estimate to 200-250 grams. The 250-gram bomb that exploded near the Delhi High Court in May 2011 did not even damage the car under which it had been placed and was characterised by Police Commissioner B K Gupta as a “low-intensity and mild blast”.
Burning questions
The main damage to the Israeli diplomat’s car was not from the explosion but from the fire, which burned so slowly that the occupants suffered no burns.
If the bomb had been filled with shrapnel of iron filings, nails or glass, or if it had been attached underneath the fuel tank or on the door next to the passenger, that bomb would have seriously injured or killed the passenger, Tal Yehoshua-Koren, the wife of the Israeli Defense Attaché. But Delhi police were able to determine that the bomb contained no such potentially deadly shrapnel. And an examination of the videos and photos of the car after the bombing revealed that the bomb had been attached instead to the rear of the vehicle, where it would have the least impact on the occupants.
Indian investigators obtained a fourth piece of evidence bearing on the intentions of the planners from their interview with Yehoshua-Koren. She told them the bomb did not go off for 30 to 40 seconds after she felt a bump from the rear of the car and saw the motorcyclist go past her window. Indian investigators had assumed that the bomb had operated on a five- or 10-second delay, like other magnet bombs with which they were familiar – only enough time for the motorcyclist to get far enough away from the blast.
Yehoshua-Koren did not get out of the car before the bomb went off, and suffered what the Israeli Defense Ministry called “moderate“ wounds – evidently from metal fragments from the rear hatch. She was nevertheless able to exit the car and get to the Israeli Embassy without any assistance.
Israeli commentary on the bombing suggested that the Iranian-sponsored terrorist team had simply proven to be ineffective in carrying out the bombing. But the combination of these four distinct indicators strongly suggests that the operation was planned so that the passenger in the car would not be injured.
Unclear patterns
Israel claimed that the evidence links the Delhi bombing to other alleged Iranian-Hezbollah plots in Tbilisi and Bangkok. Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon declared, ”It is the same pattern, the same bomb, the same lab, the same factory”.
But investigators in Delhi to concluded that the operations in Delhi and Bangkok were “unrelated“.
Despite the fact that a group of Iranian passport-holders were clearly involved with highly lethal bombs in Bangkok, there is good reason to doubt that they were working for Iran’s IRGC or Hezbollah. They spent their first three days in the country with Thai prostitutes at Pattaya. That profile suggests Iranian mercenaries, like the former kickboxer hired by Mossad to assassinate Iranian scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi in January 2010, rather than Iranian or Hezbollah operatives.
India‘s importance
In the larger context, it is very difficult to believe that Iran would have chosen New Delhi as the location for revenge against Israel, given the importance of India as a buyer of Iranian oil and India’s delicately balanced political-diplomatic position in the larger conflict.
India had just replaced China as Iran’s single biggest crude oil customer, having increased its imports to roughly 550,000 barrels a day in January, which compensated for a drop in sales to China. And the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had resisted pressure from the United States and Europe to reduce its purchases from Iran, even working with Iran to find ways to get around the planned sanctions against Iran’s National Bank. India’s Commerce Ministry was planning a large business delegation to Iran to discuss increased trade.
India had thus taken on the role of potential “spoiler” in the Western sanctions strategy against Iran. This central geopolitical reality prompted New Delhi’s “Economic Times” to ask, “Why would Iran go and poke its finger in the eye of its best customer, especially knowing full well that Israel will use even the flimsiest excuse to put the blame on it?”
Indeed, it was Israel, not Iran that stood to gain politically from the terrorist car bomb in Delhi. Israel was well aware that a terrorist bombing in Delhi that could be blamed on Tehran was a potential lever to change India’s policy toward Iran. As an Israeli official told the Wall Street Journal, if India were to adopt Netanyahu’s position that Iran was responsible for the bombing, it would take the India-Iran relationship to “a whole different level”.
Nearly two weeks before the bombing, Israel acted to ensure that Indians would assume that a terrorist attack in Delhi on that date had been carried out by Iran. A letter to the Delhi police on February 1 signed by the Israeli Deputy Chief of Mission in Delhi and the First Secretary responsible for security expressed concern that Iran and Hezbollah would take revenge on the anniversary of the Mugniyeh assassination by carrying out terrorist actions against Israelis. It also referred to the possibility of Iranian revenge for the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mustafa Ahmadi Roshan on January 11. Although the letter did not specify that an attack might take place in Delhi, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo led a delegation of intelligence officials on a visit to Delhi around the same time and turned over a list of 50 Iranian nationals with the request that they be kept under surveillance.
The Israeli letter referred to an alleged Hezbollah terror plot against Israelis that had been broken up in Bangkok in January. But the idea of a Hezbollah plan to kill Israelis in Thailand had come only from Israeli intelligence – not from any local sources. The Thai police detained Hussein Atris, a Swedish-Lebanese, in January only because Israeli intelligence officials had told them they “suspected” that he and two other Lebanese, whom they claimed were linked to Hezbollah, might carry out terrorist attacks at tourist sites popular with Israelis.
Atris admitted to owning large supplies of urea fertiliser and ammonium nitrate, which are ingredients in bombs, but Thai investigators concluded that they were not connected to any terror plot in Thailand, because of the absence of any other bomb components. The head of Thailand’s National Security Council, General Wichean Potephosree, a former chief of police, expressed doubt that Atris was a terrorist, as Israel had claimed.
After the Bangkok explosion, the Israelis renewed the claim of an Iran-Hezbollah terror threat in Bangkok, alleging that the bombs found in in all three capitals in mid-February were “exactly the same kind of devices”. But we now know that was not the case.
We may never be able to establish with certainty what happened in Delhi, Bangkok and Tbilisi earlier this month, but the evidence that has come to light thus far doesn’t support the widely accepted notion that Iran and Hezbollah were behind it. That evidence is consistent, however, with a clever Israeli “false flag” car bombing operation that would not injure the passenger but would serve its broader strategic interests: dividing India from Iran and pushing US public opinion further towards support for war against Iran.
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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
The Demonic Reality of Fukushima
And the Absurdity of the NRC
By CINDY FOLKERS | CounterPunch | March 2, 2012
In the days following the March 11, 2011 beginning of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe, chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano repeatedly reassured the Japanese public, news media, and world community that there was “no immediate health risk” from mounting radioactive releases from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. His choice of words was very similar to the U.S. nuclear power establishment’s during the Three Mile Island melt down of 1979, as captured by Rosalie Bertell’s classic anti-nuclear primer No Immediate Danger? Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth.
However, as the New York Times revealed Monday, Edano and his colleagues at the highest levels of the Japanese federal government were actually worried about a worst-case scenario, a “demonic chain reaction” of atomic reactor meltdowns spreading catastrophic amounts of deadly radioactivity from the three operating units at Fukushima Daiichi (as well as multiple high-level radioactive waste storage pools there), to the four operating reactors and pools at Fukushima Daini (just 7 miles south, which itself avoided catastrophe thanks to a single surviving offsite power line; several offsite power lines were lost to the earthquake, and all diesel generators were lost to the tsunami), to the operating reactor and pool at Tokai (much closer to Tokyo). Regarding such a nightmare scenario, eerily similar to what Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa depicted in Dreams, the New York Times reported:
“We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,” Mr. Edano is quoted as saying, naming two other nuclear plants. “If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”
On March 13, 2011, even as Fukushima Daiichi’s reactors were melting down and exploding, and its storage pools at risk of boiling or draining dry and the high-level radioactive waste catching fire, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) provided false assurance to the U.S. public and news media, that no harmful levels of radioactive fallout would reach U.S. territories. However, at the very same time, NRC was itself worried about potentially hazardous levels of radioactive Iodine-131 reaching Alaska.
Just last week, NRC held public meetings about its newly unveiled, so-called “State of the Art Reactor Consequence Analysis” (SOARCA). One meeting took place near the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, nor far from Philadelphia or Washington D.C., where two General Electric Boiling Water Reactors of the Mark I design (GE BWR Mark I) operate. Paul Gunter, Beyond Nuclear’s Reactor Oversight Project Director, attended and testified.
SOARCA is meant to replace a 1982 study, “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” (CRAC-2). CRAC-2 made shocking projections of casualties and property damage that would result downwind of a catastrophic radioactivity release from an accident at either Peach Bottom Unit 2 or 3: 72,000 “peak early fatalities”; 45,000 “peak early injuries”; 37,000 “peak cancer deaths”; and $119 billion in property damages. But CRAC-2 was based on 1970 U.S. Census data. Populations have grown significantly in the past 42 years, so casualty figures would now be much worse. And when adjusted for inflation, property damages would now top $265 billion, in 2010 dollars. Such shocking figures may explain why NRC, which commissioned the study, tried to conceal its results from the public. But U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) made the information public in congressional hearings.
Of course, as shown by Fukushima Daiichi, a major accident at either Peach Bottom reactor could very easily spread to the second reactor. And, as Yukio Edano — who now serves as Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), with direct oversight of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) — warned about Fukushima Daini and Tokai, a catastrophic radioactivity release from Peach Bottom could spread to other nearby nuclear power plants, such as Limerick Units 1 and 2, Three Mile Island Unit 1, and Salem Units 1 and 2/Hope Creek, forcing workers to evacuate and putting many additional reactors’ and high-level radioactive waste storage pools’ safety at risk.
Despite all this, NRC’s SOARCA — by assuming almost all radioactivity will be contained during an accident, any releases will happen slowly and in a predictable fashion, that emergency evacuation will come off without a hitch, etc. — claims that casualties will be low, or even non-existent. Such false assurances fall flat on their face in light of the lessons learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe, including the new revelations described above.
In fact, Peach Bottom 2 and 3 are bigger in size than Fukushima’s Units 1 to 4. Peach Bottom 2 and 3 are both 1,112 Megawatt-electric (MW-e) reactors, 2,224 MW-e altogether. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 was 460 MW-e. Units 2 and 3 were each 784 MW-e. Altogether, they were “only” 2,028 MW-e, smaller in size than Peach Bottom 2 and 3. The same is true regarding high-level radioactive wastes. The Fukushima Daiichi Units 1 to 4 storage pools contained a total of 354 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel. Peach Bottom nuclear power plant, however, stores well over 1,500 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel on-site. Although Peach Bottom has installed dry cask storage, the vast majority of irradiated fuel is still stored in the Mark I elevated, and vulnerable, pools. Beyond Nuclear recently published a backgrounder on the risk of Mark I high-level radioactive waste storage pools.
NRC should immediately withdraw its absurd SOARCA report, and get about the business of protecting public health, safety, and the environment — its mandate — rather than doing the nuclear power industry’s bidding by downplaying risks as at Peach Bottom 2 and 3. A good place to start would be immediately and permanently shutting down all 23 operating Mark Is in the U.S., including Peach Bottom 2 and 3, as Beyond Nuclear’s “Freeze Our Fukushimas” campaign calls for.
Cindy Folkers is a Radiation and Health Specialist at Beyond Nuclear.
Related articles
- Nuclear Agency Squabbling Throws Smokescreen Over Safety Lapses (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Japan may have no nuclear reactors by summer (mnn.com)
Homs in the hell of armed groups
By Silvia Cattori | February 29, 2012
Homs, now, is nothing but a sinister battlefield where government soldiers face armed groups which, according to independent witnesses about the true nature of the rebellion, are blindly firing cannon shots to sow terror and death, then pretending that only government forces are bombarding the city.
The Western media, for its part, continues to adduce as evidence the statements of local committees which spread propaganda of the armed “opponents”, in coordination with the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a London-based body created and funded by the rebellion-allied forces The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights — which collects the statements of various local committees in Syria — has been repeatedly denounced as nothing but a vulgar instrument of disinformation in the service of the revolt. Despite ample evidence of that, it remains the principal source of information from Syria – together with the famous “great reporters” — and the entire Western media are referring to it, spreading day after day the reports by this observatory.1
To understand what happens in Syria, it is therefore not possible to rely on the Syrian Observatory or on bloggers who are part of this rebellion. We also cannot rely on foreign correspondents who are, as we can see, systematically and from the heart and soul on the side of the armed “opponents”, qualifying them as “heroes” and presenting the battle that divides the Syrian people in an entirely Manichaean way: On one side the opposition which “struggles for democracy”, and on the other the terrible dictator.
Things are not like that. As demonstrated by a recent poll, as well as by the massive demonstrations in support of the Russian and Chinese veto at the UN, the vast majority of the Syrian people do not want this armed revolt, which seeks solely to legitimize NATO powers and several Arab states — notoriously known as champions of democracy, such as Qatar.
If you want to speak of “heroes” in Syria, then you should refer to all parties who are suffering, not only to the “heroes” recognized by the West …
How many Milan missiles were handed over to the rebels?
The number of Syrian citizens appealing to to their president for intervention of government forces is very high. This is especially true in Homs, where the situation is alarming because large sections of the population are held hostage by these groups occupying entire areas of the city — the neighborhoods of Baba Amr, Khaldiyeh, Karm el-Zeytoun — where the people have been calling for months for Damascus to rescue them.2
Their fate has become even more a source of anxiety since the same Milan anti-tank missile launchers delivered to the Libyan rebels during the Libyan campaign, less than a year ago, by France and Qatar, began to be used. We can remember how at the time Sarkozy and Bernard Henry Levy misled public opinion by putting the blame on forces loyal to Gaddafi for the use of these Milan missiles, which were taking a heavy toll on the people.
This is the same disturbing scenario repeating itself in Syria. Politicians, journalists and NGOs are once again taking a firm stand concerning the war, provoked by groups exploited by foreign powers. They attribute to the government forces, as was done in Libya and without proper inspection, the acts of barbarism perpetrated by the armed ‘opponents’ who are terrorizing the majority of the population.
For three weeks correspondents have been repeating that Homs has been unilaterally shelled by the Syrian army. On the contrary, the loyalist contingents attacked by the Milan missiles have suffered heavy losses since the beginning of their intervention. It is not clear whether the authorities in Damascus will be able to dislodge these groups with heavy weaponry from all quarters of the city.
Could the Syrian government not respond?
From the beginning of these battles it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the armed ‘rebels’ are trained, drilled and formed by foreign special forces and that among their ranks the opponents have elements acting on behalf of foreign powers whose presence in Syria is self-evident. Syrian television has recently disseminated pictures of Homs taken by a foreign “war photographer” who followed and filmed these armed “opponents” — the same ones glorified by the “great reporters” — who wildly launch rockets and missiles. An image has attracted attention: In a building, whose stairs are dirty with blood and destroyed furniture, a surprising graffiti with heavy meaning stood out on a wall: “From Misurata, after we have freed Lybia, we came to free Syria!”
Who is responsible for the massacres of Homs, and which objectives does he pursue?
These armed groups, whose most violent actions are attributed to Al Assad soldiers facing them, are systematically presented by the Western press as “foes” fighting for “democracy.”
Why do “great reporters” not bring evidence of Syrian victims of abductions, tortures and murders by these armed “opponents”?
Why has the President of Doctors without Borders recently contributed to this process of intoxication, showing as credible the testimonies of anonymous Syrians with covered faces — standing side by side with the rebels, and attributing to Al-Assad forces and to the hospitals’ doctors unspeakable acts of torture and injury of children?3
Who would believe in Bashar Al Assad’s interest in torturing his people, in raping children and girls? Who would believe that the majority of the Syrian people would continue supporting Bashar Al Assad if he was really such a bloody torturer as painted in the West for the purpose of war propaganda?
These incessant campaigns which defend the violent opposition, and not the people terrorized and oppressed by these rebels, are dangerous. They aim to bring grist to the foreign power’s mill — France, Great Britain, the United States, backed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia — which have been preparing for months the ground for a military intervention in Syria, and are just waiting for the green light by Obama.
Notes
[1] The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights – which collects the statements of various local committees in Syria – has been repeatedly denounced as nothing but a vulgar instrument of disinformation in the service of the revolt. Despite ample evidence of that, it remains the principal source of information from Syria – together with the famous “great reporters” – and the entire Western media are referring to it, spreading day after day the reports by this rip-of observatory.
[2] See: “Une Syrienne, dont le frère a été tué à Homs par des “opposants”, témoigne” (“A Syrian who had killed his brother in Homs by ’opponents’ witnesses”), story picked up by Nadia Khost, February 8, 2012.
(http://www.silviacattori.net/article2790.html)
[3] The role of NGOs that have contributed to the misinformation affecting Syria and thus increasing the risk of foreign intervention, and in particular Amnesty International and Medecins Sans Frontières will be the subject of further investigations.
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Original article in French (23.02.2012):
http://www.silviacattori.net/article2861.html
How the Media Got the Parchin Access Story Wrong
By Gareth Porter | Dissident Voice | March 1st, 2012
News media reported last week that Iran had flatly refused the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to its Parchin military test facility, based on a statement to reporters by IAEA Deputy Director General, Herman Nackaerts, that “We could not get access”.
Now, however, explicit statements on the issue by the Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA and the language of the new IAEA report indicate that Iran did not reject an IAEA visit to the base per se but was only refusing access as long as no agreement had been reached with the IAEA governing the modalities of cooperation.
That new and clarifying information confirms what I reported February 23. Based on the history of Iranian negotiations with the IAEA and its agreement to allow two separate IAEA visits to Parchin in 2005, the Parchin access issue is a bargaining chip that Iran is using to get the IAEA to moderate its demands on Iran in forging an agreement on how to resolve the years-long IAEA investigation into the “Possible Military Dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear program.
In an email to me and in interviews with Russia Today, Reuters, and the Fars News Agency, the Iranian Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said Iran told the high-level IAEA mission that it would allow access to Parchin once modalities of Iran-IAEA cooperation had been agreed on.
“We declared that, upon finalization of the modality, we will give access [to Parchin],” Soltanieh wrote in an email to me.
In the Russia Today interview on February 27, reported by Israel’s Haaretz and The Hindu in India but not by western news media, Soltanieh referred to two IAEA inspection visits to Parchin in January and November 2005 and said Iran needs to have “assurances” that it would not “repeat the same bitter experience, when they just come and ask for the access.” There should be a “modality” and a “frame of reference, of what exactly they are looking for, they have to provide the documents and exactly where they want [to go],” he said.
But Soltanieh also indicated that such an inspection visit is conditional on agreement about the broader framework for cooperation on clearing up suspicions of a past nuclear weapons program. “[I]n principle we have already accepted that when this text is concluded we will take these steps,” Soltanieh said.
The actual text of the IAEA report, dated February 24, provides crucial information about the Iranian position in the talks that is consistent with what Soltanieh is saying.
In its account of the first round of talks in late January on what the IAEA is calling a “structured approach to the clarification of all outstanding issues”, the report states: “The Agency requested access to the Parchin site, but Iran did not grant access to the site at that time [emphasis added].” That wording obviously implies that Iran was willing to grant access to Parchin if certain conditions were met.
On the February 20-21 meetings, the agency said that Iran “stated that it was still not able to grant access to that site.” There was likely a more complex negotiating situation behind the lack of agreement on a Parchin visit than had been suggested by Nackaerts and reported in western news media.
But not a single major news media report has reported the significant difference between initial media coverage on the Parchin access issue and the information now available from the initial IAEA report and Soltanieh. None have reported the language of the report indicating that Iran’s refusal to approve a Parchin visit in January was qualified by “at that time”.
Only AFP and Reuters quoted Soltanieh at all. Reuters, which actually interviewed Soltanieh, quoted him saying, “It was assumed that after we agreed on the modality, then access would be given.” But that quote only appears in the very last sentence of the article, several paragraphs after the reiteration of the charge that Iran “refused to grant [the IAEA] access” to Parchin.
The day after that story was published, Reuters ran another story focusing on the IAEA report without referring either to its language on Parchin or to Soltanieh’s clarification.
The Los Angeles Times ignored the new information and simply repeated the charge that Iran “refused to allow IAEA inspectors to visit Parchin military base”. Then it added its own broad interpretation that Iran “has refused to answer key questions about its nuclear development program”. Iran’s repeated assertions that the documents used to pose questions to it are fabricated and were thus dismissed as non-qualified answers.
The Parchin access story entered a new phase today with a Reuters story quoting Deputy Director General Nackaerts in a briefing for diplomats that there “may be some ongoing activities at Parchin which add urgency to why we want to go”. Nackaerts attributed that idea to an unnamed “Member State”, which is apparently suggesting that the site in question is being “cleaned up”.
The identity of that “Member State”, which the IAEA continues to go out of its way to conceal, is important, because if it is Israel, it reflects an obvious interest in convincing the world that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. As former IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei recounts on p. 291 of his memoirs, “In the late summer of 2009, the Israelis provided the IAEA with documents of their own, purportedly showing that Iran had continued with nuclear weapon studies until at least 2007.”
The news media should be including cautionary language any time information from an unnamed “Member State” is cited as the source for allegations about covert Iranian nuclear weapons work. It could very likely be coming from a State with a political agenda. But the unwritten guidelines for news media coverage of the IAEA and Iran, as we have seen in recent days, are obviously very different.
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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
Obama’s Corporate Tax Scam
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | February 29, 2012
Barack Obama can’t hide the fact that he is the One Percent’s president. Most of what he is dangling for the rest of us this election year turns out to be smoke and mirrors, yet he offers corporations a huge tax rate reduction – a gift that will keep on giving long after Obama is gone. It is typical Obama behavior. He sprinkles his speeches with phrases that mimic Occupy Wall Street, then turns around and promises the One Percent a bigger prize than George Bush could deliver.
Obama wants to lower the nominal corporate tax rate form 35 percent to 28 percent. For manufacturing industries, the rate would fall to 25 percent. Big Business has long complained – dishonestly – that American companies are put at a disadvantage by the highest tax rates in the world. But that’s only true on paper. When it comes to actually paying taxes, European corporations give a bigger share of money back to their governments and societies than U.S. companies do. The fact that the U.S. posts a higher official tax rate, while in the real world U.S. corporations pay lower taxes than Europe, is proof of the absolute corruption of the U.S. tax system, where corporations write the tax code and all of its loopholes.
Obama claims he will extract even more tax money from the corporations by doing away with loopholes. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that. The administration has no plans to revise the U.S. tax code any time soon.
Private studies show the average company pays an effective tax rate of substantially less than 20 percent, and a government study showed that more than half of American companies paid no taxes at all in at least one out of seven years.
Back in the Fifties, corporate taxes made up 28 percent of government revenues. In the Sixties, the corporate share was 21 percent of each dollar of taxes. Today, corporations only account for ten percent of the money the U.S. government takes in per year. In other words, they have never had it so good.
Hardly anyone outside the administration believes that the Obama plan will wind up collecting more corporate taxes than it gives away. The grassroots National People’s Action projects that permanently lowering the tax rate will cost the federal government $700 billion over the next ten years. The loss in revenue will increase pressures to cut programs that serve people – which is another way of saying that the 99 percent will pay for the tax reductions of the corporate 1%.
Even in the highly unlikely event that the Obama plan winds up collecting more tax money through closing down corporate loopholes, the president has already stated that the additional revenue will go right back into corporate pockets, in the form of new or existing tax breaks for favored industries, in manufacturing, clean energy, and research. This, of course, would be the biggest loophole of all. Under a Democratic or Republican administration, every corporation would claim to be a manufacturer, or to be doing research. And, President Obama can’t say the word “coal” without also saying “clean” – so that dirty industry would get tax breaks, too.
Obama’s whole plan is a tax giveaway, not a tax reform. And, that’s the point. It’s a billion dollar election year. Corporations need to know what kind of government their campaign contributions are buying.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Related articles
- Over Last 10 Years, General Electric’s Effective Tax Rate Was 2.3 Percent (thinkprogress.org)
- 5 Key Facts About The Obama Administration’s Corporate Tax Overhaul (thinkprogress.org)
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Book Review
New paperback: Butchered by “Healthcare”
Lies are Unbekoming | October 20, 2026
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
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