Deception « Aletho News

The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was

By Scott Ritter | TruthDig | June 6, 2008

I am a former U.N. weapons inspector. I started my work with the United Nations in September 1991, and between that date and my resignation in August 1998, I participated in over 30 inspections, 14 as chief inspector. The United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, was the organization mandated by the Security Council with the implementation of its resolutions requiring Iraq to be disarmed of its weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. While UNSCOM oversaw the areas of chemical and biological weapons, and ballistic missiles, it shared the nuclear file with the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. As such, UNSCOM, through a small cell of nuclear experts on loan from the various national weapons laboratories, would coordinate with the nuclear safeguards inspectors from the IAEA, organized into an “Action Team” dedicated to the Iraq nuclear disarmament problem. UNSCOM maintained political control of the process, insofar as its executive chairman was the only one authorized to approve a given inspection mission. At first, the IAEA and UNSCOM shared the technical oversight of the inspection process, but soon this was transferred completely to the IAEA’s Action Team, and UNSCOM’s nuclear staff assumed more of an advisory and liaison function.

In August 1992 I began cooperating closely with IAEA’s Action Team, traveling to Vienna, where the IAEA maintained its headquarters. The IAEA had in its possession a huge cache of documents seized from Iraq during a series of inspections in the summer of 1991 and, together with other U.N. inspectors, I was able to gain access to these documents for the purpose of extracting any information which might relate to UNSCOM’s non-nuclear mission. These documents proved to be very valuable in that regard, and a strong working relationship was developed. Over the coming years I frequently traveled to Vienna, where I came to know the members of the IAEA Action Team as friends and dedicated professionals. Whether poring over documents, examining bits and pieces of equipment (the IAEA kept a sample of an Iraqi nuclear centrifuge in its office) or ruminating about the difficult political situation that was Iraq over wine and cheese on a Friday afternoon, I became familiar with the core team of experts who composed the IAEA Action Team.

I bring up this history because during the entire time of my intense, somewhat intimate cooperation with the IAEA Action Team, one name that never entered into the mix was David Albright. Albright is the president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS, an institute which he himself founded), and has for some time now dominated the news as the “go-to” guy for the U.S. mainstream media when they need “expert opinion” on news pertaining to nuclear issues. Most recently, Albright could be seen commenting on a report he authored, released by ISIS on June 16, in which he discusses the alleged existence of a computer owned by Swiss-based businessmen who were involved in the A.Q. Khan nuclear black market ring. According to Albright, this computer contained sensitive design drawings of a small, sophisticated nuclear warhead which, he speculates, could fit on a missile delivery system such as that possessed by Iran.

I have no objection to an academically based think tank capable of producing sound analysis about the myriad nuclear-based threats the world faces today. But David Albright has a track record of making half-baked analyses derived from questionable sources seem mainstream. He breathes false legitimacy into these factually challenged stories by cloaking himself in a résumé which is disingenuous in the extreme. Eventually, one must begin to question the motives of Albright and ISIS. No self-respecting think tank would allow itself to be used in such an egregious manner. The fact that ISIS is a creation of Albright himself, and as such operates as a mirror image of its founder and president, only underscores the concerns raised when an individual lacking in any demonstrable foundation of expertise has installed himself into the mainstream media in a manner that corrupts the public discourse and debate by propagating factually incorrect, illogical and misleading information.

In his résumé Albright prominently advertises himself as a “former U.N. weapons inspector.” Indeed, this is the first thing that is mentioned when he describes himself to the public. Witness an Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post which he jointly authored with Jacqueline Shire in January 2008, wherein he is described as such: “David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector, is president of the Institute for Science and International Security.” His erstwhile U.N. credentials appear before his actual job title. Now, this is not uncommon. I do the same thing when describing myself, noting that I was a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. I feel comfortable doing this, because it’s true and because my résumé is relevant to my writing. In his official ISIS biography, Albright details his “U.N. inspector” experience as such: “Albright cooperated actively with the IAEA Action Team from 1992 until 1997, focusing on analyses of Iraqi documents and past procurement activities. In June 1996, he was the first non-governmental inspector of the Iraqi nuclear program. On this inspection mission, Albright questioned members of Iraq’s former uranium enrichment programs about their statements in Iraq’s draft Full, Final, and Complete Declaration.”

Now, as I have explained previously, I cooperated actively between 1992 and 1998 with the IAEA Action team, covering the same ground that David Albright claims to have. I do not doubt his assertion that he was in contact with the IAEA during the period claimed; I just doubt the use of the word actively to describe this cooperation. Maybe Albright was part of a top-secret “shadow” inspection activity that I was unaware of. I strongly doubt this. In 1992, when Albright states he began his “active cooperation” with the IAEA, he was serving as a “Senior Staff Scientist” with the Federation of American Scientists. That same year Albright, in collaboration with Frans Berkhout of Sussex University and William Walker of the University of St. Andrews, published “World Inventory of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium,” 1992 (SIPRI and Oxford University Press). From March 1991 until July 1992, Albright, together with Mark Hibbs, wrote a series of seven articles on the Iraqi nuclear weapons programs for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The final three articles of this series, entitled “Iraq’s Bomb: Blueprints and Artifacts,” “Iraq: It’s all over at Al Atheer” and “Iraq’s shop-till-you-drop nuclear program,” were in part based upon information provided to Albright and Hibbs by the IAEA in response to questions posed by the two authors. So far as I can tell, this is the true nature of David Albright’s “active cooperation.” Far from being a subject-matter expert brought in by the IAEA to review Iraqi documents, Albright was simply an outsider with questions.

In the November/December 1995 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Albright wrote an article, co-authored with Robert Kelley, titled “Has Iraq come clean at last?” I know Bob Kelley. In August 1992, it was Kelley, then deputy to Action Team leader Maurizio Zifferero, who helped me and other UNSCOM inspectors gain access to the Iraqi documents under IAEA control. Kelley was, and is, a great safeguards inspector, and among his many accomplishments is his leading role in directing the IAEA’s investigation into South Africa’s unilaterally dismantled nuclear weapons program in the mid-1990s. Bob Kelley had served as David Albright’s “in” at the IAEA since 1992, when he started providing Albright with access to some of the IAEA’s information on Iraq’s nuclear program. The decision to jointly author an article on Iraq was a big step toward legitimizing what had been, up until that time, an informal relationship.

The joint article with Kelley gave Albright a legitimacy within the IAEA, to the extent that there were no objections when Kelley recommended inviting Albright to participate in a surge of inspections. It was during the aftermath of the defection of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, in August 1995, and the subsequent turning over of a massive quantity of previously hidden documents, including those pertaining to nuclear issues. These activities served as the framework around which Albright and Kelley wrote their article. The June 1996 inspection Albright participated in was his one and only foray into Iraq as a weapons inspector. He was not a chief inspector, nor a deputy chief inspector, nor an operations officer. He was a minor member of the team, Bob Kelley’s bag boy, who for the most part was there to observe. In a round-table discussion with Iraqi nuclear scientists, attended by all of the inspectors, Albright was able to ask a few questions, not from the standpoint of an IAEA expert, but more as an informed tourist.

I was in Iraq at the time, spearheading the very controversial UNSCOM 150 inspection, which found our team barred from entering several sensitive sites in and around Baghdad. On the few occasions when I was able to spend some down time at the U.N. headquarters on Canal Street, I would catch up with the status of the other inspections taking place in Iraq at the same time, including the one Albright was attached to. From all accounts, his lone stint as an inspector was at best unremarkable. He was a dilettante in every sense of the word, a Walter Mitty-like character in a world of genuine U.N. inspectors. There was recognition among most involved that bringing an outsider such as David Albright into the inspection process was a mistake. Not only did he lack any experience in the nuclear weapons field (being an outsider with only secondhand insight into limited aspects of the Iraqi program), he had no credibility with the Iraqi nuclear scientists, and his questions, void of any connectivity with the considerable record of interaction between the IAEA and Iraq, were not taken seriously by either side. Albright left Iraq in June 1996, and was never again invited back.

This is the reality of the relationship between Albright and the IAEA, and the singular event in his life which he uses as the justification for prominently promoting himself as a “former U.N. inspector.” While not outright fraud, Albright’s self-promoted relationship with the IAEA, and his status as a “former U.N. inspector,” is at best disingenuous, all the more so since he exploits this misleading biographical data in his ongoing effort to insert himself into the public eye as a nuclear weapons expert, a title not supported by anything in his life experience.

I can’t say for certain when Albright became “Doctor” Albright. A self-described “physicist,” he allows the term to linger, as he does the title “former U.N. inspector,” in order to create the impression that he possesses a certain gravitas. David Albright holds a master of science degree in physics from Indiana University and a master of science in mathematics from Wright State University. I imagine that this résumé permits him to assign himself the title physicist, but not in the Robert Oppenheimer/Edward Teller sense of the word. Whatever physics work Albright may or may not have done in his life, one thing is certain: He has never worked as a nuclear physicist on any program dedicated to the design and/or manufacture of nuclear weapons. He has never designed nuclear weapons and never conducted mathematical calculations in support of testing nuclear weapons, nor has he ever worked in a facility or with an organization dedicated to either.

At best, Albright is an observer of things nuclear. But to associate his sub-par physics pedigree with genuine nuclear weapons-related work is, like his self-promotion as a “former U.N. weapons inspector,” disingenuous in the extreme. His lack of any advanced educational training as a nuclear physicist, combined with his dearth of practical experience with things nuclear, is further exacerbated by his astounding assumption of the title Doctor. In 2007 Albright received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Wright State University. This honorary award is a recognition that should never be belittled, but it in no way elevates Albright to the status of one who has undergone the formal educational training and has actually earned a doctorate, especially in the demanding field of nuclear physics. While I cannot find any evidence of Albright promoting his honorary title in a manner that indicates direct fraud on his part (i.e., falsely claiming to be a Ph.D. in physics), there are far too many instances where he is referred to by those who interview him as being both “Dr. Albright” and a “physicist” that the uninformed reader might be misled into believing that the two were somehow connected.

Albright has spent the past decade building a solid reputation as an analyst of nuclear issues. One only need look at the impressive work he and ISIS have done on the issue of North Korea to understand the potential he brings to the table as an outside observer on nuclear matters. Informed interest, combined with sustained access to critical personalities on both sides of an issue, makes for insights and opinions that contribute in a positive manner to the overall public discourse. No one who is interested in facilitating informed debate, discussion and dialogue about issues such as those facing us in North Korea, Iran and elsewhere can deny the value Albright brings to the table. That his insight into these matters should be shared with members of the media is likewise something that should be encouraged.

But an analyst must be viewed in the proper perspective, and this begins by correctly defining who and what one is. David Albright is not a former U.N. weapons inspector, but rather an accidental tourist. To call oneself a weapons inspector suggests that one participated in the totality of the inspection process, and as such can converse readily, based on firsthand experience, about the total spectrum of issues that entails. Albright, based on his flimsy résumé in this regard, is not capable of such, and therefore should stop referring to himself in this manner, and encourage the media to do the same. Likewise, all reference to Albright as “Dr. Albright” should be eliminated, as should any reference which places the words physicist and nuclear in proximity. Let his work be judged on its own merit, and not camouflaged behind misleading perceptions created through false advertising.

In that he never has designed or worked in a nuclear reactor, never has designed or worked on nuclear weapons, in fact never has done anything of a practical, hands-on nature in the nuclear field, to call Albright an expert is a disservice to the term and, again, misleading in the extreme. It is not a sin to merely be informed, or to possess a specialty. But informed specialists are a dime a dozen. There is a reason mainstream media do not turn to bloggers when seeking out expert opinion. And yet, when they turn to “Dr. Albright, former U.N. weapons inspector,” they are getting little more than a well-funded, well-connected blogger. If one takes a closer look at the ISIS Report published by Albright on June 16 and widely quoted in the press since then, one will realize that there simply isn’t any substance to the allegations. Albright’s sole source seems to be a single, unnamed IAEA official, bringing to mind Bob Kelley and his role in facilitating Albright’s “access” to the IAEA in the 1990s. The remainder of the report comprises information already available to the general public, or sheer speculation.

This is, of course, the problem when someone who is not an expert on a given subject attempts to portray himself as just that. Lacking in the foundation of knowledge and experience which generally is expected of a genuine expert, the false “expert” commits error after error, not only of the factual sort but also in judgment. Had Albright in fact been a true nuclear expert, especially one fortified with firsthand experience as a former U.N. weapons inspector, he would not have had any association with Khidir Hamza, the disgraced Iraqi defector who claimed to have firsthand knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program. A true nuclear expert would have recognized the technical impossibilities and inconsistencies in Hamza’s fabrications. And a genuine former U.N. weapons inspector would have known that Hamza had been fingered as a fraud by the IAEA and UNSCOM. David Albright instead employed Hamza as an analyst with ISIS from 1997 until 1999.

Albright likewise facilitated the story of former Iraqi nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi being told to the world. As a “former U.N. weapons inspector,” Albright had a passing knowledge of Obeidi; the Iraqi was among the scientists that the IAEA team Albright served on questioned in June 1996 (Albright himself claims to have personally questioned Obeidi). Albright helped sell Obeidi’s story about buried uranium centrifuge parts to the media, even though a true nuclear expert would have known that what Obeidi claims to have hidden possessed absolutely no value in the field of nuclear enrichment, and any former U.N. weapons inspector worth his or her salt would have recognized the inconsistencies and improbabilities in the Obeidi story.

David Albright has a history of being used by those who seek to gain media attention for their respective claims. In addition to the Hamza and Obeidi fiascos, Albright and his organization, ISIS, have served as the conduit for other agencies gaining publicity about the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program, the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor, and most recently the alleged Swiss computer containing sensitive nuclear design information. On each occasion, Albright is fed sensitive information from a third party, and then packages it in a manner that is consumable by the media. The media, engrossed with Albright’s misleading résumé (“former U.N. weapons inspector,” “Doctor,” “physicist” and “nuclear expert”), give Albright a full hearing, during which time the particulars the third-party source wanted made public are broadcast or printed for all the world to see. More often than not, it turns out that the core of the story pushed by Albright is, in fact, wrong.

While Iran did indeed possess uranium enrichment capability at Natanz and a heavy water plant (under construction) at Arak (as reported by Albright thanks to information provided by the Iranian opposition group MEK, most probably with the help of Israeli intelligence), Albright’s wild speculation about weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium proved to be wrong. There was indeed a building in Syria that was bombed by Israel. But Albright’s expert opinion, derived from his interpretation of photographs, consists of nothing more than simplistic observation (“The tall building in the image may house a reactor under construction and the pump station along the river may have been intended to supply cooling water to the reactor”) combined with unfocused questions that assumed much, but were in fact based on little (“How far along was the reactor construction project when it was bombed? What was the extent of nuclear assistance from North Korea? Which reactor components did Syria obtain from North Korea or elsewhere, and where are they now?”). And, most recently, we have Albright commenting about the contents of a computer he hasn’t even laid eyes on, though he feels confident enough to raise the specter of global nuclear catastrophe (“How will authorities learn if Iran, North Korea, or even terrorists bought these designs?” Albright asks when referring to the contents of the Swiss computer).

Nowhere in his résumé does Albright cite any formal training as a photographic interpreter; in any case, one would have to have an intimate knowledge of nuclear facilities in order to know what one was looking at when examining an aerial image. A genuine nuclear weapons expert would have been able to discern the technical faults in the logic of the stories being peddled by Albright. And a genuine former U.N. weapons inspector, well versed in preparing airtight investigations based upon verified intelligence information, would have balked at the shabby nature of the evidence provided. Again, because Albright is neither, he and ISIS play the role of patsy, the middleman peddling misinformation to a media too lazy to conduct their own due diligence before running with a story.

Albright, operating under the guise of his creation, ISIS, has a track record of inserting hype and speculation about matters of great sensitivity in a manner which skews the debate toward the worst-case scenario. Over time Albright often moderates his position, but the original sensationalism still remains, serving the purpose of imprinting a negative image in the psyche of public opinion. This must stop. It is high time the mainstream media began dealing with David Albright for what he is (a third-rate reporter and analyst), and what he isn’t (a former U.N. weapons inspector, doctor, nuclear physicist or nuclear expert). It is time for David Albright, the accidental inspector, to exit stage right. Issues pertaining to nuclear weapons and their potential proliferation are simply too serious to be handled by amateurs and dilettantes.

Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.

Editor’s note: Frank von Hippel has written a response to this column in the comments below. Click here to read his rebuttal.

November 14, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

David Albright: Purveyor of Nuclear Lies

Larouche | November 12, 2011

David Albright, the founder and director of the Institute for Science and International Security, in Washington, D.C., remains at the center of provocative press coverage of the Iranian nuclear program and the International Atomic Agency (IAEA) report issued (to governments) on Nov. 8. “The IAEA cannot get any more cooperation from Iran,” Albright declared to the PBS Newshour’s Ray Suarez, a few hours after the IAEA report was issued. “And I think the time has come that the Board of Governors probably needs to pass a resolution calling on Iran to cooperate with the IAEA and give them some time to cooperate. And then probably, if they don’t, this would then be referred to the Security Council for further consideration.”

Albright seems committed to playing the same kind of pernicious role he played in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, this time with respect to Iran.

Albright was a key figure in bringing to the West, Khidir Hamza, who was sold to, and then by, the pro-war neo-cons as “Saddam’s bomb maker.” Hamza was brought out of Iraq by Albright in 1994, and was then employed by him at ISIS from 1997 to 1999. They co-wrote a book and a number of articles on Iraq’s alleged nuclear program. In one article, entitled “Iraq’s Reconstitution of its Nuclear Weapons Program,” published in Arms Control Today in October 1998, they claimed “Iraq is suspected of having made progress on a number of bottlenecks in its weapons program, at least those that could be done with little chance of detection by inspectors.” They warned that if the UN inspection program were to become ineffective “Iraq could reconstitute major aspects of its nuclear weapons program.”

Hamza was later exposed as a fraud and a liar by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. “Had Albright in fact been a true nuclear expert, especially one fortified with firsthand experience as a former UN weapons inspector, he would not have had any association with Khidir Hamza, the disgraced Iraqi defector who claimed to have firsthand knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program.” Ritter wrote in a 2008 article, “The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was.” “A true nuclear expert would have recognized the technical impossibilities and inconsistencies in Hamza’s fabrications.” Hamza, however, did prove to be very useful to the neo-cons in driving the United States into the needless invasion of Iraq.

Albright and Hamza eventually parted ways, but Albright continued to play his role, as well. On Sept. 7, 2002, Albright published a piece arguing that what had been a uranium extraction facility prior to the 1991 Gulf War, was active once again. “Unless inspectors go to the site and investigate all activities, the international community cannot exclude the possibility that Iraq is secretly producing a stockpile of uranium in violation of its commitments under Security Council resolutions. The uranium could be used in a clandestine nuclear weapons effort,” he wrote. He based his conclusion on commercially available satellite pictures.

While he later became skeptical of claims that Iraq was on the cusp of building a nuclear bomb, he never wavered from the other claims of chemical and biological weapons, also part of the case for war. “In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has those now,” he told CNN on Oct. 5, 2002. “How many, how could they deliver them? I mean, these are the big questions.” The fact that no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons were ever found by the occupying forces showed the fraud of these claims.

Ritter’s exposé of Albright’s lack of expertise received backup from Alexander DeVolpi in a Feb. 15, 2009 posting in response to comments posted in defense of Albright on Ritter’s article, including from Frank Von Hippel of Princeton University. DeVolpi is a retired nuclear engineer from the Argonne National Laboratory, and a veteran of 40 years of field work in nuclear physics, nuclear reactors and arms control. Of Albright, he says: “Dave’s a friendly guy, but I always found him shallow on experience, and now realizing that he was once on the research staff of Princeton University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, I have a better understanding of his predisposition and educational preparation. With no substantive foundation, he has expressed himself as philosophically opposed to nuclear power. This is not uncommon, particularly with academics associated with Princeton who evince no hands-on or other practical field experience regarding nuclear-weapons, nuclear reactor technology or verification methodology.”

November 14, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

UK regulator rules against deceptive settlement ad in The Jewish Chronicle

By Ali Abunimah – The Electronic Intifada – 11/14/2011

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK statutory body that regulates truthfulness in advertising, has ruled against an ad in The Jewish Chronicle for promoting real estate in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The 2 November ASA ruling says that the ad, which appeared in June 2011, was headlined, “Vineyard View EFRAT New Neighbourhood in Dekel UNIQUE DEVLEOPMENT [sic] OF 26 NEW HOUSES.” According to the ASA:

The ad featured aerial photos of the development and bullet pointed text listed the features of the development, including “Independent Group Purchase … Israeli finance subject to status.”

However, the ASA upheld a complaint by Michael Shanahan that the advertisement “misleadingly implied that the development in Efrat in Dekel was in Israel.” Efrat is not in “Israel” but is an illegal colony in the occupied West Bank.

ASA stated, “We considered that the fact that the development in Efrat in Dekel was in the West Bank, in territory not internationally recognised as part of Israel, was likely to be highly material to consumers and that the omission of the information rendered the ad misleading.”

In its ruling, ASA noted that the advertiser, ILAN Real Estate, did not respond to its enquiries. ASA instructed: “The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told ILAN to avoid in future similar ads misleading as to the location of property developments.”

In line with previous rulings against deceptive Israeli ads

The ruling against the ILAN Real Estate ad in The Jewish Chronicle is in line with earlier adjudications by the ASA against Israeli firms and government agencies.

Last year, for example, ASA ruled that the Israel Tourist Office was deceiving the public with ads that implied that parts of eastern occupied Jerusalem were in “Israel.”

Efforts to sell settlement properties in UK fall flat

In a statement received by The Electronic Intifada, Shanahan pointed out that “The advertisement mentioned that ILAN Real Estate had a stall at the Israel Property & Investment Exhibition at the Regents Marriott Hotel,” in London last June, and that “this poorly attended event was picketed by the London Boycott Divestment and Sanctions group holding a banner saying ‘Stop Stealing Palestine Land.’”

Israeli government ads on British Airways also appear to breach advertising standards

An Israeli Ministry of Tourism brochure inserted into the October 2011 issue of the British Airways magazine High Life appeared to clearly breached earlier ASA rulings.

November 14, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception | Leave a comment

The Two Weak Pillars Of The IAEA’s Case Against Iran

Moon of Alabama | November 12, 2011

The annex of the recent IAEA report on Iran claims that Iran, up to 2003, had an active nuclear weapon program and, based on a few hints also claims that such a program “MAY” have continued after 2003. (Only 4 out of 65 paragraphs in the annex point to some post-2003 work).

The IAEA accusations about the alleged pre-2003 work relies on two major pillars of “evidence” plus some “corroborating” information from open and dubious secret sources. The report is based on “1,000 pages of research” claims the IAEA, pretending that volume can make up for quality.

The first pillar of evidence are issues related to the work of the Ukrainian scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko in Iran. The second pillar is a set of papers in electronic form known as the “alleged studies” which were collected on the “Laptop of Death” and which some secret “western” agency years ago pushed onto the IAEA. It is from a combination of selected parts of those two sets of alleged “evidence” and some additional hearsay, anecdotes and innuendo that the IAEA report draws its conclusions.

My analysis of the work of Ukrainian scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko showed that his known expertise is the production of nanodiamonds through detonations and not nuclear weapons production. Danilenko’s work is about precise explosions that push a concentrated detonation wave onto carbon atoms which then, under maximum pressure, form into small diamond crystals. These are useful in many industrial fields for example for high quality polishing of optics and computer hard disk surfaces.

I also demonstrated that Iran has a very active nanotechnology program and that its scientists have published various papers about their progress in this field. Danilenko himself categorically denies having worked on anything other than civil applications of his knowledge with Iran. While some of the technologies used in creating nanodiamonds can also be applied towards nuclear weapons, the IAEA report shows no proof that Iran has done this. That someone uses a screwdriver to fix a car does not provide that s/he plans to stab the neighbor.

This now has some officials in a twist and they are racing to reclaim the lost credibility of the IAEA allegations by throwing more chaff around:

[D]iplomats — who asked for anonymity because their information was privileged — said Danilenko’s son-in-law has further implicated the scientist, telling the agency the expert also helped Iran build a related project, a large steel chamber to contain the force of the blast set off by such explosives testing.Diplomats first told the AP last week that the IAEA had evidence of such a chamber, set up at Iran’s Parchin military complex. The confidential IAEA report obtained by the AP on Wednesday confirmed their statements.

Of course, did Danilenko help Iran build an explosion chamber? He has a patent [USSR Patent No. SU 181329 A3, Priority May 12 (1991)] for these and has built one for his son-in-law’s company Elit which has a picture of it on its website. He himself does not talk about it. Likely because he has the usual confidentiality/non-disclosure clause in his contracts with Iran like all consultants all over the world have in theirs. But the building of a detonation chamber does not prove anything nefarious. Indeed one needs such a chamber if one wants to create nanodiamonds. There is nothing in the IAEA report that proves that the chamber has been used for anything related to nuclear work.

These anonymous diplomats (American? Israeli?) also come up with another “new” “conspicuous” issue. Notice the innuendo that is involved here:

The diplomats said some of those at the meeting also expressed their concerns about indications that nearly 20 kilograms — about 45 pounds — of a component used to arm nuclear warheads was unaccounted for in Iran.The IAEA has long known that Iran has drawings of how to form uranium metal into the fissile core of warheads. But the diplomats pointed to an inconspicuous section of Wednesday’s report — near the end, under “Other Matters” — revealing that an IAEA inspection in August came up 19.8 kilograms, or 43.56 pounds, short of what Iran says it had stored.

See how “fissile core of warheads” is put next to a few kilograms of allegedly missing unidentified stuff implying that this stuff has made it into such a warhead. A simple look into the IAEA report (page 9) tells us that this stuff is nothing usable:

In August 2011, the Agency carried out a PIV at the Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Research Laboratory (JHL) to verify, inter alia, nuclear material, in the form of natural uranium metal and process waste, related to the conversion experiments carried out by Iran between 1995 and 2002. The Agency’s measurement of this material was 19.8 kg less than the operator’s declaration of 270.7 kg. In a letter dated 2 November 2011, Iran provided additional information on this matter. The Agency is working with Iran to try to resolve this discrepancy.

So there is a 7% discrepancy in weighing the stored WASTE and natural, not-enriched Uranium from quite old experiments. Are we to believe that Iran can now make a “fissile core for warheads” from old process waste? Or is it more likely that this is one of the simple discrepancies of byproduct measurement that seem to occur in every second IAEA report and is usually explained in the following one?

Onto the second pillar of the IAEA “evidence”.

The 2005 “laptop of death” “alleged studies” documents focus on three areas: the so-called “green salt project” to provide a source of uranium, high-explosives testing and re-engineering a Shahab-3 missile load chamber to fit a nuclear warhead. One wonders how papers, reportedly written in English, from three very distinct technical fields, have made it onto one laptop which then miraculously ended up in the hands of the “western” secret service that provided it to the IAEA.

Robert Kelley is an American nuclear engineer and former IAEA inspector who now works on non-proliferation at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). As an IAEA inspector he personally reviewed the “alleged studies” papers when those were handed to the IAEA and he does not believe that they are reliable evidence:

“The first is the issue of forgeries. There is nothing to tell that those documents are real,” says Kelley, whose experience includes inspections from as far afield as Iraq and Libya, to South Africa in 1993.”My sense when I went through the documents years ago was that there was possibly a lot of stuff in there that was genuine, [though] it was kind of junk,” says Kelly. “And there were a few rather high-quality things” like the green salt document: “That was two or three pages that wasn’t related to anything else in the package, it was on a different topic, and you just wondered, was this salted in there for someone to find?”

It would not be the first time that data was planted. He recalls 1993 and 1994, when the IAEA received “very complex forgeries” on Iraq that slowed down nuclear investigations there by a couple of years.

So we have Danilenko’s work, the first set of the IAEA’s “evidence”, precise detonations, hemispherical formed sets of explosives and a detonation chamber, all of which is plausibly explained through his cooperation with Iran’s work on nanodiamonds. While these technologies could eventually also be used in nuclear weapon research there is nothing in the IAEA report annex that proves that Iran has actually applied them towards anything nuclear.

We also have some stuff from the “laptop of death” which Robert Kelley regards as possible forgeries and planted evidence. Kelley as well as Shannon Kile, head of the Nuclear Weapons Project at SIPRI are unconvinced that all the above adds up to a clear case against Iran:

“Yes, Iran is making progress, they’ve covered the waterfront in terms of the main technical areas that you need to develop a nuclear weapon,” says Mr. Kile. “But there is no evidence they have a dedicated program under way. It’s not like they are driving toward nuclear weapons; it’s like they’re meandering toward capability.”
…
For Kelley, formerly with the IAEA, the current Iran report is a “real mish-mash” that includes some “amateurish analysis.”Among several technical points, Kelley notes the report’s discussion of Iran’s “exploding bridge-wire detonators,” or EBWs. The IAEA report said it recognizes that “there exist non-nuclear applications, albeit few,” and point to a likely weapons connection for Iran.

“The Agency is wrong. There are lots of applications for EBWs,” says Kelley. “To be wrong on this point, and then to try to misdirect opinion shows a bias towards their desired outcome…. That is unprofessional.”

Both pillars of the IAEA Report Annex that are supposed to prove work on nuclear weapons in Iran are very weak. Unless something proves that Danilenko’s work in Iran was not for civilian purposes and that the “alleged studies” “evidence” is not just forgery it is impossible to accept the IAEA’s report annex as something that would stand up in a trial and could support a case for punishment.

It is no wonder that the former director of the IAEA El Baradei rejected the publishing of such a report. It took the more pliable new IAEA director Amano, installed with U.S. help, to discredit the IAEA by publishing a report which the former inspector Kelley calls “unprofessional” “mish-mash”.

Based on this weak report the U.S. is pressing for more sanctions on Iran but as Russia, China and many other states do not buy the case the IAEA tried to make there is little chance for that to happen.

We can thereby expect more dirt to be thrown at Iran by anonymous “diplomats” in the hope that the media will stay as uncritical towards their claims as they so far have been. It may be that believable evidence of a nuclear weapon program in Iran may emerge one future day. So far it has not.

November 12, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

The ‘Humanitarian’ Road to Damascus

Pro-Israel Groups Outline U.S. Options to Assist Syrian Opposition

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | November 12, 2011

On November 8, the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies jointly issued a discussion paper that outlines “policy options for the United States and like-minded nations to further assist the anti-regime Syrian opposition.” Entitled “Towards a Post-Assad Syria,” the paper advocates imposing “crippling sanctions” on the Assad government, providing assistance to Syrian opposition groups, and imposing no-fly/no-go zones in Syria.

Founded in 2009, the Foreign Policy Initiative is the successor organisation to the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative advocacy group that relentlessly pushed for war with Iraq from its inception in 1997. FPI’s board of directors consists of PNAC co-founders, Robert Kagan and William Kristol; Dan Senor, a former intern at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and Eric Edelman, a Paul Wolfowitz protégé at the Pentagon who, thanks to support from Richard Perle, succeeded the scandal-ridden Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith in 2005. In a 2004 article entitled “Serving Two Flags,” Stephen Green named Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith as “the principals” in a pro-Israel neocon network who had “demonstrated, in their previous government service, a willingness to sacrifice U.S. national security interests for those of another country.”

Established shortly after the 9/11 attacks to advocate for an aggressive “war on terror,” the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has also demonstrated a preeminent concern for Israel’s security interests. Among its more notable funders are Edgar M. Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress from 1979 to 2007; Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, co-founders of Taglit Birthright which offers free trips to Israel for young Jewish adults as an inducement to go on its pro-Israel indoctrination programme; media mogul Haim Saban, who pledged $13 million to the Brookings Institution in 2002 to found the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in order to influence U.S. politics in a pro-Israel direction; Jennifer Mizrahi, director of The Israel Project; and Dalck Feith, father of the aforementioned “security risk” Douglas Feith. “With the disclosure of its donor rolls,” Eli Clifton wrote in a July 19 report, “it becomes increasingly apparent that FDD’s advocacy of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, its hawkish stance against Iran, and its defense of right-wing Israeli policy is consistent with its donors’ interests in ‘pro-Israel’ advocacy.”

While Israel’s longstanding interest in destabilising Syria goes unmentioned, the FPI/FDD discussion paper stresses two of the groups’ well-worn themes: fighting terrorism and protecting human rights. “Long a sponsor of terrorism beyond its borders,” the paper asserts, “the Syrian government is now waging an internal war against its own people.”

Acknowledging that the U.N. Security Council is “unlikely to act anytime soon” due to what they decry as “gridlock” imposed by Russia and China, the FPI and FDD take it upon themselves to propose what options they think the United States has for responding to “the Assad regime’s provocations.” Citing a paper by Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, which suggests the “military options” of an air campaign, a maritime operation to enforce strong sanctions, a no-fly and no-go zone, and even an invasion to carry out regime change, they propose keeping those options “on the table” while exploring some additional “intermediate steps.”

Critical of the Obama administration’s slow response to the Syrian crisis, the FPI/FDD paper urges the President and Congress to “work to quickly pass legislation for harsher U.S. sanctions on Syria.” As examples of relevant pending bills, the paper cites the Syria Sanctions Act of 2011, originally introduced by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Joe Lieberman and Mark Kirk; and the Syria Freedom Support Act, originally introduced by Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Eliot Engel. While few members of Congress can afford to cross the Israel lobby, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to lobby-watchers to hear that Gillibrand, Lieberman, Kirk, Ros-Lehtinen and Engel were the ones to “introduce” what was almost certainly AIPAC-crafted legislation.

To bolster their case for no-fly and no-go zones in Syria, FPI and FDD point out that “leading lawmakers are now discussing the possibility.” Senator Joe Lieberman, they note, “first suggested looking at military options to protect Syrian civilians in March 2011, and returned to the idea of no-fly and no-go zones in October 2011.” They also refer to Senator John McCain’s October 23 speech before a World Economic Forum meeting in Jordan, when he ventured, “Now that military operations in Libya are ending, there will be renewed focus on what practical military operations might be considered to protect civilian lives in Syria.” As those familiar with the careers of Lieberman and McCain well know, they are certainly “leading lawmakers” when it comes to putting Israel’s interests ahead of America’s.

If the “humanitarians” at the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies succeed in getting the Obama administration to adopt their “options” to assist the anti-regime Syrian opposition, Bill Kristol will soon be celebrating the sixth “war of Muslim liberation” that he and his pro-Israel cronies have induced the United States to wage — with little thought for all the “shed blood and expended treasure.” Unless the Syrian people want their country to be added to Kristol’s dubious roster of “the liberated” — Kuwait, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — they had better make it loud and clear that they have no desire whatsoever for the kind of “assistance” offered by pro-Israel groups.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a political analyst and editor of The Passionate Attachment.

November 12, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Iranian “laptop of death” as suspicious today as in 2005

By Jasmin Ramsey | LobeLog | November 11th, 2011

The Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Peterson reports on continued suspicions that were raised about the authenticity of the information presented in the so-called Iranian “laptop of death”–2005 information which the latest IAEA report is repeating.

Not only is the information that’s being publicized about Iran’s alleged nuclear activities “not new“, it’s also based/builds on information that was doubted by experts in the first place.

News reports at the time indicated deep skepticism, when some of the laptop contents were first shown to diplomats accredited to the IAEA. In many quarters, doubt still persists. Recognizing such skepticism, one portion of the IAEA report was devoted to addressing the credibility of the information. But Mr. Kelly, the former IAEA inspector who also served as a department director at the agency, remains unconvinced.

“The first is the issue of forgeries. There is nothing to tell that those documents are real,” says Kelley, whose experience includes inspections from as far afield as Iraq and Libya, to South Africa in 1993.

“My sense when I went through the documents years ago was that there was possibly a lot of stuff in there that was genuine, [though] it was kind of junk,” says Kelly. “And there were a few rather high-quality things” like the green salt document: “That was two or three pages that wasn’t related to anything else in the package, it was on a different topic, and you just wondered, was this salted in there for someone to find?”

It would not be the first time that data was planted. He recalls 1993 and 1994, when the IAEA received “very complex forgeries” on Iraq that slowed down nuclear investigations there by a couple of years.

“Those documents had markings on them, and were designed to resemble Iraqi documents, but when we dug into them they were clearly forgeries,” adds Kelley. “They were designed by a couple of member states in that region, and provided to the Agency maliciously to slow things down.”

November 11, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Moon of Alabama catches two major nuclear-related lies in one month

Arnold Evans | Middle East Reality | November 7, 2011

Not much for me to add here. First the US and Western nuclear policy communities were astir over the idea that a yarn-knitting facility in Syria was actually a planned centrifuge facility. It turns out, and members of the Western nuclear policy community now admit, that the accusation was just false.

I want to give full credit for that to “b” from Moon of Alabama here.

Shortly thereafter, we learned that there is supposedly a steel tube in Iran that can be used to test triggers for nuclear devices. The expertise to use this tube was supposedly transferred to Iran from a Ukrainian nuclear weapons scientist named Vyacheslav Danilenko.

Danilenko is not a nuclear scientist but works on an industrial process that makes small diamonds used industrially to polish smooth surfaces.

Thanks again to b at MoonOfAlabama. A place I need to visit more frequently.

So what does this all mean?

There is exactly one reason Iran having technology that could in theory be used to create a nuclear weapon is more sinister than Japan or Brazil having such technology. Iran is close to Israel and Brazil is not.

Barack Obama, David Sanger – one of the New York Times’ primary scare-mongers regarding Iran – and David Albright – one the the Western press’ main sources for anti-Iran nuclear information – are each committed to the idea that Israel must have a nuclear advantage over all of its neighbors and are each willing to blatantly lie if necessary toward that end.

Once the United States committed that six million Jewish people must be dominant over more than 400 million people in the region, then modern colonialism in the US’ relations with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and others, murders of scientists, sanctions, government-created computer viruses and attempts to deny industrialization and large swaths of technology to large populations follow directly from that commitment.

Obama, Sanger and Albright are proponents of that commitment. Distortions and lies meant to harm Iran for Israel’s sake are going to come from these three faster than even b can debunk them.

November 10, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Iran’s “Soviet Nuclear Scientist” Never Worked on Weapons

By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | November 10, 2011

The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published by a Washington think tank Tuesday repeated the sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.

But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives.

In fact, Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published scientific papers confirm.

It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright, the director of the International Institute for Science and Security in Washington, who was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed “Member State” on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background.

Albright gave a “private briefing” for “intelligence professionals” last week, in which he named Danilenko as the foreign expert who had been contracted by Iran’s Physics Research Centre in the mid-1990s and identified him as a “former Soviet nuclear scientist”, according to a story by Joby Warrick of the Washington Post on Nov. 5.

The Danilenko story then went worldwide.

The IAEA report says the agency has “strong indications” that Iran’s development of a “high explosions initiation system”, which it has described as an “implosion system” for a nuclear weapon, was “assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable on these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career in the nuclear weapon program of the country of his origin.”

The report offers no other evidence of Danilenko’s involvement in the development of an initiation system.

The member state obviously learned that Danilenko had worked during the Soviet period at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics in Snezhinsk, Russia, which was well known for its work on development of nuclear warheads and simply assumed that he had been involved in that work.

However, further research would have revealed that Danilenko worked from the beginning of his career in a part of the Institute that specialised in the synthesis of diamonds. Danilenko wrote in an account of the early work in the field published in 2006 that he was among the scientists in the “gas dynamics group” at the Institute who were “the first to start studies on diamond synthesis in 1960″.

Danilenko’s recollections of the early period of his career are in a chapter of the book, “Ultrananocrystalline Diamond: Synthesis, Properties and Applications” edited by Olga A. Shenderova and Dieter M. Gruen, published in 2006.

Another chapter in the book covering the history of Russian patents related to nanodiamonds documents the fact that Danilenko’s centre at the Institute developed key processes as early as 1963-66 that were later used at major “detonaton nanodiamond” production centres.

Danilenko left the Institute in 1989 and joined the Institute of Materials Science Problems in Ukraine, according to the authors of that chapter.

Danilenko’s major accomplishment, according to the authors, has been the development of a large-scale technology for producing ultradispersed diamonds, a particular application of nanodiamonds. The technology, which was later implemented by the “ALIT” company in Zhitomir, Ukraine, is based on an explosion chamber 100 sq metres in volume, which Danilenko designed.

Beginning in 1993, Danilenko was a principal in a company called “Nanogroup” which was established initially in the Ukraine but is now based in Prague. The company’s website boasts that it has “the strongest team of scientists” which had been involved in the “introduction of nanodiamonds in 1960 and the first commercial applications of nanodiamonds in 2000″.

The declared aim of the company is to supply worldwide demand for nanodiamonds.

Iran has an aggressive programme to develop its nanotechnology sector, and it includes as one major focus nanodiamonds, as blogger Moon of Alabama has pointed out. That blog was the first source to call attention to Danilenko’s nanodiamond background.

Danilenko clearly explained that the purpose of his work in Iran was to help the development of a nanodiamond industry in the country.

The report states that the “foreign expert” was in Iran from 1996 to about 2002, “ostensibly to assist in the development of a facility and techniques for making ultra dispersed diamonds (UDDs) or nanodiamonds…” That wording suggests that nanodiamonds were merely a cover for his real purpose in Iran.

The report says the expert “also lectured on explosive physics and its applications”, without providing any further detail about what applications were involved.

The fact that the IAEA and Albright were made aware of Danilenko’s nanodiamond work in Iran before embracing the “former Soviet nuclear weapons specialist” story makes their failure to make any independent inquiry into his background even more revealing.

The tale of a Russian nuclear weapons scientist helping construct an “implosion system” for a nuclear weapon is the most recent iteration of a theme that the IAEA introduced in its May 2008 report, which mentioned a five-page document describing experimentation with a “complex multipoint initiation system to detonate a substantial amount of high explosives in hemispherical geometry” and to monitor the detonation.

Iran acknowledged using “exploding bridge wire” detonators such as those mentioned in that document for conventional military and civilian applications. But it denounced the document, along with the others in the “alleged studies” collection purporting to be from an Iranian nuclear weapons research programme, as fakes.

Careful examination of the “alleged studies” documents has revealed inconsistencies and other anomalies that give evidence of fraud. But the IAEA, the United States and its allies in the IAEA continue to treat the documents as though there were no question about their authenticity.

The unnamed member state that informed the agency about Danilenko’s alleged experience as a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist is almost certainly Israel, which has been the source of virtually all the purported intelligence on Iranian work on nuclear weapons over the past decade.

Israel has made no secret of its determination to influence world opinion on the Iranian nuclear programme by disseminating information to governments and news media, including purported Iran government documents. Israeli foreign ministry and intelligence officials told journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins about the special unit of Mossad dedicated to that task at the very time the fraudulent documents were being produced.

In an interview in September 2008, Albright said Olli Heinonen, then deputy director for safeguards at the IAEA, had told him that a document from a member state had convinced him that the “alleged studies” documents were genuine. Albright said the state was “probably Israel”.

The Jerusalem Post’s Yaakov Katz reported Wednesday that Israeli intelligence agencies had “provided critical information used in the report”, the purpose of which was to “push through a new regime of sanctions against Tehran….”

GARETH PORTER is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service 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.

November 10, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Israel influenced IAEA report on Iran

Press TV – November 10, 2011

Interview with Gareth Porter, historian and investigative journalist

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Yukiya Amano has released his latest report on Iran’s nuclear activities to the 35 members of the Board of Governors of the agency.

Iran dismissed the report as “unbalanced, unprofessional and prepared with political motivation and under political pressure by mostly the United States.”

The US and its allies accuse Iran of pursuing a military nuclear program and used the false charge as a pretext to convince the UN Security Council to impose a fourth round of sanctions on Iran.

Press TV has interviewed historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter from Washington to discuss Amano’s latest report.

Press TV: How do you see this whole scenario, why would the IAEA release a report based on what it calls foreign intelligence agencies’ reports at this point in time?

Porter: First of all of course, this is a secrete annex –so called– that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed ElBaradei refused to publish in 2008 and was subjected to a concentrated attack on the part of the European and Israeli ambassadors and governments at that point, charging him with hiding relevant intelligence information about an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

ElBaradei made it clear the reason he didn’t publish it when he was the Director General was because the information did not pass the level of scrutiny that was required to ascertain that it was genuine. In other words, he had serious doubts that this was genuine evidence rather than fabrication and there is indeed every reason to believe that he was right, that much of the evidence that has been submitted by the Israelis, particularly, and I am talking about the ‘alleged studies’ documents which are the heart and soul of this secrete annex and that I have written about extensively that these are, I am quite convinced, fabrications. So this is still the same story that we have been talking about for years now, it goes back to 2005 when the US turned over these ‘alleged studies’ documents to the IAEA and the IAEA was then encouraged to go after Iran on the basis of these documents.

Press TV: Who are these foreign spy agencies that are providing the IAEA with the so-called information on Iran and would these reports be of any legal value?

Porter: Well this material, of course, will not stand up in any legal process that had any due process or fairness about it, simply because of the serious inconsistencies, the serious contradictions that are built into them –that I have talked about in my coverage of ‘alleged studies’ documents, particularly with regard to the so-called effort to integrate a nuclear payload into the Shahab-3 missile. This was a set of drawings that I pointed out where about the wromg missile

So the question is who had the opportunity and the motive to fake these kinds of documents. As I asserted in the past, Israelis are the ones who had the motive and the opportunity. They had a part of Mossad –which is known and is written about in main stream journals coverage of this– as a specific office to basically disseminate coverage or documents that are supposed to have come from Iran about the nuclear weapons program.

So they were fixed, they were prepared to put out documentation which would accomplish exactly what these ‘alleged studies’ documents have accomplished. So there was no doubt in my mind and I think that the evidence speaks for itself that Israel was the source of most of this intelligence.

Press TV: Where does this leave the credibility of this nuclear watchdog agency as this report is seriously raising questions on its impartiality?

Porter: This agency, during the period when Mohamed ElBaradei was Director General, was deeply divided between a group of people led by ElBaradei who were trying, I think, to achieve a degree of fairness and balance and a second group which was the group that Olli Heinonen in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 which was really not dedicated to any objective view or presentation of the evidence but was interested in putting Iran in the dock and making a case that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons regardless of what it took.

I have interviewed Olli Heinonen a couple of times, once in person once on the phone, and what I got from Olli Heinonen was a series of “I don’t knows”, “I don’t remembers” and basically inability to respond to the inconsistencies –which I pointed out in the reports that he has been responsible for.

November 10, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

USA spending more on nukes now than during Cold War

RT | 10 November, 2011

Though it has been decades since the Cold War came to a close, the United States government spends more money on nuclear warheads now than it did during its stand-off with the Soviet Union.

As the US vows to cut down its arsenal of nuclear weapons, the amount the country spends annually on maintaining its supply is much more than America invested each year during the Cold War. Estimates suggest that currently the US puts around $55 billion annually into its nuclear weapons program, reports Mother Jones; by comparison, the cost of the nuke complex for the country during the Cold War ran at an average of only $35 billion each year.

Only three months into his presidency, Barack Obama said in April 2009 that he envisioned an Earth in the future fee of nuclear weapons. Just two years later, however, America’s arsenal of those warheads amounts to roughly 2,500 nukes ready to be deployed.

It was only less than two weeks ago that the United States finally dismantled its largest atomic bomb, the B53, which was said to be 600 times more powerful than the nuke that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan towards the finale of the Second World War. As that nuke was dismantled, Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman told NPR that the bomb was a “Cold War relic” and showed the direction of dismantling that the United States was heading towards.

Even if the country is cutting back on its nukes, the United States has a backup stash larger than the active bombs, allowing for the country to in total have 5,113 nuclear warheads in its position. The surplus of not-quite-ready nukes is at 2,600, and though they cannot be deployed at a drop of a hat like the others, they can be reanimated as full-fledged warheads.

Peter Fedewa of the pro-disarmament Ploughshares Fund says that those nukes “could be ‘raised from the dead’ and brought back into deployment with relative ease.”

Under the START treaty that the US signed with Russia last year, both countries vow to soon enough limit their stash of active warheads to only 1,500. The document does not, however, say how many back-up nukes either country can have. In the interim, Mother Jones reports that the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas holds around 3,000 warheads that are on the schedule to be dismantled, something America used to do at a pace of around 1,300 per year. Last year, however, both Congress and the White House said that the country would cut back on the cost of dismantling the warheads and instead now invest the money on the upkeep of already dead nukes.

At the country’s current rate, dismantling the thousands of atomic nukes would take longer than a decade Joe Cirincione, a longtime analyst of nuclear weapons policy, tells NPR. Currently, only around 250 warheads are dismantled at Pantex each year.

It doesn’t help that the country is more interested in revamping the retired nukes than pulling the plug on them entirely, either.

In 2012, the country will spend $4.1 billion on the “refurbishment” of retired nukes, while only a fraction of that — $57 million — will be invested in dismantling them. That figure accounts for less than one percent of the country’s total budget for the nuclear program. In all, America’s nuclear program operates at a cost of around $55 billion, which is spread across the Departments of Defense, Energy and Homeland Security. Despite Obama’s instance on curbing the program, the tally of funding is believed to have gone up by around $3 billion since only 2008, which at the time accounted for five times the budget of the Department of State — or 14 times what the Energy Department spends on everything else.

“The same facilities that dismantle U.S. nuclear warheads are also refurbishing US warheads,” Cirincione adds to NPR. “And right now a decision has been made to prioritize refurbishment. So we’re actually building more nuclear weapons than we’re dismantling. That didn’t use to be the case, but it is now.”

When weapons are dismantled at the current snail’s pace, the risks in place are of immense danger as well. “There are very strict manuals on exactly what you have to do,” Hans Kristensen, spokesman for the Federation of American Scientists, tells MSNBC. “How much pressure can you apply to each screw, what kind of glue holds the chemical high explosives together around the spear of highly enriched uranium.”

Both Russia and America have agreed to have an arsenal of only 1,550 deployed nukes come 2018, only a fraction of the 22,000-plus on hand at the end of the Cold War. Obama told an audience in Prague in 2009 he aimed “To put an end to Cold War thinking,” adding that America “will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.” As the country is investing more money in rebuilding nukes than kicking them to the curb, however, will the president follow through with his plea or will it be added to the list of other promises gone unfulfilled?

November 9, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

IAEA Lacks Credibility

PressTVGlobalNews | November 9, 2011

November 9, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Video, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

The PA’s UN bid: self-interest at its best?

By Mohannad El-Khairy | Money & Mud Uncensored | October 31, 2011

Achieving much needed international recognition of Palestine’s right to exist on one hand, and potentially sealing the disenfranchisement of Palestinian rights, particularly those of state-less refugees, on the other. It’s like being stuck between a rock and hard place, isn’t it?

The Statehood Argument, Bottom-lined

We have what appears to be a well thought-out strategy by the Palestinian government in the West Bank to demand a permanent seat at the UN. Hussam Zomlot, Fatah’s senior official in the Department of Foreign Relations, outlined the strategy clearly on Al Jazeera:

“There are three main benefits that have directed or inspired our move – legal, political, and strategic. Legally: this will establish a legal parity, as a state. The main idea is for defence, to prevent an attack. There is a lot of talk about the ICC and how as a state we can pursue cases through them […] Legally, a Palestinian state is a deterrent weapon […] We are not going to engage in attacks like Israel does. Our deterrent is international law. Soldiers at checkpoints will think twice before hurting a lady at the border. In political terms: we have won half of the exercise […] We have reinforced forcefully on the international agenda the need for a Palestinian state. Now every single activist and journalist has been speaking about Palestine. Thus our political cause has already been achieved. Strategically: our interest is to challenge the status quo. You may ask: ‘How this will challenge the status quo? How has Israel sustained the status quo for nearly twenty years?’ The bilateral process has led nowhere, and one of the tools to sustain the status quo was negotiations themselves. We stopped that, and we stopped that strategically. Negotiations under the previous terms were just prolonging negotiations. The terms of reference were created and accepted by Israel before we even started. We are not going back to the old days of nonsense.”

Sounds like proper stuff. But Israel was never afraid of the legal card in the first place. In fact, its very raison d’etre in the West Bank and Gaza is illegal according to both the UN and the ICC. Strategically, Mahmoud Abbas contradicted Zomlot’s third point by declaring that he is still open to negotiations with the Israelis after his speech.

A few questions, then:

1. Why has the decision been unilaterally taken by Mahmoud Abbas without a consensus from all factions representing the Palestinian people?

2. Why hasn’t the PA been transparent about its plan at the UN with the global Palestinian diaspora, especially with Palestinian refugees and – yes – Palestinians living inside Israel?

3. What about the facts on the ground enabled by Israel’s military occupation– expanding settlements, land annexations, check-points, the Apartheid Wall, and the creation of Bantustans in the West Bank?

4. Why now?

5. Are there other possible motives?

PA Policies: a Brief Reminder

The first question stems from the PA’s consistent, ubiquitous and self-proclaimed title as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian nation. But let’s face it; rhetoric aside, if history were to be the judge, Abbas hasn’t really looked out for the benefit of the Palestinian people since he took office. Chanting all the right slogans is what politicians do. And although many applaud his resilience in pursuing a comprehensive two-state solution, a lot of his policies contradict the rhetoric. The masses remain, like the state of their existence, in the dark.

The Palestine Papers didn’t have to happen to make such statements true. Head to the West Bank and there’s enough evidence to understand why. On many levels, the PA has been accused of corrupt, oppressive and even collaborative behavior, one that has coordinated the occupation with Israel to keep the West Bank tamed and “head-ache free”. More elementally, the PA works to benefit a minority wealthy class within Palestinian society, and destroying the middle-class, while isolating the majority poor. The purpose of the Palestinian resistance is not only to get rid of Israel’s occupation, but to empower the Palestinian nation at all levels of society. So why the UN bid for statehood now? Alot of it has to do with timing. Let’s work our way backwards.

PA officials have openly expressed that they have built the necessary institutions for a state, and thus are ready for statehood. “Institution building”, in this context, means the PA’s security apparatus has been beefed up, the neo-liberalization of Palestine’s economy is ready, and political dominance based on serving the financial interests of corporations can be implemented.

I recently read a fascinating piece by Virginia Tilly reporting from the West Bank. Here’s an excerpt showing what happened in South Africa and its eery similarities with Palestine: “[…] More importantly, the South African comparison helps illuminate why the ambitious projects of pacification, “institution building” and economic development that the Ramallah PA and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have whole-heartedly embarked upon are not actually exercises in “state-building.” Rather, they emulate with frightening closeness and consistency South Africa’s policies and stages in building the Bantustan/Homelands. Indeed, Fayyad’s project to achieve political stability through economic development is the same process that was openly formalized in the South African Homeland policy under the slogan ‘separate development’. […] Under such vulnerable conditions, no government can exercise real power and ‘separate development’ must equate with permanent extreme dependency, vulnerability and dysfunctionality. […] Declaring independence will not solve the problem of Palestinian weakness; it will only concretize it.” Concretize; as in: solidify.

Take the massive security cooperation that took place between Israel and the PA, exposed by both wikileaks and the Palestine Papers. A December 30 2008 cable from Jerusalem details the contacts made between the PA and Israel regarding West Bank protests against the Zionist regime’s assault on their brothers and sisters in Gaza:

“PA commanders said they told IDF officers that President Abbas and PM Fayyad both directed them to avoid situations that could develop into confrontations with the IDF. The security chiefs said Abbas and Fayyad passed a message to all Palestinian factions, at a PLO Executive Committee meeting on December 29, that only peaceful marches away from flashpoints would be permitted. PA commanders noted they have no control over Areas B and C such as Qalandiya and Nil’in, and would need IDF approval to move PA forces to those areas to prevent clashes between protesters and the IDF […] PA commanders said their IDF counterparts agreed to expedite coordination and movement requests and exchange information on possible disturbances, as both sides have an interest in preventing West Bank violence. They said both sides also agreed not to leak substantive discussions about the meeting to the press, given the sensitivity of security coordination in a time of Palestinian outrage over events in Gaza”.

Similarly, why did Abbas’ forces violently chase, capture, beat and torture protesters showing their solidarity with the masses of the Arab world earlier this year? With the recent storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, hasn’t the Arab Spring clearly shown that Israeli occupation and Arab dictatorships are both being rejected because they are part of the same order? The fact of the matter is that they feed off each other politically and economically to oppress the masses — whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or even Israel itself. It has been argued that Abbas is part of this same order, proof for which is when he came out to publicly support Mubarak during the Egyptian Revolution.

So the situation on the ground is getting worse. More people are losing their lands, there is more repression of free speech, more disenfranchised youth, and a wider poor-rich gap. One must also ask who benefits with the PA’s UN bid for statehood. With public opinion reaching new lows, it is clear that in order to remain politically legitimate in the eyes of the masses, a bold step needed to be taken, one that will strengthen the PA’s image amongst its people despite the severe realities it has created on the ground.

The Word on the Street

This clear disconnect between the people and the government begs the question “then what?”. The Occupy Wall Street movement in America is the country’s very own intifada against corporate greed and policies that benefit only the rich and disenfranchise the “99%”. Do we need our government to be our own worst enemy serving the interest of the elite, like in the West? Inking the miserable status-quo on the ground mainly benefits two entities– one in the short-term and another in the long-term– while handicapping a third. On the short-term, the PA clearly benefits as it would manipulatively gain the masses’ approval, be able to exercise full control over the West Bank, while receiving all the new privileges of a member state in the UN. And as long as it doesn’t have a right-wing neo-fascist regime at the helm, Israel benefits on the long-term as it effectively seals in the characteristics of a Palestinian state it can thrive on, that is: capitulation and collaboration. A Palestine that turns its people into cheap labor isn’t a free nor liberated Palestine at all.

And here’s the kicker: Although two Israeli lobby groups in the US– the right-leaning Israel Project and the left-leaning J-Street — both came out against the Palestinian move to the UN, they are also against Congress’ proposed bill to cut funding to the PA, reminding us all of what the PA’s actual role in the West Bank is and why US officials like Senators John McCain, John Kerry and Elliot Abrams are becoming increasingly vocal about maintaining aid to the PA.

NYC-based journalist Alex Kane, who focuses his writings on Israel and Palestine, puts it this way: “The PA’s most heralded accomplishment over their decade-plus tenure was the establishment of ‘law and order’ in the West Bank, which in part meant cracking down on political dissidents through the creation of a repressive security force. The PA security forces, which have been accused of detention, arbitrary arrest and torture, have worked hand-in-hand with the Israeli military, the US and the EU to keep the West Bank void of resistance to the occupation”.

We can hear all the rhetoric we want, but the situation on the ground is reflective of the truth. Here’s a quote from a Palestinian blogger in the West Bank who summed it all up:

“Abbas and Co. are pretending (or maybe they actually believe?) that every thing’s alright. Take for example Rawabi, the name a new Palestinian town to be built by ‘Palestinian real-estate’ company Bayti. This is ironic on several levels. Instead of coming to the assistance of Palestinian villages that are experiencing actual real estate theft on behalf of Israeli colonial settlers, the PA has decided to build a new town just outside of Ramallah. The fact is that this new town – praised by Bayti as the first ‘planned’ Palestinian town – is part of Israel’s ‘economic development’ policy (which is essentially the Israeli convergence plan). It also very much in line with USAID’s idea of ‘economic zones’. The added irony is that the PA must ask permission from Israel in order to gain control of the so-called ‘land corridor’ that will link Rawabi to Ramallah. And if that wasn’t enough, a Rawabi initiative entitled Grow for a Greener Palestine, will see the Jewish National Fund (infamous for stealing Palestinian land and supporting right-wing settlers in their quest to confiscate Palestinian land) plant trees in Rawabi. So settlers are uprooting Palestinian olive trees on one hand then planting trees in Bantustans in another. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?”

This is the economics for post-apartheid, I’m afraid. Israel and the PA win no matter what the outcome is, unless the masses from both sides reject their governments and work together to get rid of extremism and build a common, pragmatic future that is defined by justice, freedom and equality for both. The recent tent protests against the increasingly harsh and unequal living conditions in the Jewish state are an opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians to reject their governments and come together in a show of true human solidarity against the elitist establishments on both sides.

One cannot help but feel moved and overwhelmed by Abbas’ evocative and powerful speech at the UN on September 23rd 2011. The standing ovations, the diplomatic and political support of over 140 nations, as well as what appears to be the PA’s last push to pressure Israel into a two-state solution, had a definitely positive resonance in our hearts and minds. But that is how powerful Palestine is emotionally– that we’ll go as far as appreciating, indeed applauding, the PA’s bid for independence, despite the fact that political independence does not necessarily mean freedom, from its own kind of oppression.

November 9, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

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