In an interview with Spiegel Onlineon April 19, 2011, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, former Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was asked if hewas deceived by the US and its allies when investigating their allegations against Iran’s nuclear program. He answered: “the Americans and the Europeans withheld important documents and information from us. They weren’t interested in a compromise with the government in Tehran, but regime change—by any means necessary.”
In his tenure at the IAEA ElBaradei had faced a dilemma. As a politically astute Egyptian, he was well aware of the nature of the US-Israeli policy of dual containment of Iraq and Iran. He was also aware that his own agency had been used as an instrument to pursue this policy. Indeed, when in 2008 ElBaradei assured Iran that the IAEA will protect her legitimate military secrets, if Iran supplied information about some “alleged studies,” this writer wrote an open letter to remind him about how the IAEA had been used by US-Israeli spies in containing Iraq. In particular, I reminded him of David Kay’s comment about the “Faustian bargain.” Kay, who had served as the IAEA/UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) Chief Nuclear Weapons Inspector in Iraq, had been accused by Iraqi officials to be a spy and was instrumental in building the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 1999 he admitted that some inspections in Iraq went hand in hand with spying and called the use of international organizations for spying a Faustian bargain, “a bargain with the Devil—spies spying.”
I also reminded ElBaradei that under his own leadership the IAEA was still being used by the US and its allies to do to Iran what had been done to Iraq. For example, IAEA reports on Iran marked “Restricted Distribution” regularly appeared—and to this day continue to appear—on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), an organization whose agenda to contain Iran on behalf of the US and Israel is clear to everyone who keeps track of its activities, claims and predictions about how soon Iran will develop nuclear weapons.
Dr. ElBaradei, of course, knew all of the above and, yet, there was hardly anything he could do about it, except to try to moderate the IAEA reports that were intended to bring about regime change in Iran after Iraq. He knew well that the US and Israel had been trying desperately to remove him as the head of the IAEA. As I wrote in 2008, the first lines of the AP report on September 9, 2007, read: “Chief nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei is coming under intense pressure for his handling of the Iran file, with the United States and key allies accusing him of overstepping his authority. The diplomats suggested that U.S. disenchantment with the International Atomic Energy Agency chief was at its highest since early 2005.”
The pressure on ElBaradei to produce tough reports on Iran or be forced out of office continued after my open letter. For example, Haaretz reported on August 19, 2009, that according to “senior Western diplomats and Israeli officials” the IAEA “is hiding data on Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear arms.” More specifically, according to some “officials,” the report went on to say, the IAEA under ElBaradei “was refraining from publishing evidence obtained by its inspectors over the past few months that indicate Iran was pursuing information about weaponization efforts and a military nuclear program.” According to the report, these officials claimed that IAEA inspectors had written a “classified annex,” but the annex was not incorporated into the agency’s published reports. Haaretz also stated that “American, French, British and German senior officials have recently pressured ElBaradei to publish the information next month in a report due to be released at the organization’s general conference.” “The efforts to release the allegedly censored report,” Haaretz went on to write, “is being handled in Israel by Dr. Shaul Horev, director general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, and the Foreign Ministry.” Haaretz then stated what the crux of the matter was:
Israel has been striving to pressure the IAEA through friendly nations and have it release the censored annex. It hopes to prove that the Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons is continuing, contrary to claims that Tehran stopped its nuclear program in 2003. A confirmation of these suspicion (sic) would oblige the international community to enact “paralyzing sanctions” on Iran.
Throughout his term, Israel has accused ElBaradei of not tackling the Iranian nuclear issue with sufficient determination. As the end of his term in December nears, Israeli diplomats are concerned that he will become less responsive and continue to hide the classified report.
Finally, Haaretz stated: “Jerusalem is hoping, however, that his successor, Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, will take up a tougher line on the Iranian nuclear program.” Israel and the US could not have hoped for a fellow with tougher line on Iran than Amano.
In a highly contested election, and after many rounds of balloting, in July of 2009 the IAEA 35-member board elected the Japanese candidate Yukiya Amano over South Africa’s Abdul Samad Minty. Amano was, as news sources pointed out, the “preferred candidate of the West” (AFP, July 2, 2009 and Bloomberg July 4, 2009). Much later, to be exact on December 2, 2010, theGuardian published a confidential cable, released by WikiLeaks and classified by US Ambassador Glyn Davies on October 16, 2009, which stated:
Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77, which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
On February 18, 2010, Amano issued his first report on Iran. As expected, the report was one of the longest and harshest reports on Iran that the IAEA had ever issued. It repeated all the old allegations mentioned in previous IAEA reports and presented them as if they were new. However, unlike previous reports, there was no mention of the fact that the IAEA did not have, and could not show to Iran, original documents alleging that Iran had engaged in illicit activities. The last section of the report, entitled “Possible Military Dimensions,” was the harshest and most ominous section. It read:
The information available to the Agency in connection with these outstanding issues [alleged activities] is extensive and has been collected from a variety of sources over time. It is also broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted and the people and organizations involved. Altogether, this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile. These alleged activities consist of a number of projects and sub-projects, covering nuclear and missile related aspects, run by military related organizations.
Needless to say that the US, Israel and their “expert” think tanks, such as the ISIS, as well as reporters who have been trying to do to Iran what Judith Miller had done to Iraq, such as David Sanger of The New York Times, had a field day with the report.
Amano’s report was opening the way for imposing more US unilateral sanctions against Iran, as well as the push for the passage of the fourth United Nations Security Council sanction resolution. Reuters had reported on February 2, 2010 that “Western diplomats told Reuters that officials at the U.S. State Department have circulated a paper outlining possible new sanctions to senior foreign ministry officials in London, Paris, and Berlin.” The report added that “Western powers would like to target Iran’s central bank.”
On September 6, 2010, Amano distributed a restricted version of the IAEA report on Iran, which as usual appeared immediately on the ISIS website. Amano’s report was, once again, harsh and confrontational. It contained something quite unusual, passages from the Security Council Resolutions sanctioning Iran. Also, for the first time ever, the report challenged Iran’s right to object to designation of those inspectors that Iran had found objectionable, either for leaking confidential information or false and misleading reporting. On “Possible Military Dimensions,” the report stated that the “passage of time and the possible deterioration in the availability of some relevant information increase the urgency of this matter.”
The next two IAEA reports, on November 23, 2010, and February 25, 2011, were not as confrontational as previous reports. But after the latter report, AP reported on March 7, 2011, that Amano could not “guarantee that Iran is not trying to develop atomic arms.” He was quoted as saying:
Iran is not providing the necessary cooperation to enable the agency to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran . . . [the IAEA cannot] conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities. . . Unfortunately, since I came into office, Iran has not interacted with us. . . There has not been progress.
Afterward, Amano told reporters: “We are not saying that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. . . We have concerns and we want to clarify the matter.”
The next report of IAEA, on May 24, 2011, added something quite menacing. At the very end, the report stated:
Since the last report of the Director General on 25 February 2011, the Agency has received further information related to such possible undisclosed nuclear related activities, which is currently being assessed by the Agency. As previously reported by the Director General, there are indications that certain of these activities may have continued beyond 2004. The following points refer to examples of activities for which clarifications remain necessary in seven particular areas of concern.
This was followed by seven allegations against Iran, such as studies on the green salt project, high explosives testing and the missile re-entry vehicle. These allegations were not new and had been based mostly on the claim by American intelligence officials that they had discovered in 2004 a stolen laptop showing Iran’s attempt to design a nuclear warhead. Indeed, the IAEA report of September 15, 2008, written under ElBaradei, had stated the following about these allegations and Iran’s response:
Iran provided written replies on 14 and 23 May 2008, the former of which included a 117-page presentation responding to the allegations concerning the green salt project, high explosives testing and the missile re-entry vehicle project. While Iran confirmed the veracity of some of the information referred to in the Annex to GOV/2008/15, Iran reiterated its assertion that the allegations were based on “forged” documents and “fabricated” data, focusing on deficiencies in form and format, and reiterated that, although it had been shown electronic versions of the documentation, Iran had not received copies of the documentation to enable it to prove that they were forged and fabricated. Iran also expressed concern that the resolution of some of these issues would require Agency access to sensitive information related to its conventional military and missile related activities.
Even though the above allegations against Iran were very old, they were now resurfacing in Amano’s IAEA reports.
On September 2, 2011, Amano issued yet another restricted report that appeared immediately on the ISIS website. Although the content of the report indicated that Iran had conceded and cooperated with the IAEA on a number of contentious issues, the tone of the report was quite harsh. Under “Possible Military Dimensions,” the report stated ominously: “the Agency is increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organizations.” Given the wording, one could expect something more drastic to appear in the next report; and this indeed happened.
On November 8, 2011, Amano released the restricted copy of the report that Israel and the US had been waiting for. The release came right after much publicity concerning the alleged plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington and plans by Israel and the UK to attack Iran. Prior to the release of the report, numerous articles appeared in the media as to what it will contain, even though the report was supposed to be restricted until its official de-restriction. On November 5, 2011, Joby Warrick of The Washington Post even wrote about the “12-page annex to the report.” Two days later he wrote the details of the report and referred mostly to the head of ISIS, “David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed the intelligence files.”
The reports in the media also indicated that some US government officials knew about the content of the report and were consulted about the report by Amano himself. On November 3, 2011, Reuters quoted President Obama as saying at the G20 summit: “The IAEA is scheduled to release a report on Iran’s nuclear program next week and (French) President (Nicolas) Sarkozy and I agree on the need to maintain the unprecedented pressure on Iran to meet its obligations.” The President’s comment came after Amano had secretly visited the White House. On November 7, 2011, David Sanger wrote in The New York Times that when “Yukia Amano, came to the White House 11 days ago to meet top officials of the National Security Council about the coming report, the administration declined to even confirm he had ever walked into the building.”
The much anticipated report, even though it was for “official use only” and “Restricted Distribution,” appeared once again on the website of ISIS on November 8, 2011, followed by an “analysis” a few hours later. The report had the 12-page “Annex” that the media had already reported. The media, however, had failed to mention, and did not mention even after the release of the report, that this was essentially the same annex that in 2009 Israel had pressured the IAEA to release, hoping that it “would oblige the international community to enact ‘paralyzing sanctions’ on Iran’”.
The annex was detailed, but given that it was basically the same document that ElBaradei had refused to publish, there was hardly anything new in it. Much of it was still no more than “allegations” made by a non-identified “Member State” or “two Member States.” Indeed, the words “alleged” and “allegation” appeared 28 times in the annex. Most of these allegations were the same ones that had been found on the mysterious laptop that somehow landed on the lap of the US government in 2004. Some, however, appeared to be new. For example, the report stated that:
The Agency has strong indications that the development by Iran of the high explosives initiation system, and its development of the high speed diagnostic configuration used to monitor related experiments, were assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable in these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career with this technology in the nuclear weapon programme of the country of his origin.
Previously, in his Washington Post article of November 7, 2011, Joby Warrick had identified the “foreign expert” as “Vyacheslav Danilenko, a former Soviet nuclear scientist.” On November 10, 2011, Reuters reported that Danilenko “has denied being the brains behind Iran’s nuclear program.” He was quoted as saying: “I am not a nuclear physicist and am not the founder of the Iranian nuclear program.” The report further added that Danilenko’s expertise was in detonation nanodiamonds, “the creation of tiny diamonds from conventional explosions for a variety of uses from lubricants to medicine.”
Some other allegations were also as flimsy as Danilenko’s case. For example, the report stated that the information “provided by Member States indicates that Iran constructed a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments. The explosives vessel, or chamber, is said to have been put in place at Parchin in 2000.” Parchin is, of course, the same military complex that ISIS had alleged in 2004 to be a possible “site for research, testing and production of nuclear weapons.” It was inspected twice in 2005 and no nuclear activities were found. Amano’s latest report itself admitted that “the Agency’s visits did not uncover anything of relevance.” But now, the report seemed to imply that inspectors had looked in wrong places!
Some other new allegations bordered on the verge of absurdity. For example, the report stated: “Research by the Agency into scientific literature published over the past decade has revealed that Iranian workers, in particular groups of researchers at Shahid Behesti University and Amir Kabir University, have published papers relating to the generation, measurement and modelling of neutron transport.” The report then added that such “studies are commonly used in reactor physics or conventional ordnance research, but also have applications in the development of nuclear explosives.” This allegation is bizarre. Since when publishing papers by some scholars at the most prestigious universities in Iran—whom the report refers to as “workers”—is illegal? What should these “workers” do, submit their papers first to Mr. Amano, or US-Israeli intelligence services, for screening?
In the end, the hyped IAEA report of November 8, 2011, turned out to contain some old allegations that remain unverified and some new ones that appear to be flimsy or strange. So why publish these allegations with fanfare? One can answer the question by paraphrasing the two aforementioned statements by former IAEA Director General ElBaradei and US Ambassador Glyn Davies: the Americans and their allies, particularly the Israelis, are only interested in one thing and one thing only, regime change in Iran by any means necessary. In this endeavor, Mr. Amano is solidly in the US-Israeli court.
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Sasan Fayazmanesh is Professor Emeritus of Economics at California State University, Fresno. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He can be reached at:sasan.fayazmanesh@gmail.com.
The Friday resignation of chief White House adviser on the Middle East Dennis Ross drew sharply contrasting reactions that reflected the sectarian, pro-Israel agenda his presence in government represented.
AIPAC, the key arm of the Israel lobby, issued a rare statement hailing Ross’s legacy. “In his tireless pursuit of Middle East peace, Ambassador Ross has maintained a deep understanding of the strategic value of the US-Israel relationship and has worked vigorously to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”
Rashid Khalidi, a former negotiator for the PLO who now directs the Middle East Institute of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, had a less positive take on Ross’s legacy.
“Since the Reagan administration, Dennis Ross has played a crucial role in crafting Middle East policies that never served peace, which is today farther away than ever,” Khalidi said. “His efforts, which contributed to the growth in the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, were marked by a litany of failures. It is long overdue for him and the bankrupt policies he represents to be shown the door.”
Despite references to Ross’s pro-Israel leanings by his defenders and detractors, his full impact on the trajectory of US policy towards the Middle East in general and the Arab Israeli conflict in particular remains underrated or under-reported.
Serving in four American administrators and overseeing a long and fruitless process to secure an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ross did more than any official to advance Israeli ambitions of expansion at the cost of Palestinian pursuit of statehood and freedom.
Inside the Obama White House, Ross made little effort to conceal his pro-Israel agenda. While serving on the President’s National Security Council, Ross actively sought to obstruct the US from pressing Israel to engage in negotiations on final status issues like borders and refugees, or to apply measures to stop its construction of settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. At the same time, Ross spearheaded Washington’s effort to punish Iran for pursuing nuclear energy capacity, pushing for harsh sanctions against Iran that have proven fruitless. The New York Times described Ross simply as “Israel’s friend in the Obama White House.”
When Ross announced his resignation this week, he chose to do so before the board members of the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank founded by Israel’s Jewish Agency to develop prescriptions for combating threats to “Jewish demographics” in Israel and abroad. Ross directed the think tank for several years before entering the Obama administration. By the time Ross revealed his plans to retire from government, he had already arranged for a golden parachute with one of the key arms of the Israel lobby. In December, Ross will return to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a hawkish think tank that he founded in collaboration with AIPAC. After nearly three decades of advancing Israel’s interests from the inside, Ross’s career had come full circle.
Ross was raised in a strictly secular atmosphere by a Catholic stepfather and a secular Jewish mother. Like many American Jews of his generation, Ross became religiously observant and enthusiastically Zionist following Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 war. Ross’s first paper for WINEP, which he published in 1985, demanded the appointment of “a non-Arabist Special Middle East envoy” who would not “feel guilty about our relationship with Israel and our reluctance to force Israeli consensus.”
He gathered diplomatic experience at the failed US-brokered Madrid Summit, where Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir privately revealed Israel’s intention to “drag out the talks on Palestinian self-rule for ten years while attempting to settle hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Occupied Territories.”
With the election of Democratic President Bill Clinton, Ross’s dream job finally arrived. Clinton’s presidential campaign drew momentum from the Israel lobby’s anger at President George H.W. Bush, who momentarily withheld loan guarantees to Israel to force Shamir to accept a settlement freeze. Clinton’s top individual donor was Haim Saban, an American-Israeli media tycoon committed to cementing Israeli influence over American policy. Saban raised US$3.5 million at an event he hosted for the Clinton campaign, then helped secure the appointment of WINEP co-founder Martin Indyk as US Ambassador to Israel once Clinton was elected. For his part, Ross was appointed as Clinton’s special Middle East coordinator – his “non-Arabist Special Middle East envoy.”
Ross was the most influential American figure in negotiations between Israel and Palestinian representatives during the 1990’s, arguably more powerful than even the President. As a former senior Clinton official told journalist Clayton Swisher, “Part of the problem was with people like Dennis… instead of being a broker – instead of facilitating the parties making a deal – they started doing it as if they were the principal or the President himself.”
Ross played a central role in negotiating the Oslo Accords, an agreement that postponed all major issues from borders to refugees to a later date while granting full Israeli military control over 60 percent of the West Bank, enabling Israel to transform large swathes of the occupied area into a land of settlers while strategically confining the Palestinian urban population into a series of isolated Bantustans. As new Israeli “facts on the ground” that forever altered the landscape of future negotiations, the settlements stood as symbols of Ross’s legacy.
After repeated Israeli violations of the terms it agreed to at Oslo, Ross urged the White House to avoid making any moves that might cause Israel to question America’s commitment to the special relationship. Behind the scenes, Ross spent hours at a time huddling with Israeli officials, helping them hammer out onerous demands, while hoarding communications that arrived from the Palestinians, refusing to allow National Security Advisors to view them. Ross alienated Palestinian negotiators to the point that Arafat personally asked Clinton for his removal.
Inside the Clinton administration, some national security advisers grumbled about Ross’s behavior, demanding he be replaced even though they knew he was entrenched to the point that he was practically intractable.
“Dennis assumed he knew more about the issue than anyone else,” a former State Department official told Swisher, “and when he felt close to getting a deal, it became evident to everyone that his more pro-Israeli feelings were coming out. As we came very close to the time to do a deal, Dennis became very nervous about the Israelis’ position on the potential deal.”
Though the Clinton administration rarely strayed from the Israel lobby’s diktat, Ross was so determined to extend Israeli influence over American policy that he actively undermined the President. In 1999, when Congress attempted to insert a special provision that would have eliminated the President’s authority to block legislation moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Ross argued at a meeting in the White House, “I just don’t see why we can’t move the embassy to Jerusalem.”
At the time, Ross’s son was interning for Senator Joseph Lieberman, a strong advocate of the legislation to move the embassy. In the end, the congressional initiative failed, while Clinton’s inner circle made efforts to isolate Ross from negotiations.
At Camp David in 2000, the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority met to resolve final status issues. After repeated Israeli violations of the terms of Oslo, however Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was skeptical about the usefulness of more talks. He agreed to them only after extended pressure from Clinton, who explicitly promised that he would not blame Arafat if the negotiations failed.
Ross returned to his central role at Camp David, using his control over the flow of documents to ensure that Israel had the upper hand. “The ‘no surprises’ policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking,” Ross’s deputy, Aaron David Miller complained afterwards. Alluding to his boss, Miller described the American negotiating team at Camp David as “Israel’s lawyer.”
When the talks collapsed, primarily because of Israel’s refusal to relinquish key areas of East Jerusalem – Israel and the United States attempted to force Arafat’s team to agree to terms that stood well outside the Arab consensus – Clinton reneged on his promise to Arafat, publicly blaming him for rejecting a “generous offer” in order to help then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak win re-election.
Ross curiously omitted Clinton’s broken promise from his voluminous, 840-page account of Camp David, “The Missing Peace,” attacking Arafat instead as a “skunk” and offering the Orientalist and ahistorical claim that Arafat was psychologically incapable of making the transition from freedom fighter to statesman.
The American campaign against Arafat enabled Barak to introduce the “no partner” theme – that there was no Palestinian partner for peace – a canard designed to justify Israel’s brutal repression of the Second Intifada and its subsequent strategy of unilateralism. In October 2000, before the Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing had begun in earnest, Israeli troops fired 1.3 million bullets at Palestinians revolting against the occupation. Like the post-Oslo settlement construction boom, the lives – and limbs – shattered in the wake of Camp David symbolized Ross’s legacy of failure.
When the George W. Bush administration took power, Ross cooled his heels at WINEP, collecting a US$230,000 annual paycheck while padding his wallet with over US$220,000 in speaking fees from pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC. Ross delivered a total of zero speeches for Arab and Muslim groups during this period. Ross also found time to join leading neoconservatives in making the case for invading and occupying Iraq.
With the mission accomplished in Iraq, Ross joined John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and a Who’s Who of neocons to produce a report called “Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development.” The paper was a bellicose collection of arguments for ramping up conflict with the evildoers of Iran. Veteran national security analyst Jim Lobe summarized the document most succinctly when he called it “a road map to war.”
The same year, Ross emerged in a novel role as a campaign proxy for Obama, who was attempting to weather a storm of slander from his Republican opponents. The latter accused Obama of everything from crypto-Islamic sentiments to a hidden pro-Palestinian agenda, pointing to a past relationship with Rashid Khalidi (the horror!) that in fact amounted to little more than a casual friendship.
From Obama’s vulnerability on the Israel issue came Ross’s strength, allowing the veteran insider to emerge as Obama’s de facto liaison to the Jewish donors who accounted for so much of the Democratic Party’s base of funding.
During the final months of the campaign, Ross was junketed to synagogues in affluent suburbs from Pennsylvania to Florida to reassure nervous pro-Israel voters that he would be their man on the inside, working for Israel’s interests at every turn.
When Obama appeared at the annual convention of AIPAC in 2008, Ross inserted a provocative line that reflected his personal zealotry: “Jerusalem must remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”
By mouthing the phrase, Obama contradicted official US policy, generating embarrassment and controversy that forced him to backpedal immediately afterwards. But thanks to the guiding hand of Ross, the candidate doubts inside the pro-Israel community that he might prove insufficiently pliant. Thus the flow of bundled donations continued unabated.
Ross’s departure from the Obama administration has fueled concerns about the President’s fundraising potential. “Ross’s departure is not a diplomatic problem for the White House; it is instead a problem for the Obama re-election campaign,” wrote Elliot Abrams, the neoconservative former Assistant Secretary of State for the Bush II administration. “For Ross was the only official in whom most American Jewish leaders had confidence. As most of them are Democrats who have long accepted Ross’s faith in the ‘peace process,’ they viewed his role as the assurance that a steady, experienced, pro-Israel hand was on or near the tiller.”
Ross’s dual role as Obama’s Jewish consigliere and Middle East advisor was the ultimate symbol of the Israel lobby’s corruption of American foreign policy. Ross may have failed at each turn, but each successive failure has enabled maximalist Israeli impulses, from the construction of settlements to the siege of the Palestinian population. In this regard, Ross fulfilled his promises to his cohorts in the lobby. Whether Ross and his allies have advanced the long term Israeli goal of securing international legitimacy is another matter, however. Indeed, it is no coincidence that he left government with the peace process in shambles and with Israeli leaders braying for a war of aggression against Iran. Perhaps nothing summarizes Ross’s career as well as a single line sung by Bob Dylan: “There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”
This report is legally problematic in a number of ways.Firstly and most fundamentally, the IAEA simply has no legal mandate to produce such a report on activities being carried on within an IAEA member state concerning items and technologies that may be related to the development of a nuclear explosive device, but that are not directly related to fissionable materials or associated facilities.
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Since the IAEA is acting outside of its legal authority in this section of the report, it does not have a legal standard to apply to its conclusions regarding possible nuclear weapons related activities not involving fissile material. […] In short, as the ancient legal maxim states, there can be no illegality where there is no law. The IAEA is simply “concerned.”
Why they are concerned is itself a matter of curiosity. There is no knowledge or technical ability related to nuclear weapons detailed in this report, and allegedly possessed by Iran, which other technologically advanced non-nuclear-weapon states like Japan or Germany do not possess. These are specialized bodies of knowledge and technical capabilities, to be sure, but they are well within the knowledge base and technical abilities of these advanced industrial states.
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Since there is no evidence presented in this new report by the IAEA Director General that Iran has physically constructed a nuclear explosive device or any of its components, one can conclude that the Director General’s concern expressed in this report cannot be justified as being based upon a breach of a rule of international law prohibiting the activities outlined in the IAEA report. Such a rule exists neither in Iran’s safeguards agreement with the IAEA, or in the NPT. Rather, the reason for the IAEA’s and the UN Security Council’s attention to Iran can only be based on other factors, primarily including the determination of the US and other states that Iran is a threat to Israel, the region and international peace and security generally.
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[The IAEA’s] track record in devoting so much critical attention to Iran over the past nine years, and not to other non-nuclear-weapon states who have for decades engaged in precisely the same production of knowledge and capabilities, through the same processes, has convinced both Iran and the other members of the Non-Aligned Movement (comprising the vast majority of states in the world) that the IAEA has thereby undermined its independence and objectivity as a technical monitoring and verification body. Instead, they believe, it has become a politicized instrument of the foreign policy goals of the US and other Western states. The agency’s overreaching in its new report is simply the most recent evidence of this fact.
With regard to “to other non-nuclear-weapon states who have for decades engaged in precisely the same production of knowledge and capabilities, through the same processes” Joyner mentions, let us just point to two of them (there are many more).
Many of Japan’s political and intellectual leaders remain committed to nuclear power even as Japanese public opinion has turned sharply against it. One argument in favor rarely gets a public airing: Japan needs to maintain its technical ability to make nuclear bombs.
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“I don’t think Japan needs to possess nuclear weapons, but it’s important to maintain our commercial reactors because it would allow us to produce a nuclear warhead in a short amount of time,” Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister, said in an interview in a recent edition of Sapio, a right-leaning twice-monthly magazine.”It’s a tacit nuclear deterrent,” added Mr. Ishiba, an influential parliament member who made similar remarks on a prime time television news show in August while serving as policy chief of Japan’s main opposition party.
Jose Alencar, who also served as defense minister from 2004 to 2006, said in an interview with journalists from several Brazilian news media that his country does not have a program to develop nuclear weapons, but should: “We have to advance on that.”
Like Iran Brazil has not signed the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty plus it has several nuclear activities that awake at least suspicion with regards to possible nuclear weapon manufacturing including an HEU production facility for highly enriched Uranium at Resende that is only partially under IAEA watch. Brazil seems, in total, much more determined and active working towards nuclear weapon capability than Iran.
Joyner is quite right in pointing out that the IAEA is far off its legal basis and highly partisan with regards to Iran. He also caught the reason why this is so quite well.
TEHRAN – Parliamentary sources revealed on Saturday that Iran’s legislature is due to discuss the country’s withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general released a biased report against Iran.
Vice-Chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mohammad Kowsari told FNA on Saturday that his commission would “study Iran’s withdrawal from the NPT” after a relevant demand by a major political faction of the Iranian university students.
His remarks alluded to a relevant demand raised earlier today by the Iranian students’ Office for Consolidating Unity (Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat), asking the Iranian officials to review the country’s membership in the IAEA.
Kowsari underlined the “unreal” nature of the IAEA report on Iran which has been issued under the pressures of the US and Israel, and said the UN nuclear watchdog should not be turned into a place for the US false claims and allegations against other countries as it will impair the Agency’s dignity and credibility.
IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano released a US-dictated report on Iran earlier this week, in a move seen by many, even in the West, as part of Washington and Israel’s efforts to find a new pretext for intensifying pressure on Tehran.
The western diplomats and sources had informed around a month ago that the new report would contain allegations on the basis of some copied documents which have been presented to the IAEA by certain western countries to show that Iran is pursuing a military drive in its nuclear program.
Once the report was released, not only Iran, but also many world states, including Russia, China and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) member states, strongly rejected it and blasted the UN nuclear watchdog chief for acting as a White House proxy.
Iran also said that it would not budge “an iota” from its peaceful atomic activities.
Israel and its close ally the United States accuse Iran of seeking a nuclear weapon, while they have never presented any corroborative document to substantiate their allegations. Both Washington and Tel Aviv possess advanced weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear warheads.
Syrian protesters have stormed the Saudi and Qatari embassies in Damascus to voice their outrage at an Arab League’s decision to suspend Syria’s membership in the Pan-Arab body.
The incident occurred late on Saturday when thousands of people poured into the streets of Damascus to stage protest rallies in front of the Qatari, Saudi, Turkish and US embassies.
Demonstrations were also held in Syria’s major cities of Aleppo, Raqqa, Lattakia, Tartous, Hasaka and Sweida.
In Damascus, some protesters broke into the Saudi embassy while some accessed the rooftop of the Qatari embassy building and raised the Syrian national flag.
Others pelted the Qatari facility with tomatoes and eggs to protest against Doha for heading the Arab League emergency session, where the suspension was announced earlier in the day.
Chanting slogans in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the protesters then gathered in front of the Turkish and US embassies, condemning the Arab bloc for acting out a plot they said had been hatched by the United States.
A similar protest was held against the Saudi-based Al-Arabiya and the Doha-based Al-Jazeera news channels in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
The angry protesters tried to break into the buildings of news channels, which they blamed for following a US and Israeli agenda against Syria.
The Arab League voted “to suspend Syrian delegations’ activities in its meetings” until the peace plan proposed by the body is implemented by the Syrian government.
It also urged Arab countries to recall their ambassadors from Damascus and called for the imposition of economic and political sanctions on Syria.
The announcement of Syria’s membership suspension came during an emergency meeting at the League’s headquarters in the Egyptian capital, Cairo.
Syria has been experiencing a deadly unrest since mid-March and according to the United Nations, over 3,500 people have been killed in the violence. Hundreds of Syrian security forces are among the dead.
While the Syrian opposition accuses the security forces of cracking down on what it calls anti-government protesters, Damascus blames the violence on outlaws, saboteurs and armed terrorist groups sponsored by foreign countries.
Israel is trying to exploit the international community’s uncertainty about how to respond to this week’s report by the UN nuclear watchdog (IAEA) on Iran’s nuclear program to justify a possible military strike against Iran. The IAEA’s report indicated Iran has secretly worked for years on developing a nuclear warhead and might still be doing so.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report is certain to lead to demands by the US and Europe for stiffer sanctions on the Iranian regime. Russia and China, meanwhile, have urged dialogue and cooperation with Iran.
Amid the divisions, British government officials said this week that Israel was preparing to launch a military attack on Iran’s suspected nuclear sites within the next two months, probably with logistical support from the United States.
An unnamed senior official at the Foreign Office told the Daily Mail newspaper: “We’re expecting something as early as Christmas, or very early in the new year.”
Similarly anonymous US military officials have been ringing alarm bells in the US media that Israel might launch an attack. The Pentagon, CNN reported, was “increasingly vigilant” for military activity between Israel and Iran.
The warnings followed a fortnight of reports in the Israeli media of bitter feuds within the Israeli government, as well as with Israel’s security chiefs, about plans to initiate such a strike.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are said to be strongly in favour of an attack. The balance in the inner cabinet apparently tipped in their favour last week when they recruited the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to their cause.
Further reports suggest that Netanyahu and Barak have recently moved from discussing a strike to the stage of “implementation.” In what looked like an additional intimidatory move, Israel test-launched last week the Jericho III, a long-range missile capable of reaching Iran.
Lined up against Netanyahu and Barak, according to the Israeli media, are both the current and recently retired heads of all the main military and intelligence services. They appear to be using the country’s military affairs correspondents to pass on dire warnings of the folly being prepared by Netanyahu.
The only one who has gone public so far is Meir Dagan, who departed as head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, nearly a year ago. He incurred Netanyahu’s wrath early this year by stating that an attack on Iran was the “stupidest thing I have ever heard.”
He undermined Netanyahu’s public position again last month, arguing that Iran could not develop a nuclear bomb for at least another three years and, apparently contradicting the IAEA report, suggested there was no evidence Tehran has yet decided to develop military uses.
That position accords with the 2007 estimate of 16 US intelligence agencies, which found no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. An updated estimate this year has so far been kept under wraps by the White House, apparently because it confirms the earlier assessment.
Iran has long claimed it is only seeking to establish a civilian nuclear energy programme, as it is entitled to do as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has been receiving help chiefly from Russia.
However, some experts believe Iran is also secretly trying to become a “nuclear threshold state”: that is, to get close to developing a warhead so that, should Tehran be threatened – possibly with a US invasion, as happened to neighboring Iraq – it can quickly produce a nuclear bomb as a deterrence.
Dagan and other Israeli security officials are reported to believe that an Israeli attack on Iran would be futile and dangerous. It would fail to disable most of the nuclear production sites, which are dispersed and hidden underground, and would only intensify the pressure on Tehran to develop the technology.
Israel’s security establishment also fears that a strike would lead to severe retaliation not only from Iran but also potentially from Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas; rally Iranians behind their regime; threaten reprisals against the US in Iraq; and bring international condemnation on Israel’s head.
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, underlined that point today when he said any attack by either Israel or the US would provoke “regional war.”
Similarly, Iranian leaders have warned that, if attacked, they would hit back against both Israel and the US. “We would make them regret such a mistake and would severely punish them,” said Hassan Firouzabadi, the Iranian chief of staff, this month.
Nonetheless, the Israeli public appears to be supportive of an attack. In May, 71 percent of Israelis backed the US launching a strike against Iran. A poll this month showed 41 behind a lone Israeli operation, with a further 20 percent undecided. Support among Israeli Jews is almost certainly higher, as the survey included the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and are generally opposed to military action.
The very public display of division in Israel’s political and military establishments on a matter of such importance to national security is almost unprecedented, leading Dan Meridor, a deputy prime minister, to call the debate “insane” and a “scandal.”
Israel is believed to have twice launched attacks on Arab states to prevent what it claims were secret efforts towards making a nuclear warhead. In 1981 it bombed Iraq’s Osirak experimental reactor, while it was under construction; and Israel is widely assumed to have been responsible for a strike in 2007 on a suspected nuclear site in Syria.
Both attacks were carried out without warning.
Israel’s true intentions in this case are hard to decipher.
Israel has been warning of the dangers of an Iranian bomb for nearly two decades, regularly claiming over that period that Tehran is only years or months from building a warhead.
However, in recent years Israel has won backing in the form of a series of increasingly stringent sanctions on Iran, imposed by the UN Security Council, to dissuade it from pursuing even a nuclear energy programme.
But most in the Israeli leadership are known to be skeptical that sanctions alone can stop Tehran from getting the bomb. They argue that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat to world peace and suggest that Israel would be first to be targeted.
Netanyahu has been especially vociferous in promoting this threat, calling Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the “new Hitler” and warning that Israel faces a “Holocaust from the ayatollahs” – comparing Israel’s position to that of the Jewish community in Germany in 1938.
Israel’s real concerns, however, are rather different from the doomsday rhetoric.
In fact, the leadership is chiefly fearful of the domestic and geo-political implications of Tehran developing a warhead, believing it would severely weaken both Israel’s regional superpower status and its tight alliance with Washington.
Israel has its own nuclear arsenal – estimated at between 200 and 400 warheads – which it developed secretly with assistance from Britain and France, and against US wishes, in the late 1960s.
Commentators have noted that one of Israel’s chief aims in developing a warhead was to blackmail the US and force it into a military alliance for fear that otherwise Israel might use the bomb in a confrontation with a neighboring state.
Francis Perrin, head of the French Atomic Energy Agency during the period when France helped Israel to develop a nuclear weapon, said: “We thought the Israeli bomb was aimed against the Americans… to say ‘if you don’t want to help us in a critical situation we will require you to help us, otherwise we will use our nuclear bomb.”
Just such a moment occurred a few years later, in 1973, when the US was forced massively to rearm Israel as it faced defeat at the hands of neighboring Arab states.
At the regional level, Israel’s current fear is that an Iranian bomb would unravel these gains. Israeli analysts were clear on this point as far back as the early 1990s, when Iran was trying to get European oversight for a nuclear energy programme.
Aluf Benn, an analyst for Haaretz, wrote in 1994, for example, that Israel regarded Iran as the number one military priority because it “could aspire to regional hegemony and ruin the peace process by virtue of having nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.”
In this assessment, were Tehran to become a military rival to Israel, it would be able to bolster its position with the Arab states, force Israel to make major concessions to the Palestinians and compete for influence in Washington.
None of these prospects is easy for Israel to live with.
In addition, there are also fears that a nuclear Iran would pose a “demographic threat” domestically for Israel, making Israeli Jews consider emigrating and Jews in the diaspora unwilling to immigrate. Given Israel’s desire to ensure the Jewish population outnumbers the Palestinians at all times, such issues are taken seriously.
In 2006 Ephraim Sneh, at the time the deputy defense minister to Barak, revealed that Israel was not primarily concerned that Iran might fire a nuclear missile.
The danger of an Iranian bomb, he warned, was that “most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will.” He added: “I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.”
But while there is no doubt these threats are taken extremely seriously by Israel’s security establishment, there is much less clarity about what action can feasibly be taken.
Dagan is credited with a series of exploits – including assassinating Iranian scientists, introducing computer viruses into the software being used in Iran’s nuclear programme, and setting up shell companies to sell faulty equipment to Tehran – that are believed to have slowed Iranian progress.
According to a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks last year, Dagan told US officials that covert action, including helping minority groups topple the regime, could contain Iran’s nuclear programme for the forseeable future.
There has been fevered speculation about why Israeli officials have gone public with their dispute about military action.
The disagreement has made Israel look weak and indecisive, fuelling fears that Netanyahu and Barak are sincere about wanting a military strike, even if they have to go against US wishes.
More likely, however, Dagan and others in the intelligence establishment are concerned that, while Netanyahu’s belligerent posturing towards Iran is a bluff, it might escalate into a dangerous confrontation. Haaretz’s military correspondent, Amos Harel, said there was a danger in Netanyahu’s behaviour of “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
That concern is shared by Russia. Its foreign minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said today that Israel was using “dangerous rhetoric” that could lead to “a major war.”
Certainly, there is little evidence that Netanyahu’s threats are likely to dissuade Tehran from developing a weapon, if that is what Ahmedinejad’s regime is really trying to do. In fact, menacing Iran may simply firm up its resolve to protect itself by building a warhead.
The real audience of Netanyahu’s threat of military action, it seems, is the White House and the international community.
According to Israeli analysts, the US alone has the military muscle to take out Iran’s nuclear sites. Netanyahu appears to hope that Washington can be goaded into carrying out a strike of its own to avoid the threat of an unsuccessful Israeli operation.
At the very least, he may hope, Obama will be assisted in trying to win over China and Russia to “crippling sanctions,” as Lieberman demanded this week.
Even intensified sanctions might be used to try to bring Iran to its knees, as occurred in Iraq. That is the fear of Russia. Its deputy foreign minister, Genady Gatilov, warned this week that more sanctions would be seen as “an instrument of regime change in Tehran”.
The question is how Obama responds to the pressure. He is facing a presidential election year, and can expect to come under enormous arm-twisting not only from Israel but also from its supporters in the Congress and among Washington’s lobby groups.
How credible the report is is already open to doubt. Yaacov Katz, a Jerusalem Post analyst, noted that Israeli intelligence had provided “critical information used in the report.” That may have included information that Iran had recruited a Russian scientist, Vyacheslav Danilenko, to help in developing its nuclear programme. Almost immediately, evidence surfaced indicating that Danilenko had no nuclear expertise.
In a sign that the White House might fight a rearguard action to try to stop Israel cornering it into military action, US defence secretary Leon Panetta warned today that such an attack should be a “last resort,” and would make little impact on an Iranian programme but would have unintended consequences, including for US forces in the region.
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.
Robert Wexler, former Florida congressman and a key Obama ally on Israel/Palestine issues, was one of the speakers at a Churches for Middle East Peace dinner last night. Wexler is a liberal Zionist, who (correctly) sees Israel’s long term interest in a two state solution, and has taken a lot of flack for defending Obama from attack by the Zionist right. But last night he was terrifying.
He began by saying he didn’t want to spend much time talking about the troubled peace process, about which there was little new to say, but Iran. What followed was a “Oh how it pains me to conclude this” analysis about how the US (not Israel) must launch a military attack on Iran, due to the progress Teheran has made in its nuclear program. Only then, Wexler said, in a line eerily evocative of the the neocons’ “road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad” line of 2002, will Israel feel secure enough to make peace with the Palestinians. Obama faces the choice of going down in history as the president who was on watch while Iran acquired nuclear weapons, or being the one who stopped it. An Iranian bomb would unleash all kinds of unknowable dangers in the Middle East, but the consequences of the US attack on Iran are knowable. Much as it pained him to say this (channeling the classic Israel “shoot and cry” trope) American military action is the most rational course. He closed by calling explicitly for “regime change” in Teheran.
None of this went over very well with our group. One former ambassador asked a pointed question about whether the Grand Bargain was possible, and when Wexler said it had been tried, the questioner pointed to the Obama administration’s dismissive reaction to the Turkey/Brazil initiative on Iran’s nuclear program. I asked, “While I agreed that the consequences of a nuclear Iran are unknowable, could he please tell us the consequences of a US attack, since he claimed they are knowable.” He didn’t answer, pontificating for three minutes on “what if they got the bomb” and then saying American military planning could game out the consequences of a US attack. One sentence.
A couple of thoughts. First Wexler made not even passing mention of a possible Israeli strike– he seems to know that Israel by itself doesn’t have the capacity to end Iran’s nuclear program or do very much more than damage Iran and stir up hatreds that will last generations. So this has to be an American operation. Secondly, he is a major liberal Democratic foreign policy figure, and Obama seems to rely upon him. It’s the first time I’ve seen a representative of this group call explicitly for American attack on Iran.
At my table, the feeling was that we were witnessing the opening volleys of a major new push for war, by liberal Zionists and liberal hawks. By supporting Obama on two states (not that it has made the slightest difference) Wexler has positioned himself as a necessary ally of the administration, so if he defected because of Obama’s reluctance to launch a war, it might be seen as politically damaging. I would like to think that Wexler has no influence in the Obama White House, but I don’t believe that. And he wants another American war on a Muslim country, consequences be dammed. His position is exactly the same as Richard Perle’s.
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….”
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.
Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni has demanded that the international community be proactive and stop Iran’s nuclear program.
Livni, leader of Kadima – the largest political party in the Israeli parliament – on Wednesday called for international intervention to halt Iran’s nuclear activities in the wake of the latest report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the Islamic Republic, Jerusalem Post reported.
“A lot of countries used the excuse we don’t have enough information [in order to take action],” Livni said.
She added, “Now it’s official. The world has the information and must act to halt Tehran’s nuclear program.”
“The threat of a nuclear Iran is far more dangerous than the economic implications of upholding sanctions on Iran,” Livni commented.
IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano’s latest report on Iran’s nuclear activities was distributed to the 35 members of the Board of Governors on Tuesday evening, ahead of the seasonal meeting of the board, which is scheduled to be held in Vienna from November 17 to 18.
Iran dismissed the report as “unbalanced, unprofessional and prepared with political motivation and under political pressure by mostly the United States.”
Israel, which is widely believed to possess over 300 atomic warheads, also test fired a new long-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. This three-stage Jericho-3 missile which is capable of delivering a 750-kilo warhead to a distance, is estimated to have a range of up to 10,000 kilometers.
Paradoxically, the new nuke-capable missile, which can target many parts of the globe, is not considered a threat in the eyes of the West.
The Unites States — the first and only country to have used nuclear weapons against another nation — has also allocated a new budget to its military nuclear program, despite alleged commitment to a nuclear-free world and promises to reduce its nuclear stockpile.
While Israel refuses to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities or to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty based on its policy of nuclear ambiguity, Iran is a signatory to the NPT and has been subjected to snap International Atomic Energy Agency inspections due to its policy of nuclear transparency.
Iranian officials have promised a crushing response to any military strike against the country, warning that any such measure could result in a war that would spread beyond the Middle East.
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
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