[Previous entry: "Americans turning inward, study says"] [Next entry: "The Pentgon's Plans to Invade Venezuela"]

11/19/2005:

"The New York Times, Nuclear Weapons and Iran: Stupidity, Laziness or Déjà vu All Over Again?"

Déjà vu All Over Again? . . .

On November 13, 2005, the Times published a report by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger headlined, “Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims”. The report contains allegations of secret Iranian plans to obtain a nuclear warhead based on information contained in a stolen laptop computer. The allegations are made by anonymous US “officials”, in the mode of former Times reporter Judith Miller, whose fabulously wrong pre-Iraq invasion September 2002 report on Iraq’s quest for aluminum tubes for use in a clandestine nuclear weapons program set the stage for Bush administration heavies Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice to start talking about tubes + Saddam Hussein x 9-11 = mushroom clouds over America.

Like Miller before them, in their story Broad-Sanger rely heavily on anonymous “American officials”, “American intelligence officials”, “officials” in the Bush administration, etc. to roll out the “strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead.”

What is the evidence found in the laptop? “More than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments” that show “a long effort to design a nuclear warhead.” Where did the laptop come from? “American officials have said little. . . about the origins of the laptop, other than that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a source in Iran who they said had received it from a second person, now believed to be dead.” Is the evidence (or intelligence) convincing? “[W]hile the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.” What is Iran’s response? Not in the Broad-Sanger article but in a Reuters article, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said: “The baseless claim made us laugh. We do not use laptops to keep our classified documents.''
commondreams.org

UN agency says Iran got nuclear designs; warhead plan suspected