"No Shred of Evidence",
Iran Building Nukes,
Ex Head of IAEA Says
By Sherwood Ross
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25088
Global Research, June 2, 2011
The
former Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA)
said in a new published report that he had not seen “a shred of
evidence” that Iran was “building nuclear-weapons facilities and using
enriched materials.”
Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize
recipient who spent 12 years at the IAEA, told investigative journalist
Seymour Hersh, “I don't believe Iran is a clear and present danger. All I
see is the hype about the threat posed by Iran.”
El Baradei, who is now a candidate for
the presidency of Egypt, added, “The core issue is mutual lack of trust.
I believe there will be no solution until the day that the United
States and Iran sit down together to discuss the issues and put pressure
on each other to find a solution.”
El Baradei's remarks are contained in an article by Hersh titled “Iran And The Bomb,” published in the June 6th issue of The New Yorker magazine.
Hersh
points out that the last two U.S. National Intelligence Estimates
(N.I.E.s) on Iranian nuclear progress “have stated that there is no
conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb
since 2003.”
An
N.I.E. Report supposedly represents the best judgment of the senior
offices from all the major American intelligence agencies.
The
latest report, which came out this year and remains highly classified,
is said by Hersh to reinforce the conclusion of the last N.I.E. Report
of 2007, that “Iran halted weaponization in 2003.”
A
retired senior intelligence officer, speaking of the latest N.I.E.
Report, told Hersh, “The important thing is that nothing substantially
new has been learned in the last four years, and none of our
efforts---informants, penetrations, planting of sensors---leads to a
bomb.”
Hersh
revealed that over the past six years, soldiers from the Joint Special
Operations Force, working with Iranian intelligence assets, “put in
place cutting-edge surveillance techniques” to spy on suspected Iran
facilities. These included:
# Surreptitiously removing street signs and replacing them with signs containing radiation sensors.
#
Removing bricks from buildings suspected of containing nuclear
enrichment activities and replacing them “with bricks embedded with
radiation-monitoring devices.”
#
Spreading high-powered sensors disguised as stones randomly along
roadways where a suspected underground weapon site was under
construction.
# Constant satellite coverage of major suspect areas in Iran.
Going
beyond these spy activities, two Iranian nuclear scientists last year
were assassinated and Hersh says it is widely believed in Tehran that
the killers were either American or Israeli agents.
Hersh
quotes W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army intelligence officer and former
ranking Defense Intelligence Agency(DIA) analyst on the Middle East as
saying that after the disaster in Iraq, “Analysts in the intelligence
community are just refusing to sign up this time for a lot of baloney.”
The DIA is the military counterpart of the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA).
Hersh
writes that Obama administration officials “have often overstated the
available intelligence about Iranian intentions.” He noted that Dennis
Ross, a top Obama adviser on the region, told a meeting of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee that Iran had “significantly expanded
its nuclear program.”
Hersh
noted further that last March, Robert Einhorn, the special arms control
adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told the Arms Control
Assn. The Iranians “are clearly acquiring all the necessary elements of a
nuclear-weapons capability.”
Additionally,
Senator Joseph Lieberman, a strong Israel supporter, told Agence
France-Presse, “I can't say much in detail but it's pretty clear that
they're(Iran) continuing to work seriously on a nuclear-weapons
program.”
Hersh
recalled that “As Presidential candidates in 2008, both Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton had warned of an Iranian nuclear arsenal, and
occasionally spoke as if it were an established fact that Iran had
decided to get the bomb.”
But
last March, Lieutenant General James Clapper, the Director of National
Intelligence which creates the N.I.E. Assessments, told the Senate Armed
Services Committee that Iran had not decided to re-start its nuclear
weapons work. When asked by Committee Chairman Carl Levin, “What is the
level of confidence that you have (in that estimate)? Is that a high
level?” Clapper replied, “Yes, it is.”
At a
round of negotiations in Istanbul five months ago, Iranian officials
told Western diplomats that the United States and its allies need to
acknowledge Iran's right to enrich uranium and that they must lift all
sanctions against Iran.
Clinton
adviser Einhorn has said that because of those sanctions Iran may have
lost as much as $60 billion in energy investments and that Iran had also
lost business in such industries as shipping, banking, and
transportation. “The sanctions bar a wide array of weapons and missile
sales to Iran, and make it more difficult for banks and other financial
institutions to do business there,” Hersh writes.
However,
Hersh says, “The general anxiety about the Iranian regime is firmly
grounded” even if there is no hard evidence it is working to build a
nuclear weapon. “President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned
the Holocaust and expressed a desire to see the state of Israel
eliminated, and he has defied the 2006 United Nations resolution calling
on Iran to suspend its nuclear-enrichment program.”
He goes
on to write that while IAEA inspectors “have expressed frustration with
Iran's level of cooperation and cited an increase in production of
uranium...they have been unable to find any evidence that enriched
uranium has been diverted to an illicit weapons program.”
One
approach to resolving the Iran nuclear issue has been suggested by
former ranking American diplomat Thomas Pickering, a retired ambassador
who served in Russia, Israel, Jordan and India, and who has been active
in the American Iranian Council, devoted to the normalization of
relations with Iran.
According
to Hersh, Pickering has been involved “in secret, back-channel talks
with...some of the key advisers close to Ahmadinejad” and has long
sought a meeting with President Obama. Hersh quotes one of Pickering's
colleagues as saying if Obama were to grant a meeting, Pickering would
tell him: “Get off your no-enrichment policy, which is getting you
nowhere. Stop your covert activities. Give the Iranians a sign that
you're not pursuing regime change. Instead, the Iranians see continued
threats, sanctions, and covert operations.”
The website Politico.com reports
in its May 31 issue that a senior Administration intelligence official
asserted Hersh's article was nothing more than “a slanted book report.”
Sherwood
Ross is a Miami, Fla.-based public relations consultant who also writes
on political and military affairs. Contact him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
