The Daily Background

Burried on page A17 of today’s Washington Post is a story of considerable signifigance. For some reason, the Post thought it was more important to put a story about some lady with a bionic arm instead of an article about the IAEA accusing the House Intelligence Committee on Iranian nuclear activities of falsifying evidence and making fake claims about the middle eastern country’s ambitions and activities.

The Post obtained a copy of a private letter written to the House Intel Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) which accused the Committee of producing a report which made “outrageous and dishonest” claims. The Post writes the following:

Among the committee’s assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that “incorrect,” noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.

Bam! I gotta say, all seriousness aside, I found the following two paragraphs hillarious.

The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents.

After no such weapons were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to building nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the administration orchestrated a campaign to remove the IAEA’s director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. It failed, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Gooooddddd. The article also quotes an expert former nuclear inspector as saying “This is like prewar Iraq all over again… You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that’s cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors.”

Filed under: Iran Related, Z-TDB Blog