Benjamin
Netanyahu’s stage performance about Iran seeking a nuclear weapon
not only was based on old material, but evidence shows it was
fabricated too, says Gareth Porter in this Consortium News exclusive
report.
by
Gareth Porter
Part
6 - No Official Seals
The IAEA
refused to reveal which member country had provided the document to
the IAEA. But former Director-General ElBaradei revealed in his
memoirs that Israel had passed a series of documents to the Agency in
order to establish the case that Iran had continued its nuclear
weapons experiments until “at least 2007.” ElBaradei was
referring to convenient timing of the report’s appearance within a
few months of the U.S. NIE of November 2007 concluding that Iran had
ended its nuclear weapons-related research in 2003. And the “MPI”
document fulfilled precisely that political function.
Netanyahu
pointed to a series of documents on the screen as well a number of
drawings, photographs and technical figures, and even a grainy old
black and white film, as evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons work.
But absolutely nothing about them provides an evidentiary link to the
Iranian government.
As Tariq
Rauf, who was head of the IAEA’s Verification and Security Policy
Coordination Office from 2002 to 2012, noted in an e-mail, none of
the pages of text on the screen show official seals or marks that
would identify them as actual Iranian government documents. The
purported Iranian documents given to the IAEA in 2005 similarly
lacked such official markings, as an IAEA official conceded to me in
2008.
Netanyahu’s
slide show revealed more than just his over-the-top style of
persuasion on the subject of Iran. It provided further evidence that
the claims that had successfully swayed the U.S. and Israeli allies
to join in punishing Iran for having had a nuclear weapons program
were based on fabricated documents that originated in the state that
had the strongest motive to make that case – Israel.
***
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