Reuters is reporting: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said an International Atomic Energy Agency report, obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, confirmed long-standing concerns over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”
GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com
Porter is an investigative journalist and historian specializing in U.S. national security policy. His investigative piece on the IAEA report on Iran is forthcoming. He said today: “The report of the IAEA published by a Washington D.C. 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.” Porter’s most recent book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
MUHAMMAD SAHIMI, moe at usc.edu
Sahimi just wrote the piece “The IAEA Report on Iran’s Nuclear Program: Alarming or Hyped?”
He said today: “The allegations are not really new. They are mostly based on documents that supposedly existed in a laptop, stolen from Iran in 2004. Iran has rejected the allegations based on the laptop, saying it is false. What is new is that the IAEA now claims that it has corroborating evidence for those allegations ‘supplied by 10 member states.'” Sahimi is a professor at the University of Southern California and lead political columnist for the website PBS/Frontline/Tehran Bureau.
RAY McGOVERN, [in D.C] rrmcgovern at gmail.com
McGovern, who was a U.S. army officer and CIA analyst for 30 years, said today: “What’s really new, if anything, in the IAEA report? And why are some U.S. officials, belatedly, playing it down after a lot of pre-release ballyhoo? Does this reflect a nervous attempt to rein in the ‘crazies’ in Tel Aviv and their neocon friends in Washington? If so, is it likely to have that effect? Poor Obama, who was recently overheard complaining, ‘I have to deal with him [Netanyahu] every day.’ When he talks to him today, will our President’s words be guided by the [Israeli] Lobby and his fixation on Election 2012, or by a less crass, more mature awareness of the huge dangers involved if Israel provokes hostilities with Iran?”
McGovern’s recent pieces include “Israel’s Window to Bomb Iran,” “Switching Focus from Iraq to Iran” and “Petraeus’s CIA Fuels Iran Murder Plot.”
Also see “An Iraq-WMD Replay on Iran?” by Robert Parry.
And “Reading the Iran Nuke Leaks” by Peter Hart.
