Is ElBaradei playing us for suckers?
Michael Young | June 18, 2008, 2:21pm
The ongoing mystery over a Syrian nuclear program continues to interest the international media. In September 2007 Israel destroyed what appeared to be a nuclear facility in Syria, and in April 2008 the CIA released photographs suggesting that what had been destroyed was a clandestine reactor built in collaboration with North Korea.
The French daily Le Monde has just published a piece saying it has information from "several non-American sources" corroborating the CIA revelations. The newspaper says that among its sources of information are "satellite photos provided by various countries" and other information from "[International Atomic Energy Agency] investigations of North Korean nuclear activities" and "from research carried out by the IAEA on clandestine networks for acquiring nuclear equipment throughout the world."
More disturbing however, is the apparent contradiction between the report in Le Monde and what the IAEA director general, Mohammed ElBaradei, told the Al-Arabiya satellite channel. In a report on the interview from Reuters, ElBaradei is quoted as saying: "We have no evidence that Syria has the human resources that would allow it to carry out a large nuclear program. We do not see Syria having nuclear fuel."
Perhaps, but the article in Le Monde tells us that "two central questions will occupy IAEA inspectors: Where was the fuel for the Al-Kibar reactor [in Syria] supposed to come from? And is there a secret facility in Syria that allows the retreatment of spent fuel? Retreatment is a technology that permits the production of plutonium that can be used in the manufacture of a nuclear weapon. It is by this method that the North Koreans built an atomic weapon which they tested in 2006."
In other words, ElBaradei in his Al-Arabiya interview said that the IAEA did not see Syria as having nuclear fuel, whereas the Le Monde report suggests that the IAEA is investigating whether the fuel may, in fact, have been retreated at a facility inside Syria. I don't pretend to be an expert here, and perhaps ELBaradei is cleverly walking between raindrops in being vague. Perhaps, as Le Monde suggests, he is even protecting the IAEA from accusations that its inspection regime is ineffective. However, if Syria has the means to retreat spent nuclear fuel, or if the IAEA is still looking into that possibility, that's quite different than the more affirmative statement by ElBaradei underlining that his institution does not believe Syria has nuclear fuel.
joe | June 18, 2008, 8:50pm | #
HANS BLIX: Well, I think there was no way that Saddam Hussein in Iraq could have reconstituted his nuclear program within years after 2003. David Kay went in, and he came out and said, “Well, there are no weapons, but there are [inaudible] programs.” And then he went out, and in went his successor, and he came out after a year and says there are no programs, but there were intentions. In fact, Iraq was prostrate after so many years of sanctions, and it would have taken them many years to recover and to contemplate any nuclear weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: What did you understand at the time? What were you saying at the time?
HANS BLIX: Well, at the time, we were saying that we had carried out a great many inspections and that we did not find any weapons of mass destruction, and we also voiced some criticism of the some cases that the US Secretary of State Colin Powell had demonstrated in the Security Council. My colleague, Mr. ElBaradei, who was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had revealed that the alleged contract between Iraq and the state of Niger in Africa for the import of uranium oxide was a forgery and that the—also the tubes of aluminum, which had been alleged to be for making of centrifuges to enrich uranium, they most likely were not for that purpose.
So while the evidence that had been advanced from the US side and the UK side had been very weakened, we had carried out some 700 inspections without finding any evidence at all, and we had actually been to something like three dozen sites, which were given to us by intelligence, and had been able to tell them that, no, there was nothing in them, so that all allegations had been weakened very much, but not to the point of saying that there is nothing, because to prove that there is nothing is really impossible.
TallDave | June 19, 2008, 12:09am | #
I can't wait these polls updated, too, now that Iraq just had the lowest number of both civilian and U.S. casualties in May (despite some very amusing rumors that Al-Sistani was starting a new civil war that was about to make things a lot worse).
Mar 15th 2004
Fifty-six percent say their lives are better now than before the war, compared with 19 percent who say things are worse (23 percent, the same).
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/GoodMorningAmerica/Iraq_anniversary_poll_040314.html
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November 2005 survey.... when by 51%-29% Iraqis said life was better
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-03-18-poll-cover_N.htm
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March 18, 2007
Iraqis: life is getting better
Marie Colvin
MOST Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today.
The survey of more than 5,000 Iraqis found the majority optimistic despite their suffering in sectarian violence since the American-led invasion four years ago this week.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1530762.ece
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Date: 17.03.2008
A poll of public opinion across Iraq, commissioned by four major broadcasting organisations, suggests Iraqis are now more optimistic about their lives and the future than at any other time in the last three years.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/03_march/17/iraq.shtml
I mean, if they've been this optimistic for years, even when violence was 700% higher...
Fluffy | June 19, 2008, 9:30am | #
I honestly can't believe there is any doubt here as to why Michael Young receives hostility on these pages.
Young's articles consist in the main of a steady drumbeat of excuses for more war in the Middle East.
As others here have pointed out, he can't even be bothered to try to come up with a different
method for promoting war - he just sticks to the good old Judy Miller paradigm: Find some journalist to take your anonymous "scoop" about the scary, scary activities of some nation in the Middle East.
His work on Iran has been fundamentally dishonest in the way most hawkish material on Iran has been fundamentally dishonest: it refuses to include the
most important point in the dispute, namely that both the US and Iran are signatories to a treaty that says that Iran can develop a nuclear industry and can enrich its own fuel. Young is one of those neocon douchebags who decided that because we don't like Iran, we get to ignore the rights we have conceded to it by treaty, and we can try to use our influence in Europe and at the UN to try to unilaterally withdraw those rights and to impose a sanction regime on Iran.
At every step in Iran's development of nuclear facilities, the IAEA was included as per Iran's NPT obligations. But every IAEA report on Iran's
legal activities was turned into another occasion for the US and Israel to threaten Iran with war and destruction. Every IAEA report on Iran's
legal activities was turned into an excuse for the US to try to use the Security Council to trump international treaty and law, and to punish Iran for activities it had an absolute treaty right to pursue. And guys like Michael Young went along with that, because they want war and won't be satisfied until there is a war with Iran. Period.
So Iran finally said, Well, if continuing to report to the IAEA is going to produce these results, fuck it - hit the bricks, IAEA. And they were perfectly justified in doing so, as far as I can see.
And as for why I am annoyed with Young today, back in the day Young even went so far as to publish conspiracy theories purporting to explain how Iran really, truly, secretly had progams that our NIE said they didn't have.
And now he's publishing articles trying to exploit the gap between statements about what the IAEA can
prove and what some unnamed newspaper source
suspects in order to cast doubt on the IAEA generally - and it's transparently obvious to me that the reason he wants to do this is so that when the IAEA comes out and says, "Iran's program is peaceful" he can say "You guys didn't catch Syria, so you're wrong and we don't have to listen to you and woo hoo now we can have war war war war ZOMG bomb bomb bomb oooo let me drink the blood of children please yahagagagagrgagah!" And I am not kidding or exaggerating and I shit you not.
