Don’t Bomb Iran

February 7, 2006
Gravest Threat – Not
by Gordon Prather
extract:
In particular, John Negroponte, new head of all US intelligence forces in his first assessment to the Senate Committee on Intelligence, (find ref), said “Iran conducted a clandestine uranium enrichment program for nearly two decades in violation of its IAEA safeguards agreement.”

Now if any of those intelligence weenies sitting behind Negroponte had bothered to check with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), they would have obtained the intelligence that Iran has not yet begun initial operations of its planned uranium enrichment program, which will – in any case – be fully safeguarded. Nor has Iran ever been reported to the UN Security Council to be in violation of its IAEA Safeguards Agreement.

True, as a result of Iran’s voluntary cooperation under an Additional Protocol to Iran’s Safeguards Agreement – which the Iranian parliament has yet to ratify – the IAEA learned almost three years ago that Iran had previously imported small quantities of “source and special nuclear materials” and had engaged in laboratory-scale activities involving those materials that ought to have been reported to the IAEA, but were not.

The IAEA recently learned about similar activities by South Korea.

But the bottom line is that both Iran and South Korea have reported those activities, now. And as best as the IAEA can tell, both Iran and South Korea are presently in complete compliance with their existing Safeguards Agreements.
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