Iran
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IAEA responds to the Fleitz Report
U.N. Inspectors Dispute Iran Report By House Panel
Paper on Nuclear Aims Called Dishonest
Dafna Linzer, Washington Post, Thursday, September 14, 2006; A17
[Note: on August 24 the Post ran Linzer's article on the Fleitz report on the front page. Linzer's article on the IAEA's response ran on page 17. The IAEA deserves more attention than a single Republican staffer committed to U.S. military confrontation with Iran, since the IAEA inspectors actually have expertise and are part of the reality-based community. -JFP]
[Link to the August 24 article.]
[Here is the IAEA letter.]
[In response to this article, Representative Kucinich requested that Congress investigate why the office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (headed by John Negroponte) apparently reviewed the report without objecting to the claims the IAEA called "erroneous, misleading, and unsubstantiated."]
U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims. Officials of the UNs' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements."
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. The administration orchestrated a failed campaign to remove the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. Last year he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The agency noted five major errors in the committee's report, which said Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown. 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.
Rep. Rush Holt, a committee member, said the report was "clearly not prepared in a manner that we can rely on." The report was never voted on or discussed by the full committee. Rep. Jane Harman told Democratic colleagues that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire - and the Intelligence Community's assessments as more certain - than they are." Several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate.
The committee report, written by a single Republican staffer with a hard-line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for not providing evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons. It concluded that the lack of intelligence made it impossible to support talks with Tehran. Democrats on the committee saw it as an attempt from within conservative Republican circles to undermine Secretary of State Rice, who has agreed to talk with the Iranians under certain conditions. The report's author, Fredrick Fleitz, was a special assistant to John Bolton.
Among the allegations in Fleitz's Iran report is that ElBaradei removed a senior inspector from the Iran investigation because he raised "concerns about Iranian deception regarding its nuclear program." The agency said the inspector has not been removed. A suggestion that ElBaradei had an "unstated" policy that prevented inspectors from telling the truth about Iran's program was particularly "outrageous and dishonest," according to the IAEA letter.
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