IAEA dossier heightens danger of war against Iran

10 November 2011

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran’s nuclear program published Tuesday is a highly political document drawn up at the behest of the US and its allies to set the stage for a reckless campaign of aggression against Tehran. The report recalls the dossiers produced by the US and Britain in 2002 based on a crude mixture of half-truths, lies and fabrications that were used to justify the criminal invasion of Iraq.

In order to overcome the overwhelming public distrust generated by the Iraq war, the US has been pressing the IAEA for years to put its seal of approval on “evidence” that Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons. The vast bulk of material contained in thelatest IAEA report is not new, but was supplied to the UN body over the past decade by American, European and Israeli intelligence agencies.

In October 2009, a confidential IAEA document summing up the intelligence supplied by Western agencies and entitled “Possible Military Dimensions of Iran’s Nuclear Program” was leaked to the New York Times. The leak was a deliberate attempt to circumvent then-IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei, who was critical of its dubious content and refused to publish it.

In 2002, ElBaradei earned Washington’s undying enmity when he flatly contradicted the US lie that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons.

In December 2009, the US and its allies finally succeeded in replacing ElBaradei with a more pliable IAEA director, Yukiuya Amano. As Amano himself explained to a top US diplomat in a