While Asia Times Online often has some readable pieces of non-mainstream news, it today disgraces itself with putting a sensational nuclear Iran piece by intelligence consultant Richard M Bennett at the top of its homepage.

The piece is false from the first letter to the last dot.

Mr Bennett starts by asserting that the recent NIE, which claimed Iran had stopped a nuclear weaponization program in 2003, is wrong:

However, in late 2007, the flawed and now largely discredited NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) report, "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities", was published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in Washington and simply discarded years of supposedly hard intelligence.

Then Mr. Bennett sets out to "report" several bites of "news" to make believe that an Iranian weaponization program (which may well never have existed) has, as he asserts, not been stopped;

It is reported that concrete proof of Iran’s sophisticated disinformation came in mid-December 2006, when the CIA intercepted a conversation between two unidentified officials at the Defense Ministry in Tehran, reporting differences between the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) and the Ministry of Defense.

One of the Iranian officials reportedly said, "Currently, as for the CTBTO [Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization], I think that the Ministry of Defense must have the last word, because they [the leaders of the AEOI] know that ultimately we intend to conduct tests."

Yet this damning evidence of deliberate Iranian deception was also discounted in the NIE findings.

With Google’s help we find that the "report" Mr. Bennett referred to is from the Iranian Press Service, an Iranian opposition "news service" in Paris, itself based on a rumor mongering Le Monde piece (in French – an English translation is at the MEK’s, the anti-Iranian cult, site).

So Mr. Bennett "reports" what some Iranian opposition site "reports" by mangling up a Le Monde "report" which itself is solely based on "sources close to an intelligence service."

Mr. Bennett continues:

Controversially, China was also reported to have recently embarrassed Iran by providing the UN with intelligence on its close ally’s efforts to acquire nuclear technology.

This was, indeed, "reported" – in the always unreliable Daily Torygraph – and refuted by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

On goes Mr. Bennett:

Chinese designs for centrifuges that refine uranium into a "weaponized" state had been found previously in Iran, but these had been thought to have come exclusively through a network controlled by disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Not only have designs be found in Iran, but several thousand centrifuges. The design of the Iranian centrifuges came indeed through Mr. Khan. But
the design of these is not a Chinese one. Khan copied  the Dutch/German design when he worked for URENCO in the Netherlands and used this in the Pakistani and Iranian program.

There are also of course no special centrifuges to "weaponize" uranium. The enrichment concentration of U235, for civil or military use, is prinicpally determined by the number of centrifuges coupled into a cascade, not by the centrifuge design.

Further on:

Expert observers suspect Iran is replacing its original P-1 centrifuges with the IR-2, a modified P-2 second-generation system which operates three to four times faster.

This is not "suspected" by "expert observers" but was announced by Iran loud and proud and with lots of glossy centrifuge pictures.

And now the very best from Mr. Bennett’s report:

Significantly, Ahmadinejad paid a little reported visit in April 2006 to the research complex at Neyshabour in Khorassan. This top-secret and heavily protected facility ringed by the most advanced Russian air defense missiles is designed to eventually operate as many as 155,000 centrifuges.

The only site that has this "little reported" "news," sans the "most advanced Russian air defense" which Mr. Bennett added himself, is the Israeli Mossad disinformation service DEBKAfile:

According to our intelligence sources, running-in has begun at some sections of the Neyshabour installation, which is located 600 km northeast of Tehran. DEBKAfile’s sources reveal too that the Neyshabour plant has been built 150 m deep under farmland covered with mixed vegetable crops and dubbed Shahid Moradian, in the name of a war martyr as obscure as its existence.
…
Russian experts completed the
initial plans in 2003 and construction began in early 2004. In late
2005, Bulgarian transport planes delivered tens of thousands of
centrifuges from Belarus and

they were transported directly to Neyshabour.

(Just in case you are interested, the DEBKA site also has several bridges on sale …)

Mr. Bennett, like DEBKA, spells that alleged nuclear city’s name wrong. It is Neyshabur or Nishapur and it doesn’t have an airport.

So what we have here is a mix of confused opposition reports, lots of false facts and Israeli disinformation mixed up and stirred into a dramatic report by an intelligence consultant.

It seems that ATOL needs a better editor.