There is another run of bomb-Iran news making the rounds. The IAEA released a new report (pdf) and immediately the media bashing began. The NYT had a completely misleading report  which Cyrus Safdari thankfully takes down in detail.

In August last year the IAEA and Iran made a deal on how to proceed on the then open questions. Those procedures were followed and in February the IAEA gave Iran essentially a clean bill of health. The agreement was fulfilled. But at the same time the U.S. gave the IAEA some very dubious ‘evidence’ derived from the ‘Laptop of Death’ that alleged projects of nuclear militarization. Iran has answered questions about some but not all of this ‘evidence’ which it says is at least in part forged.

This sequence of events does of course not prevent the Washington Post editors from lying to their readers:

LAST AUGUST, the International Atomic Energy Agency struck a deal with Iran on a "work plan" for clearing up outstanding questions about its nuclear program within three months — in other words, before December 2007.
…
On Monday, some six months after the expiration of the deadline, the IAEA issued a report saying, in essence, that Iran had not acted in good faith and was engaging in delaying tactics.

The report says no such thing and the December ‘deadline’ never was one. But through it we learn a bit more about the alleged ‘evidence’. One of the "documents shown to Iran in connection with the alleged studies" is about "High Explosives Testing":

Five page document in English describing experimentation undertaken with a complex
multipoint initiation system to detonate a substantial amount of high explosive in hemispherical
geometry and to monitor the development of the detonation wave in that high explosive using a
considerable number of diagnostic probes.

In English?!?

And why a hemisphere? A hemisphere implosion device is needed for Plutonium bombs. Iran is not even alleged to work on anything with Plutonium. For a bomb based on Uranium much simpler ways are available to start the nuclear reaction. Why would Iran, unlike Pakistan, take the more complicate route?

Also:

21. Concerning the documents purporting to show administrative interconnections between the alleged green salt project and a project to modify the Shahab-3 missile to carry a nuclear warhead, Iran
stated that, since some of the documents were not shown to it by the Agency, it could not make an
assessment of them. Although the Agency had been shown the documents that led it to these
conclusions, it was not in possession of the documents and was therefore unfortunately unable to make
them available to Iran.

So at least part of the alleged ‘evidence’ has only been ‘shown’ to the IAEA and has not been provided to Iran at all. How is Iran to refute ‘evidence’ that it has never seen but that, to them, is mere hearsay? If this ‘evidence’ is relevant why is it not given to the IAEA to confront Iran? In another part of the report the IAEA also says that some of the ‘evidence’ only exists in "electronic form" which is of course prone to easy falsification.

As the IAEA notes later, the standard for verification is ‘access to documents’.

23 .The Agency is continuing to assess the information and explanations provided by Iran. However, at this stage, Iran has not provided the Agency with all the information, access to documents and access to individuals necessary to support Iran’s statements.

So while Iran is not even allowed to see the ‘evidence’ it is supposed to deliver documents to refute it.

Adding to the manipulative reporting about the nuclear issues, there is a constant stream of attack warnings. Alex Cockburn wrote about  new plans of a U.S. undercover war against Iran three weeks ago. Yesterday Muhammad Cohen wrote in ATOL about bombs on Iran:

The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.
…
The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC’s elite Quds force.

Now this may be the truth or it may be that the source, likely Richard Armitage, manipulates or has been manipulated.

As Col. Sam Gardiner shows, the administration communication theme before the 2004 election was ‘terrorism’ and it led to an incredible spike in media reports and news releases that included the term. He sees a similar communication strategy and spike coming for the 2008 election. This time the threat theme is "Iran".

An attack on Iran may come. But so far this might only be an election ploy. If an attack really comes, it is unlikely that we will be sure of it before the bombs fall. But remember:

"Over that summer of 2002," McClellan writes, "top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage."
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