Remember all those WMD's we were all told Saddam had - as justification for invading Iraq.
We now know that it was a bare-faced lie and the people who peddled it knew so.
Fast forward to 2007 and now it's the nuclear threat from Iran. If Reuters is right in its report, the US and its allies are lying once again about that Iranian threat.
"Iran’s uranium enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is far from producing nuclear fuel in significant amounts, according to a confidential U.N. nuclear watchdog report obtained by Reuters.
A senior Iranian nuclear official said the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report showed U.S. suspicions about Tehran’s nuclear intentions were baseless.
Officials familiar with the report said the IAEA could open future inquiries into Iran’s atomic activity if new suspicions arose, even after Tehran answers questions about the program under a transparency deal reached this month.
Western leaders suspect Iran wants to build atom bombs, not generate electricity, and were alarmed when Tehran said in April it had reached “industrial capacity” to enrich uranium.
But the IAEA report said Tehran remained far short of that threshold. Iran had just under 2,000 centrifuges divided into 12 cascades, or interlinked units, of 164 machines each refining uranium at its underground Natanz plant as of August 19, it said."
We now know that it was a bare-faced lie and the people who peddled it knew so.
Fast forward to 2007 and now it's the nuclear threat from Iran. If Reuters is right in its report, the US and its allies are lying once again about that Iranian threat.
"Iran’s uranium enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is far from producing nuclear fuel in significant amounts, according to a confidential U.N. nuclear watchdog report obtained by Reuters.
A senior Iranian nuclear official said the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report showed U.S. suspicions about Tehran’s nuclear intentions were baseless.
Officials familiar with the report said the IAEA could open future inquiries into Iran’s atomic activity if new suspicions arose, even after Tehran answers questions about the program under a transparency deal reached this month.
Western leaders suspect Iran wants to build atom bombs, not generate electricity, and were alarmed when Tehran said in April it had reached “industrial capacity” to enrich uranium.
But the IAEA report said Tehran remained far short of that threshold. Iran had just under 2,000 centrifuges divided into 12 cascades, or interlinked units, of 164 machines each refining uranium at its underground Natanz plant as of August 19, it said."
Comments
I believe that the answer is threefold. First of all, answers can be found in Saddam's paranoid logic. He believed that it was better to risk the wrath of the world's greatest superpowers, than to let his neighbors know that he was not as militarily capable as he had been. Secondly, vast amounts of chemical and biological weapons were never accounted for by Iraq or the United Nations. Last is the basic fact that all of the intelligence agencies around the world were saying pretty much the same thing. It would seem that the agencies were vetting information through each other rather that vetting the sources of the information itself.
As far as any UN reports are concerned, they have been wrong more often than any intelligence agency could ever be accused of with any sincerity. After the first gulf war, it was found that rather than the years away from concluding Iraqi WMD programs as claimed by the United Nations, Saddam was literally within 12 months from finishing some of his most deadly weapons development programs, which included nuclear weapons.
At the time, Saddam’s own disinformation machine was in high gear shouting the UN's reports to the heavens in the hopes that he could stall any definitive actions until his weapons programs were completed. Today we see the Iranian mouthpieces doing exactly the same thing. The simple and deadly fact of the matter is that they only need one nuclear device to change the world in a most horrific and devastating way.
The United Nations does not represent the United States let alone any other government in the world, nor does it have any incentive to protect the United States or it's citizens and the UN has in fact proven itself time and again to be completely ineffective when it comes to accurately gaging the capabilities and or intentions of hostile regimes.
Western leaders on the other hand have every incentive to be as forthright and as honest as prudence and national security allows. Western leaders and the citizens they represent are not the fools Iran would have us to be. We know with little doubt or uncertainty that when a hostile, terrorist regime such as can be found in Tehran says openly that they are working towards the capability of producing weapons grade materials on an industrial scale and furthermore that they intend to destroy Israel, and then add to that the massive construction projects and security programs currently underway in their country, perhaps, just possibly, they might be a threat.