Benjamin
Netanyahu’s stage performance about Iran seeking a nuclear weapon
not only was based on old material, but evidence shows it was
fabricated too, says Gareth Porter in this Consortium News exclusive
report.
by
Gareth Porter
Part
1
Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim in his theatrical
20-minute presentation of an Israeli physical seizure of Iran’s
“atomic archive” in Tehran would certainly have been the “great
intelligence achievement” he boasted if it had actually happened.
But the claim does not hold up under careful scrutiny, and his
assertion that Israel now possesses a vast documentary record of a
covert Iranian nuclear weapons program is certainly fraudulent.
Netanyahu’s
tale of an Israeli intelligence raid right in Tehran that carted off
55,000 paper files and another 55,000 CDs from a “highly secret
location” requires that we accept a proposition that is absurd on
its face: that Iranian policymakers decided to store their most
sensitive military secrets in a small tin-roofed hut with nothing to
protect it from heat (thus almost certainly ensuring loss of data on
CDs within a few years) and no sign of any security, based on the
satellite image shown in the slide show. (As Steve Simon observed in
The New York Times the door did not even appear to have a lock on
it.)
The
laughable explanation suggested by Israeli officials to The Daily
Telegraph– that the Iranian government was afraid the files might
be found by international inspectors if they remained at “major
bases” — merely reveals the utter contempt that Netanyahu has for
Western governments and news media.
Even if
Iran were pursuing nuclear weapons secretly, their files on the
subject would be kept at the Ministry of Defense, not at military
bases. And of course the alleged but wholly implausible move to an
implausible new location came just as Netanyahu needed a dramatic new
story to galvanize Trump to resist the European allies’ strong
insistence on preserving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Act (JCPOA)
nuclear deal with Iran.
In fact,
there is no massive treasure trove of secret files about an Iran
“Manhattan Project.” The shelves of black binders and CDs that
Netanyahu revealed with such a dramatic flourish date back to 2003
(after which a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said Iran
had abandoned any nuclear weapons program) and became nothing more
than stage props like the cartoon bomb that Netanyahu used at the
United Nations in 2012.
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