Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

As should be obvious from my piece for NuclearSpin, I am an opponent of nuclear energy. It is dangerous, dirty and expensive. However, I completely support Iran’s right, guaranteed under Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to develop it. In fact, I think Iran should bypass the energy option, and go straight for a nuclear deterrent if it is to avoid the kind of bullying in the future that it is presently experiencing from US-Israel and their numerous minions. This will not only strengthen its defenses, it will also marginalize hardliners, as a confident and assertive Iran will have little need for “tough guys” to stand up to would-be bullies.

But there is a more compelling reason why Iran should not comply with IAEA demands: the body has been pressuring Iran, a country that is a signatory to the NPT and has been following its rules to the letter, under pressure from Israel, a country that hasn’t signed the NPT, posesses a massive thermonuclear arsenal, and is the biggest violator of UN Security Council resolutions. More egregiously, IAEA has been passing the information collected during inspections to the Israeli intelligence (both in the case of Iraq and Iran).

At the moment, I am reading Scott Ritter’s book Target Iran: The Truth About the US Plans for Regime Change, and it has the most exhaustive account of IAEA’s dealings with Iran. In it, Ritter reveals the level of collusion between the Israeli Intelligence and IAEA, which on occasion has turned all its collected data over to the Israelis, in order to get their “expert analysis”. Here are some important excerpts from the book:

IAEA-Israel Nexus

Israeli intelligence teams would often travel to Vienna, and rendezvous with IAEA personnel in hotel rooms used as impromptu safe houses. On the issue of Iraq, the israelis had established a similar level of cooperation with the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team…The relationship involved not only the provision by Israel to the IAEA of intelligence information, but also placing at the disposal of the IAEA the extensive resources of Israel’s intelligence analytical community, where the IAEA could pose question to selected technical experts, or have the results of inspections or other intelligence data reviewed by the Israelis. This relationship…operated with the expressed permission of the Director General… [emphasis added] (p. 49)

Thanks to the IAEA inspections, the United States (and Israel) had extremely detailed intelligence on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program… (p. 147)

The IAEA has no moral authority to check Iran’s peaceful nuclear development, when it has done nothing to raise attention to, let alone prevent, Israel’s aggressive nuclear program.

Here are some other important revelations from Ritter’s book.

Germans Spying for Israel

Many Germans secretly supported the Isareli position concerning the ndeed for a preemptive strike. German intelligence agents, operating under economic cover, had been inside Iran for years, often times in support of joint German-Israeli mission objectives…So even while German diplomats negotiated in support of an incentives-based approach towards resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis, German intelligence officials secretly hedged their bets towards an American-backed effort to undermine and ovethrow the regime of the Mullahs. (pp. 154-155)

Bolton’s Incestuous Israel Connection

One determinant of the hardline US stance against Iran has been the personal initiative of the former Undersecretary of State, and Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Ritter writes:

When it came to defining what constituted the naational interest, John Bolton, like many of his neoconservative colleagues, seemed to possess a decidedly split personality, especially when it came to maters involving the state of Israel…Bolton has developed a strong relationship with Israel, one that had him undermine official U.S. policy by keeping policy papers critical of Israeli actions from crossing the desk of the Secretary of State as Bolton did early on in the tenure in the administration of George W. Bush, blocking a memo which suggested that Israel had violated American laws with its July 23, 2000, assassination of Salah Shehada, a senior Hamas activist in Gaza City. Israel reportedly used an American-made F-16 fighter-bomber to drop a bomb on a house in the Gaza Strip, killing Shehada and fourteen others (including women and children), and injuring more than 100 others. In his position as undersecretary of State, Bolton has engaged in numerous one-on-one meetings with Israeli officials without getting prior country clearance from the relevant offices within the State Department. Bolton frequently travels to Israel, where he has developed a strong relationship with Israeli intelligence officials, againt outside of official bureaucratic channels… (p. 141)

On May 22, 2006, at a B’nai B’rith breakfast meeting in which John Bolton had already spoken, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman declared Bolton to be the sixth Isareli diplomat assigned to the United Nations. Gillerman also noted that if the B’nai B’rith membership, hhistorically unquestioningly pro-Israeli, were counted, the Israeli Mission would in fact be one of the largest at the United Nations. (p. 208)

EU-3 as Chamberlain

German, Britain and France were behaving in a manner that was strnkingly similar to the behavior of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 when he backed down over Hitler’s demands over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In an effort to forestall another American illegal war of aggression, the europeans were negotiating with Iran to convince the Iranians to give up a nuclear program that operated demonstrably within the framework of international law. Europe committed to the principle of Iranian legal rights regarding the enrichment of uranium, all the while caving in to pressure from the United States to deny Iran this right. (p. 163)

MeK: The Israel Connection

When Israel’s early attempts to sell the Irani WMD threat failed to gain traction in Washington, despite Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer’s personal lobbying (George Tenet rejected the intel casting doubt on its credibility), the Israelis looked for a new conduit for their intelligence that would “spur America to take that threat posed by Iran [sic] more seriously.”

Sobhani [an Iranian con-artist] and CDI [Committee for a Democratic Iran, an AIPAC spinoff] provided an ideal solution, namely that the Israeli government use Reza Pahlavi as the mouthpiece for telling the world about what the Iranians were up to in the field of nuclear weapons, and in exchange Pahlavi would be given immedite credibility and with it front runner status in the race of those trying to rule Iran post-Mullah. Unfortunately for the Israelis and CDI, Reza Pahlavi balked…Undeterred, [Michael] Ledeen and the CI turned to the MEK, or more specifically, its political front in the Washingt, D.C., the NCRI, as the next best option to bring the Israeli intelligence to center stage. CDI reportedly lobbied the NCRI representative, Alireza Jaferzadeh, to serve as the mouthpiece for presenting the Israeli intelligence to the general public…Isareli intelligence had maintained a relationship with the MEK that dated back to the mid-1990s. (p. xxv)

Thus all Israeli intelligence, most of dubious quality, was presented to the American public, and the rest of the world, through a third-party, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political wing of Mujahedin-e-Khalq (People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran).

Here is an interview with Ritter from Democracy Now!, (Once again, thanks to my good friend Ann for bringing the vid to my notice) based on his book: