Hey everybody, welcome back to the show.
That's Antiwar Radio.
On the line is Mohammad Sahimi, Professor of Chemical Engineering at USC, but he's also a writer for PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau website.
Man, there's some killer journalism going on there.
Bob Dreyfuss and other great writers as well.
PBS Frontline, Tehran Bureau.
And also, of course, he writes for Antiwar.com, where he's got a piece today called, Yukia Amano, Minion of the Empire.
Thank you for not mincing words.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammad.
How are you doing?
I'm not too bad.
Thank you for having me on your program again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And you sure called this guy out right.
He really is pathetic, this leader of the IAEA.
I guess I ought to tell people real fast, there's this organization called the IAEA under the UN, and its job is inspecting countries that sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, who don't have nuclear weapons, who have, by signing that treaty, promised not to get them by hook or crook.
These are the inspectors that go in and make sure that they're still abiding by all the rules.
And Yukia Amano is their new-ish Director General.
So what do you know about this guy?
What's your beef, Mohammad Sahimi?
Well, from the very beginning, when he became the Director General of IAEA on December 1, 2009, he has taken positions with regards to Iran's nuclear program that are totally one-sided and biased.
He issued his first report about Iran's nuclear program in February of 2010, a couple of months after he took over.
And just a couple of weeks after that, I analyzed his report, and in that report I pointed out that the tone and direction of IAEA's report on Iran's nuclear program have changed under Amano.
And Amano has set aside the cautious and very scientific approach that the previous Director General, Mohammad al-Baradei, had, where he was not paying attention to all sorts of unfounded information that was being fed to IAEA by, for example, Israeli intelligence agencies and other intelligence agencies.
And he was always emphasizing that the IAEA deals with facts on grounds, namely with what they can see, what they can touch, and what they can inspect, and whatever information that they have, that there can be some plausible basis for it.
But Amano has changed that completely.
He has made allegations one after another in his reports about Iran, and one after another they have turned out to be totally unfounded, or at least, at the very least, very suspect.
For example, in the report that he issued last November, which was supposed to be a game-changer and was supposed to present all sorts of evidence why Iran had restarted its nuclear weapon program, that the IAEA itself and the National Intelligence Estimate said that Iran had stopped in 2003, even though I have never seen any evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapon program before 2003, but even if you assume that it did, Amano made all sorts of allegations in his November report that were nothing new, and it was basically a rehash of all the old allegations that Mohammed al-Baradei had mostly discarded and thought that they were not very credible.
For example, he has made a big deal about how Iran might have used the Parchin facility, which is a facility southeast of Tehran, where Iran has been making ammunition for its Convention on Military for decades, and how Iran has probably or has possibly used that facility to carry out high-explosive experiments that might be relevant to triggering a nuclear reaction and might be relevant to a nuclear weapon.
These allegations are not new.
They were made in 2004, and I must say that one of the people who played a big role in turning up these allegations was David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, where he and his institute issued a statement after a statement that something might be going on in Parchin, the IAEA must go to Parchin and must visit it.
And in fact, Iran allowed visits to Parchin, and in January and November of 2005, the IAEA sent its inspectors.
They went to Parchin, they visited Parchin.
Iran said that they can visit five sites within the compound that they wanted to do, and they inspected those five sites that they had selected.
And then in the second visit that they made in November of 2005, according to Iranian press, Ali Heinonen, who was at that time the PC Director General for Safeguards, surprised Iranian officials by asking to visit two more sites that they hadn't put on the list of the sites that they wanted to visit.
And the Iranian government allowed them to go and visit those two sites, and they visited those two sites also, and they didn't find anything.
And the Iranian press at that time reported that Heinonen told Iranian officials that Parchin's case has joined history, meaning that there is nothing to be found.
Now, when Amano took over, he has revived those allegations again.
So in his November of 2011, he made a big deal about how Iran might have, you know, a steel container, built a steel container at Parchin to do these experiments with high explosives.
Okay.
So they sent a team to Tehran in January and February.
They made two visits to Tehran in January and February.
During the first visit that lasted three days, the IAEA team negotiated with Tehran a visit to Parchin, and Iran agreed in principle to allow the visit to Parchin, provided that they can formally reach an agreement that if they go into the Parchin and inspect everything and they don't find anything, they should specify where they visited, what they found, what they didn't find, and then if it was to the satisfaction of IAEA, the issue would be closed.
But the IAEA refused to agree to that, but agreed to continue negotiations to visit Parchin.
So in the next visit that they had, which was a few weeks later, February 21, against the agreement that they had made during the first visit, namely that they could visit Parchin once the formal agreement was signed between Iran and IAEA, all of a sudden they decided that they want to go to Parchin and visit again.
And Iran, of course, refused that, because they said that, you know, there has to be a formal agreement between the agency and Iran.
And they asked the team to stay in Tehran at least one day longer so that they can conclude the negotiations and draw the formal agreement.
But after consulting with Amano, Amano did not allow them to stay longer in Tehran, and they left Tehran.
And, in fact, Garrett Porter, as well as Iranian press, reported that not only Iran did not refuse visit to Parchin, provided the formal agreement can be signed, but also offered them to take them to another site in Marivan, which is a town in western Iran, to visit it, because in the November 2011 report, Amano had expressed concern about it.
So not only they were not, you know, they were not, they were totally open to visit the Marivan site, but they also said that we allow you to visit Parchin, stay longer so that we can formalize the agreement and sign it, and therefore you can go to Parchin and visit the sites that you want.
But Amano refused it, and that created a whole environment of hysteria over how Iran is uncooperative with the IAEA and is not allowing the IAEA to visit the Parchin site.
So that's one of the examples of what Amano has been doing against Iran.
All right, well, we'll have to hold it right there and pick it up on the other side of this break.
It's Mohamed Sahimi from Antiwar.com and PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau website.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, and we're talking with Mohamed Sahimi from Antiwar.com and PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau website.
His new piece at Antiwar.com today is called Yukia Amano, Minion of the Empire, and it's about Mohamed ElBaradei's replacement as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, inspectors agency, and you correctly pat yourself on the back here in this article for getting it right from the moment this guy stepped onto the public stage, that this guy is completely in the tank for the empire.
And it's so obvious.
You just illustrated the point so well with the example of the Parchin facility, which is supposed to be such a big, scary deal, and which so obviously for anyone who actually spent some time looking into it or explaining it as you just did, it clearly is not.
And what we're left with is, at least the obvious parallel to me, is the Office of Special Plans.
It lied us into war with Iraq in 2002 and 2003, where they went basically digging through the CIA's trash trying to come up with, can we make a conspiracy theory about how Saddam and Osama are allied together?
And we'll just say anything that was ever said is all high confidence intelligence.
So any rumor that the CIA ever discarded basically became the basis of an entire speech or something, or an entire TV appearance by a general on TV to sell the case for war.
And that's basically what this guy Amano has done, is he's gone digging through the IAEA's trash and included nothing new, if I understand it right, included only things that Mohammed ElBaradei and his team had already discarded as either unimportant or maybe interesting questions, but ones that had already been answered, or facilities that had already been inspected and cleared, etc.
Am I missing the point here somewhere?
No, I think you make an excellent point that there is a lot of similarity between what Amano is doing and what the neocons were doing during the Bush administration.
And as you pointed out, and I also pointed out in my article, Amano is trying to dig up supposed information that had already been discussed with Mohammed ElBaradei and his team and had been discarded.
They thought that a lot of those allegations did not have any basis in reality.
They couldn't find any evidence for it when they went in to inspect Iran's nuclear program.
And in addition, Amano, I'm sorry, ElBaradei had formed a second group of advisors and experts who would second-guess whatever information his own team, for example, went to Iran and inspected.
They would second-guess them, and they would intensely debate them among themselves so that they would make sure that if they come out with any sort of allegations or accusations or guess, it would be based on intensive discussions, it would be based on exchange of ideas and a thorough investigation of whatever evidence they might have had.
But Amano has completely dissolved that group, namely because as one of the WikiLeaks documents that was publicized indicates that the U.S. delegation to IAEA had complained that there are some advisors to Mohammed ElBaradei that haven't been very helpful to our position, as if IAEA is an organization that should basically do what the U.S. interests want.
So Amano, once he took over, he basically eliminated that office, and he's relying on very few advisors.
And as Robert Kelly, the former IAEA inspector, said that Amano is getting trapped in the way Dick Cheney was, namely relying on a few advisors and relying on unsubstantiated and unfounded allegations that they used in order to invade Iraq.
And the Parchin example is just one example.
In the very first report that Amano issued about Iran, he started making allegations that Iran may have nuclear materials that it has not declared to IAEA.
And of course this is a very serious allegation, because if Iran does have nuclear material that hasn't been declared, that would be a very serious violation of its safeguard agreement.
Yeah, but that's exactly how he does it, right?
He says, well, you know, but this is, I've verified the non-diversion, but that's the only nuclear material I know about.
There could be, who knows what, maybe ready-made hydrogen bombs laying around.
You know what, Mohammed Sahimi, you might have a howitzer in your backyard, as long as we're making stuff up.
He doesn't cite any reason whatsoever to believe that there's any parallel program or any separate amount of nuclear material that hasn't been, you know, catalogued.
He simply says, could be.
Yeah, could be, and then proving a negative is almost impossible.
I mean, you can make any sort of accusation against any nation or any government or any person.
But I hope nobody raids your house looking for a howitzer.
Mohammed Sahimi does not have a howitzer.
I was lying like a mono here, basically, is what happened just now.
Not yet, anyway, but this is just one allegation.
Or, for example, in his November 2011, he makes allegations that because some Iranian scientists had done research on neutron transport, and they had published the result of the research on neutron transport in open-source journals so that everybody can see it, that means that, for example, they might have done something that could be relevant to a nuclear weapon.
Or, even with the high explosive issues, Iran has said that, you know, we have high explosives, but these are, first of all, for our conventional military and ammunition, and secondly, whatever work that we do, that, by the way, Iran did declare to IAEA, is for civilian applications.
For example, making roads, making tunnels, and all sorts of things.
And even the IAEA itself says, oh yeah, there are other applications, but we are really interested to know whether Iran wants to use it in a nuclear weapon program.
I mean, these are the type of allegations that he has made, that there has been no evidence, no basis for it, and yet he keeps going after them.
And these are all old allegations that, as you said, and I also mentioned, Mohammed al-Barady and his team had basically dismissed the entire report of November 2011 that the mainstream media in this country made a big deal about it, was mostly based on laptop, old laptop stories that you have talked about on your program, and I have talked about your program many times, that al-Barady had said many, many times that these are not credible.
But he revived all those allegations and made new ones, and he keeps going at this again and again and again and again, to the point that, for example, even Julian Borger of Guardian, that hasn't been really kind to Iran's nuclear program, has been very critical, just published a piece last week in which he quoted many, many experts, both former IAEA inspectors and diplomats and so on, who were highly critical of Amano and have said that Amano has taken a very dangerous path because his report and his unfounded allegations create an atmosphere of war and contribute to the hysteria over Iran's nuclear program.
And this is really dangerous.
Well, and that's really what it's all about.
Just like the Office of Special Plans, their primary task was creating the talking points to flood the media echo chamber with everybody knows Saddam's making bombs, Saddam's got germs, Saddam's doing this, backing terrorism, that.
And so nobody ever was in dispute about the premise.
Everybody always agreed on the laundry list of reasons.
Then the only question was left of what to do about it.
And that's what's going on here.
They don't ever really make a case for any of this stuff, Parchin or anything else.
Hell, even David Sanger is debunking the Parchin allegations in the New York Times, of all things, to happen.
But it doesn't matter.
What matters is that there were 10,000 allegations about Iran's nuclear program in a row.
And people just basically assume that there couldn't be, unless there was something going on there, smoke and fire and all that, for people who don't have time to look into it.
And so the narrative there, the atmosphere of war, as you said, is already there in the background.
But so now let me ask you real quick at the end here, Mohamed, whether you have any hope for the new talks.
Chuck Slavin wrote a piece that you might have seen for the Atlantic Council, saying that, oh, I forgot which one of these former diplomat types.
Oh, I know, it was Chuck Hagel, I think, was telling her that it looks like there's going to be some new talks and that maybe they really mean it on both sides this time.
What do you think?
I think Iran has sent several signals that indicate that they are ready to compromise.
One of Iran's representatives that has visited Europe a couple of weeks ago said that Iran is ready to be fully cooperative with the 5-plus-1 group, provided that they also cooperate with us, which means that, you know, leave some of these sanctions or at least suspend them for a while.
The Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, we know he wants to reach a compromise.
Even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has indicated in his speeches lately several times that we don't have a nuclear weapon after making a nuclear weapon because it is a sin in Islam to do it.
So the question is whether the empire will take yes for an answer.
Yes, I hope they can take yes for an answer, yes.
All right, thank you very much for your time.
I'm sorry we're all out of it.
I sure appreciate you on the show, though, again.
Thank you again, Scott.
That's the great Mohammed Sahimi, everybody.
Antiwar.com today.
