WHAT GOOD IS A WATCHDOG THAT BARKS YEARS AFTER YOUR HOME IS BURGLARIZED? THE IAEA
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=521736
Slo-Mo Watchdog
Iran: The global agency whose job it is to prevent nuclear proliferation has just publicly recognized the atomic weapons ambitions of the terrorist regime in Tehran — years after everyone else.
What good is a watchdog that barks years after your home is burglarized? Because of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s devotion to diplomacy over force — and also possibly due to its former director general’s sympathies for an Islamic military counterbalance to the state of Israel — the United Nations’ nuclear “watchdog” has muzzled itself regarding Iran for years.
Mohamed ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to delegitimize President George W. Bush’s liberation of Iraq, recently departed as head of the IAEA. And that might be linked to the agency’s issuing a report last week expressing concerns about Iran’s possible “past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
Newly headed by Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, the IAEA now warns that “Iran has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the Agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”
Within the report are to be found frightening concerns. Tehran’s “alleged activities consist of a number of projects and sub-projects, covering nuclear and missile related aspects, run by military related organizations,” the IAEA report notes.
Consider some of “the activities which the Agency has attempted to discuss with Iran”:
• Work involving “high precision detonators fired simultaneously.”
• Studies on “high explosives and missile re-entry body engineering.”
• Tehran’s “Green Salt Project,” in which uranium ore is converted to uranium tetrafluoride, or “green salt,” an intermediate product in the process toward producing nuclear weapons fuel.
• Questions on “whether Iran’s exploding bridgewire detonator activities were solely for civil or conventional military purposes.”
• The issue of whether Tehran has “developed a spherical implosion system, possibly with the assistance of a foreign expert knowledgeable in explosives technology.”
• Concerns regarding “whether the engineering design and computer modeling studies aimed at producing a new design for the payload chamber of a missile were for a nuclear payload.”
• Questions about “the relationship between various attempts by senior Iranian officials with links to military organizations in Iran to obtain nuclear related technology and equipment.”
Add to that the IAEA’s concerns about “details relating to the manufacture of components for high explosives initiation systems; and experiments concerning the generation and detection of neutrons.”
The IAEA complains that since August 2008, “Iran has declined to discuss the above issues with the Agency or to provide any further information and access (to locations and/or people) to address these concerns .”
Of supreme note is the U.N. agency’s conclusion that Iran’s illicit nuclear activities “seem to have continued beyond 2004” — bringing the IAEA closer to the realities accepted by the U.S. and other Western spy agencies.
It took a long time for the world’s slow-motion nuclear watchdog to concede with minimal qualification the terrible truth the rest of the world has known for years: One of the world’s worst regimes is developing the world’s worst weapons.
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