Burying the most important news on Iran's nuclear programme?

Western media reports on Iran have invariably betrayed an ominous slant. Nowhere has this been more evident than, as the following reports illustrate, in the news concerning its nuclear programme and its attitude to nuclear disarmament.

Peter Hart

THE release of a new International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran was greeted as an ominous development by some major media outlets. But are they playing down what could be the most important news in the report?

The IAEA's latest made it to the New York Times (30 August) under the headline 'Inspectors Confirm New Work by Iran at Secure Nuclear Site'. Reporters David Sanger and William Broad write:

'Iran has installed three-quarters of the nuclear centrifuges it needs to complete a site deep underground for the production of nuclear fuel, international inspectors reported Thursday, a finding that led the White House to warn that "the window that is open now to resolve this diplomatically will not remain open indefinitely."'

The findings indeed sound dramatic: Twice as many centrifuges as before, and what some think is a suspicious clean-up job at the Parchin site, where some say Iran is conducting weapons research (an argument that is highly debatable).

The next day the Times was ramping up the talk of war, devoting a front-page piece to the debate inside Israel about how and when they might attack, presumably based on the same IAEA report. 'Report on Iran Nuclear Work Puts Israel in a Box,' reads the headline, and it stresses the Israeli government's interpretation in the lead:

'For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday offered findings validating his longstanding position that while harsh economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation may have hurt Iran, they have failed to slow Tehran's nuclear programme. If anything, the programme is speeding up.'

The piece goes on to claim that 'the agency's report has also put Israel in a corner, documenting that Iran is close to crossing what Israel has long said is its red line: the capability to produce nuclear weapons in a location invulnerable to Israeli attack'.

The piece leans on anonymous sources in Israel and the United States, and frames the whole matter as a question of when Israel will decide to act: 'The report comes at a critical moment in Israel's long campaign to build Western support for stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.'

Of course, there is the obvious possibility that Iran is developing no such thing, but media too often assume that Iran is building a weapon - despite the fact that there is zero evidence to substantiate that claim.

But what should be the most important news in the IAEA report is being buried. Deep in the 30 August Times piece, readers learn this: 'Some of the 20% fuel is in a form that is extremely difficult to use in a bomb, and most of the stockpile is composed of a fuel enriched at a lower level that would take considerably longer to process for weapons use.'

Those findings are quite a bit at odds with the ominous talk of Iran crossing some sort of red line, and the need to strike sooner rather than later.

In the Washington Post, Joby Warrick had a piece that stressed the bad news first: 'Iran dramatically increased its production of a more enriched form of uranium in recent months,' his 30 August article begins. But then he mentioned:

'The report said Iran has 255 pounds of uranium enriched at 20%, up from 159 pounds in May.

'But the IAEA also found that Iran had converted much of the new material to metal form for use in a nuclear research reactor. Once the conversion has taken place, the uranium can't be further enriched to weapons-grade material, Obama administration officials said.'

The dispute over Iran's nuclear programme has led to harsh sanctions that affect everyday life in the country. There is a very real chance that the United States and/or Israel will attack Iran. If the new report presents evidence that a significant part of Iran's uranium stockpile cannot be used for weapons-making, it's hard to fathom why news accounts wouldn't lead their stories with this fact. Instead, we get stories that give Israeli officials one more chance to warn that war is inevitable to stop a nuclear weapons programme - one that very well might not exist.                      

Peter Hart is the activism director at US media watch group FAIR, from whose website (www.fair.org) this article is reproduced. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra!, and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003).

Iran call for nuclear abolition by 2025 is unreported by New York Times Alice Slater THE Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), formed in 1961 during the Cold War, is a group of 120 states and 17 observer states not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. NAM held its 2012 summit under the new chairmanship of Iran, which succeeded Egypt as the chair. Significantly, an Associated Press story in the Washington Post, headlined 'Iran opens nonaligned summit with calls for nuclear arms ban', reported that 'Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi opened the gathering by noting commitment to a previous goal from the nonaligned group, known as NAM, to remove the world's nuclear arsenals within 13 years. "We believe that the timetable for ultimate removal of nuclear weapons by 2025, which was proposed by NAM, will only be realised if we follow it up decisively," he told delegates.' Yet the New York Times, which has been beating the drums for war with Iran, just as it played a disgraceful role in the deceptive reporting during the lead-up to the Iraq War, never mentioned Iran's proposal for nuclear abolition. The Times carried the bland headline on its front page, 'At Summit Meeting, Iran Has a Message for the World', and then went on to state, 'the message is clear. As Iran plays host to the biggest international conference .it wants to tell its side of the long standoff with the Western powers which are increasingly convinced that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons' - without ever reporting Iran's offer to support the NAM proposal for the abolition of nuclear weapons by 2025. Surely the most sensible way to deal with Iran's nascent nuclear weapons capacity is to call all the nations to the table to negotiate a treaty to ban the bomb. That would mean abolishing the 20,000 nuclear bombs on the planet - in the US, UK, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel - with 19,000 of them in the US and Russia. In order to get Russia and China to the table, the US will also have to give up its dreams of dominating the earth with missile 'defences' which, driven by corrupt military contractors and a corporate- owned Congress, are currently being planted and based in provocative rings around Russia and China. The ball is in the US court to make good-faith efforts for nuclear abolition. That would be the only principled way to deal with fears of nuclear proliferation. The US must start with a genuine offer for negotiations to finally ban the bomb in all countries, including a freeze on further missile development. It should stop beating up on Iran and North Korea while it hypocritically continues to improve and expand the US arsenal, with tens of billions of dollars for new weapons laboratories and bomb delivery systems, and fails to speak out against the nuclear activities of other nations such as the enrichment of uranium in Japan and Brazil and the nuclear arsenal of Israel.

Alice Slater is New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the Coordinating Committee of Abolition 2000, a global nuclear disarmament network. This article is reproduced from CommonDreams.org.

*Third World Resurgence No. 263, July 2012, pp 27-28