http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7594"ROBERT KELLEY, NUCLEAR ENGINEER, FORMER IAEA INSPECTOR: Good to see you.
JAY: So, first of all, the debate about the Iranian program seems to fall more or less into two camps. One camp says they're seeking knowledge, but there's no evidence--and, again, there's a demand by this camp for actual evidence, rather than just sort of speculation--there's no evidence of a active weapons program. The other camp which one hears from, certainly led by Israel, but you hear from the American administration, but maybe not its intelligence agencies, says that in fact there is an active program and that this report proves it. So my question to you to start with: is there anything new in this report? Have they actually proved such a thing?
KELLEY: Well, there's very little new in the report. I was really quite surprised. It was a week's worth of hype before the report came out. There were many leaks of details that were going to be in the report, notably a couple
And then when the report came out, it was really watered down. So we know that a lot of people in the Washington area and around the world were benefiting from leaks of information. They had lots more detail than was in this report. And yet the report itself didn't bring it out. Because the report is numbered, I went through and looked paragraph by paragraph at the technical pages, and if you look paragraph by paragraph, the majority of things that are mentioned have been mentioned in the press, in news articles, have been debated, going back as far as 2004. So I'm reluctant to say there's very much new. I found a few new things, and they're interesting, but there wasn't much there.
JAY: But one of the things that's being suggested in the press and by, you know, people speaking on behalf of Israel and the United States, they're suggesting that maybe it's not all that new, but that the former head of the IAEA, ElBaradei, was spinning this information sort of in Iran's favor, and that the new head, Amano, essentially is more telling the truth. I mean, what do you make of that?
KELLEY: Well, if you want to say somebody's spinning it, I would say that you could argue that either of them was spinning it. The current tack on this is extremely hardline and fairly inappropriate for a UN agency. If I go back to what I've been doing, in 2001, 2002 we knew that the drums were beating for war in Iraq, we knew it was probably going to happen, but we took all of the information we had, we analyzed it very, very carefully, we were very thorough, and we put in front of the world that there was no program there prior to the war. And, course, we were ignored and there was a war. But we were at least trying to get the truth out and lean toward the side of peace. The current report is bolstering hardliners by taking information that's very old that could very well relate to a program that existed that has been canceled, and feeding it as raw meat to people who want to move forward. Look at the last Republican debate..."
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