Really, really shoddy evidence about Iran's supposed nukes.

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/289-134/8424-the-holes-in-the-iran-nuke-report

A devastating piece of reporting from Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service follows one of the main pieces of evidence cited in the report to its source. The report, Porter says,

repeated the sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.

But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives.

In other words, his legitimate reason for being in Iran from 1996-2002 was not a cover, it really was legitimate. As Porter points out, the Washington Think-Tanker who helped spread the word of this "renegade scientist" theory, David Albright, admitted the intelligence claims from an unidentified "member state" that spawned the theory almost certainly came from Israel. Later, that intelligence was incorporated into Amano's findings without any independent verification.

<snip>

Another fount of evidence supporting Amano's report is likely the so-called "laptop of death" allegedly nabbed from an Iranian scientist by US intelligence services in 2005. The smoking gun evidence on the laptop was all written in English, had no reference to official classification, and included graphs made on Microsoft PowerPoint. When this piece of evidence first surfaced in 2007 in connection to the US National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear program, it was largely dismissed by IAEA officials and international diplomats as a likely forgery. But that was before Yukiya Amano headed the agency. Indeed, Amano's predecessor El Baradei publicly confirmed that Western Intelligence agencies had sought to exaggerate the threat of the Iranian nuclear program.

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[No Joe]

2. We've seen this movie before

KR

[Scuba]

3. The drumbeats are pounding, as Big Oil and the MIC once again join...

... forces (were they ever separate?) to send Americans off to war. Profits over everything.

[Bosonic]

4. To play Devil's Advocate

His http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Danilenko">wikipedia entry is quite specific in stating where he previously worked (nuclear installation known as NII-1011,located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-70). I'm sure an investigative journalist worth their salt could use this as a starting point of an investigation.

Also the stated nature of his work, miniaturizing the conventional explosive initiator for nuclear weapons is not incompatible with using explosives to generate nanodiamonds. Really they are both applications of the same general skill-set; namely using precisely/symmetrically arranged and timed explosives to produce intense pressures within a volume.

[eridani]

6. That's a good point

Still doesn't explain why Iranian bureaucrats write each other memos in English.

[redqueen]

5. Here we go again.

I hope the public will be less gullible this time.

And congress less complicit. (yeah, right)