Have UN-Inspectors ever helped in any crisis?

UN-Inspectors historically have been good to make scientific assessments which have been more or less close to reality, but their inability to produce any kind of change in a world of politics that uses science to their evil goals, has been frustrating.

However, once their assessment was done, what has been their impact? Not meaningful, to say the least.

In the case of Iran, with the pretext that "if anyone" would have attacked Iran earlier to stop their evil nuclear program would have caused uproar among the otherwise Western-friendly Iranian population has instead, bought time to the bad guys and brought strictly no positive change whatsoever.

Thus, the so-called Iranian resistance, whether popular or student movements, have been unable to produce any kind of result to remove their "unwanted" leaders, in essence, because of a tangible weak spirit of resistance among the people of Iran. And, that's a fact.

And, now, as Churchill says "... the worst case is to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it's better to die than to live as a slave..."

We are slowly entering a world of demonic savagery, where massacres, beheading, stoning, honor killing, mutilation, and so more are the rule under the evil Muslim Islamic Sharia law, unless Western populations worldwide react and fight before it's too late.
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Iran nuclear crisis: UN inspectors arrive in Tehran
From the BBC News

UN nuclear inspectors have arrived in Tehran for the second time in a month to discuss Iran's nuclear programme.

Chief inspector Herman Nackaerts said his team's "highest priority" was to clarify the "possible military dimensions" of the nuclear programme.

But he cautioned that progress "may take a while".

Iran insists it is enriching uranium to use for power generation, but Western nations believe the programme is geared towards making weapons.

Tensions have risen over speculation that Israel may carry out a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

US national security adviser Tom Donilon arrived in Israel at the weekend for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.

But the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, warned on Sunday that it was still unclear whether Iran was at a stage to assemble a nuclear bomb.

"On that basis, I think it would be premature to exclusively decide that the time for a military option was upon us," Gen Dempsey said.

'New developments'
Last week Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took part in an elaborate ceremony to unveil new developments in his country's nuclear programme.

Tehran said it had used domestically-made nuclear fuel in a reactor for the first time, as well as developing faster, more efficient uranium enrichment centrifuges.

State TV showed the president inspecting the fuel rods as they were loaded into a reactor.


Iranian media showed President Ahmadinejad (at right) at a ceremony to unveil "new developments" in Tehran's nuclear programme
The IAEA inspectors described their last visit, in January, as positive, and said Iran was "committed" to "resolving all outstanding issues".

Mr Nackaerts said on Sunday that he hoped to have a "couple of good and constructive days in Tehran".

"Importantly we hope for some concrete results from the trip. The highest priority remains of course the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear programme, but we want to tackle all outstanding issues," he said.

"This is of course a very complex issue that may take a while. But we hope it can be constructive".

The inspectors' evaluation of their visits may form part of the next written report on Iran's nuclear programme, expected later in February.

But last November, the IAEA said it had information suggesting Iran had carried out tests "relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device".

That information led to a decision by the US and the European Union to tighten sanctions against Iran, including measures targeting the country's lucrative oil industry.

Iran said on Sunday it had halted oil sales to British and French companies ahead of an EU oil embargo set to begin on 1 July. Analysts say the gesture of retaliation is largely symbolic.

On Monday, the head of Iran's national oil company said the ban might be extended to other EU members that continued "hostile acts" against Iran.

Ahmad Qalehbani said exports to Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Germany and the Netherlands could be stopped, semi-official Mehr news agency reported.

BENADOR: Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vs the West

As History unravels in front of our eyes, the West finds themselves with a most formidable enemy, Iran.

And, whether some may pretend that the people of Iran are not the government of Iran, just as everywhere else, the inept behavior of that same people to stop the Mullahs tyranny, is giving tacit legitimacy to an evil regime that does not hesitate to be vociferous in their intentions to destroy one country that legitimately exists on this Earth.

Iran's Ahmadinejad explict will to destroy Israel and annihilate the Jewish people makes the world miss the point, as we see, because the issue is not only with Israel but, as Mr. Khamenei shows, with the whole Western civilization.

Israel is the gate to civilization... or is it...?

In these threatening times, the corrupt liberal Israeli leadership misses the point in that they have had until now the utmost military power in the region. However, if they wanted the best for the country, namely the security of their own people above all, it should time for them now to turn to their best weapon, the One who gave the Land of Israel to the Jewish people: G-d.

Righteous Jewish people in Israel and abroad, read this with your heart and your soul, raise your voice so G-d can hear all of us trusting Him, Our G-d, Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father Our King:

"If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, let Israel now say;
If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us;
Then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their wrath was kindled against us;
Then the waters would have overwhelmed us, the stream would have gone over our soul;
Then the proud waters would have gone over our soul!
Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as a prey to their teeth!
Our soul has escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped!
Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth!" Psalm 124
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Khamenei's outlook dims hope for Iran nuclear deal
By Alistair Lyon
LONDON | Mon Feb 20, 2012 10:05am EST
(Reuters) - As tensions over Iran's nuclear program ratchet higher once again, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's aversion for the West remains a formidable barrier to any diplomatic solution.

A visit by U.N. nuclear inspectors to Iran this week, a few days after Tehran wrote to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton promising "new initiatives" in negotiations, suggests the door to diplomacy has not slammed shut.

Harsher Western sanctions are damaging Iran's economy and Israel is debating military action, with or without a U.S. green light, lending fresh urgency to efforts to defuse the crisis over the Islamic Republic's sensitive nuclear activity.

Yet a sea change in policy seems unlikely while the tall, bearded Khamenei, 72, holds power in a country whose Shi'ite Muslim religious leadership has made "Death to America, death to Israel" its mantra since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

This month Khamenei said sanctions would not alter Iran's nuclear course, military threats would "harm America" and any nation or group fighting Israel, thought to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power, would have Tehran's backing.

"In response to threats of oil embargo and war, we have our own threats to impose at the right time," he declared.

Khamenei has in the past denied that Iran seeks atomic bombs, saying: "It is against our Islamic thoughts."

But he has shown little interest in genuinely assuaging Western worries about Iran's activities, authorizing what the U.N. nuclear watchdog regards as only incomplete cooperation, as well as intermittent talks with six world powers that Western officials suspect Tehran pursues primarily to gain more time to attain nuclear "breakout" capability.

The bespectacled cleric, who ultimately decides all matters of state, including nuclear and foreign policy, simply does not trust the United States, once described by his late mentor Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a wolf to Iran's lamb.

In 2009, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, himself no friend of the West, leaned toward a compromise involving a nuclear fuel swap to allay concerns about Iran's intentions, hardliners shot it down, apparently with Khamenei's blessing.

WARY OF RIVALS

Khamenei has long sought to ensure that no group, even among his conservative allies, musters enough power to challenge him.

And when Ahmadinejad appeared to do just that last year, Khamenei was swift to react, reinstating an intelligence minister sacked by the president against his will.

Iranian analysts say the Supreme Leader is keen to ensure that Ahmadinejad emerges weaker from next week's parliamentary election, expected to be mostly a contest among hardliners.

After Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei, who served two terms as president in the 1980s, was picked to succeed him, a surprise choice for some, as he was then only a mid-ranking cleric. He was swiftly promoted to ayatollah.

Khamenei inherited enormous powers, but could not hope to emulate the towering political and religious authority of Iran's revolutionary founder. His allies say he tends to reach major decisions after consulting a tight-knit group of top officials.

He can count on the loyalty of the elite Revolutionary Guards and Basij religious militia, which quelled the worst unrest in the Islamic Republic's history after Ahmadinejad was re-elected in June 2009 in a vote opponents said was rigged.

TAKING SIDES

Khamenei then cast his weight behind Ahmadinejad, declaring that defeated opposition leaders would be responsible for any bloodshed in what proved to be eight months of street protests.

Soon after the election, Khamenei, the final authority in Iran's complex system of clerical rule and limited democracy, appeared to offer his own life for the Islamic revolution in an emotional Friday sermon that drew tears from the congregation.

"We will do what we will have to do," he said. "I have an unworthy life, a defective body and little honor, which was given to me by you. I will put all of these on the palm of my hand and spend them on the path of the revolution and Islam."

The message of the Supreme Leader, whose right hand was crippled in a 1981 assassination attempt, was that defiance of his will amounted to a counter-revolutionary act.

Khamenei should stay above the political fray, according to Khomeini's system of "velayat-e faqih", or rule by a religious jurist. His one-sided intervention in the uproar after the 2009 vote, which divided Iran's religious and political elite, further stoked a crisis of legitimacy that still lingers.

In practice, Khamenei has long favored hardliners, helping to thwart reforms and feelers toward the United States when the moderate Mohammad Khatami was president from 1997 to 2005, and for years backing his radical successor, Ahmadinejad.

In theory, he could be removed by the 86-man Assembly of Experts, but the clerical body is never known to have challenged a man who controls many of the levers of power.

Khamenei, whose black turban signifies he is a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad, is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and appoints many senior figures, including the heads of the judiciary, security agencies and state radio and television.

Born into a clerical family in Mashhad in northeast Iran in 1939, he became involved with underground groups opposed to the U.S.-backed Shah in the 1960s and was jailed several times.

In a study of Khamenei's writings, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment argued that his hostility to U.S. "global arrogance" was matched by fear that any opening to the West would allow foreign influences to dilute Iran's Islamic purity.

"After three decades of being immersed in a 'death to America' culture, it may be asking too much for Khamenei to reinvent himself," Sadjadpour wrote.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

BENADOR: West Getting Serious with Nuclear Arms Charge Against Iran

Ever since the Shah was ousted, the fate of Iran has been at the hands of murderous mullahs and as time has gone by, the situation has worsened, especially with a president who virulently has called for the destruction of an existing country and who has been supporting the Islamist movements expansion throughout the world by exporting and encouraging, promoting terrorism.

Nuclear weapons at the hands of rogue regimes are among the most dangerous situations, and ideally, it should have been the turn of the Iranian people to stop their own misfit government. But they have not. And, one can but see with no enthusiasm the need of other countries to 'fix' the situation.
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Nuclear Arms Charge Against Iran Is No Slam Dunk: Robert Kelley

By Robert Kelley Jan 10, 2012 7:01 PM ET

The conflict between Iran and the West just keeps heating up, with the Iranians announcing over the weekend that they have begun to enrich uranium at a second major facility, a well-defended site outside the city of Qom.
Given the high stakes, it’s valuable to take another look at the main source of the tension: Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. That this enterprise is active is widely considered a given in the U.S. In fact, the evidence, contained in a November report of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is sketchy. And the way the data have been presented produces a sickly sense of deja vu.
I am speaking up about this now because, as a member of the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team in 2003, I learned firsthand how withholding the facts can lead to bloodshed. Having known the details then, though I was not allowed to speak, I feel a certain shared responsibility for the war that killed more than 4,000 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis. A private citizen today, I hope to help ensure the facts are clear before the U.S. takes further steps that could lead, intentionally or otherwise, to a new conflagration, this time in Iran.
It’s accepted that Iran at one time had a nuclear-weapons program. The country’s enormous investment in a secret underground uranium-enrichment complex in the city of Natanz is essentially proof of clandestine intentions. The military plutonium-production reactor in Arak is yet another indicator.
However, it must be remembered that in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, U.S. agencies concluded that Iran halted its nuclear-arms program in 2003 under international pressure. It’s rare for intelligence officials to determine that they have sufficient evidence to say a program has ended, so their information presumably was very good. Similarly, until this year, the IAEA has consistently reported that it had no information suggesting Iran had a nuclear-weapons program after 2004.
So the issue is not whether there is evidence of such a program, but whether there is evidence that it was restarted after being shut down in 2003.
The Nov. 8, 2011, report of the IAEA, under the leadership of Director General Yukiya Amano, is long on the former and very short on the latter. In the 24-page document, intended for a restricted distribution but widely available on the Internet, all but three of the items that were offered as proof of a possible nuclear-arms program are either undated or refer to events before 2004. The agency spends about 96 percent of a 14- page annex reprising what was already known: that at one time there were military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.
Three Indications
What about the three indications that the arms project may have been reactivated?
Two of the three are attributed only to two member states, so the sourcing is impossible to evaluate. In addition, their validity is called into question by the agency’s handling of the third piece of evidence.
That evidence, according to the IAEA, tells us Iran embarked on a four-year program, starting around 2006, to validate the design of a device to produce a burst of neutrons that could initiate a fission chain reaction. Though I cannot say for sure what source the agency is relying on, I can say for certain that this project was earlier at the center of what appeared to be a misinformation campaign.
In 2009, the IAEA received a two-page document, purporting to come from Iran, describing this same alleged work. Mohamed ElBaradei, who was then the agency’s director general, rejected the information because there was no chain of custody for the paper, no clear source, document markings, date of issue or anything else that could establish its authenticity. What’s more, the document contained style errors, suggesting the author was not a native Farsi speaker. It appeared to have been typed using an Arabic, rather than a Farsi, word-processing program. When ElBaradei put the document in the trash heap, the U.K.’s Times newspaper published it.
This episode had suspicious similarities to a previous case that proved definitively to be a hoax. In 1995, the IAEA received several documents from the Sunday Times, a sister paper to the Times, purporting to show that Iraq had resumed its nuclear-weapons program in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The IAEA quickly determined that the documents were elaborate forgeries. There were mistakes in formatting the documents’ markings, classification and dates, and many errors in language and style indicated the author’s first language was something other than Arabic or Farsi. Inspections in Iraq later in 1995 confirmed incontrovertibly that there had been no reconstitution of the Iraqi nuclear program.
Today’s Regrets
I regret now that ElBaradei did not speak out more vehemently, before the U.S. went to war, about the 1995 faked documents, additional forgeries provided to the agency in 2003 and other falsifications. A good man, he had been an international lawyer with years of experience dealing with half- truths and prevarications. But he was trapped between telling the whole story and overtly insulting the U.S., which supplied 25 percent of the IAEA’s funding.
For example, ElBaradei labeled documents provided to the IAEA about Iraq’s attempts to acquire uranium from Africa “not authentic.” A better description would have been “blatant and amateurish forgeries.” He provided evidence that aluminum tubes the U.S. said were for nuclear centrifuges were actually for rockets. But he did not supply the supporting engineering details publicly. The truth was lost in the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s scandalous detailing of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, which was wrong in almost every respect.
ElBaradei’s successor also has fallen short by failing to note in his report the earlier doubts that Iran was continuing to develop a neutron-producing device. If Amano has found new reasons to overlook the many questionable aspects of this story, he should present them. Given past doubts about the episode, the agency’s reporting on it should be above reproach.
When it comes to accurately accounting for potential diversions of nuclear materials, the IAEA’s main mission, the agency has gone about its work with precision. It needs to be just as exacting when it delves into allegations about Iran’s weapons intentions.
I should be clear: Iran deserves tough scrutiny. It claims to have given up its nuclear-weapons ambitions, yet repeatedly acts as if it has something to hide. I am a skeptic; I suspect the Iranians may have an ongoing weaponization program. And the uncertainty must be resolved.
At the same time, we should not again be held hostage to forgeries and the spinning of data to make the worst case. If Iran is developing nuclear weapons, let it be proved through the analysis of current, solid information -- not recycled, discredited data. If there is to be a war with Iran, let’s not have a repeat, afterward, of the anguished articles and books from officials who kept their misgivings to themselves. Let’s get all the facts on the table now.

Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer, was a director at the IAEA, where he worked for nine years. He gained his weapons expertise over 30 years at the University of California’s nuclear-weapons laboratories. The opinions expressed are his own.

Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View.
To contact the writer of this article: Robert Kelley at R.kelley@atomicreporters.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Lisa Beyer at lbeyer3@bloomberg.net.

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