This is shocking news, shocking. Though it is interesting how the NY Times puts it, in that “Israel says”, as opposed to tens of thousands of documents say
Israel Says Secret Files Prove Iran Lied About Nuclear Program
Revealing a huge archive of stolen Iranian nuclear plans, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accused Iran on Monday of lying for years about its efforts to build a nuclear weapon.
Days before President Trump was to decide whether to pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Mr. Netanyahu presented records from a secret warehouse in Tehran, making the case that Iranian leaders had deceived the international nuclear agency when they insisted their nuclear program was for peaceful purposes. Israeli spies seized the documents in an overnight raid in January, a senior Israeli official said.
But Mr. Netanyahu did not provide any evidence that Iran had violated the nuclear agreement since it took effect in early 2016. That suggests that the Israeli prime minister — who has opposed the deal since its inception, and even went to the American Congress to try to block it — was hoping that the disclosures would bolster Mr. Trump’s resolve to scuttle the agreement on May 12.
Wow, it took 3 whole paragraphs before , , and
After offering more political observations, and comments from Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, we finally get some details
“These files conclusively prove that Iran is brazenly lying when it said it never had a nuclear weapons program,†Mr. Netanyahu said, pointing to copies of what he said were 55,000 printed pages and 183 compact discs.
He said Israel had passed the information on to the United States, which “can vouch for its authenticity.â€
Mr. Netanyahu said that Iran had intensified its efforts to hide evidence of its weapons program after signing the nuclear deal in 2015, and in 2017 moved its records to a secret location in Tehran that looked like “a dilapidated warehouse.â€
If they’re doing this post-deal signing, then, that would rather make them non-compliant.
American intelligence agencies concluded in 2007 that Iran suspended the active portion of the bomb effort after the beginning of the Iraq war, in 2003, and Mr. Netanyahu confirmed that in his presentation. But he said that other elements of what Iran had called “Project Amad†went ahead, directed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist.
The documents he showed were not the first to leak out of the Iranian archives, or to document Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s role.
A decade ago, in early 2008, the chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency gathered diplomats from around the world to a meeting at the agency’s Vienna headquarters and showed them images from a similar trove, including sketches of bomb designs and memos and budget documents from Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s project. That presentation included sketches of a “spherical device†that could be detonated using high explosives, similar to plans Mr. Netanyahu showed on Monday.
And that’s the way the article goes: Iran being shown to be in non-compliance, and attempt by the NY Times to defend Iran. They’re rather soft on telling us about the 55,000 pages of documents, images, and videos on almost 183 CDs indicating that Project Amad has continued to operate out of a secret location in Tehran, mentioning Project Amad, the whole point, just once.
As Ed Morrissey notes
Netanyahu offers four conclusions from the sample he revealed in his presentation:
- Iran lied about never having a nuclear weapons program
- After the deal, Iran preserved their research and have expanded it
- Iran lied to the IAEA and violated the terms of the nuclear deal
- The nuclear deal is based on lies.
Here’s a conclusion that Netanyahu is too diplomatic to state out loud: The people who signed onto this deal are saps. It also points out the fecklessness in leaving the ballistic missile program outside of the original deal.
“Saps” is being way too kind. In the summer of 2015, “John Kerry, then secretary of state, assured reporters that American intelligence agencies had “absolute knowledge”about Iran’s past efforts to build a nuclear weapon.” All the people in Obama’s admin, along with Obama himself, told us that Iran was super cooperative, and that this deal was awesome. The Iran deal was essentially Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, and it’s all based on lies.
