Wanniski.com Friday, November 19, 2004 Iran is Not a Nuclear Threat!!! Memo To: Editors and reporters By Jude Wanniski Re: Please get off your behinds NOW that most of you have apologized for sitting on your duffs while the neo-cons planned and executed the totally unnecessary war against a toothless regime in Baghdad, I suggest you get off your duffs in regard to the neo-con plot to war against Iran. David Irving comments: I'VE pointed out in the past that just because I post an article on this website, that does not mean that I endorse its content. This one I do.    It is plain beyond peradventure that the Washington regime is now planning an early strike against Iran, and is flying the idea like a kite over the rest of a subservient world to see if anybody shoots it down.   I predict: an early air strike against Iran's nuclear facility, an air strike which will both appease Israel, and incidentally destroy any evidence that the Pentagon's expert sources -- Iranian dissidents all -- have lied.    It was hilarious today, Nov 20, 2004, to see President Bush at an imternational conference in Chile, trying to pronounce the word nuclear: he has obviously been alerted to his elocution defect, because each time he pronounced the treacherous word nuclear now it was no longer nucular -- his previous best -- but a kind of mangled nyookle, prefaced by a brief pause, as though taking a short run at it, and accompanied by the slightest grimace.  I predict that Bush will tell speechwriters to use "atomic" in future. What fun we speech-watchers, William Safire and I, are going to have.      INTERESTING will be to see if Mr Sanctimonious Blair joins in the coming air strike with Britain's own airforce; or even allows the Americans the use of the big Royal Air Force bomber base at Fairford, Gloucestershire, for the purpose.   If Britain, the US, and dozens or other regimes around the world pursue uranium enrichment programs for their own no doubt entirely peaceful purposes, then why should not the Iranians?    If real evidence is ever produced of their violating this agreement, they can always be dealt with swiftly. And, on a déjà vu note, was it not painful to see our Black hero, Colin Powell, last night, Nov 19, 2004, in the dying days of his office, once again posturing before maps and aerial photographs (just like Feb 2003 before the U.N. Security Council!) warning a gullible universe of the threat posed to its inhabitants, this time by Iran?    Not by the United States, which invades country after country in its murderous thirst for oil and scarce resources; and not by Israel, which openly violates the United Nations by building an atomic arsenal while refusing to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.    Try getting your tongue round that treaty, George. It's a tricky one. Pricklier than a pretzel. I've been posting memos here for months pointing out that Iran has not done anything to warrant the propaganda directed at it from the Perle Cabal, i.e., Richard Perle's network that is laced through both political parties, Congress and the White House. Iran is in full compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has a hundred times publicly pledged to permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect any gol-durned site inside its borders if someone has reason to believe it has a secret nuclear program underway. Iranian exile groups pop up from time to time with press conferences about some diabolical site they have discovered, but Iran always allows the inspectors to go in, and they find nothing. Now I know it is impossible to get the Wall Street Journal editorial page to take a good look at the dopey charges being leveled against Tehran. It has been intellectually corrupted by the Perle Cabal and robotically publishes anything the Cabal asks it to. Today it runs a long op-ed by Henry Sikolski, a Perle stooge, who warns that Iran is not only deceiving all of us, but that it could soon be weeks or months away from having a nuke to rain down upon its adversaries in the region, i.e., Israel. Can this be possible? Not on your life. Not on your life. But for goodness sakes, The New York Times has been pulled into the same orbit, a recent editorial wringing its hands over Iran and the possibility that it could have a nuke to threaten the region, i.e. Israel. The Times editors are well-meaning, but they do not seem to check anything out with independent sources. Here is what I wrote the Times editors after reading their editorial: My longtime friend Gordon Prather, a nuclear physicist who actually designed nukes (when we were still designing new nukes) tells me your editorial today is factually incorrect in a very basic way and that you would do well not to accept the material being presented to reporters by the Boltons and Sikolskis of the world. That is, the edit says: "The centrifuges at [Natanz] can just as easily be used to make bomb-grade enriched uranium as to prepare lower-grade fuel for reactors. Any country that builds and operates such a plant has taken the most crucial step down the road toward building nuclear weapons." Dr. Prather says your editorial writer seems to think it would be easy to make a nuke once you have a uranium enrichment plant. He points out that Iran could not take the first step unless it first completed the plant at Bushehr and ran it for a year, then announced its withdrawal from the NPT, which requires six months lead time, and then spends several years taking the fuel out of Bushehr, allowing it to cool down for a few years so it could be handled, then reprocessed, and eventually turned into one nuke device.... probably not one small enough to be able to be carried by a missile. His recommendation is that you send your editorial writer to one of the URENCO plants in Europe, where he/she can ask the people who run their uranium enrichment plants what it would take for Iran to go from A to Z with what they have now. Prather believes the protocols Iran would sign in order to proceed with a low-enrichment plant would make it absolutely impossible for them to take steps two or three or eight hundred, etc., to make a nuke, without being detected. Because Iran has the right to enrich uranium under the supervision of the IAEA in order to have a complete nuclear fuel cycle you are really asking the Iranian government to give up that right if it wishes to produce nuclear power. Please editors and reporters, I hate to challenge your collective intelligence, but I must do so. In 2002-2003, the whole world demanded through the United Nations Security Council that Saddam Hussein open up his whole country to prove to us that he had no weapons of mass destruction. And he did so! He invited inspectors from the U.N., from the IAEA, and from the US Congress, and from the CIA to come to Iraq and look into every nook and cranny. We did, found nothing, and still invaded. Now, dear editors and reporters, please take note that the neo-cons have been insisting Iran has all kinds of WMD programs underway and Tehran says it does not... and says we can send inspectors into any nook and cranny of Iran to check that out. Doesn't it ever occur to you, dear journalists of the Fourth Estate, that you are not doing the minimum to prevent a second or a third unnecessary war? Huh? © 2004 Wanniski.com   The story which Farnaz did not file: her email to her friends giving the true version of events. (She was dismissed by The Wall Street Journal when it surfaced on the Internet.). Farnaz Baghdad diary David Irving: A Radical's Diary - on the latest war crimes seen in Iraq: "Alas, Mr Sanctimonious Blair's love affair with Mr Illiterate Bush is already leading some ugly morning stains on the bedspread. "

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