ISIS Encourages the IAEA to Use Unauthenticated Evidence in its Reports on Iran
Posted: February 11, 2013 Filed under: Nuclear 5 CommentsFriend of ACL Professor Yousaf Butt, and Dr. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, both highly qualified physicists, have just published an insightful new analysis of information which appears to have formed part of the evidence on which the IAEA has relied in its continuing determination of Iran’s noncompliance with its safeguards agreement.
This is important stuff, as it goes directly to the heart of evidentiary provenance and reliability, the IAEA’s practices of evidence gathering and assessment, and thus to the reliability and credibility of IAEA reports and legal determinations regarding Iran and potentially other countries.
I highly recommend that you read this. It makes the issues clear even for non-technical types like me.
Arms Control Law 
Thanks to Dan for highlighting the WMD-Junction write-up.
Folks may also be interested in a CSMonitor piece I did arguing why this “graph” may be the thin edge of the wedge:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/1205/Flawed-graph-weakens-case-against-Iran-nuclear-program-video
You don’t say?
ISIS is fanning the flames over fake evidence? That’s what they’ve been doing for a while:
have a lookie —
http://consortiumnews.com/2011/11/08/an-iraq-wmd-replay-on-iran/
“The American public is about to be inundated with another flood of “expert analysis” about a dangerous Middle Eastern country presumably hiding a secret nuclear weapons program that may require a military strike, although this time it is Iran, not Iraq.
In the near future, you will be seeing more satellite photos of non-descript buildings that experts will say are housing elements of a nuclear bomb factory. There will be more diagrams of supposed nuclear devices. Some of the same talking heads will reappear to interpret this new “evidence.”
You might even recognize some of those familiar faces from the more innocent days of 2002-2003 when they explained, with unnerving confidence, how Iraq’s Saddam Hussein surely had chemical and biological weapons and likely a nuclear weapons program, too.
For instance, back then, former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright was all over the news channels, reinforcing the alarmist claims about Iraq’s WMD that were coming from President George W. Bush and his neocon-dominated administration.
David Albright
Today, Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) is issuing a flurry of alarmist reports about Iran’s nuclear bomb progress, often accompanied by the same kind of satellite photos and diagrams that helped persuade many Americans that Iraq must possess unconventional weapons that turned out to be fictitious.”
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Who funds ISIS anyway? Where do they get the money for all the expensive satellite photos that the misinterpret badly?
I read that article, and I read the quotes that are attributed to Albright, and the question nags, nags, nags at the back of my mind: does David Albright actually know what he is talking about?
As in: not whether Albright has an agenda.
No, not that.
The question that nags me is whether he is actually has the competence that would warrant the attention that is paid to him.
I mean, it’s one thing to be wrong, and it’s another thing altogether to then double-down on that error.
The first is “a mistake”, and everyone makes mistakes.
The second is, well, “dumb”.
Well, “dumb” is not very polite — I think Not All That Bright may be more accurate. As in David NotAllThatBright.
Well, unfortunately, the media folks think he is physicist even though he never got his doctorate in any field of science — as far as I know he has a maters degree: which is like a door-prize given at grad schools for science fields.
He also claims to be a ex-IAEA inspector when he has no such qualification — have a lookie:
http://scotthorton.org/2013/01/23/12213-muhammad-sahimi/
I think NotAllThatBright gets some legitimacy by circulating satellite pictures even though he’s made mistakes in interpreting them for decades….he has no training in satellite imagery.
What an investigative reporter should do is find out who funds him and why?
Why is ISIS politically bias is the question.
See also this deconstruction of ISIS’ methods and sources:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/sahimi.php?articleid=14420