Benjamin
Netanyahu’s stage performance about Iran seeking a nuclear weapon
not only was based on old material, but evidence shows it was
fabricated too, says Gareth Porter in this Consortium News exclusive
report.
by
Gareth Porter
Part
4 - New Nose Cone
It is
now well established, however, that Iran had begun redesigning the
Shahab-3 missile with a conical reentry vehicle or nosecone as early
as 2000 and replaced it with a completely different design that had a
“triconic” or “baby bottle” shape. It made it a missile with
very different flight capabilities and was ultimately called the
Ghadr-1. Michael Elleman, the world’s leading expert on Iranian
ballistic missiles, documented the redesign of the missile in his
path-breaking 2010 study of Iran’s missile program.
Iran
kept its newly-designed missile with the baby bottle reentry vehicle
secret from the outside world until its first test in mid-2004.
Elleman concluded that Iran was deliberately misleading the rest of
the world – and especially the Israelis, who represented the most
immediate threat of attack on Iran – to believe that the old model
was the missile of the future while already shifting its planning to
the new design, which would bring all of Israel within reach for the
first time.
The
authors of the drawings that Netanyahu displayed on the screen were
thus in the dark about the change in the Iranian design. The earliest
date of a document on the redesign of the reentry vehicle in the
collection obtained by U.S. intelligence was August 28, 2002 –
about two years after the actual redesign had begun.
That
major error indicates unmistakably that the schematic drawings
showing a nuclear weapon in a Shahab-3 reentry vehicle – what
Netanyahu called “integrated warhead design” were fabrications.
Netanyahu’s
slide show highlighted a series of alleged revelations that he said
came from the newly acquired “atomic archive” concerning the
so-called “Amad Plan” and the continuation of the activities of
the Iranian who was said to have led that covert nuclear weapons
project. But the single pages of Farsi language documents he flashed
on the screen were also clearly from the same cache of documents that
we now know came from the MEK-Israeli combination. Those documents
were never authenticated, and IAEA Director-General Mohamed
ElBaradei, who was skeptical of their authenticity, had insisted that
without such authentication, he could not accuse Iran of having a
nuclear weapons program.
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