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
2 - Disinformation Campaign
Netanyahu’s
claim about how Israel acquired this “atomic archive” is only the
latest manifestation of a long-term disinformation campaign that the
Israeli government began to work on in 2002-03. The documents to
which Netanyahu referred in the presentation were introduced to the
news media and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
beginning in 2005 as coming originally from a secret Iranian nuclear
weapons research program. For many years U.S. news media have
accepted those documents as authentic. But despite the solid media
united front behind that narrative, we now know with certainty that
those earlier documents were fabrications and that they were created
by Israel’s Mossad.
That
evidence of fraud begins with the alleged origins of the entire
collection of documents. Senior intelligence officials in the George
W. Bush administration had told reporters that the documents came
from “a stolen Iranian laptop computer”, as The New York Times
reported in November 2005. The Times quoted unnamed intelligence
officials as insisting that the documents had not come from an
Iranian resistance group, which would cast serious doubt on their
reliability.
But it
turned that the assurances from those intelligence officials were
part of an official dissimulation. The first reliable account of the
documents’ path to the United States came only in 2013, when former
senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt, who retired from
his long-time position as coordinator of German-North American
cooperation, spoke with this writer on the record.
Voigt
recalled how senior officials of the German foreign intelligence
agency, the Bundesnachtendeinst or BND, had explained to him in
November 2004 that they were familiar with the documents on the
alleged Iran nuclear weapons program, because a sometime source—but
not an actual intelligence agent—had provided them earlier that
year. Furthermore, the BND officials explained that they had viewed
the source as “doubtful,” he recalled, because the source had
belonged to the Mujahideen-E Khalq, the armed Iranian opposition
group that had fought Iran on behalf of Iraq during the eight year
war.
BND
officials were concerned that the Bush administration had begun
citing those documents as evidence against Iran, because of their
experience with “Curveball” – the Iraqi engineer in Germany who
had told stories of Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs that had turned to
be false. As a result of that meeting with BND officials, Voigt had
given an interview to The Wall Street Journalin which he had
contradicted the assurance of the unnamed U.S. intelligence officials
to the Times and warned that the Bush administration should not base
its policy on the documents it was beginning to cite as evidence of
an Iranian nuclear weapons program, because they had indeed come from
“an Iranian dissident group.”
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