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UN clears Iran nuclear facility
Why am I not surprised?

Tuesday, 29 June, 2004, 16:07 GMT 17:07 UK

The head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency has said Russia’s nuclear co-operation with Iran is no longer a matter of concern. After talks involving suitcases of cash in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin, Mohamed ElBaradei said Russia’s construction of Iran’s first nuclear reactor was not even discussed.
ElBaradei’s complaisance bubbles to the surface yet again.
He denied US claims that the Bushehr reactor could be used to make weapons.
"The Yanks have got these perfectly splendid mullah chaps all wrong, I tell you!"
The statement came after IAEA experts visited another site where the US says Iran worked on nuclear arms. "Bushehr is not apparently at the centre of my international concern," Mr ElBaradei told reporters on Tuesday. The IAEA chief said the reactor was aimed at producing nuclear energy only, and there was an agreement to return spent fuel to Russia.
And we all know what Iranian agreements are worth.
"It is not something that is of any concern on our part," he added. Mr Elbaradei said the reactor was not even mentioned in the hour-long meeting he had with President Putin.
Too busy counting his money, I guess.
The US - which says Iran has been running a secret nuclear weapons programme - has put pressure on Russia not to go ahead with the reactor in southern Iran. Tehran says its nuclear programme is designed solely to provide energy.
They decline to specify whether that energy is for steady or burst release.
Construction on the Bushehr reactor began in 2002, despite strong US objections. Moscow denies any suggestion that Tehran could make a bomb on the basis of the nuclear technology it is making available.
And Moscow is out of reach for Iranian missiles. What a coincidence!
The reactor is due to become rubble operational in 2005.

Satisfaction

Mr Elbaradei also said that Iran had provided details about another site at the centre of American allegations.
Which he just as quickly promised to ignore.
He said Iranian officials had told an IAEA team that the Lavizan site in Tehran was initially used for military research - but not nuclear weapons as the US suspects - before it was razed.

"The Iranians said it was a former research and development military site and was used as a physics institute, later for bio-technology weapons research," Mr ElBaradei said.

The Americans say the site has been completely dismantled and the topsoil removed in the past year, to try to hide evidence of nuclear activity. Iranian officials say the site was razed to make way for a park.
And some baby ducklings and some rabbits ... I get to pet the rabbits, huh, George?
International inspectors visited the site on Monday. Mr ElBaradei expressed satisfaction with Iran’s co-operation with the inspectors - less than two weeks after his agency criticised Iran.
Makes sense. An Arabic figurehead who can’t even find a covert nuclear weapons program on his own native country’s home soil and cannot manage to find one on another Islamic brother nation’s turf either. I’m shocked! Shocked, I say!
Posted by: Zenster 2004-06-29
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=36762