IAEA Report Shows Iran Reduced Its Breakout Capacity

by Gareth Porter

9-4-2012 10:00am

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report made public Thursday reveals that Iran has actually reduced the amount of 20-percent enriched uranium available for any possible “breakout” to weapons grade enrichment over the last three months rather than increasing it.

Contrary to the impression conveyed by most news media coverage, the report provides new evidence that Iran’s enrichment strategy is aimed at enhancing its bargaining position in negotiations with the United States rather than amassing such a breakout capability.

The reduction in the amount of 20-percent enriched uranium in the Iranian stockpile that could be used to enrich to weapons grade is the result of a major acceleration in the fabrication of fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor, which needs 20-percent enriched uranium to produce medical isotopes.

That higher level enriched uranium has been the main focus of U.S. diplomatic demands on Iran ever since 2009, on the ground that it represents the greatest threat of an Iranian move to obtain a nuclear weapon capability.

When 20-percent uranium is used to make fuel plates, however, it is very difficult to convert it back to a form that can enriched to weapons grade levels.

When data in the Aug. 30 IAEA report on the “inventory” of 20-percent enriched uranium is collated with comparable data in the May 25 IAEA report, it shows that Iran is further from having a breakout capability than it was three months earlier.

The data in the two reports indicate that Iran increased the total production of 20-percent enriched uranium from 143 kg in May 2012 to 189.4 kg in mid-August. But the total stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium that could be more easily enriched to weapons grade – and which has been the focus of U.S. diplomatic demands on Iran ever since 2009 – fell from 101 kg to 91.4 kg during the quarter.

The reduction in the stockpile available for weapons grade enrichment was the result of the conversion of 53.3 kg of 20-percent enriched uranium into fuel plates – compared with only 43 kg in the previous five months.

Iran was thus creating fuel plates for its medical reactor faster than it was enriching uranium to a 20-percent level.

But although that reduction of the stockpile of enriched uranium of greatest concern to the United States was the real significance of the new report, it was not conveyed by the headlines and leads in news media coverage. Those stories focused instead on the fact that production of 20-percent enriched uranium had increased, and that the number of centrifuges at the underground facility at Fordow had doubled.

“Nobody has put out the story that their stockpile is shrinking,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a leading independent specialist on nuclear weapons policy, in an interview with IPS.

David Sanger and William Broad of the New York Times asserted in an Aug. 30 story that Iran had “doubled the number of centrifuges installed” at Fordow and had “cleansed” the site where the IAEA believed there had been nuclear weapons development work. The story made no reference to fuel plates or the effective stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium.

A second story by Sanger and Jodi Rudoren on the same day, datelined Jerusalem, was even more alarmist and inaccurate. It declared that the nuclear programme was “speeding up” and that Iran was “close to crossing what Israel has said is its red line: the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in a location invulnerable to Israeli attack.”

Reuters and AP stories also focused on the doubling of centrifuges as the main message in the IAEA report, and Reuters also said Iran “seems to be struggling to develop more efficient nuclear technology that would shorten the time it would need for any atom bomb bid”.

The Washington Post headline said that Iran was “speeding up” uranium enrichment, and the lead said Iran had “substantially increased the production of a more enriched form of uranium in recent months”. But in the second paragraph, it added, somewhat cryptically, that Iran “appeared to take steps that would make it harder to use its uranium stockpile to make nuclear bombs”.

Only a few paragraphs later was it made clear that the lead was misleading, because the IAEA had found that Iran had “converted much of the new material to metal form for use in a nuclear research reactor.” It even quoted an unnamed Barack Obama administration officials said it could not be “further enriched to weapons-grade material….”

In fact the IAEA data showed that it had converted all of the uranium enriched to 20 percent during the quarter to fuel plates, and had converted some of the production from previous quarters as well.

The media reports of a doubling of the number of centrifuges at the underground facility at Fordow were also misleading. When the information is examined more carefully, it actually provides further evidence that Iran is not striving to amass the higher level uranium needed for a breakout capability but is maneuvering to prepare for a later negotiated settlement.

Although the IAEA report shows that the number of centrifuges in place in Fordow has increased from 696 to 2,140 over the past six months, it also makes it clear that the number of centrifuges actually operating has not changed during that period.

The reason for that striking anomaly in the deployment at Fordow does not appear to be technical problems with the centrifuges. The 1,444 centrifuges that are not operating were never even connected by pipes, as the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) observed in its Aug. 30 commentary on the report.

The noncommittal character of the deployment of centrifuges at Fordow suggests that Iran has not decided whether those 1,444 centrifuges are to be committed to 3.5-percent enrichment or to 20-percent enrichment.

The Obama administration appears to understand that this uncertainty about the purpose of the centrifuges is aimed at strengthening Iran’s diplomatic hand in future negotiations. “They have been very strategic about it,” a senior U.S. official told the New York Times just before the report was made public. “They are creating tremendous capacity, but they are not using it.”

The official added, “That gives them leverage, but they think it also stops short of creating the pretext for an attack.”

Cirincione agrees with that senior official’s analysis. “The Iranians are excellent chess players. They are moving their pieces very carefully,” he said. “They are continuing to enhance the value of their bargaining chips.”

The implication of the IAEA report, Cirincione believes, is that Iran is still maneuvering to position itself for a more advantageous agreement in future negotiations. “If you were the Iranians, why would you negotiate right now?” asked Cirincione. “You would want to wait for a better deal.”

In previous rounds of negotiations with Iran in 2012, the United States demanded an end to all 20-percent enrichment and even the closure of the Fordow facility but offered no alleviation of the harsh financial sanctions now being imposed on Iran.

Within ‘Special Cell’ of Delhi Police, A History of Falsifying Evidence – Part Three

by Gareth Porter

8-30-2012 8:00am

In this three-part series, "The Delhi Car Bombing: How the Police Built a False Case", award-winning investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissects the Delhi police accusation against an Indian journalist and four Iranians of involvement in the Feb. 13 bombing of an Israeli embassy car.

WASHINGTON, Aug 29 2012 (IPS)- The Delhi Police Special Cell, which has accused an Indian journalist and four Iranians of conspiring to bomb an Israeli embassy car in Delhi Feb. 13, has a long history of planting evidence on those it has accused and of obtaining false confessions, according to court records now cited by critics of the police unit.

The Special Cell (SC) was organised in 1986 to investigate terrorism and major crimes, but it has been given such wide latitude in its operations that it has violated legal norms with complete impunity, critics say.

But the unit’s efforts to frame those it accuses have been so obvious – often employing the same tactics over and over again – that a significant majority of its cases have been rejected by judges in recent years.

Of the 174 individuals against whom the SC has brought charges from 2006 through 2011, 119 of them – nearly 70 percent – have been acquitted, according to official figures obtained under India’s Right to Information Act by activist Gopal Prasad.

The SC response to that development has been to leak false confessions and evidence to the news media in a largely unsuccessful effort to sway judges.

Confessions falsified by the SC are “routinely leaked to the press to establish the guilt of the accused”, Manisha Sethi, an assistant professor at Jamia Milia University in Delhi and an activist with the civil rights organisation Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association, told IPS. She described the result as “a vicious trial by media that indicts the accused well before the trial even begins”.

In the recent embassy car bombing, the first wave of leaks to the press about the alleged confessions of Indian journalist Syed Mohommed Ahmad Kazmi was timed to generate a wave of sensational articles in March portraying Kazmi as admitting to having been a participant in the embassy car bomb plot just before his bail application, as Sethi pointed out in an e-mail to IPS.

That maneuver prompted the court that was hearing Kazmi’s bail application to admonish the public prosecutor to refrain from such leaks.

A report, soon to be published by the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association and a copy of which has been obtained by IPS, of 16 terrorism cases brought by the SC from 1992 to 2008 documents a consistent pattern of irregularities in police procedures that led the courts to conclude that the police had framed those who had been accused.

The report’s detailed accounts of the cases are based entirely on conclusions reached by the judges in rejecting the central claims of the SC.

Among the most prominent irregularities documented in the report are those relating to incriminating evidence said to have been seized from suspects and to alleged confessions.

Typical of the SC terrorism cases described in the report is the case of Salman Kurshid Kori. The SC claimed that it arrested Kori and two other Muslim men as operatives of the militant Islamic group Lashkar-e-Toiba in December 2006. The SC reported seizing explosives, detonators and hand grenades from bags carried by each of the three men.

But the judge for the case heard evidence that the accused had been detained much earlier than the dates cited by police.

He also pointed out that there were no public witnesses to the seizure of the weapons, contrary to normal police procedures, despite the fact that a crowd had gathered to witness the arrest.

Even more telling, the “seizure memo”, which should have been written at the site of the seizure well before the “First Information Report” (FIR) was filed in the case, was found to have been written in the same handwriting and ink as the FIR.

Those obvious signs of police deception convinced the judge that the SC had framed the three men.

The SC officer who supervised the interrogation and arrest of the three men was then-Assistant Commissioner of Police Sanjeev Yadav, now an Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police and in charge of the embassy car bomb case.

The Kori case is not the only one over which Yadav presided to have been rejected by a judge because of indications that innocent people were framed. The report documents a total of four such cases – all from 2006 and 2007 – in which the seizure memo was signed at the same time and by the same person as the FIR. Also, no public witnesses attested to the seizures, and the suspects were found to have been detained much earlier than claimed.

Yadav is also under investigation by the Indian government for the deaths of five people who were said to have been killed in a violent “encounter” in May 2006 in Delhi’s Sonia Vihar district between an SC team and what was believed to be a criminal gang. Relatives of two of the dead alleged in a petition to the National Human Rights Commission that the victims had been taken from their residences by police and then killed in Delhi.

After examining forensic evidence surrounding the supposed encounter, the NHRC concluded in a mid-2010 report that no “cross firing” had occurred – and thus that the police account had been falsified. That report led to the launch of an investigation by a magistrate into the incident last September.

In a separate investigative report published last February on SC abuses in terrorism cases, Sethi described a common pattern in one case after another: alleged secret information from an informant about the arrival of a terrorist in Delhi, followed by dispatch of a police party to the point of arrival; unsuccessful efforts to get civilians to be public witnesses; the apprehension of the “terrorist”; and subsequent recovery of arms or explosives, which were displayed to the press.

Only when each of the cases went to trial was the SC narrative found to have been bogus, according to Sethi’s investigation, which was also based on court documents.

In the 2005 case of Moinuddin Dar and Bashir Amad Shah described by Sethi, the SC claimed that the two men were Kashmiri terrorists who had come to Delhi from Kashmir carrying 450,000 rupees (8,000 U.S. dollars) in a car loaded with arms and ammunition, after the SC had been informed by a confidential source when and where they were arriving. Upon arrest, the two men had allegedly confessed to their terrorist plan.

But Sethi recounted that the case soon fell apart in court when the judge found that the car full of arms and ammunition had been “planted” and “used as a tool to falsely implicate the accused persons in this case”. He found that the police vehicle that was supposed to have taken the police team to the site of the arrest had actually not moved that day, and that the two men had been held illegally by police in a hotel room for two weeks.

After investigating another 2006 SC terrorism case, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation called for three SC officers to be charged with lying under oath and creating false evidence. But despite several instances in which courts directed the Delhi Police Commissioner to initiate legal action against officers of the SC for various abuses, none have yet been punished.

*This story is the last in a three-part series, “The Delhi Car Bombing: How the Police Built a False Case”, in which award-winning investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissects the Delhi police accusation against an Indian journalist and four Iranians of involvement in the Feb. 13 bombing of an Israeli embassy car.

:: Republished with permission from Gareth Porter. Article originally published by Inter Press Service on September 1st, 2012.