The newspapers tended to merge the two periods, relying on interpretations from "experts" like former weapons inspector David Albright, who was the principal source for a front-page Washington Post news article on Monday about the IAEA's impending report -- and who was famously wrong about Iraq's WMD in 2002-2003.
"The [Iranian nuclear bomb] program never really stopped," Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said, according to the Post. "After 2003, money [in Iran] was made available for research in areas that sure look like nuclear weapons work but were hidden within civilian institutions."
The IAEA was more circumspect in its conclusions, although it is a truism that academic research on a wide variety of topics can, theoretically at least, be applied to building a nuclear bomb. Which is apparently one of the reasons why assassins have targeted Iranian physicists for murder in recent years.
In its Thursday editorial, the Post raised no objection to that strategy of killing Iranian scientists -- except to indicate that it didn't go far enough. The Post's neocon editors wrote:
"The Obama administration and other Western governments must recognize that the sanctions [on Iran] that have so far been put in place, and covert operations aimed at sabotaging Iranian centrifuges and killing scientists, have not succeeded in changing the regime's intentions or stopping its work."
The Post's editors seem to accept the fact (and the rationalization) for assassinating Iran's scientists, but the practice, if done against scientists in Western countries or in Israel, would surely be denounced as terrorism.
Similarly, it almost goes without saying that the Post and the Times saw no reason to mention that Israel possesses a sophisticated nuclear arsenal and -- unlike Iran -- has refused to subject itself to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or the scrutiny of the IAEA.
No one in the U.S. mainstream news media seems to find it the least bit hypocritical that Israel would be supplying evidence to the IAEA about the alleged secret nuclear ambitions of Iran when Israel itself is a rogue nuclear state.
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