"There is no way to know whether or not the activity you see in a particular satellite image is cleansing or just regular work." Brannan added, "There's a lot of activity there -- always."
The new alarm over alleged satellite images recalls the accusation by the George W. Bush administration in close consultation with Israel in 2004 that Iran was using high explosives to test nuclear weapons at Parchin.
ISIS Executive Director David Albright told interviewer Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio in July 2009 that he had "gotten a tip" in September 2004 that high explosives testing at Parchin "could be used for nuclear weapons."
ISIS then published a series of satellite photographs that the organization said were "consistent" with facilities for such nuclear testing.
The satellite images were then cited by Undersecretary of State John Bolton as alarming evidence of covert Iranian nuclear weapons work. The United States and its Western allies put strong pressure on the IAEA to get Iran to agree to a visit to Parchin.
But Bolton and the IAEA had only vague suspicions rather than hard intelligence to go on. The IAEA asked to visit four entirely different areas of the 24-square-mile Parchin facility for places that Israeli intelligence believed were consistent with some kind of nuclear- related testing activity.
The Iranians insisted that the IAEA inspectors could only visit one area per visit, even though they were allowed to visit five different buildings of their own choosing each time. The result was embarrassing visits in January 2005 and again in November that found nothing to justify the suspicions.
Another IAEA mission to Parchin that concedes that the information it had been given by those unnamed member states was false would deal a serious blow to the efforts of Israel and its European allies to refute the 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate.(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
