MI6 and Iranian nukes – don’t believe the hype!
Posted by admin978 on July 13, 2012 · Leave a Comment
MI6 chief Sir John Sawers: whose agenda is served by hyping the Iranian nuclear 'threat'?
Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph carried a dramatic front page headline claiming that MI6 has so far stopped Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, and that the Iranians are now only a couple of years away from obtaining their own nukes.
But Telegraph readers should beware of the hype and should be asking themselves whose interests are really served by all this hysteria about Iran. The claims were supposedly made by the MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, speaking to a hundred civil servants at a conference in London last week. Yet in reality intelligence professionals have repeatedly agreed that Iran hasn’t even decided to start a nuclear weapons programme. The considered judgment of both the CIA and MI6 is that Iran halted its early stages of nuclear weapons research way back in 2003, and hasn’t started it up again.
Political agitation forced the CIA to reopen their investigation: but they again concluded that there was no Iranian nuclear weapons programme. One CIA source told the New York Times that even the Israeli spy agency Mossad agreed with this conclusion: “Mossad does not disagree with the U.S. on the weapons program. There is not a lot of dispute between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities on the facts.”
So what is actually going on here? It seems that the Daily Telegraph – together with some Tory politicians such as former Defence Secretary Liam Fox – is determined to push the political agenda of the Israeli government, beating the drum for military conflict with Iran at every opportunity.
Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan has warned against attacking Iran, but hardliners in the Israeli government such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disagree with their own intelligence chiefs. Just like Tony Blair and George Bush at the start of the Iraq war, they are prepared to ignore the facts and are determined on a military showdown.
The key fact that such lobbyists ignore is that there is only one nuclear power in the Middle East, and that is Israel itself – a country that obtained nuclear weapons by subterfuge and remains adamantly opposed to any form of international inspection. They even kidnapped and imprisoned one of their own nuclear scientists, Mordechai Vanunu, after he dared tell the truth to the British press.
And now – while accusing of Iran of terrorism – Israel openly boasts to friendly journalists of its role in murdering Iranian scientists.
Its time for our government to start putting our own country’s interests first: that means avoiding yet another bloody, illegal and disastrously costly war.
