Gal on Chris Mathews Just Said "There is Highly Enriched Uranium in Iran"

We have found the smoking gun... I am not sure who this gal is...

I am tivoing back to take the quote, will post here

AM: "UN Diplomats are tiring to low-ball this, but inspectors have found the first hard evidence of highly enriched uranium that can make weapons, not be used for peaceful purposes, inside Iran at a former defense site"

CM “Will it work?”

AM: “Well it's, it can be now a real, smoking gun if you will, that Iran is not doing enrichment for civilian purposes but really is a weapons program”

I think. I wonder what anonymous WH source she got that talking point from.

bush? cheney? gonzales? all of them?

They are beating the drums of war

been found. but nothing to follow up on that article (and can not find it now.

IAEA Clears Iran on HEU
Aug 24, 2005

Dafna Linzer reports the IAEA empaneled an international group of scientists to confirm that traces of highly enriched uranium in Iran originated with contaminated centrifuge components obtained through the AQ Khan network ..

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/744/iaea-clears-iran-on-heu

Tehran, May 14, IRNA

IAEA-Iran-Nuclear
Head of the UN nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei said on Sunday he believes existence of highly enriched uranium in an Iranian atomic site was of little significance at the current juncture.

Arabic TV station Al Jazeera on Sunday quoted the International Atomic Energy Agency chief as saying research is still underway to find the source of contamination.

The source of contamination may have originated from machines that were imported to Iran, ElBaradei said, adding time is still needed to reach a conclusion in this respect.

He stressed Iran's right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and added a balance between Iran's nuclear rights and concerns of the international community would not be created through verbal disputes, but rather dialogue would be the solution.

http://www.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-234/0605149956145839.htm

nominated

Pakistan, like their knowledge and equipment to start their nuclear program did.

IF.

(Saw references to it yesterday and the day before....)

the IAEA found trace amounts and aren't sure where it came from; they think it could have been come from weapons obtained from Pakistan. Anyway, the finding is not significant according to El Baradei:

"The IAEA determined earlier traces of highly enriched uranium were imported on equipment from Pakistan that Iran bought on the black market during nearly two decades of clandestine activity.

The U.S. argues that such reports strengthen suspicion that Tehran wants to develop nuclear arms.

The United States has led calls for the U.N. Security Council to adopt a binding resolution requiring Iran to halt enrichment if Tehran doesn't accept the European proposal."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/14/world/main1616570.shtml

"Fears that Iran is trying to build nuclear warheads were aggravated Friday, when diplomats said U.N. inspectors may have found traces of highly enriched uranium on equipment from an Iranian research center linked to the military.

The diplomats, who demanded anonymity in exchange for divulging the confidential information, initially said the density of enrichment appeared to be close to or above the level used to make nuclear warheads.

But later a well-placed diplomat accredited to the International Atomic Energy Agency said the level was below that, although higher than the low-enriched material used to generate power and heading toward weapons-grade level."

A year after we invade, this will become "uranium enrichment program activities" and will consist of a single hand-written note saying "I want an A-bomb".

However, in the past she has been caught passing blatant misinformation, specifically on the Plame matter, but MSNBC is banking on the fact the amurkins have short memories.

It ought to be illegal to spew crap like that.

"The Iran threat" has already entered the lexicon of public discourse. It's taken as a given now and the question has moved on to "how bad is it" and "what do we do about it."

You know, when I said above that it ought to be illegal to spew this crap I was being facetious, but now that I think about it I'm not so sure it's funny. It's illegal to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater because people will act predictably in a bad manner. The same is true of manipulating a populace into war-- it's ridiculously easy and the outcome is predictably terrible. Politicians and their lackies who do it OUGHT to be accountable for it.

in their scrawls. Of course the sheep will believe it. Again.

Why don't they just go on and invade?

anytime the question is not asked as well "why is this 'evidence', and this 'smoking gun', more credible than what we were told in the leadup to the Iraq war?" - the interviews are b.s.

Could be true - but given the track record of the last claims of immenent threats and smoking guns, shouldn't interviewers ask that question - why should the public believe this information after it is clearly known that the last time we heard such rhetoric, offered as "fact", it was later learned to be dubious at best?

Big difference.

country that we already know has been enriching uranium to weapons-grade.

This was not uranium that was enriched by Iran, but by Pakistan.

Please...don't drop that shit.

and Enterprise are heading there to take care of it.

Elisabeth BOOmiller

Howard Fineman

Andrea Mitchell

Bill Carter (?) NY Times

plus Matthews

might as well bring up my favorite piece on the worst of the worst: Wimblehack

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1078448

the winner:

That leaves as the winner Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, who did file a number of grossly objectionable pieces after the election, and so wins the contest, if not yet the prize. And though this contest fails in its stated objective of delivering a just reward, we can say with a clear conscience that Bumiller deserves her hollow victory, for consistently representing almost everything that made this campaign the Monumental Bummer it was.

On November 7, reverting to her pre-campaign state as a Times White House correspondent, Bumiller filed her first large post-election article. Entitled "President Feels Emboldened, Not Accidental, After Victory," the piece was pleased to draw a number of conclusions about the sunny state of the reelected executive's mind. She writes:


One trademark of President Bush's first term was his aversion to news conferences, which his staff says he often treated like trips to the dentist. So on the morning after Mr. Bush's re-election, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, was taken aback when the president told him he was ready to hold a news conference that Mr. Bartlett had suggested, win or lose, the week before.

"I didn't have to convince him or anything," Mr. Bartlett said. "Without me prompting him, he brought it up."

It was a small but telling change for a president whose re-election has already had a powerful effect on his psyche, his friends and advisers say.


This habit of taking at face value the unconfirmable assertions about the personal feelings of officials – assertions hand-delivered to the journalist by a paid mouthpiece whose very job is to deadpan preposterous pieces of mythmaking to the media – is nothing new to most political reporters. But almost no one consumes this stuff more eagerly than Bumiller.

Take her piece from March 2 of this year, "Gay issue leaves Bush ill at ease," in which Bumiller gives off-the-record spokesmen a chance to allow Bush to split the difference on the gay-marriage issue:


>>>When President George W. Bush announced his support last week for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, his body language in the Roosevelt Room did not seem to match his words. Bush may have forcefully defended the union of a man and a woman as "the most fundamental institution of civilization," but even some White House officials said he appeared uncomfortable.

This kind of thing is standard in the business – it is how we are delivered such seemingly unknowable facts as the "remarkably close friendship" we are told exists between Bush and Vladimir Putin – but what's striking about Bumiller is that this is apparently her conscious response to an administration whose excessive secrecy she has complained about in public.

On December 3 of last year, Bumiller gave a talk at Yale University nauseatingly entitled "Shock, Awe, and Battle Fatigue," in which she complained about the lack of access in the Bush White House.

"The White House has set a troubling standard for secrecy," she said. "I worry that future administrations will look at this White House as a model that has worked fairly well."

Bumiller went on to laud the administration's "genius" in interpersonal relations, adding: "The White House is awesomely good at what it does... The political skills of the president and his handlers are unparalleled."

>>>much much more here....the embedded links to the New York Press aren't working, for whatever reason:

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20532/

How long is a piece of string?

"Highly" enriched is meaningless and a distraction from the fact that it will take years for Iran to enrich uranium to the point necessary for creating nuclear weaponry.