"Reporting" on Iran Should Seem Familiar

Fox News currently has an
article at the top of its website that is headlined: "CIA:
Iran Moving Closer to Nuclear Weapon." The report, by DOD and
State Department correspondent Justin Fishel, begins with this alarming
claim:

A recently published report by the Central Intelligence Agency
says Iran is still working on building a nuclear weapon
despite some technical setbacks and international resistance -- and the
Pentagon say it's still concerned about Iran's ambitions.

But, as blogger George Maschke
notes, that statement is categorically false. The actual report,
to which the Fox article links and which the DNI was required by
Congress to submit, says no such thing. Rather, this is its core
finding:

The report says the opposite of Fox's statement that "Iran is still
working on building a nuclear weapon." And, of course, the 2007
National Intelligence Estimate which concluded
that Iran ceased development of its weapons program has never been
rescinded, and even the most hawkish
anonymous leaks from inside the intelligence community, when
bashing the 2007 NIE, merely claim that analysts "now believe that Iran may
well have resumed 'research' on nuclear weapons -- theoretical work on
how to design and construct a bomb -- but that Tehran is not
engaged in 'development' -- actually trying to build a weapon."

This misleading "reporting" is hardly confined to Fox News.
Reporting on Obama's efforts to secure international sanctions, Reuters
today makes this claim:

[E]evidence has mounted raising doubts about whether Tehran is
telling the truth when it says its nuclear program is only to produce
peaceful atomic energy.

Particularly damning was a report in February from the U.N.
nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that said Iran
may be working to develop a nuclear-armed missile.

But as Juan
Cole correctly notes:

This Reuters article also misinterprets the stance of the
International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN, which continues to certify
that none of Iran's nuclear material, being enriched for civilian
purposes, has been diverted to military uses. The IAEA has all along
said it cannot give 100% assurance that Iran has no weapons program,
because it is not being given complete access. But nagging doubt is not
the same as an affirmation. We should learn a lesson from the Iraq
debacle.

Meanwhile, The New York Times' David Sanger -- who is the
Judy Miller of Iran when it comes to hyping
the "threat" based overwhelmingly,
often
exclusively, on
anonymous sources -- continues his drum beat this week. In
an article co-written with William Broad, Sanger warns -- "based on
interviews with officials of several governments and international
agencies" ("all" of whom "insisted on anonymity") -- that "international
inspectors and Western intelligence agencies say they suspect that
Tehran is preparing to build more sites in defiance of United Nations
demands." But rather than the secret, nefarious scheme which the NYT
depicts this as being, these plans for additional sites were
publicly announced -- by the Iranian government itself -- many weeks
ago.

As I've noted before, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Iran
wanted a nuclear weapons capability. If anything, it would be
irrational for them not to want one. What else would a rational Iranian
leader conclude as they look at the U.S. military's having
destructively invaded and continuing to occupy two of its neighboring,
non-nuclear countries (i.e., being surrounded by an invading
American army on both its Eastern and Western borders)? Add to that the
fact that barely
a day goes by without Western
media outlets and various
Western elites threatening them with a bombing attack by
the U.S. or the
Israel (which itself has a huge stockpile of nuclear
weapons and categorically
refuses any inspections or other monitoring). If our goal were to
create a world where Iran was incentivized to obtain nuclear weapons, we
couldn't do a better job than we're doing now.

But regardless of one's views on that question, or on the question
of what the U.S. should do (if anything) about Iranian proliferation,
the first order of business ought to be ensuring that the reporting on
which we base our views is accurate. A CNN poll
from February found that 59% of Americans favor military
action against Iran if negotiations over their nuclear program
fail (see questions 31-32) -- and that's without the White House even
advocating such a step. As the invasion of Iraq demonstrated, the kind
of fear-mongering, reckless, and outright false "reporting" we're seeing
already -- and
have been seeing for awhile -- over Iran's nuclear program poses a
far greater danger to the U.S. than anything Iran could do.