January 3, 2010 - By BNP News

The warmongering Rupert Murdoch-owned and Tory-supporting media in Britain has been caught out lying once again over Iran’s non-existent “atom bombs” by new American intelligence reports which dismiss “important documents” published by The Times as a clear forgery.

According to the North American Interpress Service (IPS), US intelligence “has concluded that the document published recently by The Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a ‘neutron initiator’ for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication.”

Quoting a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, IPS said that intelligence sources “say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.”

The Times published its story on 14 December 2009, but did not identify the source of the document. It quoted “an Asian intelligence source” — a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials, according to IPS, as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.

“The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of US and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel’s threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails,” the IPS reported.

“US news media reporting has left the impression that US intelligence analysts have not made up their mind about the document’s authenticity, although it has been widely reported that they have now had a full year to assess the issue.

“Giraldi’s intelligence sources did not reveal all the reasons that led analysts to conclude that the purported Iran document had been fabricated by a foreign intelligence agency. But their suspicions of fraud were prompted in part by the source of the story, according to Giraldi.

“The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government,” Giraldi said.

The Times is part of a Murdoch publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News, Sky News and the New York Post.

The document itself also had a number of red flags suggesting possible or likely fraud, the IPS pointed out.

“The subject of the two-page document which The Times published in English translation would be highly classified under any state’s security system. Yet there is no confidentiality marking on the document, as can be seen from the photograph of the Farsi-language original published by The Times.

“The absence of security markings has been cited by the Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, as evidence that the ‘alleged studies’ documents, which were supposedly purloined from an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related programme early in this decade, are forgeries.

“The document also lacks any information identifying either the issuing office or the intended recipients. The document refers cryptically to ‘the Centre’, ‘the Institute’, ‘the Committee’, and the ‘neutron group’.

“The document’s extreme vagueness about the institutions does not appear to match the concreteness of the plans, which call for hiring eight individuals for different tasks for very specific numbers of hours for a four-year time frame,” the IPS report continued.

“Including security markings and such identifying information in a document increases the likelihood of errors that would give the fraud away.

“The absence of any date on the document also conflicts with the specificity of much of the information. The Times reported that unidentified ‘foreign intelligence agencies’ had dated the document to early 2007, but gave no reason for that judgment.

“An obvious motive for suggesting the early 2007 date is that it would discredit the US intelligence community’s November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had discontinued unidentified work on nuclear weapons and had not resumed it as of the time of the estimate.

“Discrediting the NIE has been a major objective of the Israeli government for the past two years, and the British and French governments have supported the Israeli effort.

“The biggest reason for suspecting that the document is a fraud is its obvious effort to suggest past Iranian experiments related to a neutron initiator. After proposing experiments on detecting pulsed neutrons, the document refers to ‘locations where such experiments used to be conducted.’

“New York Times reporters David Sanger and William J Broad reported US intelligence officials as saying the intelligence analysts ‘have yet to authenticate the document.’ Sanger and Broad explained the failure to do so, however, as a result of excessive caution left over from the CIA’s having failed to brand as a fabrication the document purporting to show an Iraqi effort to buy uranium in Niger.

“The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick dismissed the possibility that the document might be found to be fraudulent. ‘There is no way to establish the authenticity or original source of the document…,’ wrote Warrick.”

Mr Giraldi has previously been the source of other correct tip-offs about important forged documents. He identified the individuals responsible for creating the two most notorious forged documents in recent US intelligence history, the UPS said.

In 2005, he identified Michael Ledeen, former consultant to the National Security Council and the Pentagon, as an author of the fabricated letter purporting to show Iraqi interest in purchasing uranium from Niger. That letter was used by the George W Bush administration to bolster its false case that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons programme.

He also identified officials in the “Office of Special Plans” who worked under Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith as having forged a letter purportedly written by Hussein’s intelligence director, Tahir Jalail Habbush al-Tikriti, to Hussein himself referring to an Iraqi intelligence operation to arrange for an unidentified shipment from Niger.