'Failing yet again to absorb the lessons of Iraq & WMD'

"... Fast-forward to 2011 and we're left wondering if these same newspapers have really taken on board the lessons of Iraq. Here, for example, is David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times, writing in its Sunday Review last weekend:

At the White House and the CIA, officials say the recently disclosed Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States – by blowing up a tony Georgetown restaurant frequented by senators, lobbyists and journalists – was just the tip of the iceberg.

Note how the allegation of an "Iranian plot" in the US – which was greeted with a good deal of scepticism when it first surfaced last month – now appears to have become an established fact (even though it has yet to be tested in court). Not only that. Sanger's anonymous officials are now asking us to believe it is part of a bigger and even more menacing Iranian plot which stretches across continents from the Yemen to Latin America.

At the Washington Post, meanwhile, Joby Warrick has been briefed by David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security. Citing Albright, Warrick describes Iranian work on a detonation device known as the R265 generator:

"According to the intelligence provided to the IAEA, key assistance in both areas [design and testing] was provided by Vyacheslav Danilenko, a former Soviet nuclear scientist who was contracted in the mid-1990s by Iran's Physics Research Center, a facility linked to the country's nuclear programme."

The way this is presented in the Washington Post, it points very clearly to the idea that Iran was working on a trigger for a nuclear bomb. But look elsewhere and that interpretation becomes less certain: possibly it wasn't nuclear at all, but (See MoonOfAlabama) a project to manufacture nanodiamonds.

Of course, these are extremely murky waters and I'm not at all sure who to believe. There is probably a lot of deception taking place on both sides. But what seems to me extraordinary is the reluctance of journalists – especially in the US mainstream – to acknowledge the uncertainties and their willingness to accept what, as far as Iran is concerned, are the most incriminating interpretations.