The Iran Report: "Forgeries, junk, pretty bad, a real mish-mash & unprofessional!"

"... "The first is the issue of forgeries. There is nothing to tell that those documents are real," says Kelley, whose experience includes inspections from as far afield as Iraq and Libya, to South Africa in 1993.
"My sense when I went through the documents years ago was that there was possibly a lot of stuff in there that was genuine, [though] it was kind of junk," says Kelly. "And there were a few rather high-quality things" like the green salt document: "That was two or three pages that wasn't related to anything else in the package, it was on a different topic, and you just wondered, was this salted in there for someone to find?"
It would not be the first time that data was planted. He recalls 1993 and 1994, when the IAEA received "very complex forgeries" on Iraq that slowed down nuclear investigations there by a couple of years.
"Those documents had markings on them, and were designed to resemble Iraqi documents, but when we dug into them they were clearly forgeries," adds Kelley. "They were designed by a couple of member states in that region, and provided to the Agency maliciously to slow things down."
In 2002, notes Kelley, the IAEA also dealt with "pretty bad" forgeries done by the Italians, on Iraq's supposed nuclear links to Niger, that the CIA picked up and used for the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq....
Analysts say that, since the summer, Amano has come under pressure from the US to produce a more hard-hitting report on Iran, which would detail the IAEA case – and present Iran as being actively committed to acquiring nuclear weapons.
"It still goes back to the so-called 'laptop of death' and the alleged studies," says Kile at SIPRI. The IAEA has "clearly gone out of its way" to show they "tried to track down a lot of this, including to independently verify and confirm the information."
"For me, I've never seen the information about some of the alleged weapons activities, especially administrative linkages for a nuclear weapon program, presented in this level of detail before," says Kile. "I have no way of being able to judge the information this was based upon, but just to see it laid out so clearly was actually quite useful."
For Kelley, formerly with the IAEA, the current Iran report is a "real mish-mash" that includes some "amateurish analysis."
Among several technical points, Kelley notes the report's discussion of Iran's "exploding bridge-wire detonators," or EBWs. The IAEA report said it recognizes that "there exist non-nuclear applications, albeit few," and point to a likely weapons connection for Iran.
"The Agency is wrong. There are lots of applications for EBWs," says Kelley. "To be wrong on this point, and then to try to misdirect opinion shows a bias towards their desired outcome.... That is unprofessional."..."