Time for IAEA to clarify claims on Parchin: Journalist

Press TV has conducted an interview with Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist from Washington, to get his take on a visit by IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano to the Parchin military site during his recent trip to Iran.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Amano has praised this as a very important step and also Iran has said that there were no IAEA inspectors at the site and that Iran did not pass its red lines, while the verification process was adhered to. I guess this would also be a very important step in terms of confidence-building, especially given that world powers, including the US, are watching this.

Porter: The confidence-building process of course depends upon the way in which this is carried out and what has become clear, which I think was fairly evident of even before this, is that what the IAEA and Iran had worked out was an arrangement under which Iranian specialists would take the sample physically on location, but that the IAEA could actually see them at work and verify that they were there and they were taking the samples directly. And of course that is perfectly in line with IAEA ways of gathering samples as Amano himself has said is been done dozens of times elsewhere.

Press TV: How important is the progress made on this particular topic -- the Parchin military site?

Porter: First of all of course, I think the big news, which I have to say that the news media has generally speaking then remiss and not reporting up front making the lead and stories is that the IAEA director general himself visited the building, in which allegedly there was this Phantom Bomb Test Chamber installed according to the IAEA’s claims in 2000, and [they] found nothing there. I mean there was no equipment of any kind as he said himself. This is very big news and I mean although the claim has not been explicitly that they expected to find a chamber there; that certainly has been the implicit assumption on which all of this news media coverage, which is sort of very sensational for the last four years now, has been based. And I think it’s now incumbent on Amano and the IAEA to explain when they would have expected that Iran had removed the bomb chamber because this site has been under inspection ever since 2004. In other words, it has been under inspection by aerial surveillance of National [Technical] Means as it’s called, in other words CIA and Israeli satellite photography has been following the site very closely, as we know very well from official statements.

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