by Gareth Porter

In the wake of the preliminary nuclear deal with Iran, the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler, has questioned whether Obama administration officials should have taken the anti-nuclear fatwa by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seriously. But the column is less a disinterested investigation of the truth about [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Gareth Porter

In the wake of the preliminary nuclear deal with Iran, the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler, has questioned whether Obama administration officials should have taken the anti-nuclear fatwa by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seriously. But the column is less a disinterested investigation of the truth about the issue than a polemic that leans clearly toward the related position of Israel, AIPAC and their Congressional supporters.

After quoting Secretary of State John Kerry’s acknowledgment in November of Khamenei’s fatwa against the possession or use of nuclear weapons, Kessler referred to it as “the alleged fatwa” and as a “diplomatic MacGuffin”. A “McGuffin” is a device that moves the plot forward but, as Kessler put it, is “unimportant to the overall story”. Kessler argued that the fatwa “gives the Americans a reason to begin to trust the Iranians and the Iranians a reason to make a deal”. But he asserted that U.S. officials were wrong to suggest that the fatwa “prohibits the development of nuclear weapons”.

While acknowledging that Khamenei may have issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, he cited three reasons why greater skepticism by these officials about the fatwa is called for. In all three cases, however, Kessler failed to examine the available evidence carefully and offered conclusions that are clearly contradicted by that evidence.

Kessler noted that Khamenei’s fatwa, first issued in 2003, linked the ban on nuclear weapons to an earlier fatwa by the first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, that banned the production of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. But according to Kessler, there was no such chemical weapons ban, and thus Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons should not be trusted.  He wrote:

Iran admitted to chemical weapons production after it ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 1997, and U.S. intelligence agencies suspected Iran of maintaining a chemical weapons stockpile at least until 2003. So what does it say if the origin of the supposed fatwa is based on a misleading statement?

It has indeed been the official position of the U.S. intelligence community — and has been repeated many times by secondary sources over the years — that Iran admitted to the CWC’s governing body in 1997 that it had produced chemical weapons during the war. But Kessler apparently did not check the original text of the supposed Iranian “admission.” He relied instead on a secondary source that only cited the reference to the Iranian statement, along with an Israeli press article claiming that Iran had admitted to having had chemical weapons.

But the full text of the statement in question, submitted to the Conference of States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) by Iranian Ambassador Mohammad R. Alborzi in November 1998, is available on the Internet. Had Kessler looked it up, he would have learned that Alborzi did not in fact say that Iran had produced chemical weapons.

What Alborzi actually said is that, confronted with repeated chemical attacks by Iraq over several years,

Iran was left with no alternative but to seek an effective means of deterrence in the hope that it could halt or at least limit the barrage of these barbarous weapons on its people…. In this context, the decision was made that, on a strictly limited scale, capability should be developed to challenge the imminent threat particularly against the civilian populated centers. We declared, at the time, that Iran had chemical weapons capability, while maintaining the policy not to resort to these weapons and rely on diplomacy as the sole mechanism to stop their use by its adversary. The war ended soon after. Following the establishment of ceasefire, the decision to develop chemical weapons capabilities was reversed and the process was terminated.

Moreover, Alborzi’s statement was fully consistent with what Iran had said during the war. On December 29, 1987, Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi said, “The Islamic Republic is capable of manufacturing chemical weapons and possesses the technology.” But he also said, “[W]e will produce them only when Islam allows us and when we are compelled to do so.”

The Iranians were clearly engaging in an effort to deter Iraq’s use of chemical weapons by letting it be known that it could produce such weapons if the Iraqi chemical attacks did not cease. The State Department actually commented publicly in April 1985 that Iran was “developing a chemical weapons capability.” And the CIA had repeatedly made the same distinction between developing the “capability” for making unconventional weapons and actually manufacturing them in its reports on Iran’s WMD programs to Congress in the late 1990s.

The published record on Iran’s policy toward chemical weapons has been distorted by the general acceptance of the idea that both Iraq and Iran had used chemical weapons in 1988 against the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja. That belief had been actively promoted by officials of the Defense Intelligence Agency who had also been involved in assisting the Iraqi military in its air offensive against Iranian forces, as former Washington Post correspondent Patrick Tyler later revealed. But a 2007 book by Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s former deputy director for the Middle East and North and its current chief operating officer, on the Halabja attack definitively refuted the idea that Iran had used chemical weapons on that occasion or at any other time or place during the Ira-Iraq War.

Contrary to Kessler’s claim, therefore, Khamenei was not lying when he said in a 2003 speech, “Even when Iraq attacked us by chemical weapons, we did not produce chemical weapons.”

Moreover, the reason for Iran’s decision to forgo producing, let alone using chemical weapons in retaliation was not that it lacked the ability to do so. Iran’s chemical sector was at least equal to, if not more advanced than that of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, according to a study for the Harvard Sussex Program. What U.S. officials and the news media have been loathe to acknowledge is that Khomeini considered chemical weapons illegal under Islam, and that his judgment was binding on the Iranian government — just as Khamenei noted in the speech declaring nuclear weapons likewise illegal.

Kessler’s second and third arguments were based entirely on the opinions of Mehdi Khalaji, whom he appears to regard as the ultimate source on the subject of Iranian fatwas in general and the “alleged fatwa” against nuclear weapons in particular. What Kessler did not tell his readers, however, is that Khalaji’s employer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank spun off from AIPAC itself, can hardly be considered a disinterested or objective source on the issue of Khamenei’s anti-nuclear fatwa.

Kessler cited Khalaji as asserting that Khomeini had abruptly shifted course on various issues, such as woman’s suffrage and the eating of sturgeon. (“He was also against the eating of sturgeon — until he was for it,” Kessler commented tartly.) The implication the reader is invited to draw from those comments is that Khomeini’s fatwas were arbitrary, changeable and therefore could not have been the definitive factor in anything so weighty as weapons of mass destruction.

But as can be seen from detailed account of what actually transpired in regard to Khomeini’s fatwa making sturgeon halal (allowed) rather than haram (forbidden) under Islam makes it clear that Khalaji’s cavalier dismissal of Khomeini’a fatwas as “abruptly shifting course” is grossly inaccurate.

Khalaji is also Kessler’s source for the more serious claim that Khamenei’s fatwa no longer applies to the possession of nuclear weapons as distinct from their use. “Whereas in 2005 Khamenei said that the ‘production of an atomic bomb is not on our agenda’,” wrote Kessler, “more recent statements have focused on use of nuclear weapons, often dropping references to the ‘development’ of such weapons.”

But Khamenei’s 2005 statement was not about the “development” of nuclear weapons but about their “production”. As Khalaji himself reported in a 2011 article, what Khamenei actually said was, “Islam does not allow us [to produce the atomic bomb]”. The crucial bracketed phrase was added by Khalaji himself.

The only question, therefore, is whether Khamenei has indeed stopped referring to the “production” of nuclear weapons. Kessler quoted from a 2012 Khamenei speech in which Khamenei clearly indicates that his fatwa bans the production of nuclear weapons. Here is the English-language translation that Kessler quoted:

We do not pursue to build nuclear weapons. In reality, having nuclear weapons is not to our benefit. From the viewpoint of ideology, theory, and the Islamic jurisprudence, we consider this as forbidden and proliferation of nuclear weapons as a wrong decision.

The quote provided by Kessler himself thus directly contradicts his own claim that Khamenei had begun to focus only on the “use of nuclear weapons” and had backed off on his ban on the building and possession of nuclear weapons.

Clearly recognizing the contradiction, Kessler then suggested there is something wrong with the English-language translation. He cited an alternative translation of the same 2012 Khamenei statement quoted above by Khalaji (who, of course, had inserted the bracketed material in the original):

In fact, nuclear weapon is not economically useful for us. Furthermore, intellectually, theoretically and juridically [from Sharia point of view] we consider it wrong and consider this action wrong.

Kessler claimed that there is “quite a difference” between the two translations. But even a quick comparison of the two reveals that there is no substantive difference between them. The reference in Khalaji’s translation to “this action” in the second sentence clearly implies that Khamenei had included an active verb in the first sentence, which the official version had translated as “pursue to build a nuclear weapon”. Otherwise, the phrase “this action” makes no sense.

Khalaji thus appears to have bowdlerized the sentence in his translation so as to make it appear that Khamenei had not said that Iran considered the pursuit of building a nuclear weapon juridically “wrong”.

Kessler’s column uses the gimmick of assigning “Pinocchios” to those whose political pronouncements turn out to be untrue, with the number of such long noses indicating the seriousness of the untruth. In this case, Kessler chose not to give the Obama administration any such bad marks, concluding that Kerry’s statements “do not quite rise to the level of earning Pinocchios”.

But Kessler’s column itself would seem to warrant three “Pinocchios” — one for each of the three false claims that appeared therein. Kessler’s failure to check primary sources, his exclusive reliance on a researcher from a pro-Israeli think tank, his introduction of a false criterion for judging whether Khamenei has retreated from the fatwa and his unwarranted suggestion that an official translation of Khamenei’s statement had somehow been altered to change Khamanei’s meaning all raises serious questions about the objectivity and thoroughness of his fact-checking on this issue.

Kessler’s failure in fact-checking on the Khamenei fatwa is symptomatic of a much larger problem. For many years, news media have systematically failed to check the facts in regard to one claim after another about alleged Iranian ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons. The result is a narrative about the Iranian nuclear program that is highly distorted and needs to corrected in order to have a rational discussion of the issue.

With the widely touted shift in the public opinion polls after the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney is no longer an underdog. That being the case, his pronouncements are attracting some well-deserved scrutiny from mainstream media sources. Romney’s major foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Oct. 8 [...]]]> via Lobe Log

With the widely touted shift in the public opinion polls after the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney is no longer an underdog. That being the case, his pronouncements are attracting some well-deserved scrutiny from mainstream media sources. Romney’s major foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Oct. 8 is being  fact-checked — and castigated —  by the Associated Press, CNN, and even by Fox News.

Among the more egregious calumnies in the speech is Romney’s mischaracterization of Obama’s response to the 2009 election in Iran.

… when millions of Iranians took to the streets in June of 2009, when they demanded freedom from a cruel regime that threatens the world, when they cried out, “Are you with us, or are you with them?”—the American  President was silent.

CNN has done a remarkably good job of laying out and scrutinizing Romney’s accusations, and the harsh Republican and neoconservative criticism of President Obama’s response to the Iranian election in mid-June 2009. Are Romney’s accusations factual? No, according to CNN: “During the first couple of days of the protests and violence, Obama did not weigh in publicly, but by a few days in, he was not “silent”– and a week later, took a tougher stance.”

As Glenn Kessler pointed out in a Washington Post article from June 19, 2009, “President Obama and his advisers have struggled to strike the right tone, carefully calibrating positive messages about the protests in an effort to avoid giving the government in Tehran an excuse to portray the demonstrators as pro-American.” Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi told Kessler in a telephone interview that she had no complaints about Obama’s response. “What happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard,” she said.

This past January, former GOP-nomination contender Rick Santorum also assailed Obama’s response to the post-election protests in Iran, as 2008 presidential rival John McCain had. Santorum’s Jan. 1, 2012 exchange with David Gregory on Meet the Press provides the blueprint for the charges Romney hurled at Obama at VMI. Whoever is prepping the President for the upcoming foreign policy debate might find Gregory’s tough, pointed and well-informed questions a useful model for dealing with Romney’s dissembling:

MR. GREGORY: Before you go, I want to ask you about foreign policy. You’ve been very critical of the president, particularly on the issue of Iran, which has been a big issue of debate here in Iowa. Let me play a portion of that.

(Videotape, December 7, 2011)

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: And this president, for every thug and hooligan, for every radical Islamist, he has had nothing but appeasement. We saw that during the lead up to World War II. Appeasement.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY: How can that possibly be accurate, if you’ve taken an objective look at the foreign policy of this administration? What on Iran specifically separates the approach that President Obama has taken and that of President Bush?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: Number one, he didn’t support the pro-democracy movement in Iran in 2009 during the Green Revolution. Almost immediately after the election, I mean, excuse me, like with hours after the, the polls closed, Ahmadinejad announced that he won with 62 percent of the vote. Within a few days, President Obama basically said that that was–election was a legitimate one.

MR. GREGORY: But what would that have done specifically to disarm Iran?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: Well, well, I understand why the president would, would understand that, you know, someone announcing the minute after the polls closed that he won, I mean, he comes from Chicago, so I get it. But the problem is that this was an illegitimate election. The people in the streets were rioting saying, please support us, President Obama. We are the prodemocracy movement. We want to turn this theocracy that has been at war with the United States, that’s developing a nuclear weapon, that’s, that’s killing our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq with IEDS. And the president of the United States turned his back on them. At the same time, a few years–a year later, we have the same situation where Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists are in the streets of, of Egypt opposing an ally of ours, not a sworn enemy like Iran, but an ally of ours in Mubarak…

 MR. GREGORY: I’m sorry. The question I asked you…

MR. SEN. SANTORUM: …and he joins the radicals instead of…

MR. GREGORY: Wait a second.

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: …standing with our friends.

MR. GREGORY: The–first of all, that’s patently contradictory. If you say you support democracy, there was a democratic movement in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood got elected. So how could you be for democracy in some countries and not others?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: I don’t, because, because…

MR. GREGORY: Which is inconsistent.

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: No. The Muslim Brotherhood is not–is not about democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood are Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood are going to impose Sharia law.

MR. GREGORY: They were popularly elected, I think. Isn’t that what democracy is about?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: No. No.

The day after Santorum’s appearance on Meet the Press, FactCheck critiqued his claims:

Iran’s presidential election was June 12, 2009, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared victory — triggering protests in Tehran. On June 15, Obama said at a press conference: “We weren’t on the ground, we did not have observers there, we did not have international observers on hand, so I can’t state definitively one way or another what happened with respect to the election. But what I can say is that there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.”

Obama issued a statement five days later again condemning Iran’s post-election “violent and unjust actions against its own people” and asserting that the U.S. “stands with all who … exercise” the “universal rights to assembly and free speech.” It was one of many such statements.

FactCheck also noted that the Washington Times had reported on June 27, 2009 that Obama was being cautious in what he said about the election results because he didn’t want to be accused of interfering and providing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a propaganda “tool.”

While other leaders have been more out front in their criticism, Mr. Obama has taken pains not to appear to meddle in the debate on the actual election results, arguing he doesn’t want his words to become propaganda for the Iranian regime. “Only I’m the president of the United States, and I’ve got responsibilities in making certain that we are continually advancing our national security interests and that we are not used as a tool to be exploited by other countries,” he said at a press conference Tuesday.

Fact checkers Brooks Jackson and Eugene Kiely concluded that, in comparing Obama’s handling of the elections in Iran and Egypt, “Obama treated both cases similarly: condemning the governments’ use of violence against their own citizens and supporting the protesters right to protest.”

Progressives and conservatives can find many faults with the Obama’s administration’s handling of foreign policy in general and dealings with Iran in particular. The question in the upcoming election is whether Mitt Romney could or would do any better. Daniel Larison, a staunch conservative, doesn’t seem to think so. In “Mitt Romney’s Vapid, Misleading Foreign Policy Speech” Larison writes:

The failings of Romney’s foreign policy arguments are not entirely his. Boxed in by his party’s hawks and most Republicans’ unwillingness to acknowledge Bush administration blunders, Romney’s script was to some extent written for him before he became a candidate. Not being in a position to lead his party in a new direction on this or any other issue, he had already embraced the worldview that he found among Republican hawks in an effort to become acceptable to them. Unfortunately for the country, Americans could have used a credible opposition party and presidential candidate to hold the administration accountable for its real mistakes.

Amen.

Here’s the Times report, by Ben Birnbaum (my emphasis throughout), minus the article’s last two [...]]]> The Washington Times story on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s talk on Tuesday is missing a little something. Specifically, the Times omits any mention of his assessment of the unsavory outcomes of a U.S. military attack on Iran.

Here’s the Times report, by Ben Birnbaum (my emphasis throughout), minus the article’s last two paragraphs about an Iranian air defense war game:

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said Tuesday that there were indicators that international sanctions on Iran had caused a rift between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme LeaderAyatollah Ali Khamenei.

“I personally believe they’re still intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, but also the information that we have is that they have been surprised by the impact of the sanctions,” he said. “Those measures have really bitten much harder than they anticipated, and we even have some evidence that Khamenei now is beginning to wonder if Ahmadinejad is lying to him about the impact of the sanctions on the economy and whether he’s getting the straight scoop in terms of how much trouble the economy really is in.”

Mr. Gates said “the only long-term solution in avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest” and “everything else is a short-term solution.”

On Nov. 8, Mr. Gates cited the success of the sanctions to push back against comments from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “a credible threat of a military operation” is the only way to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Speculation continues to run wild over whether Israel will launch air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities if Western diplomatic and economic measures are seen as failing.

Not a word on Gates’ warning about an attack, a warning that echoes the concerns of a wide array of former top Pentagon brass and diplomats and prominent Iranian dissidents — namely, that an attack would unify Iran against the United States and destroy the nascent opposition.

Birnbaum simply doesn’t report this aspect of the talk.

Compare his story with Reuters’s lede:

Sanctions against Iran are biting hard and triggering divisions among its leadership, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday, as he argued against a military strike over Tehran’s nuclear program.

And the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, reiterating his long-standing opposition to a military attack on Iran, said Tuesday that new sanctions led by the Obama administration are causing divisions within the Iranian leadership.

Kessler, a mere two paragraphs later, adds:

Gates, who has repeatedly warned against military strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, said, “I personally believe they are intent on acquiring nuclear weapons…”

Lest Reuters and the Washington Post be accused of some sort of liberal bias, here’s the right-wing Israeli Jerusalem Post‘s third paragraph:

Additionally, Gates told the [audience] that a military strike would not succeed at halting Iran’s nuclear program. He said it would only result in it becoming more secretive than it already is, and strengthen the country’s unity.

While most of those pieces were longer than Birnbaum’s, it’s clear these other publications reported what was a central thrust of Gates’s answer to the question he was asked about Iranian nukes — that attacking Iran is a bad idea. Birnbaum leaves this out entirely, instead juxtaposing Gates’s recent PR work for sanctions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for a “credible military threat” against Iran. Given that Birnbaum had enough “white space” to tack on two paragraphs about Iranian wargames, it seems that brevity was not the issue, either.

The Washington Times, which until recently faced some financial problems, has a decidedly hawkish bent. Their opinion section regularly publishes some of the most belligerent voices in U.S. foreign policy. That does not necessarily reflect poorly on the newsroom; the Times has featured Eli Lake’s informative national security reporting.

I’m not as familiar with much of Birnbaum’s work, but it seems good enough. Eli Clifton, on this blog, reported an instance when the Bahraini government took issue with a diplomat’s comments to Birnbaum, but it seems to have been a standard walk-back. Our colleague Daniel Luban also took a little issue with Birnbaum’s New Republic hit piece on Human Rights Watch, but said from the get-go that Birnbaum’s piece “actually isn’t terrible, at least by the (admittedly low) standards of TNR hit pieces.” That’s pretty much how I feel about what little I’ve read.

Nonetheless, in this instance, Birnbaum’s omission raises serious questions his reporting.