Iran’s Prez: We don’t even need an a-bomb

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tosses out another misdirection:

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted Thursday that Tehran’s nuclear program is peaceful and said he is “at a loss” about what more he can do to provide guarantees. “The bottom line is we do not need a bomb,” he said at a news conference on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. “The time for nuclear bombs has ended,” he added.

Ahmadinejad said his country has not hidden anything and was working within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

What the AP report leaves out is context. Simply put, Mahmoud is lying when he says Iran hasn’t hidden anything and is working within the NPT framework.

Changes in inventories of nuclear materials must be reported to the IAEA, and nuclear facilities declared, and the IAEA has documented many violations by Iran of these disclosure obligations. In all cases, the information concealed is critical to a weapons program, and that is what has convinced the Europeans that Iran’s nuclear activities are not for peaceful purposes.

It should be noted that the author of this context-free report is one Scheherezade Faramarzi. I don’t want to make too much of this, but Faramarzi is an Iranian name. That wouldn’t mean much to me by itself, since there are many many Iranians in the US and around the West who escaped Iran when the mullahs took over, and they’re anything but radical Islamists or apologists for Iran’s current president. They despise him. As for their religious beliefs, many are Christians. They left Iran to escape persecution by the Islamic Republic. So you can’t judge people solely by their name or where they might be from.

But this Faramarzi’s previous journalistic exploits include lionizing the 7/7 London bombers by selectively interviewing the bombers’ friends and apologists, and muddying the facts of a US strike in Iraq. Faramarzi also blamed the death of a sick Iraqi child on the US invasion (missing context: what were Iraqi hospitals like before the invasion?) and can toss out irrelevant polemical asides with the best editorialists. The problem with that is, Faramarzi is allegedly a news reporter. For the Associated Press.

Update: Lefty blogger Matthew Yglesias finds the Holocaust-denying, genocide-promising, probable American hostage-taking Iranian president “entertaining,” with a “sweet, hipster style.”

Very nice. Mahmoud and his posse are soooo hip, aren’t they?

Update (Allahpundit): The ABC headline writer didn’t get the memo. Or maybe he’s just a conservative.

Blowback