Published on December 6th, 2014 |
http://www.lobelog.com/why-hasnt-the-iaea-followed-up-irans-inspection-offer-marivan/#more-27300
Why Hasn’t the IAEA Followed Up Iran’s Inspection Offer?
The Marivan Mystery
by Gareth Porter
When Iran offered last month to allow the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) to visit the Marivan region near the border with Iraq,
the IAEA might have been expected to respond with alacrity to the
opportunity.
The IAEA had been complaining for months that Iran had not provided
the information and access required to “clarify” allegations of nuclear
weapons-related experiments. But the immediate IAEA response to the
Iranian offer, as well as the previous history of the Marivan issue,
suggest that the nuclear agency is less than eager to take advantage of
it. That reason appears to be because the Agency’s source for the
alleged experiments failed to identify the site where the alleged
experiments were supposed to have been conducted.
The Agency’s
November 2011 report
asserted that “information” provided by a “Member State” indicated that
Iran had carried out “large scale high explosive experiments” in “the
region of Marivan” using a technique for initiating an explosive charge
found in “some known nuclear explosive devices.”
In a significant development in the IAEA-Iran process for resolving
the “possible military dimensions” (PMD) issue however, Iran’s Permanent
Representative to the IAEA, Reza Najafi,
told the Board of Governors
during its quarterly conference November 21 that Iran was ready to give
the IAEA “one managed access” to the western Marivan region to “prove”
that the allegations of nuclear weapons experiments were “wrong and
baseless.” He said such alleged experiments “could easily be traced if
the exact site would be visited.”
http://www.lobelog.com/why-hasnt-the-iaea-followed-up-irans-inspection-offer-marivan/#more-27300