U.N. attacks House report on Iran’s nuclear program

WASHINGTON – United Nations inspectors investigating Iran’s nuclear program angrily complained Wednesday to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman about a recent House committee report on Iran’s capabilities, calling parts of the document “outrageous and dishonest” and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Officials of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some “erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements.” The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., the chairman of the House intelligence committee that issued the report, and a copy was hand-delivered to Gregory Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna, Austria.

The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents. After no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to building nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the administration orchestrated a failed campaign to remove the IAEA’s director, Mohamed ElBaradei, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wednesday’s letter, a copy of which was provided to the Washington Post, was the first time the IAEA has publicly rebutted U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. The agency noted five major errors in the Hoekstra committee’s 29-page report, which claimed Iran’s nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.

Among the committee’s assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that “incorrect,” noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent and did so under IAEA monitoring.

When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said his intent was “to help increase the American public’s understanding of Iran as a threat.” His spokesman Jamal Ware said Wednesday that Hoekstra would respond to the IAEA letter.

Committee member Rush Holt, D-N.J., said the Hoekstra report was “clearly not prepared in a manner that we can rely on.” He agreed to send it to the full committee for review, but the Republicans decided to make it public before then, he said in an interview.

The report was never voted on or discussed by the full committee. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the vice chairman, told her Democratic colleagues in a private e-mail that the report “took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire – and the Intelligence Community’s assessments as more certain – than they are.”

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. But Hoekstra’s office said the report was reviewed by the office of John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Negroponte’s spokesman John Callahan said in a prepared statement that his office “reviewed the report and provided its response to the committee on July 24, 06.” He did not say whether it had approved or challenged any of the claims about Iran’s capabilities.

“This is like pre-war Iraq all over again,” said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. “You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that’s cherry picked and a report that trashes the inspectors.”