Iran 16

De goed geinformeerde auteur Dilip Hiro schrijft in Tom Dispatch over Iraans nucleaire activiteiten: 'These days, however, Iranian leaders are learning that transparency has its virtues. Following the publication in the March 13 Sunday Times of a leak from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office regarding his country's possible plans to raid Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, President Muhammad Khatami escorted a party of 30 local and foreign journalists to the underground facility. That dispelled some of the fear-filled mystique about the place created by the story Israeli officials had planted. Among the structures the visiting journalists saw was a huge empty hall meant for the installation of thousands of centrifuges at some future date. A few weeks later, Iran broke another taboo. It took Elahe Mohtasham, a representative of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, on a day-long visit to the Uranium Conversion Facility in Isfahan. In a long report she published in the Sunday Times on May 1, she described not just the equipment and buildings she saw, but also her conversations in Persian with scientists and other officials at the site. The facility, completed in March 1998, is visited by the IAEA every three or four weeks. It was there that, in March 2004, the Iranians converted yellow cake into uranium hexafluoride gas UF6 for the first time. Iran thus became the tenth country in the world to do so -- the five members of the initial nuclear club, the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, and China; and later, Israel, India, Pakistan, and Brazil.' Lees verder: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2452