Soon after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised address in which he unveiled a cache of 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs that he claimed comprised Iran's alleged "atomic archive" of documents on its nuclear program, supposedly proving the existence of an illegal and ongoing secret program to "test and build nuclear weapons" called Project Amad, the UN's atomic agency weighed in to directly negate the claims.
But right on cue, Reuters now reports that "Trump has all but decided to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear accord by May 12 but exactly how he will do so remains unclear, two White House officials and a source familiar with the administration’s internal debate said on Wednesday."
Image source: The Jerusalem Post
On Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued an assessment in response to Netanyahu's speech firmly asserting that there are "no credible indications" supporting Netanyahu's claims of a continued Iranian nuclear weapons program after 2009.
According to the AP summary of the IAEA assessment:
The U.N. nuclear agency says it believes that Iran had a “coordinated” nuclear weapons program in place before 2003, but found “no credible indications” of such work after 2009...
The documents focused on Iranian activities before 2003 and did not provide any explicit evidence that Iran has violated its 2015 nuclear deal with the international community.
The IAEA statements followed on the heels of a number of international Iran analysts weighing in to say there appeared "nothing new" in terms of "evidence" which Netanyahu confidently presented as if it were an open-and-shut bombshell revelation of Iranian malfeasance.
Nothing really new in @netanyahu Iran speech. Confirms that Iran closed down nuclear weapons program in 2003. Continued technology efforts. In principle all of this well known. No allegation that Iran cheats on 2015 nuclear deal. https://t.co/IJElnZ3JmM
One such specialist in an op-ed for the New York Times called the supposed Israeli Mossad intelligence haul a big "nuclear nothingburger" full of things already well-known to the world, with the further implication that the intelligence operation that netted the files itself appears hokey and untrustworthy.
Middle East analyst Steven Simon noted in the Times piece that:
The archive had been stored in what Mr. Netanyahu described as a derelict warehouse in Tehran. The photos he displayed indicated that there did not even appear to be a lock on the door. One wonders how important the Iranians thought these documents were, given the slapdash approach they took to storing them. In any case, the Mossad operation that netted this haul apparently took place in January and President Trump was briefed on...