The AP's controversial and badly flawed Iran inspections story, explained
Iran nuclear program so shocking that many political pundits declared the nuclear deal dead in the water. But the article turned out to be a lot less damning that it looked — and the AP, which scrubbed many of the most damning details, is now itself part of this increasingly bizarre story.
To get a handle on all this, I spoke to Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at Middlebury College's Monterey Institute of International Studies. What follows is a primer on what happened, what the AP story said and how it changed, the nuclear issues involved — a place called Parchin and something known as PMD — and what they mean for the nuclear deal.
The bottom line here is that this is all over a mild and widely anticipated compromise on a single set of inspections to a single, long-dormant site. The AP, deliberately or not, has distorted that into something that sounds much worse, but actually isn't. The whole incident is a fascinating, if disturbing, example of how misleading reporting on technical issues can play into the politics of foreign policy.
More:
Because the stakes are so low for the Parchin inspection, arms control experts have long suspected that the IAEA and Iran would work out a compromise that looks like what's reported in the AP story. ...
Lewis suspects that the point of the leak was to make the IAEA agreement on Parchin sound as bad as possible, and to generate political attention in Washington, with the hopes that political types who do not actually understand normal verification and inspection procedures — much less the Parchin issue — will start making demands.
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/20/9182185/ap-iran-inspections-parchin
If you see someone pimping this story on Facebook, in real life, or at DU, they're a Neocon warmongering asshole and also probably a Republican.
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