– Tom Abate covers the technology sector for GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. The views are his own. —

When Iranian protesters used internet services like Twitter to gain global attention they also reminded the world that oppressive regimes continue to buy or build technologies to enforce censorship.

Clothilde Le Coz, director of internet research for Reporters Without Borders, says Iran is second only to China in the extent and sophistication of its efforts to stifle dissent online.

“The Iranian government said last year that it was blocking 5 million websites,” Le Coz said in a telephone interview. “They brag about what they can do, perhaps to intimidate their opponents.”

The complicity of Western companies in Iranian censorship was brought into focus when the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran’s ability to monitor online protests “was provided at least in part” by Nokia Siemens Networks, a jointly owned subsidiary of the two European tech firms.

Hoping to limit the damage to its reputation, the European telecommunications firm issued a statement explaining that it had only provided Iran the ability to tap wireless phone calls — a function called “lawful intercept” that it is also legally required to sell as a crime-fighting tool in Europe and the United States.

“Nokia Siemens Networks has not provided any deep packet inspection, web censorship or internet filtering capability to Iran,” the company said.

Iran, already subject to a U.S.-imposed trade embargo, apparently considers internet censorship so critical that it has developed its own web monitoring tools.

“Iran now employs domestically produced technology for identifying and blocking objectionable websites, reducing its reliance on Western filtering technologies,” according to a recent report from the Open Net Initiative, an academic consortium that tracks internet censorship.

The report added: “With the emergence of this domestic technical capacity, Iran joins China as the only countries that aggressively filter the internet using their own technology.”

The fact that so much material leaked out over the internet despite Iran’s efforts to squelch the flow shows the difficulties of censoring a medium that evolves so quickly, said Nart Villeneuve, a research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk Center for International Studies, which is part of the Open Net Initiative.

For instance, the relatively new messaging service, Twitter.com, delivered more than 2 million brief reports from inside Iran during an 18-day period, according to one post-election analysis. Villeneuve said Iranian authorities tried to stop the message flow by blocking access to Twitter.com, but many Iranians knew how to evade such measures by relaying their “tweets” through unblocked proxy servers.

Villeneuve said some nations, notably Burma and Nepal, have simply cut themselves off from the internet during periods of civil unrest to deny protesters a world audience, but international actors like Iran and China seem reluctant to go to such extremes, preferring selective censorship instead.

This suggests that the continuing battle between free speech and censorship will involve Western companies whenever they do business with repressive regimes. A total embargo on countries that don’t adhere to Western norms is unlikely and perhaps unwise. As Nokia Siemens Networks spokesman Ben Roome noted in an email to GlobalPost, the number of Iranian cellphone subscribers went from 12 million to 53 million in a two-year period. “Would people in Iran be better off without access to telecommunications?” he asks rhetorically.

Activist groups hope to force Western tech companies to avoid supporting censorship. Reporters Without Borders used the Iranian crisis to focus renewed attention on the Global Online Freedom Act, a proposal that asks the U.S. Congress to impose fines on American companies that make or modify technologies that aid internet censorship.

Meanwhile, Iran’s efforts to develop its own filtering technologies suggest that whatever Western nations and companies do, repressive governments want to enjoy the benefits of technology while minimizing challenges to their authority — even when their tactics seem downright foolish.

For instance, the Open Net Initiative report notes that in 2006, the Iranian government told its internet service providers not to offer home access faster than 128 kilobytes. Whether this was to discourage the downloading of porn or the uploading of protest images, according to the report, the policy makes Iran “the only country in the world to have instituted an explicit cap on internet access speeds for households.”

(Pictured above: An Internet user tries to log onto social networking site Facebook in Tehran May 25, 2009. The Farsi text reads “Dear Customer, access to this site is not possible. In the event that this site has been mistakenly filtered please email filter@dci.ir with the name of the domain and any other necessary explanation.” REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubaz)

Click here for the full article.

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Should Germany change its election law just a few months before September’s parliamentary vote? That’s the question that has been weighing on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s right-left coalition.

But fears that Germany might end up “smelling like a banana republic”, as Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper columnist Kurt Kister wrote, or be mentioned in the same breath as Iran if it ends up tampering with the law so close to the Sept. 27 ballot has helped kill the intriguing idea for the time being. There is also a tacit angst running through Merkel’s conservative CDU and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, that they could end up throwing away a possible victory once again (a 21-point lead melted to 1-point win in 2005) for their preferred centre-right coalition with the Free Democrats by changing the law now.

It’s a quirk of the German mixed member proportional two-vote system that has caused a mess with so-called “Ueberhangmandate” (”overhang seats”). Each voter can cast one ballot for a specific candidate in one of the 299 constituencies and a second ballot for a particular party. The second vote gives the percentage of seats each party wins. But if a party wins more direct seats in the constituency via the first ballot than it should have based on the percentage of second votes, new “Ueberhangmandate” are created. The CDU/CSU and SPD are the primary beneficiaries.

Der Spiegel news magazine cited research from political scientists showing that the CDU and CSU could pick up a record 24 “overhang seats” while the SPD is projected to pick up at most 3 additional seats. That would raise the odds of the CDU/CSU being able to form a centre-right coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats and end their loveless marriage with the SPD in the grand coalition. The CDU/CSU currently enjoys a 11-point lead in opinion polls but their lead is expected to narrow by September — as it did in 2005.

The touchy issue of the “overhang seats” will flair up briefly in parliament on Friday, one of the final sessions before the election, when opposition parties put what is likely to be their doomed motion to change the law up for a vote.

The small parties feel justifiably disadvantaged by the law and the Constitutional Court agreed. Germany’s highest court in 2008 ordered changes to the election law to eliminate that built-in advantage that has often given a few extra seats in parliament at each election to the two larger parties, Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the SPD. “Overhang seats” helped cement Merkel’s position in the 2005 election and before that it helped the SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s ruling SPD-Greens coalition get a bit more breathing room in 1998 and 2002 with a slightly more comfortable majority. Before that CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the beneficiary of “overhang seats”.

The only catch was that the Constitutional Court in 2008 gave the government three years, until 2011, to make the changes. The CDU/CSU and the SPD were understandably in no rush to change the law that had helped them in past elections. The SPD, as it slowly dawned on them that they might be the big loser in the overhang seats sweepstakes this time, briefly entertained the notion of backing the measure by the Greens and Left party. But that would have immediately brought down the grand coalition and left the SPD out of power and left Merkel running a minority government in a caretaker role until September, according to
Bild columnist Hugo Mueller-Vogg.

And the SPD bolting to back a measure with the Greens and Left party would have immediately prompted a national debate about whether the SPD would be, despite claims to the contrary, preparing the way for a federal alliance with the Left party after the election.

So should Germany quickly change its election law before September and risk looking like a “banana republic” or carry on with a system that puts the smaller parties at a distinct disadvantage?

PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel casts her vote at the Federal Assembly in the Reichstag building in Berlin, May 23, 2009 that re-elected Horst Koehler president. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

"Heartbreaking."

That was President Barack Obama's response to a video showing the death of Neda, a young woman who has come to symbolize the uprising against the Iranian government.

The video shows the woman, identified as Neda Agha Soltan, on the ground after apparently being shot, blood streaming over her face as she dies.

"It's heartbreaking," Obama said at a news conference. "And I think that anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust about that."

He quoted civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King's expression "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

"We have to believe that ultimately justice will prevail," Obama said.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Ho New (Frame grab from YouTube shows woman identified as Neda Agha-Soltan)

Insiders say Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was rather reticent and stiff in public when he took the job in 1997. He’d spent decades below the radar in Egypt’s foreign service, U.S. academia and the U.N. nuclear watchdog as head of the legal and external relations divisions.

But Mohamed ElBaradei evolved into a politically outspoken tribune for international peace and fair play.

That reputation grew as he challenged George W. Bush’s neocons over bogus evidence of mass-destruction weaponry they used to invade Iraq, and their policy of threatening rather than negotiating with Iran, which seemed to backfire by encouraging, not dissuading, Tehran to build up nuclear capability.

ElBaradei’s campaigning for negotiated non-proliferation, disarmament and development through peaceful uses of the atom earned a Nobel Peace Prize for him and the IAEA in 2005.
   
Now, as he prepares to retire in November, the 66-year-old, self-described “secular pope” has gone into legacy-building overdrive. Media interviews have proliferated with cable TV or web magazine outlets that air or publish his remarks unedited.

This week ElBaradei went public even in private, expounding off-the-cuff and very undiplomatically at a closed door meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors, then authorising his remarks to be “leaked” to the media outside.

At other governors’ meetings dealing with hot-button issues like Iran’s stonewalling of IAEA investigators, I had to chase participants by sms or after-hours phone calls just to get tiny,
broken snippets of what ElBaradei had said inside.

This time, whole transcripts of his interventions on the boardroom floor found their way to nuclear beat reporters.

ElBaradei pulled no punches. And the pickings were rich.

On Tuesday, he lambasted the governors for their protracted failure to reach consensus on a big budget rise he wants to upgrade a crumbling inspections regime he said threatens to turn the IAEA into a laughing stock among nuclear proliferators.

“What you are reaping today is what you have sown for the last 20 years of zero real growth budgets,” he said.

“The whole idea that now we have to go out and borrow or hold out our hands and say, ‘Please give us some money to do safety and security,’ is really a bastardisation of an international organisation,” ElBaradei fumed.

“Today our lab lacks the equipment to do sensitive particle analysis. How can I come here and tell you I have credible conclusions on issues that have tio do with war and peace?

“If you come to me and say cut here or cut there, I and my colleagues will not assume responsibility if in a couple of years from now we see another Chernobyl, or a nuclear terrorist attack, or a clandestine nuclear programme.”

On Wednesday, ElBaradei dispensed with diplomatic caveats by telling the BBC it was “his gut feeling” that Iran “definitely would like to have the technology that would enable it to have nuclear weapons if they decided to do so”.

To IAEA governors, he said the IAEA’s mission to prevent nuclear weapons spreading to unstable regions was “going around in circles” because it lacked enforcement tools and world powers
had not negotiated seriously with states like Iran, or shared intelligence with U.N. inspectors in a timely way.

“We are sometimes called the ‘watchdog,’ but we don’t bark at all if we don’t have the legal authority to do our work.

“The U.N. Security Council should not necessarily mean just sanctions. It is supposed to be a forum to find solutions,” he said. “When there’s no dialogue, we come to a standstill. We are completely gridlocked in North Korea and Iran.”
   
On Thursday, simmering tensions between Israel and ElBaradei boiled over at the Board when the Jewish state’s envoy accused him of political bias and lacking assertiveness in his probe into an alleged secret plutonium reactor site in Syria.
   
That was a “totally distorted” position, ElBaradei shot back. He upbraided Israel for trying to tell the IAEA how to do its verification job but hindering it from doing that job by having bombed the purported reactor to ruin in 2007 before alerting inspectors first to check the evidence.

“(Israel says) we refrain from using tools. Israel is not even a member of the Non-Proliferation Regime, to tell us what tools are available to us. You cannot sit on the fence, making use of the system, without being accountable.

“To say I am biased, I won’t dignify that with a response.”

On Thursday, the IAEA governors, citing rights disputes, derailed ElBaradei’s campaign for a global nuclear fuel supply bank that would reduce the appeal of proliferation-prone enrichment in unstable states.

It was a stinging setback to his vision of stemming the spread of nuclear arms knowhow while sharing atomic energy for peaceful purposes in a safe, accountable way.
   
This time, ElBaradei was silent.

But he still has a few more months to weigh in on this and all his passionately-felt themes of war and peace — and later when he will be in demand on the global lecture circuit.

(International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei attends a board of Governors meeting at Vienna’s UN headquarters June 15, 2009. REUTERS/Herwig Prammer (AUSTRIA POLITICS ENERGY HEADSHOT))

Media outlets covering the street demonstrations in Iran have devoted plenty of coverage to the so-called "Twitter Revolution" and the role social networking Web sites like Facebook have played in circulating photos and video taken by protesters using cell phones.

But several of the Farsi-language satellite TV and radio stations based in Southern California, with its population of as many as 500,000 residents of Iranian heritage, also have become a bulwark of opposition to Iran's controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his disputed re-election last Friday.

Los Angeles-based satellite station  Channel One TV, which is run by expatriate Iranians, has made contributions -- some of them not so old, either, as one might think from an "old media" provider of satellite TV coverage. Shahram Homayoun, the president of Channel One TV, said that before the demonstrations -- although not in preparation for exactly that occurrence -- it mailed out thousands of camera pens to citizens in Iran to help them document events the government wants to keep quiet. The pens pull apart to reveal a flash drive for plugging into a computer and uploading video.

Officials with Channel One said they do not know how widely the James Bond-style pens are being used in the current demonstrations in Iran. But the fact that the station even shipped them out is an indication of how much pressure stations like Channel One are putting on the Islamic Republic's government, which has worked to block their satellite signals.

In 2006, former U.S. President George W. Bush poured $75 million into "promoting democracy" in Iran, in part by funding satellite broadcasts. But Homayoun said his station does not take any money from the U.S. government, relying instead on constant televised appeals for funds, even during his high-voltage, excited coverage of street protests.

Officials with Channel One said that their station operates on a budget of nearly $2 million a year, with a staff of 40. Beverly Hills-based satellite radio station KRSI is a decidedly smaller operation, and one host there said the donations it receives are paltry.

On Wednesday, KRSI carried an interview with Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran (pictured at left), who over the airwaves urged on the protesters and said the demonstrations were the biggest tumult to hit Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted his father. 

Listeners able to hear the programming in Iran occasionally call into the studio. Every now and then, the Iranian-American broadcasters say they receive calls from supporters of Ahmadinejad, who accuse the journalists of being traitors to their home country. "They say we are the people for America, for Israel," said show host Hossein Mohri, who has lived in the United States for 18 years.

Farrokh Javid, 67, who left Iran in the 1980s and now hosts a morning show on KRSI called “Follow the Sun,” said he tries to make his show non-political, but that has been impossible in recent days.

In addition to our Iran full coverage page on Reuters.com, we’re posting links to our stories on the Twitter account Reuters_Iran and in the live headline box below. We’ll also selectively re-publish tweets from Iran and other sources that illuminate events in the country.

Note: Reuters coverage is now subject to an Iranian ban on foreign media leaving the office to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.

Although the U.N.’s racism conference in Geneva has been dominated by Middle East politics, Palestinian rights groups say Palestinians have effectively been silenced.On the one hand tough rules by the conference organisers prevented Palestinian NGOs from holding “side events”, they say. On the other hand Monday’s controversial speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, slamming Israel as a “totally racist government” founded “on the pretext of Jewish suffering”, has distracted attention from the issues that actually affect Palestinians.

  “One thing that we have noticed in this conference is that there has been a concerted effort to silence the voices of the Palestinian presence and raising the Palestinian issue,” said Wisam Ahmad of Al-Haq, a Ramallah-based advocacy group.

 Ahmad says that Ahmadinejad’s speech became the symbol of the conference, as intended by “those that wanted this conference to fail”.

 “We as Palestinians want to be heard and it is unfortunate that the press attributes the statements of the president of Iran to all of the Palestinian people,” he said.

Ingrid Jaradat, director of the Badil Resource Center in Bethlehem, agrees.

 “We all knew he was going to come, we all knew that the European governments were going to wait until they just hear the key word and then they will all stand up and leave the hall and then the press comes in, they all would write about what he said or did not say and everybody would forget what is really written in the documents and what the conference is really about,” she said.

  “From my point of view I do not think that this was helpful for the Palestinian people in general and not for our organisation.”

 Diplomatic manoeuvering in the run-up to the conference, known as Durban II, resulted in references to the Palestinian question being dropped from the draft declaration, in an effort to get all U.N. members to take part.

In the event the United States, Israel and half a dozen other countries decided to stay away. European states walked out of Ahmadinejad’s speech but most came back for the rest of the conference, which agreed a final declaration on Tuesday.

 That document “reaffirms” the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) agreed in 2001, which does refer to Israel and the Palestine territories.

 It was that reaffirmation that prompted the United States to stay away this time. The U.S. and Israel walked out of the 2001 meeting following attempts, subsequently dropped, to equate Zionism with racism in the final document.

The 2001 meeting was marred by anti-Semitic demonstrations and activities by some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that led Jewish groups to warn that Durban II – the review meeting in Geneva – could be another “hatefest”.

 This time conference organisers put strict limits on what NGOs could organise on the sidelines of the meeting. Such side events had to deal with “thematic” questions such as the treatment of immigrants, not individual countries.

As a result Palestinian rights groups found their requests to hold events dealing with Palestine issues were rejected.

 (A pro-Israel group did manage to hold an event at the U.N. during the conference, apparently by circumventing the conference organisers and booking a room directly through the U.N. offices.)

Critics of the U.N. human rights process say it spends a disproportionate amount of time on the Israel/Palestine issue.

 For example, since its creation three years ago, the U.N. Human Rights Council has devoted five of its 10 special sessions to Israel and its alleged human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon. (One each examined the financial crisis, Congo, the food crisis, Myanmar and Darfur.)

 “The real victims of the hijacking of the human rights agenda to focus on Israel are not Israel. Israel is a strong country. It can defend itself, it has articulate spokespeople to defend it,” said civil rights activist and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz.

 “While the people of Rwanda were being murdered the U.N. was debating Israel. While the people of Darfur were being murdered the U.N. was debating Israel. While the people of Cambodia were being murdered the U.N. was debating Israel,” he said.

And Palestinians acknowledge that they have little to show for all the diplomatic focus on their problems. Even though the 2001 document refers to the plight of the Palestinians under occupation, little has changed.

 “So far the Durban declaration and programme of action has not really succeeded to bring about any major change or improvement in the situation of the Palestinian people but in fact our situation has very much deteriorated since 2001,” said Jaradat.

A United Nations conference on racism is being boycotted by the United States and many of its allies.

They fear the meeting in Geneva will single out Israel for criticism. A previous racism conference in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, was marred by anti-Semitic street protests and attempts to pass a resolution equating Zionism with racism, prompting the United States and Israel to walk out.

The final declaration of that conference omitted that language and was hailed by Israel’s foreign ministry as a triumph.

Canada and Israel had long made it clear that they would not attend the follow-up conference in Geneva, known as Durban II.

Now, despite President Barack Obama’s policy of re-engaging with the rest of the world, the United States has decided to stay away too. So have Australia and Germany among others. Britain and France and current EU-president the Czech Republic are represented only by their ambassadors.

                                   The only head of state to attend is Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad,

who has called for Israel to be wiped from the map and cast doubt on the Nazi Holocaust, which is also commemorated by Jewish communities on Monday.

He used similar language again on Monday, denouncing Israel as a racist regime oppressing the Palestinians and founded “on the pretext of Jewish sufferings”, and accusing “Zionism” of penetrating mass media and financial systems in other countries to impose its domination worldwide.

Several advocacy organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have said the United States and other Western countries should take part, arguing that their boycott constituted a blow against efforts to promote human rights.

Even in Israel, some people say that a boycott leaves the floor open to critics of the country.

Still, those who object to the conference can draw some paradoxical comfort from Ahmadinejad’s words. According to one conspiracy theory making the round of the Palais des Nations – the U.N.’s European headquarters where it is hosting the conference – the boycott, by allowing the spotlight to fall on Ahmadinejad, simply proves the point of the opponents: that the U.N.’s international diplomacy is flawed and its efforts to discuss human rights always end up in an attack on Israel.

The U.N. nuclear non-proliferation watchdog assiduously guards its impartiality as it monitors and investigates disputed activity in Iran and Syria, with suspicious Western powers impatient for the inspectors to draw conclusions.

So the International Atomic Energy Agency typically puts what have become keenly anticipated, quarterly reports on Iran and Syria through many painstaking drafts before they see the light of day, to help ensure that not a single word can be misunderstood, misinterpreted or turned to political advantage.

But the IAEA had to scramble this month to stay the course amid growing Western edginess over Iran’s defiant advances towards nuclear capacity with possible bomb applications, as well as a perceived Syrian nuclear cover-up.

The U.N. watchdog had to do battle with politically charged headlines and alarmist commentary both because of unexplained references in its latest reports and things that were left out.

Unguarded remarks coaxed from senior U.N. officials by aggressive nuclear beat reporters also stirred the pot. First, we pounced on a figure of 1,010 kg of low-enriched uranium (LEU) accumulated by Iran for future nuclear fuel. Our antennae were twitching since this echoed U.S. estimates of the minimum LEU Iran would need to reprocess into high-enriched uranium (HEU) for a bomb, if it so chose.

Yet, the science is inexact. Other estimates range up to 1,700 kg, depending on factors like quality of uranium, natural loss or wastage of material from further enrichment and so on.

Such nuances got lost in U.S. and European headlines:

“IRAN HAS ENRICHED ENOUGH URANIUM FOR BOMB, IAEA SAYS”.

In fact, the IAEA had not said that. It was just an unnamed U.N. official who, pressed by reporters to draw conclusions, said: “Do they have enough LEU to produce a significant quantity of HEU? Yes. But it is theoretical. They’re not there yet.”

Still, that looked to some as if the IAEA was passing judgment on a nation’s nuclear capability. Iran protested because that is outside the IAEA’s technical mandate, which to safeguard nuclear items from diversion into bombmaking.

His “yes” whipped up fear in a West convinced Iran is bent on building The Bomb, despite a dearth of hard evidence. In fact, for the security hedge Iran desires to turn the tables on U.S.-Israeli predominance in the Middle East, all it needs is a perceived ABILITY to build a nuclear weapon.

That is entirely legal since uranium enrichment technology also generates electricity, the stated goal of Iran’s programme.

Since enrichment is the toughest of a good dozen technical steps entailed in creating a bomb, Western concerns now fixate on the size of Iran’s LEU stockpile. And that figured in a second ruckus arising from the IAEA’s report.

Eagle-eyed U.S. nuclear reporters, comparing figures with those in the IAEA’s prior report, found that Iran’s estimate of its LEU stockpile was 209 kg less than the IAEA’s own inventory check. Answering a question, a U.N. official said this “physical inventory verification” (PIV) was done just once a year.

Headlines blared: “IRAN UNDERSTATES URANIUM STOCKS”. Alarm bells rang: could Iran be misleading the IAEA about its LEU stocks and squirrelling some away for secret conversion into HEU?

The IAEA was taken aback, wrongfooted by its failure to acknowledge and explain the unusually large discrepancy in the report, and it took three days to issue a clarifying statement. No, it said, this was only an honest mistake by Iran down to technical inexperience and Iran is cooperating well to improve its future estimates. The IAEA assured that all LEU was under constant agency surveillance. Not everyone was convinced.

“(Since a PIV) is conducted once a year…, given the time taken to process the results, it means a diversion occurring just after a PIV might not be detected for 13 or 14 months,” wrote James Acton in the influential Arms Control Wonk web blog.

Fellow ACW blogger Jeffrey Lewis saw no reason for fuss. “Another IAEA report on Iran. Cue the panic…This is going to frighten you, but large industrial processes are not measured in bomb units, even though this would be awesome,” he wrote. Alluding to the LEU, Lewis added: “If you aren’t sure how much he weighs, Elvis is still in the building.”

As for Syria, a rare impromptu disclosure of investigative findings omitted from the IAEA’s formal report created a media splash and a protest from Damascus, which denies allegations it tried to build a plutonium-producing reactor in secret.

Answering a reporter’s query, a U.N. official said graphite traces were found in soil samples taken at a site where Washington says Syria almost built a graphite-core reactor with North Korean help before Israel bombed it to ruin in 2007.

Some reporters including me led their stories with the graphite, understandably because this was news. We also quoted the U.N. official saying it was to early to tell if there was a nuclear link with the graphite, an element with many other uses.

But that qualifier escaped many punters. The IAEA was forced to send a memo to its 35-nation governing board a day later spelling out that no graphite-nuclear link had been established
“at present”.

For its part, Syria’s state news agency said no suspicious graphite had been or would be found. Syrian officials denied any graphite was found, suggesting the IAEA was lying.

But as the last week made clear, politics, paranoia and conspiracy theories can sometimes make it hard to get the whole truth across when it comes to the IAEA’s complex Iran and Syria investigations.

(Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (C) visits the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, 350 km (217 miles) south of Tehran, April 8, 2008. Iran has begun installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant, Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday, defying the West which fears Tehran is trying to build nuclear bombs. Picture taken on April 8, 2008. REUTERS/Presidential official website/Handout (IRAN). FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS.)