Today, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) that promotes an outright distortion of the facts in order to argue for more crippling sanctions and potential military strikes on Iran.
The authors--Reul Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz--claim that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspects Iranian enrichment facilities only once a month, and therefore Iran will soon become a "threshold nuclear state" because the IAEA won't be able to detect a move to produce weapons grade uranium. They argue that new sanctions must be leveled to collapse Iran's economy imminently before "a pre-emptive military strike becomes essential."
Gerecht and Dubowitz are wrong. IAEA inspections of Iran's enrichment facilities don't occur just once a month, they occur about once a week.
The fact is that IAEA inspections of the enrichment facilities referenced in the article occur three to four times a month. Two of those visits are regularly scheduled--which the Wall Street Journal itself has previously reported--and an additional one to two unannounced inspections occur at these facilities each month.
In addition to reporting this previously, the Wall Street Journal has also noted that the IAEA operates cameras at Iran's nuclear sites at all times and that U.S. officials maintain the IAEA would detect any move by Iran to reconfigure their centrifuges to begin producing weapons-grade fuel.
So why did Wall Street Journal allow FDD to blatantly distort this fact in the paper's own opinion pages?
FDD has been given a free pass by the Wall Street Journal to argue for sanctions that will starve ordinary people, and for a new war in the Middle East based on their own set of facts. We saw with Iraq what happens when the media turns a blind eye to the blatant distortion of reality.
So we are calling on the Wall Street Journal to correct this misstatement, and you can join that call by sending a letter through www.IranFact.org.
FDD is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. The organization, headed by Mark Dubowitz, has explicitly argued in the Wall Street Journal previously that sanctions should punish Iran's middle class. Reul Marc Gerecht has argued that bombing Iran would help the Green Movement. We can disagree about the merits of those opinions, but the facts used to support those opinions are not up for debate.
When FDD blatantly misrepresent the facts, the record should be corrected. The Wall Street Journal has a responsibility to hold its contributors accountable to this fact. Take a moment to ensure the Wall Street Journal upholds this duty and corrects the record instead of allowing for the public to be mislead into another war. Call on the Wall Street Journal to explain the facts and correct the record by sending them a letter at www.IranFact.org.