A ‘secret uranium enrichment plant deep inside a mountain’ the New York Times calls it. The ‘serial deception of many years’, the unspeakable Gordon Brown calls it, but all of this is deception itself. The existence of this ‘secret’, non-operational facility of the Iranians has been known to the US intelligence agencies for years, therefore they knew all about it when they issued the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 (pdf), you know, the one that showed that the Iranians had no nuclear weapons programme. Which means this secret plant is harmless junk from the past (Iran abandoned nuclear weapons research in 2003)*. The only reason Obama and Brown and all these other suits are suddenly yapping about it, like the lapdogs of war gnawing at the ankles of world peace, is because the other day the Iranians decided to tell the IAEA it was there. ‘Beware politically motivated hype’, says former weapons inspector Scott Ritter in his very good article in the Guardian. And never forget that the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ pundits were never expunged from the media after Iraqi WMDs were found not to exist, they are still taken seriously (by the media) and they’ll resort to the same shite to get someone to invade Iran.
*Update, 25 October 2009: it’s not, as I wrote, junk from the past, but from the future, and is currently a hole in a mountain! The IAEA has inspected the site and it seems the site is being built to house existing Iranian nuclear material in case the Israelis or US attack. See the United for Peace news report ‘IAEA inspection of Fordo site near Qom begins‘.