Thursday, 3 June 2010



3 May 2010

Iran Does Have Weapons-Grade Uranium 

Two news items in the media over the last day or so oblige me to break silence on Iran’s acquisition of weapons-grade uranium.  They have had it for several years.


Today the Daily Express reports that Iran has "two tons of uranium" which "would be enough for two nuclear warheads".  Yesterday the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a report headlined "Iran on the brink of a nuclear bomb." 


Comments on the web this morning are suggesting both stories are exaggerations at least, and fabrications at worst. 


I profoundly disagree. 

 

While I was in Brussels between 2004 and 2009 I and others established beyond doubt, with the assistance of retired diplomats from the former Belgian Congo, that weapons-grade uranium was being shipped from the former Belgian Congo direct to Iran, despite a world-wide ban on such traffic.

 

The Belgian EU Commissioner Louis Michel, supposedly responsible for the EU’s humanitarian aid to the third world from 2003 to 2009, was - at the time - directly related to one of the directors of the company in the Congo making the shipments.  


He refused to answer any questions on his links, or to account for the EU funds being sent to the Congo. 

 

Worse, despite the considerable evidence I and others presented to OLAF (the EU’s supposedly ‘independent’ fraud investigation organisation) they refused to look into the matter.  The director-general, a former German judge called Bruner, told me in committee that “we do not snoop on our friends”.

 

Despite our best efforts we were never able to establish was a direct link between Michel and the exports, beyond his family relationship.  So we could never go fully public.   

 

Instead I and others briefed several investigative journalists in the UK.  But their editors were terrified of letting them follow the story up and proving the missing link.  The consequences for UK-EU relations were considered unacceptable, and their attitude was also based on the assumption that claims made by a mere European Parliament backbencher who wanted the UK out of the EU could not possibly be relied upon.  (The fact that, in the past, I had been an investigative journalist myself apparently counted for nothing, or was regarded as an inconvenient truth.)

 

Personally I have not the slightest doubt Iran is determined to have its own atomic bomb and will stop at nothing to get it.  What the former diplomats told and showed me let me in no doubt whatsoever.  I saw, and still have copies of, bills of lading and other export documents.  I am also of the firm opinion that the EU has (perhaps unwittingly, but I doubt it) helped finance Iran’s acquisition of weapons-grade uranium over several years. 

 

If you ask me why key people inside the EU’s secretive supreme soviet might countenance such dangerously de-stabilising mischief, I need only point you towards the almost pathological hatred of the USA to be found amongst almost all its members.  

 

There will be a much fuller account of the activities of Louis Michel and his family relations in the former Belgian Congo in my memoirs in due course.

 

 

 

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