The board of the International Atomic Energy Agency met today to decide whether to reappoint Mohamed ElBaradei to a third term as the head of the UN’s atomic watchdog agency. They had to postpone the decision: thirty-four out of the 35 IAEA board member countries support naming Mohamed ElBaradei to a third term. One, however, opposed: The United States wants to block his nomination.

Yep, it’s payback time. El Baradei, remember, spoke up against the White House’s campaign of misinformation in the days before the invasion of Iraq, providing intelligence that shot down White House rationales for going to war. And he made the grievous mistake of being right:

He Was Right About Nuclear Weapons: IAEA Director ElBaradei told the United Nations that nuclear experts had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In February 2003, he warned the White House “We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq.” President Bush’s nomination to the U.N., John Bolton, attacked him, saying that was “impossible to believe.” (Today, two years after the invasion of Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction have been found and, in fact, the “intelligence” provided by Bolton’s Office of Special Plans turned out to be “dead wrong.”)

He Was Right About Uranium: In March 2003, El Baradei said the “documents which formed the basis for [the White House's assertion] of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic.” Vice President Cheney, asked about this a week later, said, “Mr. El Baradei frankly is wrong.” (The documents turned out to be fakes. Cheney, frankly, was wrong.)

He Was Right About Aluminum Tubes: In March 2003, ElBaradei said nuclear experts found “no indication” that Iraq tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes for a centrifuge to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ignored that finding and claimed in July 2003 that “the consensus view” in the intelligence community was that the tubes “were suitable for use in centrifuges to spin material for nuclear weapons.” (The tubes, in fact, were not for use for weaponizing uranium. They were the wrong size — “too narrow, too heavy, too long” for a centrifuge. They had a special coating to protect them from the weather, which was “not consistent” with use in a centrifuge, as it could cause bad reactions with uranium.)

Guess the White House would rather have people who are serially wrong — like John Bolton — in positions of international power than those who’ve been consistently proven right. Way to get it backwards.

“The insurgents have very little stock in the country anymore … Almost any indicator you look at [on the insurgency in Iraq], the trends are up. So we’re definitely winning.”
– Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, 4/26/05

VERSUS

“[The Iraq insurgency] is right about where it was a year ago.”
– Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, 4/26/05

– Ken Gude

Another record was broken this year — the number of serious international terrorist attacks in a single year more than tripled, from a record of 175 in 2003 to 655 last year, according to recently released U.S. government figures.

This data, however, will no longer be in the annual report on international terrorism submitted to Congress by the State Department. Just over ten days ago the State Department decided to eliminate the report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” entirely.

All this comes not even a year after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had to publicly apologize for the first edition of the 2003 report — which severely undercounted the number of terrorist attacks. “The numbers were off,” Powell said, and “we have identified how we have to do this in the future.”

Apparently Condoleezza Rice doesn’t agree — her office had suggested an alternative method for counting attacks, and when the National Counterterrorism Center decided not to use this new method, the State Department eliminated the terrorism statistics in the congressionally mandated report altogether.