Amnesty U.S.A director says Iran has a ‘weapons program’, misrepresents Iranian dissident.

A regular poster on the Media Lens message board caught this

Suzanne Nossel is – as "Peter" describes – an "ex-State Department/Obama administration official currently masquerading as a neutral human rights advocate as head of Amnesty International U.S.A.." Years before being selected to run Amnesty USA, Nossel openly supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq – though she advised the Bush administration to "postpone" the invasion for a few months until a UN resolution could be obtained.


As shown below, even as head of Amnesty USA, Nossel openly bolsters yet another a fraud based rush to war.

What follows is how "Peter", the Media Lens regular, explained it:

"Iranian dissident Shirin Ebadi is reported as saying that Western sanctions on Iran are only hurting the people, and need to be lifted 'for a sustainable life', Nossel tweeted:

'Nobelist Ebadi opposes nuke sanctions affecting citizenry/disputes regime's claim that weapons program is popular'


But Ebadi disputes nothing of the sort. Here's what the article actually says:

'Ms. Ebadi, 64, who was attending a conference in Minneapolis on Thursday and Friday, asserted that the Iranian government was not correct in saying that its nuclear energy program was popular among Iranians. While Iranians across the political spectrum say Iran has the legal right to develop nuclear energy, Ms. Ebadi said, many people are privately worried about the environmental risks of nuclear reactors, particularly in Iran's earthquake zones. She said there was no public discussion about this issue because the government had banned newspapers from reporting anything but the official position in recent years'.


As you can see, she is clearly reported as talking about the 'nuclear energy' program not being popular among Iranians, because of the potential 'environmental risks' associated with it, rather than any 'weapons program'.

Indeed, nowhere in the article is a nuclear 'weapons program' even mentioned, except when it's reported that Ayatollah Khameini 'insists that Iran will never use its uranium stockpile to develop nuclear weapons'.

And how convenient that Nossel's misrepresentation of Ebadi feeds into the hawkish but almost certainly false narrative of a menacing Iran currently being in the process of developing a nuclear weapon, and which must be stopped.

Or as Nossel herself put it in 2006:

'Iran is writing the script for a Western drive to rally the world behind the need to contain a menacing country that seems willing to flout the international system for its own greater glory . . . If we and the Europeans tee this up methodically, we can build a broad coalition . . . The military option cannot be off the table. Keeping it on the table is essential to getting others to realize that we won't tolerate open-ended wait-and-see policies'.


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