Yukiya Amano … head of the agency. Photo: HERWIG PRAMMER LONDON: The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog at the heart of the growing Iranian crisis,nike shox sko, has been accused by several former senior officials of pro-Western bias, over-reliance on unverified intelligence and of sidelining sceptics. Robert Kelley, a former US weapons scientist who ran the agency’s action team on Iraq at the time of the US-led invasion, said there were worrying parallels between the West’s mistakes over Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and the IAEA’s assessment of Iran now. ’'Amano is falling into the Cheney trap. What we learned back in 2002 and 2003, when we were in the run-up to the war, was that peer review was very important,Louis vuitton topanky, and that the analysis should not be left to a small group of people,’‘ he said. Advertisement: Story continues below ’'So what have we learned since then? Absolutely nothing. Just like Dick Cheney, [the head of the agency, Yukiya] Amano is relying on a very small group of people and those opinions are not being checked.’‘ Other former officials have also raised concern that the IAEA is becoming an echo chamber, focused on suspicions over Iran’s program, without the vigorous debate that characterised the era of Amano’s predecessor Mohamed ElBaradei. They point to Amano’s decision, in March last year, to dissolve the agency’s office of external relations and policy co-ordination (Expo), which under ElBaradei had second-guessed some of the judgments made by the safeguards department inspectors. Expo cautioned against the publication of IAEA reports that the Bush administration might use to justify military action. Some inspectors believed that amounted to censorship and Western governments said it was not the agency’s job to make political judgments. ’'There has been a concentration of power, with less diversity of viewpoints,’‘ a former official said. Hans Blix, a former IAEA director general, also raised concerns over the agency’s credibility. ’'There is a distinction between information and evidence, and if you are a responsible agency you have to make sure that you ask questions and do not base conclusions on information that has not been verified,’‘ he said. The IAEA would not comment, but diplomats in Vienna, where the IAEA has its headquarters, defended Amano,puma maratonki, pointing out that much of the material on weaponisation had been raised when ElBaradei ran the agency, albeit in less detail. Guardian News & Media

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