Another Crude Anti-Iran Hoax by The AP's George Jahn

In the latest instance the "exclusive" evidence was in the form of two secret graphs "leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran's atomic program..."

(PROVIDENCE, RI) - On November 27 an Associated Press story by George Jahn proclaimed “Exclusive: Diagram suggests Iran working on bomb three times the force of Hiroshima” (bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-exclusive-graph-suggests-iran-working-bomb).

George Jahn is the same AP writer who in July 2011 spread a tale about an electrical-engineering student assassinated on a street in Tehran.  Jahn had been told the student was working on an atomic bomb.  Thus Israel “justified” the murder.

Then in November 2011 Mr. Jahn promoted a story about Iranians moving some dirt.  Jahn concluded that they must be trying to hide a nuclear-weapons facility.

In April and May 2012 the same George Jahn gave us an “exclusive,” based on a drawing of a gigantic explosion-containment chamber which he said Iran was building—allegedly to test bomb components (http://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-drawing-focuses-irans-nuke-153134246.html).

In each case Mr. Jahn got his secret information from an anonymous informant from an unnamed country in the Middle East.  (We can probably guess what country that was.)  Even though Jahn would not reveal his source, the tales were accepted and published by major media as though they were true.

And each time these stories turned out to be bogus.

In the latest instance the “exclusive” evidence was in the form of two secret graphs “leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran's atomic program ... on condition that they and their country not be named” – Jahn’s familiar “source.”

One of the graphs was a dotted curve allegedly representing the energy from an explosion measured in “kT,” apparently meaning equivalent kilotons of explosives. The second graph was a solid curve purported to represent power – the rate of production of energy in “kT per second.” (Such graphs are readily available in textbooks and on the internet with no connection to nuclear weapons.)

Energy must be the integral of power, but you don’t even need calculus to see the absurdity of the graphs. High-school arithmetic suffices. From 1.9 to 2.0 microseconds the power graph shows an average rate of about 5 trillion kT/sec. This would yield a total energy during that 0.1 microsecond of about 500,000 kT. But the energy graph shows less than 10 kT at the end of 2 microseconds – a colossal blunder by whomever drew the graphs!

A first-semester calculus student should be able to produce graphs like Jahn’s. And if he or she were my student the work would have to be much better for a passing grade. Yet AP, Fox news, CBS, the Boston Globe, the Detroit Free Press, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Washington Times and others report stuff like this without questioning it. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was temporarily fooled by some of the hoaxes.

This would be funny if the potential consequences were not so horrendous. Americans should recall George Bush’s lies about “yellow cake” from Niger and Colin Powell’s disgraceful performance before the U.N. Security Council about Iraq’s “WMD.” Both were used to justify war against Iraq. Now Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama are using George Jahn’s nonsense to justify their threats and actions against Iran.

Rod Driver studied engineering and mathematics at the University of Minnesota, receiving a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1960. He worked at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque for six years before taking a teaching position at the University of Rhode Island for 30 years. Rod says he became a 'peacenik' in 1951 (thanks to a few weeks on Pariss Island). He became particularly active in opposition to U.S. wars in Indochina and U.S. involvement in overthrowing governments and supporting dictators in Latin America and Iran. As the Vietnam war was winding down Rod began paying attention to the abuse of Palestinians - enabled with U.S. weapons and dollars, which has never stopped. Rod is the founder and president of the non-profit Justice First Foundation.

In Rhode Island Rod was an elected delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1986, Then he was elected a state representative for 10 years. At this time he is not in office. You can write to Rod Driver at this address: rod@roddriver.com