Can You Say Israel?

Amazingly NPR can't when talking about nuclear proliferation. If you listened to the sloppy piece by Mike Shuster yesterday on ATC you'd never know that Israel is one of the nuclear villains in the Middle East (not Iran!) and that the US is one of the principle violators of the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty. I've written a lot about these issues in past posts and so won't retread that tire. But this latest propaganda shuffle deserves a some attention.

The two "experts" consulted and quoted in this piece are US government tools: Mitchell Reese and Scott Sagan (notice in his bio it states, "served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.")
Here's a bit of what these fellows had to tell us:

• "....seems to me that Iran is the test case."

• "key weakness right now of the non proliferation regime is enforcing compliance with international laws and norms; North Korea has violated those, so has Iran. To date they’ve paid little if any price; it’s really up to us to make sure that they do pay a penalty."

Don't fear, Shuster doesn't rely only on his guests to point this discussion in the right (far-right) direction. In case you missed the road signs pointing to Tehran, he reminded us "the North Korean crisis has forced even greater scrutiny of Iran and how the US and other nations will deal with it. Secretary of State Rice made that point yesterday."