Jacqueline Shire at ABC News obtained an unclassified State Department briefing—entitled Iran’s Nuclear Fuel Cycle Facilities: A Pattern of Peaceful Intent?—being used to make the case that Iran is up to no good.

The briefing is divded into three sections: an examination of Iran’s concealment efforts using unclassified satellite imagery, an econometric analysis of Iran’s fuel cycle facilities and a comparison of Iran’s facilities with other states of, shall we say, concern.

The unclassified satellite images contain new images for me, including the mysterious uranium mine at Gchine (above). Gchine, Gehine, Gachin, it all transliterates as sketchy.

Dafna Linzer reported US officials presented the briefing—she reported the title as A History of Concealment and Deception, which is the title of the first section—to diplomats in Geneva “to win allies for increasing pressure on the Iranian government…”

Linzer also notes that the briefing has an usual provenance:

The presentation has not been vetted through standard U.S. intelligence channels because it does not include secret material. One U.S. official involved in the briefing said the intelligence community had nothing to do with the presentation and “probably would have disavowed some of it because it draws conclusions that aren’t strictly supported by the facts.”

The presentation, conducted in a conference room at the U.S. mission in Vienna, includes a pictorial comparison of Iranian facilities and missiles with photos of similar-looking items in North Korea and Pakistan, according to a copy of the slides handed out to diplomats. Pakistan largely supplied Iran with its nuclear infrastructure but, as a key U.S. ally, it is identified in the presentation only as “another country.”

Shire learned “the unclassified presentation is the work of two Energy Department labs: Los Alamos National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories.”

I think—maybe—the Los Alamos contribution is drawn from a talk given by Frank Pabian, project leader for “Rest-of-World” Nuclear Nonproliferation Infrastructure Analysis within International Research, Analysis and Development, Los Alamos National Laboratory. Pabian analyzed unclassified satellite imagery in a presentation to the Nuclear Suppliers Group entitled Concealment and Deception in Iran: A Pattern for Peaceful Intent?

Pabian’s talk is on-line, behind a firewall.

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On a related note, I am a long time fan of Edward Tufte, attending one his seminars in Arlington, VA. ET will have, no doubt, something devastating to say about this PP presentation, as he did about Colin Powell’s foray into PowerPoint.

Writing in The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, ET concluded with this advice to an audience:

As a consumer of presentations, you should not trust speakers who rely on the PP cognitive style. It is likely that these speakers are simply serving up PowerPointPhluff to mask their lousy content, just as this massive tendentious pedestal in Budapest once served up Stalin-cult propaganda to orderly followers feigning attention.