David Albright’s latest piece (with Robert Avagyan) on Parchin indicates that he has returned to his main interest (as was suggested by Professor Dan Joyner at the University of Alabama School of Law in a recent post on Arms Control Law).

Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), has been obsessed with this site for some seven years and his monitoring and reporting of satellite images of the site has attracted new interest even by IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano who cryptically answered “yes” when asked yesterday, by Reuters, “whether Iran was continuing to dismantle a site that is part of the Parchin complex, which U.N. inspectors can now only monitor via satellite imagery.” And furthermore, according to the same source, “They are undertaking quite intensive activities at Parchin.” Well, when reading the title of Albright and Avagyan’s piece, one may in fact fear that illicit high explosive tests are a current problem at Parchin (they are not), not something which has probably been conducted ten years ago.

Dan Joyner’s, well, uncouth  suggestion to Albright not to talk about business (international law) he is not an expert of but rather “stick to obsessing over satellite pictures of tarps at random military bases in Iran” aroused quite a comment storm on his blog, including a fierce rebuttal by Andrea Stricker, one of Albright’s few employees at ISIS, and Albright’s unfortunate rants, who even denounced Joyner’s expertise in NPT matters. There were quite a lot demands coming from what Albright later called Iranian regime “apologists” to substantiate his claims. Joyner himself was called by Albright “the Ayatollah’s lawer”, an unbelievable decompensation.

Well, Albright has a reputation of not being able to constructively respond to justified criticism of his agenda on Iran. His rants and threats in an interview with Sam Husseini and then and now his pathetic mentioning undoubted sex offenses committed by Scott Ritter, who had dared to deny that Albright has ever been a UN weapons inspector, when he criticizes one of Joyner’s “revealing” sources to “attack him” tells quite a lot about Albright’s apparent lack of any sense for academic disputes. When it comes to war and peace, it’s all about evidence, not speculation; something which non-academics may have problems to comprehend.

I have written about Albright’s questionable (as they are not peer-reviewed) and even dangerous analyses about Iran’s nuclear program before, then quoting two highly recommended pieces, one by  Scott Kemp and Alexander Glaser at Princeton and another Professor Muhammad Sahimi at Stanford published at antiwar.com. Sahimi recalled this piece yesterday at Joyner’s blog, and, what has now to be expected, how Albright responded to it then.

18 October 2012 @ 7:52 am

Last modified October 18, 2012.