While Iran leads a war of words against nuclear-armed Israel and has defied a U.N. Security Council request to stop all uranium enrichment, Brazil is peaceful and democratic. It doesn't have border disputes, is not in an arms race, and strives for good relations with all nations. Its last war ended in 1870.

''Brazil doesn't cheat on the Nonproliferation Treaty and it does not exist in an area of high tension,'' said David Albright, a former U.N. inspector who runs the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

The U.S. Embassy in the capital, Brasilia, referred all questions to the State Department in Washington, where spokesman Sean McCormack dismissed any parallel between Brazil's nuclear program and Iran's.

''My understanding is they have a peaceful nuclear program,'' he said Thursday.

Still, Brazil's enrichment program - and its reluctance to allow unlimited inspections - has raised suspicions abroad.

''Brazil is beginning to be perceived as a country apparently wanting to reevaluate its commitment to nonproliferation, and this is a big part of the problem,'' said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

The government-run Industrias Nucleares do Brasil S.A. has been conducting final tests at the enrichment plant, built on a former coffee plantation in Resende, 90 miles west of Rio de Janeiro. When it opens this year, Brazil will join the world's nuclear elite.

Brazil has the world's sixth-largest uranium reserves, but until the plant becomes operational, it can't use the fuel for energy without shipping it to and from URENCO, the European enrichment consortium.

Brazil says its plant will be capable of enriching natural uranium to less than 5 percent uranium-235, an isotope needed to fuel its two reactors. Warheads need ore that has been enriched to 95 percent uranium-235, a material Brazil says it can't and won't produce.

''If you can enrich to 5 percent, you're decades away from enriching to 90 percent,'' Odair Dias Goncalves, president of the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission, told The Associated Press. ''You need a whole new technology that we don't have.''

But former U.N. inspector Albright said he worked with Goncalves at the Brazilian Physics Society on a project to show that the Brazilian centrifuges could be used to produce highly enriched uranium, even if that wasn't their intended use.

''Centrifuges are very flexible,'' he said. ''Reconfiguring the cascades or recycling the enriched uranium multiple times can allow for the production of weapons-grade uranium.''

Brazilian leaders insist the fuel will be used for the nation's $1 billion nuclear energy industry. Already Latin America's biggest nuclear power provider, Brazil plans up to seven new atomic plants to reduce its dependence on oil and hydroelectric power and plans to export enriched uranium to provide energy for other countries.

Brazil initially refused inspections by the International Atomic Energy Association, arguing that providing full access to its state-of-the-art, Brazilian-designed centrifuges would put it at risk of industrial espionage. Since then, IAEA inspectors have visited the plant many times, monitoring the uranium that comes in and out, but they're still prevented from seeing the actual centrifuges, which are covered with opaque screens.

The IAEA inspectors have said they're satisfied no material is being diverted. Brazilian physicist Jose Goldemberg said Brazil won't be able to produce enriched uranium for export until 2014.

Brazil had great nuclear ambitions during a 1964-85 military dictatorship, when it built the two nuclear energy plants, worked to develop a nuclear submarine and had secret plans to test an atomic bomb in a 1,000-foot-deep, concrete-and steel-lined hole in the Amazon jungle. That idea was formally scrapped in 1990, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in 2004 that ''we know for sure that Brazil is not thinking about nuclear weapons in any sense.''

But Brazil's nuclear ambitions have been rekindled under leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in part, analysts say, because joining the nuclear club would boost Brazil's status internationally and possibly earn it a permanent seat on the Security Council.

What is really at stake in both Brazil and Iran is self-image, Goldemberg said. ''It's nationalism, pride. That's the real reason,'' he said.

Negroponte expressed concern both about Iran's claim to have resumed uranium enrichment with a cascade of 164 centrifuges in Natanz and extreme statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"The developments in Iran -- clearly they're troublesome," he said in response to questions after a speech to the National Press Club.

"By the same token, our assessment at the moment is that even though we believe that Iran is determined to acquire or obtain a nuclear weapon, that we believe that it is still a number of years off before they are likely to have enough fissile material to assemble into, or to put into a nuclear weapon; perhaps into the next decade," he said.

"So I think it's important that this issue be kept in perspective," he said.

Negroponte is marking his first year in office as the director of national intelligence, a post created in the wake of the intelligence fiasco over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Critics have complained that the new intelligence directorate, which is supposed to coordinate the work of some 15 US intelligence agencies, is developing into another bloated bureaucracy with nearly 1,000 people reportedly working for it.

Negroponte denied that the reforms he is pursuing have been "a theory-based experiment or an exercise in bureaucratic bloat."

"Government programs require government officials to implement them," he said, adding that the last three embassies he led as an ambassador were larger than his intelligence directorate.

Russia and China, both veto-holding members of the Security Council, are leading opposition US calls for UN sanctions on Iran. The differences played out this week in Moscow at talks on Iran involving those three powers and Britain, France and Germany.

Rice restated the US administration's standard position that all options are on the table in dealing with Iran, 'and we have always said that the right to self-defence does not necessarily require a UN Security Council resolution.'

But she contrasted Iran with Iraq, where a US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003.

'The issue here is to mobilize the international community, to unify the international community around the view that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,' Rice said.

'It's a very different situation,' she said. 'I believe we can make the diplomacy work.'

Iran says its uranium enrichment programme, which it kept secret for nearly two decades, is solely for civilian nuclear power. The US is building a diplomatic coalition for its view that Iran's real aim is nuclear weapons.

Echoing similar views, Dr. Kenneth Courtis of Goldman Sachs said that the former dictator of Iraq was exporting more oil during the sanctions than the total oil being produced in Iraq today. "With Iran's geography and the oil reserves, no sanctions can work against it," Courtis opined at the opening session of the three-day event.

The media forum has attracted nearly 350 journalists, politicians, political commentators and bureaucrats and diplomatic envoys from all over the world to deliberate on various topical issues, including the Iran dilemma.

Richard Holbrooke, a former Clinton ambassador to the United Nations and former assistant secretary of state urged host Kazakhstan to exert political pressure on its two giant neighbors, China and Russia, to help Washington tighten the noose against nuclear aspirant Tehran.

Holbrooke said that Iran's nuclear plans have reached a stage of frenzied political concern in Washington and among the Bush administration. "The concern cannot be overstated," the former ambassador said, adding that he was not speaking for the Bush administration. "Today Iran tops the U.S. agenda. This will be a major issue during the upcoming G-8 summit in St. Petersburg and also during this week's summit between President Bush and visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao," Holbrooke said.

Landlocked Kazakhstan lies between Russia and China and is geographically close to Iran. Any military action against Tehran could seriously affect this former Soviet Republic. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney is due to visit Kazakhstan in the next three weeks and Iran is likely to dominate bilateral talks.

Kuznetsov said that Moscow was definitely exerting pressure on Iran "but sometimes the pressures don't work."

But Holbrooke minced no words, saying, "The U.S. is upset at Russia's stance on Iran. I believe that Moscow should support Washington against Tehran."

He hailed Kazakhstan for giving up its nuclear arsenal back in 1994. "If Kazakhstan set such a fine example, Iran wants to go the other way," Holbrooke said.

Answering questions if the Iran issue would split the U.N. Security Council, the former Clinton administration official said that Bush administration has not had a smooth ride with the international body in seeking consensus.

Courtis, however, said that an Iran resolution lies in Moscow and Beijing. "If the U.S. fails to win China's support, the Iran issue will not be resolved," the managing director of Goldman Sachs said.

These comments come at a time when Chinese President Hu Jintao is visiting the United States for bilateral talks with President Bush.

Meanwhile, Russia on Thursday said it would continue supporting construction of a nuclear power plant in Iran, saying it poses no threat to the international non-proliferation regime. Russia's state atomic energy agency is contracted to help Iran build the $1 billion nuclear reactor.

"The construction of a nuclear power plant in Bushehr is being carried out in compliance with all international agreements," Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency head Sergei Kiriyenko told a news conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

In the United States, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday cautioned against assuming that the White House is keen on military intervention in Iran.

Although President Bush has repeatedly said that all options, including the use of force, are possible to stop Iran from producing nuclear warheads, Rice said in Chicago that diplomatic measures must first be exhausted.

Rice said that many "diplomatic tools" will be used and that she hoped Iran would get the message from a unified international community. The U.N. Security Council has given Iran until April 28 to halt uranium enrichment.

The Security Council is so far divided on the Iran issue. While Germany, France and Britain have said they would push for a diplomatic solution, Russia and China have both opposed any sanctions and a military solution.

The United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, discovered three years ago that Iran had carried out secret nuclear activities for 18 years in breach of its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty.

Iran says it has the right to enrich nuclear energy for civilian purposes, but the West believes Tehran is using the process to secretly and illegally build nuclear weapons. Iran denies the charge.

The Tor-M1 is a fifth-generation integrated mobile air defense system designed for operation at medium, low and very low altitudes against fixed/rotary wing aircraft, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle), guided missiles and other high-precision weapons.

Despite strong criticism from the United States, Russia has maintained that the systems could be used only to protect Iran's air space.

Baluyevsky also said Russia's Armed Forces would not be involved in any military conflict in Iran.

"I do not think the conflict [in Iran] will turn into a war," he said. "Russia will not propose the use of its armed forces in a potential military conflict on either side."

Baluyevsky said he did not discuss the Iranian nuclear program with Jones, although the issue is "on everybody's mind."

Meanwhile, Iran's Defense Minister, Mostafa Mohammad-Najar, said Wednesday that his country would go ahead with its non-military nuclear research because it was a legitimate right of the Iranian people.

The Iranian official is currently on a three-day visit to the neighboring Central Asian republic of Azerbaijan to discuss bilateral cooperation in the defense sphere.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will attend a summit of Economic Cooperation Organization, a regional cooperation body, in the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, on May 4-5.

Iran says its nuclear work aims only to produce electricity, not bombs. But it has hidden parts of its program in the past, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has heightened world concern by saying Israel should be "wiped off the map."

Senior cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani told Friday prayer worshippers ElBaradei and the IAEA had singled out Iran's quest for technology, while ignoring a nuclear-armed Israel.

"Israel has got nuclear warheads and it is proliferating them constantly and you do not ask them why," Kashani said.

He also criticized the Security Council for failing to live up to its name. "You are establishing security for the wolves and predators rather than for the sheep," the cleric declared.

Iran had said an IAEA team led by Olli Heinonen, deputy director-general for nuclear safeguards, would arrive on Friday, but diplomats said they had been told Heinonen would not go.

A Vienna-based EU diplomat said Iran had not responded to requests for more cooperation. There was no point in Heinonen going to Tehran "if he's just going to get stonewalled."

The use of military force against Iran was "probably the last choice," Lieberman said, before adding: "But it has to be there."

The Connecticut Democrat compared the rhetoric coming from Iranian President Mamoud Ahmadinejad, who threatened just last week to "annihilate" Israel, to declarations from both Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler, noting:

"Sometimes when people say really extreme things, which at some level a lot of people don't want to even believe . . . they may actually mean it. They may intend to do it. So I do think that the statements of Ahmadinejad are taken very seriously, both with regard to [speaking of a world without] the US and with regard to Israel."

Lieberman told the Post that any U.S. strike against Iran would not involve ground troops, explaining: "I don't think anyone is thinking of this as a massive ground invasion, as in Iraq, to topple the government."

It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States. When I flew to Washington and offered it to the national public broadcaster, PBS, I received a curious reaction. PBS executives were shocked by the film, and spoke admiringly of it, even as they collectively shook their heads. One of them said: "John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States played such a destructive role, so we have decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator."

The term "journalistic adjudicator" was out of Orwell. PBS appointed one Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and one of the few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he gave my film the thumbs-down. One of the PBS executives confided to me: "These are difficult days under Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems."

The lack of truth about what had really happened in southeast Asia - the media-promoted myth of a "blunder" and the suppression of the true scale of civilian casualties and of routine mass murder, even the word "invasion" - allowed Reagan to launch a second "noble cause" in central America. The target was another impoverished nation without resources: Nicaragua, whose "threat," like Vietnam's, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the colonial dictatorships backed by Washington. Nicaragua was crushed, thanks in no small part to leading American journalists, conservative and liberal, who suppressed the triumphs of the Sandinistas and encouraged a specious debate about a "threat."

The tragedy in Iraq is different, but, for journalists, there are haunting similarities. On Aug. 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.

We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the secret intelligence service. In what was called "Operation Mass Appeal," MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction - such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All these stories were fake. But this is not the point. The point is that the dark deeds of MI6 were quite unnecessary. Recently, the BBC's director of news, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her "embedded" reporters in Iraq, having accepted U.S. denials of the use of chemical weapons against civilians, could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as to "bring democracy and human rights" to Iraq. She replied with quotations from Blair that this was indeed the aim, as if Blair's utterances and the truth were in any way related. On the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader described this illegal, unprovoked act, based on lies, as a "miscalculation." Thus, to use Edward Herman's memorable phrase, the unthinkable was normalized.

Such servility to state power is hotly denied, yet routine. Almost the entire British media has omitted the true figure of Iraqi civilian casualties, willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit respectable studies. "Making conservative assumptions," wrote the researchers from the eminent Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with Iraqi scholars, "we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq ... which were primarily the result of military actions by coalition forces. Most of those killed by coalition forces were women and children...." That was Oct. 29, 2004. Today, the figure has doubled.

Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as "democracy," "liberation," "freedom," and "reform" have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels, such as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and Bill Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed. How many people know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on Sept. 11, 2001, up to 20,000 innocent people died in Afghanistan?

In reclaiming the honor of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned - that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to "us," and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by dehumanizing them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that country were an abstraction, not a human society. Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is currently being softened up on both sides of the Atlantic. A few weeks ago, Channel 4 news carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the U.S. State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the program's Washington correspondent, presented Chávez as a cartoon character, a sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin ways disguised a man "in danger of joining a rogues' gallery of dictators and despots - Washington's latest Latin nightmare." In contrast, Condoleezza Rice was given gravitas and Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to compare Chávez to Hitler.


Indeed, almost everything in this travesty of journalism was viewed from Washington, and only fragments of it from the barrios of Venezuela, where Chávez enjoys 80 percent popularity. That he had won nine democratic elections and referendums - a world record - was omitted. In crude Soviet flick style, he was shown with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, though these brief encounters had to do with OPEC and oil only. According to Rugman, Venezuela under Chávez is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons. No evidence was given for this absurdity. People watching would have no idea that Venezuela was the only oil-producing country in the world to use its oil revenue for the benefit of poor people. They would have no idea of spectacular developments in health, education, literacy; no idea that Venezuela has no political jails - unlike the United States.

So if the Bush administration moves to implement "Operation Bilbao," a contingency plan to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela, who will care, because who will know? For we shall have only the media version; another demon will get what is coming to him. The poor of Venezuela, like the poor of Nicaragua, and the poor of Vietnam and countless other faraway places, whose dreams and lives are of no interest, will be invisible in their grief: a triumph of censorship by journalism.

It is said that the Internet offers an alternative, and what is wonderful about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report as many journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of muckrakers such as Claud Cockburn, who said: "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." But the Internet is still a kind of samizdat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on, just as most of humanity does not own a mobile phone. And the right to know ought to be universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the majority of the people were being denied the truth and ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words." That time is now.

This is an abridged version of an address, "Reporting War and Empire," by John Pilger at Columbia University, New York, in company with Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, and Charles Glass.

A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy



But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment. Prominent Israeli leaders and their American supporters pressed very hard for the invasion of Iraq; but the United States would probably be in Iraq today even if there had been no Israel lobby. Is Israel, in Mearsheimer/Walt's words, "a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states?" I think it is; but that too is an issue for legitimate debate.

The essay and the issues it raises for American foreign policy have been prominently dissected and discussed overseas. In America, however, it's been another story: virtual silence in the mainstream media. Why? There are several plausible explanations. One is that a relatively obscure academic paper is of little concern to general-interest readers. Another is that claims about disproportionate Jewish public influence are hardly original - and debate over them inevitably attracts interest from the political extremes. And then there is the view that Washington is anyway awash in "lobbies" of this sort, pressuring policymakers and distorting their choices.

Each of these considerations might reasonably account for the mainstream press's initial indifference to the Mearsheimer-Walt essay. But they don't convincingly explain the continued silence even after the article aroused stormy debate in the academy, within the Jewish community, among the opinion magazines and Web sites, and in the rest of the world. I think there is another element in play: fear. Fear of being thought to legitimize talk of a "Jewish conspiracy"; fear of being thought anti-Israel; and thus, in the end, fear of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism.

The end result - a failure to consider a major issue in public policy - is a great pity. So what, you may ask, if Europeans debate this subject with such enthusiasm? Isn't Europe a hotbed of anti-Zionists (read anti-Semites) who will always relish the chance to attack Israel and her American friend? But it was David Aaronovitch, a Times of London columnist who, in the course of criticizing Mearsheimer and Walt, nonetheless conceded that "I sympathize with their desire for redress, since there has been a cock-eyed failure in the U.S. to understand the plight of the Palestinians."

And it was the German writer Christoph Bertram, a longstanding friend of America in a country where every public figure takes extraordinary care to tread carefully in such matters, who wrote in Die Zeit that "it is rare to find scholars with the desire and the courage to break taboos."

How are we to explain the fact that it is in Israel itself that the uncomfortable issues raised by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have been most thoroughly aired? It was an Israeli columnist in the liberal daily Haaretz who described the American foreign policy advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith as "walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments ...and Israeli interests." It was Israel's impeccably conservative Jerusalem Post that described Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, as "devoutly pro-Israel." Are we to accuse Israelis, too, of "anti-Zionism"?

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

Looking back, we shall see the Iraq war and its catastrophic consequences as not the beginning of a new democratic age in the Middle East but rather as the end of an era that began in the wake of the 1967 war, a period during which American alignment with Israel was shaped by two imperatives: cold-war strategic calculations and a new-found domestic sensitivity to the memory of the Holocaust and the debt owed to its victims and survivors.

For the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East - and its enduring implications for our standing there - has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

"As we all know from our experience with the tsunami, multinational responses to regional crises are likely to be the norm in the future," Alexander Arvizu, the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy, told reporters.

"In order to better address tomorrow's disasters, future peacekeeping requirements, or contingencies, it is vital that our friends train together," he said.

Nearly 11,300 troops will take part in the exercises, dubbed the "Cobra Gold," the vast majority of them from Thailand and the United States.

Japan is sending 40 members of its so-called Self Defense Forces, but they will only join in computer simulations and observe in humanitarian projects.

Singapore is sending 96 troops, with another 15 from Indonesia.

The live-fire exercises, launched 25 years ago and originally limited to US and Thai troops, will include an anti-terror component for the fifth straight year.

Last year, the exercises focused on responses to natural disasters, after the December 2004 tsunami that killed 220,000 people in 12 countries.

This year's Cobra Gold exercises are much larger than last year's, when some 5,800 US, Thai, Japanese and Singaporean forces took part.

But they are still noticeably smaller than earlier years, when some 20,000 personnel were involved.

Nine other countries will observe this year's drills: Australia, China, France, Germany, Laos, Malaysia, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.