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February 23, 2007 13:14 IST
United States President George W Bush may attack Iran next year before the end of his tenure if he thinks diplomacy has failed to solve the nuclear issue with the West Asian country, senior British government sources said.
"He will not want to leave it unresolved for his successor," the sources were quoted as saying to The Times.
The Guardian newspaper reported that much of the intelligence inputs provided by US spy agencies to UN inspectors on Iran's nuclear facilities has proved to be 'unfounded.' Most of it has turned out to be incorrect, the report said, quoting a Vienna-based diplomat at the International Atomic Energy Agency with detailed knowledge of the agency's investigations.
"They gave us a paper with a list of sites. The inspectors did some follow-up, they went to some military sites, but there was no sign of banned nuclear activities," he said. One of the inputs concerned records of plans to build a nuclear warhead, which the Central Intelligence Agency said it found on a stolen laptop computer supplied by an informant inside Iran. In July 2005, US intelligence officials showed printed versions of the material to IAEA officials.
But Tehran rejected the material as forgeries and there are still reservations about its authenticity in the IAEA.
"First of all, if you have a clandestine programme, you don't put it on laptops, which can walk away," one official told The Guardian.
"The data is all in English, which may be reasonable for some of the technical matters, but at some point you had have thought there will be at least some notes in Farsi. So there is some doubt over the provenance of the computer," he said.
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