Mark Kirk: “I thank my friend and I want to emphasize his point that the violations we are talking about were not based on faulty…”

“I thank my friend and I want to emphasize his point that the violations we are talking about were not based on faulty intelligence from the U.S. CIA. These violations that we are talking about are documented in formal, open reports by the United Nations international staff under Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA. Inspections through June of 2003 showed many reporting failures by Iran; and by mid-year, Iran admitted to enriching uranium, purification, reprocessing and later admitted to the United Nations of losing nuclear material that had been covered by her U.N. safeguards agreement. Iran built a centrifuge enrichment plant at Natanz with 1,000 rotors and started construction at another facility with 50,000 rotors. Iran first claimed that it had not enriched uranium at all, and the IAEA reported then that it had found contaminations of enriched uranium at the Kalaye Electric Company, at one place, of 36 percent enriched uranium; at another, 54 percent on imported components; and at another, 70 percent enriched uranium inside its workshop. Until these discoveries by the U.N., Iran had only admitted to enriching uranium once to a level of 7 percent. After the A.Q. Khan network was exposed in Libya, Iran also admitted to using advanced rotors of Pakistani design to enrich uranium. It also admitted in May 2004 that it had separated plutonium in much larger amounts than previously reported.…”