The last IAEA report cobbled together old and questionable intelligence and rose unfounded concerns about a possible military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program. This became the primary basis imposing even harsher international sanctions against Iran targeting their financial and oil sectors, measures which have had harmful effects on the Iranian population.

Leaked statements about the upcoming report to be released in March claim it will include new details about an alleged effort by Tehran to develop a nuclear warhead for a ground-to-ground missile.

An IAEA delegation visited Tehran to engage diplomatically with Iranian authorities regarding their nuclear program. While initial reports characterized the visit as constructive, Reuters later reported that Western diplomats have said the Iranian visit was a total failure and that Iran did not open up its facilities to inspection. The IAEA will return to Tehran for another round of discussions on February 21.

The leaked statements on the new IAEA report may be overblown, just as happened the last time around. Robert Kelley, a retired IAEA director and nuclear engineer, told the New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh ”that he could find very little new information in the IAEA report. He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established.”

Some even dismissed the report as politically motivated, claiming the IAEA’s new Director General, Yukiya Amano, has a pro-Western bias. Indeed, the Guardian’s Julian Borger compiled a series of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks which reveal a similar evaluation of Amano by the U.S.

In October 2009, as Amano was coming in as Director General, the U.S. State Department wrote that he was “DG [Director General] of all states, but in agreement with us.” According to the cables, Amano reminded the U.S. ambassador that he would have to be “fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”

As Flynt Leverett, former Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, wrote at the time, “ever since Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei stepped down as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in late 2009, the United States and some of its allies have pushed Baradei’s successor, Yukiya Amano, to ratify Western arguments that Iran is trying to acquire nuclear weapons.”

“There are many reasons,” Leverett continued, “to question virtually every detail in the IAEA’s accounting of the “possible military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear program. But, more importantly, the stories do not indicate that Tehran is currently trying to produce nuclear weapons.”

While the IAEA report raised the possibility, without evidence, that there could be military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program, it actually concluded that “the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.”

All 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in 2007, and again in 2011, that there is no military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program. A U.S. intelligence official explained to The Washington Post last month that Iran has not decided to pursue nuclear weapons: “Our belief is that they are reserving judgment on whether to continue with key steps they haven’t taken regarding nuclear weapons.”

Even the Obama administration has had to admit this. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability.”

This conforms to previous assessments. Adm. Dennis Blair, Obama’s former director of national intelligence, told Congress in March 2009, “We judge in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities” but that Tehran “is keeping open the option to develop them.”

Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the IAEA, said that same year that he did not “believe the Iranians have made a decision to go for a nuclear weapon, but they are absolutely determined to have the technology because they believe it brings you power, prestige and an insurance policy.”

The more critical report next month has the potential to trigger even more belligerent responses from the U.S. and Israel, and could set the stage for a military attack on Iran, whether its findings are based in truth or not.

At issue was one of the inspectors broaching the subject of a future visit to the Parchin Complex after Iran made it clear it would allow them unlimited access to any nuclear site in the country. The problem is that Parchin is not a nuclear site but rather a conventional missile site, and Iran apparently did not give a formal answer to the proposal by the time the inspectors left.

Notably, despite great emphasis on the importance of the visit, the IAEA inspectors did not actually visit any sites while in Iran. Instead, they appear to have limited the visit entirely to talks with officials.

Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran is under no obligation to allow IAEA inspectors to access random military bases, but the nation did permit a “limited access” visit in 2005, which affirmed that no nuclear material was present in Parchin.

“The negotiations between the two sides were held in a positive and constructive atmosphere,” an IAEA official was reported as saying. The two sides agreed to hold additional talks in the future.

The IAEA inspectors met with Iranian officials to discuss the alleged military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program. Some reports claimed that the IAEA team was granted permission to inspect all of Iran’s nuclear sites, even though that was not the purpose of the visit.

Still, U.S. and Israeli officials continue to discuss the potential for a preemptive military strike on Iran. The head of Israel’s intelligence service secretly visited Washington last week to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, and Senator Dianne Feinstein referred to that visit during a committee hearing on Tuesday in the context of a question about the likelihood of possible pre-emptive military action by Israel against Iran’s nuclear sites.

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Tuesday reiterated that “no option should be excluded against the program of Iran, which seeks to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”

Iran denies any intention to build nuclear weapons and there is yet no evidence of any nuclear weapons program. All 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in 2007, and again in 2011, that there is no military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program. And despite the hyperbolic reporting on it, the latest report from the IAEA said, “the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.”

As Adm. Dennis Blair, Obama’s former director of national intelligence, told Congress in March 2009, “We judge in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities” but that Tehran “is keeping open the option to develop them.” This is likely a deterrence strategy, as opposed to a desire to actually attain nuclear weapons, which would gain Iran even more international condemnation.

The talks between IAEA officials and Iran will determine whether the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany) can resume negotiations with Iran. But an unprecedented U.S.-led sanctions regime, a covert war, and continuous U.S.-Israeli threats may win out over diplomacy.

The visit was being loudly welcomed by top Iranian officials, with their nuclear chief saying that the inspection would finally end international allegations that the program was anything but a legal, civilian program. Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi added that the IAEA inspectors would be given free and full access to any nuclear sites they requested.

The inspection team includes weapons experts, with the expectation that they will grill Iran over the alleged military ambitions of their program. Previous inspections have failed to uncover any solid evidence that there is any military program at all, which has only fueled further accusations from Western nations that Iran is hiding them. The IAEA’s current chief Amano Yukiya, has mostly gone along with these allegations, issuing a report warning that they couldn’t prove Iran didn’t secretly have a weapons program.

This time, however, the fear that Israel might start a massive regional war over the accusations is likely going to color any official IAEA statements coming out of the visit. Unfortunately any statement could theoretically be used as an excuse for a war, as Israel’s current government could spin any allegation as the “last straw” or present a lack of accusations as proof that the international community will never attack Iran and that they must do so unilaterally.

Ihanoglu, who as well as heading the OIC is also seen as a likely future President of Turkey, said that the IAEA’s reports have never included concrete evidence and that Iran has a right to civilian nuclear technology.

The comments point to NATO member nation Turkey continuing to play spoiler in the run-up to war, as previously the Obama Administration privately demanded that officials silence Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan after he made similar comments about the lack of evidence for the allegations.

But having the comments come out of the OIC also suggests that the US and Israeli allegations haven’t found much currency within the international community. The OIC covers 57 member nations worldwide.

At the same time, it was pointed out by members that Israel’s massive nuclear arsenal and total lack of transparency are going to make the goal of a nuclear-free Middle East entirely impossible.

Israel, for its part, loudly condemned calls for transparency saying that it was only possible for Israel to offer any transparency on its nuclear program when “the threate perception of all regional members is low.”

Officials cited the “noncompliance with international obligations” of other nations in the Middle East as a chief region for their refusal to even enter into such obligations themselves. Israel is the only nation in the entire region with nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US would continue to “keep pressure on” Iran over its nuclear program, praising a new IAEA resolution which is demanding that Iran address the “increasing concern” surrounding the program.

The resolution said Iran needs to clarify the claims to “exclude the existence of possible military dimensions” to their program, claims which were reiterated, though with no real evidence, in the IAEA’s most recent report.

Iran for its part has said that it really doesn’t have anything to answer for in the allegations, and that the IAEA should consider releasing a revised report that doesn’t make such claims. German FM Guido Westerwelle suggested that more international sanctions could also come if Iran doesn’t agree to “serious” talks.

We don’t know what was left out, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s complaints suggest there were even more random allegations to be made, and his anger that “only things that could be proven were written” suggests the case for the new allegations was even weaker.

Netanyahu, however, insisted that the IAEA report wasn’t nearly accusatory enough, and that he believed Iran was much closer to getting a nuclear weapon than even the fanciful IAEA tale made them out to be.

Netanyahu ended his comments by demanding the world “stop Iran’s race to arm itself with a nuclear weapon before it is too late,” again fueling speculation that his government may follow through with decades of threats to attack Iran.

The speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, said that the report suggested the IAEA was increasingly a political tool of the United States, and the vote creates a parliamentary commission to investigate how IAEA relations could be further downgraded in retaliation.

Currently Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA goes beyond the protocols it has ratified in its membership agreement, so conceivably some reduction to that additional cooperation could be performed.

Even this may not be enough for some MPs, however, who are saying that Iran should respond by withdrawing from the IAEA entirely. This move appears to be considerably more controversial, particularly since such a withdrawal would be used as a further excuse for Western nations to start a war with Iran.

For Iranian officials, the whole situation is simply something to ridicule, as officials mocked the “lousy” intelligence work of the atomic watchdog and said that nothing claimed in the IAEA document showed that the Parchin site had anything but conventional weapons research.

In what is perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that the publicly released report falls well short of the hype, officials are now claiming that the IAEA has been showing a special “secret” set of intelligence on Iran to a select 35 nations.

Exactly what was in the “secret” evidence is unclear, but was apparently the source of diplomatic conclusions (since debunked) that V.I. Danilenko, a physicist with no background in nuclear physics, was a major foreign contributor to their weapons program.