UTTERLY OUTRAGEOUS – AT 11:08 A.M. ET:  When Mohamed ElBaradei was heading the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency there were serious suspicions that he wasn't playing it straight, not that this would be shocking for a UN official.

ElBaradei seemed to favor the Iranians, a suspicion ratified after his tenure ended, when we found out he'd held back critical information about the Iranian nuclear program.   Indeed, ElBaradei never seemed to meet a dictatorial regime he didn't like.

For his deceptions and appeasement of thugs, ElBaradei was, natch, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the little Norwegian politicians who give out that embarrassment.  Among other "deserving" recipients:  Al (it's too darned hot) Gore and Jimmy (I'm the best ex-president ever) Carter. 

Now ElBaradei is running for president of Egypt, where he has lived only rarely in recent years.  And he's written a sickening book.  From AP:

The former chief United Nations nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the shame of a needless war in Iraq.

Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of grotesque distortion in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.

Of course he doesn't point out that virtually every intelligence agency in the world agreed with our assessment.  Nor does he point out his own laxness in pursuing the issue.  And he certainly doesn't point out that, while we didn't find stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, we found the WMD programs, ready to be restarted.

The Iraq war taught him that deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators, ElBaradei writes in The Age of Deception, being published Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.

The 68-year-old legal scholar, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009 and recently a rallying figure in Egypt's revolution, concludes his 321-page account of two decades of tedious, wrenching nuclear diplomacy with a plea for more of it, particularly in the efforts to rein in North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions.

Notice how the Reuters story paints this jerk as kind of demi-god.  In fact, he did a real botch job, maybe intentionally.

"All parties must come to the negotiating table," writes ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the IAEA in 2005. He repeatedly chides Washington for reluctant or hardline approaches to negotiations with Tehran and Pyongyang.

Sickening.  Just sickening.  Iran and North Korea are countries that murder their own citizens.  And we have negotiated with them for years.

He is harshest in addressing the Bush administration's 2002-2003 drive for war with Iraq, when ElBaradei and Hans Blix led teams of UN inspectors looking for signs Saddam Hussein's government had revived nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs.

As noted above, inspections after the war concluded that the programs were about to be restarted. 

COMMENT:  Do you get the feeling that ElBaradei is playing to his crowd?  You can be sure his book will receive laudatory coverage in parts of the mainstream media.  Now it's important that former Bush officials answer this apologist for dictators and confront his own cynical record.

April 23, 2011