The last wave of this hysteria began in response to the newest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency about Iran’s nuclear program released two months ago. Yet the new smoking gun in that document, as it was confusingly described in one media account after another, was based on questionable and old intelligence going back to 2003. There was nothing new. Seymour Hersh reports:

Robert Kelley, a retired I.A.E.A. director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons program, told me that he could find very little new information in the I.A.E.A. 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. Those materials, and others, “were old news,” Kelley said, and known to many journalists. “I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.

Indeed, the IAEA “continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material” as it has in its previous reports.