A recent episode of The Globe and Mail’s podcast, The Decibel, spent nearly 29 minutes discussing the Iran-Israel war, and dramatically misrepresented the nature of the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions.

In the June 23 episode entitled: “Threat of wider war looms after U.S. bombs Iran nuclear sites,” host Menaka Raman-Wilms spoke with Doug Saunders, one of the newspaper’s columnists.

Listen to the full episode:

In her introduction, Raman-Wilms told listeners that “in March, it (the United States government) determined Iran is not building a nuclear weapon,” referring to testimony that month from Tulsi Gabbard, the United States director of national intelligence. However, that is a cherry-picked reference which ignores a litany of other evidence, including comments from Gabbard in that very same testimony.

In her March 25 comments, Gabbard said that “in the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

More recently, on June 10, the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) was even more explicit, with its commander, General Erik Kurilla, saying that the regime’s “current stockpiles and the available centrifuges … are sufficient to produce… up to ten nuclear weapons in three weeks,” and two days later, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for the first time in nearly 20 years, censured Iran for noncompliance of its non-proliferation obligations.

All of this together pokes enormous holes in the tidy narrative presented that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons, yet none of these details were presented to listeners.

In his comments, Saunders speculated that the war with Israel could “cause it (the Iranian regime) to pursue a nuclear weapon, something it has not done since 2003.”

While Saunders is paid to express his opinions, that does not permit him to make declarative statements that go far beyond the evidence, yet he has done exactly that, overlooking testimony from key US intelligence officials publicly indicating precisely the opposite.

Moreover, if Iran was in fact pursuing nuclear weapons, as significant evidence suggests, then the fear-mongering that Israel’s strikes against Iranian officials could make Tehran pursue those very same weapons is simply nonsensical.

Two days later, Saunders authored another opinion column entitled: “What was the point of the conflict in Iran? To keep three men in power,” where he grossly mischaracterizes the nature of Iran’s hegemonic ambitions. He wrote that “He (Khamenei) has so far stopped short of launching a weapons program, likely out of the realization that this would doom his regime.” It is unclear what is the source of Saunders’ declarations, given that it flies flat in the face of testimony from US intelligence services just days before Israel’s strikes against Iranian nuclear targets, which said Tehran was on the precipice of developing nuclear weapons.

The real reason, Saunders speculatesd for Israel’s strikes on Iran was to ensure the “political survival” of Israel’s leader, wholly ignoring that the danger of Iran’s nuclear threat is a widespread political consensus in Israel, spanning across party lines.

This is not Saunders’ first time blurring the line between fact and fiction, and taking creative license to misrepresent the truth. He has claimed that Israel has sought to “deprive Palestinians of food,” stated confidently in a previous June 13 column that “there was, in fact, no looming nuclear-weapons threat from Iran,” and has accused Israel of fighting Iranian proxy terrorist groups in order to “shape the outcome of a U.S. election,” ignoring that it was Iran’s proxy Hamas which started the current conflict.

Arguably amongst the most egregious comments he has made of late were found in an April 25 opinion column, where he accused the fledgling Israel of “launching military raids” on its Arab neighbours in 1948, a fabrication and inversion of history so outlandish that it garnered an official correction from the newspaper in response, given that it was Israel’s Arab neighbours who invaded, seeking to destroy the newly-independent country.

The Globe and Mail’s Decibel podcast on June 23, and Doug Saunders’ column on June 25 both presented a misleading portrayal of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, selectively omitting critical intelligence assessments and factual context. Globe readers deserve better.