Why the Charade?

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In Iran, as previously happened in Iraq, inspectors were sent in to see if the respective governments were meeting all demands of the U.S. international community. With Iraq it was the mysterious and elusive “weapons of mass destruction.” With Iran, it has simply been a nuclear weapons program. In both instances, the Bush administration was willing to go through the theatricals of sending in weapons inspectors to validate their claims.

And now we can say that in both instances the inspectors exonerated the countries of any weapons misconduct. Today we have word that the IAEA has concluded that traces of enriched uranium found in Iran were in fact due to contamination from their supplier and not the result of a sinister weapons program.

Yet in both instances, the Bush administration refused to accept the inspectors’ reports. We all know what happened with Iraq. And now Washington seems prepared to reject the IAEA’s findings as “inconclusive” and that “unresolved concerns” remain. So it seems a forgone conclusion that Bush, as with Iraq, was going to stick to his own story regardless of the findings.

Why? Why the public charade? Why go through all the drama of sending in inspectors if you have already made up your mind?

It sort of makes you wonder what the administration would count as evidence that no program exists.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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