Additional Protocol. Additional Protocol. Additional Protocol.

Reading current press articles about Iran I read a lot about how Iran has provided less information about its current nuclear program than it did in early 2006.

Elbaradei said that while there was an increased level of cooperation with Iran about its past activities, its knowledge of Iran's current nuclear programmed had "diminished" since 2006.

Also

Muhammad el-Baradei stressed today that the IAEA knows less now about Iran's nuclear activities than it did a year ago.

Also

Inside the meeting, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told delegates that his agency knows less now about Iran's atomic activities than it did a year ago.

But I'm not reading that Iran stopped implementing the voluntary additional protocols a year ago. Of course this is spelled out in Baradei's report and of course the press knew this before the report. The term "additional protocols" is an important detail in this story that is currently being left out by every news organization that covers it.

Why?

The thing about the Additional Protocols is that they require giving the IAEA information that the US would use to target Iran's nuclear infrastructure if the US was to attack. Not that there is an imminent threat, but it just would be bad policy to commit to giving this information before Iran has been accepted by the US as nuclear capable. The issue of Iran's refusal to ratify or implement the Additional Protocols is a relatively easy one to resolve when communication begins and will not be resolved before then.