An article by Rick Gladstone runs under the headline "Iran Finding Ways to Evade Sanctions, Treasury Department Warns." The article has at least two problems.
First, there's a reference to "Steve H. Hanke, a Johns Hopkins University economics professor and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington research group, who has been following Iran's case, said the official inflation rate reflected what he called the Central Bank's 'habit of failing to release useful economic data, and what it does release often has what I would describe as an 'Alice in Wonderland' quality.'"
The Cato Institute favors gay marriage, drug legalization and cuts to defense spending, and it tends to oppose American military operations abroad along with the national security apparatus at home that supports the war on terror. It's not a "conservative" group; it's a libertarian group. I believe the Times has run corrections on this point in the past. It's not a difficult point to grasp, that there are some people who aren't big-government liberals but who also aren't conservatives, but for some reason the Times has a hard time with it. The correct descriptor for Cato isn't conservative, it's libertarian. Conservative is an inaccurate descriptor. That's not a criticism of Cato, which is an admirable institution in many ways and which works with conservatives often on issues such as reducing government spending, opposing campaign speech limitations, and getting tort reform.
Second, there's this bizarre and clumsy formulation, on Iran's nuclear program: "Iran says the program is for peaceful use, while Western nations and Israel suspect it is meant to develop the ability to make nuclear weapons."
I'd argue that Israel is a Western nation. It's a member of the OECD, and it sided with America in the Cold War. One can argue that geographically it's in the Middle East. But there are plenty of other nations that are not geographically in the West but that nonetheless suspect Iran of building nuclear weapons, and that are not mentioned in the Times article. A 2010 U.N. Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program, for example, was approved on a vote of 12 to 2, with one abstention. Among the countries voting with America in favor of the resolution were Japan and Uganda. Israel has a special stake in the matter because it is the country that Iran's leaders have vowed to wipe off the map. But it's not as if Israel is some sort of outlier among nations, pushing a highly controversial theory about Iran's nuclear program. It's a view that is widely held, even outside "Western nations and Israel."