Science Quote by Mohamed ElBaradei

Power in bureaucratic prose often arrives disguised as a modest procedural update. ElBaradei's line is doing exactly that: turning the dry vocabulary of "rights" and "access" into a public pressure campaign. On paper, he's describing inspection logistics. In practice, he's drawing a bright line between verification and theater.

The specific intent is to establish credibility and leverage at once. "Immediate, unfettered access" is the gold standard for any inspection regime; it signals that the inspected party can't stall, stage-manage, or launder evidence through delays. Naming "any site" closes the loophole of "declared" locations, while "interview people" expands the battlefield from buildings to testimony, the human supply chain of information that regimes can intimidate into silence. ElBaradei is telling Baghdad: cooperation isn't a photo op, it's a surrender of control over time, space, and narrative.

The subtext points outward, too. This is also aimed at Washington, London, and a skeptical global audience in the run-up to war: give inspections room to work, and we'll produce something better than suspicion. It's a scientist's language deployed as political counterweight, insisting that claims require methods, and methods require access.

Contextually, ElBaradei led the IAEA during the Iraq WMD crisis, when intelligence assertions and UN verification were in open contest. The sentence reads calm because it has to; its calmness is the weapon. It frames transparency as the decisive test, making anyone impatient with that test look less like a guardian of security and more like an author of predetermined outcomes.