Today’s jaw-dropping example of United Nations idiocy comes from the head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, who declared that his agency is powerless to do anything about nuclear proliferators who don’t tell the truth.

He actually seems surprised to discover that nations like Iran and Saddam-era Iraq would try to hide their nuclear programs. Say it ain’t so, Mohamed!

Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the crux of the problem was that some countries under investigation, the latest being Syria, had failed to ratify an agency protocol permitting short-notice IAEA visits to sites not declared to be nuclear to ensure no bomb-related work was going on at secret locations.

“Our legal authority is very limited. With Iraq, we have discovered that unless we have the Additional Protocol in place, we will not really be able to discover undeclared activities,” he said on the sidelines of the agency’s annual 145-nation General Conference in Vienna.

“Our experience is that any proliferator will not really go for declared diverted activities (that would quickly reveal them as violators of the Non-Proliferation Treaty), they will go for completely clandestine undeclared activities,” he said.