Posted on 12/08/2007 4:32:32 PM PST by Aristotelian
. . . the fact is that the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran never really said what many in the media (and antiwar camp) claimed it said — that Iran was out of the nukes game, had been for at least four years.
And the NIE’s implication that the flaming Islamic state had foresworn nukes altogether was equally absurd.
“In fact, the report contains the same sorts of flaws that we have learned to expect from our intelligence agency offerings,” wrote two nuclear proliferation experts in The New York Times opinion pages on Thursday, Dec. 6.
“It, like the report in 2002 that set up the invasion of Iraq, is both misleading and dangerous,” wrote Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, and Valerie Lincy, editor of the nonpartisan group’s Web site, Iranwatch.org.
The Iranians are plunging ahead with 3,000 gas centrifuges, they pointed out, which could produce weapons-ready enriched uranium in a year.
The regime is also building a heavy water reactor, which “is ideal for producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, but is of little use in an energy program.”
Why does oil-rich Iran need nuclear energy anyway?
(Excerpt) Read more at cqpolitics.com ...
I agree with The Wall Street Journal editorial that blamed bad personnel choices for putting ringers into top intelligence slots. These dispicably partisan people try to knock Bush off balance at every turn.
Here from NY Times of November 13, 2005:
In mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.
The Americans flashed on a screen and spread over a conference table selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, according to a half-dozen European and American participants in the meeting.
The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.
I thought it was garbage from the moment I heard about it. It struck me as being so overtly a spun political document that I couldn’t see how anyone could take it seriously.
But how frightening is it that we cannot even trust parts of our own intelligence community?
Mitch Rapp, where are you now that we need you?
Get this NIE wrong and the consequences are almost unimaginable — such as most of Israel destroyed and nukes in the hands of international terrorists.
“saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead,”
That’s enough for me.
Mr. Bush, use your Executive War Powers and let’s reign down a little Christmas cheer on our enemies, what a GREAT present that would be!!
I am afraid that the publication of this NIE rules out any military action by the U.S. against Iran’s nuke facilities during the remainder of Bush’s term. I guess that was the real intent of producing and publishing this skewed report.
The dissemination of the weapons is a given when discussing Iranian leadership. They have disseminated weapons and fomented battles in which they are used. There is no reason to believe that they will not continue to do so. They will.
My dad used to work very deep in military intelligence during the Cold War years before he retired. He had little to no respect for most of the other field agents with whom he worked and considered most of the “intelligence” they collected in those days to be as useful as a handful of warm poop.
Based on the LIE . . . . . . er, NIE, nothing has changed and the product has the same value as before!
I don’t care what the NIE says, I just want to drive the Libs daffy!!
Can you IMAGINE what the MSM would do if we bombed Iran on November 1st, 2008?
I know it is unrealistic, but can’t I dream?! :)
I look at this on the positive side... Bush wasn’t going to do anything anyway. He was going to hand off the problem to his successor. If Hillary is elected, then Bush will have the opportunity to say I told you so even though he wasn’t planning to do a thing. The Dems walked right into it. Their flunkies at the CIA gave Bush the cover he needed to do what he was going to do anyway. All he’s gotta do is pretend like the Dems have tied his hands, and blame the result on them.
Interestingly, the BBC reports:
Iran has sent a formal protest letter to the United States, accusing it of spying on Iran’s nuclear activities. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said the note was sent in response to a US intelligence report released on Monday about Iran’s nuclear activities.
bfl
Most Israeli Jews are not going to line up for the showers. Now alone and facing an existential threat without conventional resources to deal with the threat, they will go nuclear. Once nukes start flying about the mideast, the regions oil production halts indefinitely and world economies grind to a halt, the consequences of this NIE will have only just begun.
After all, in June, 2003, Bolton told congress, "The world has put Iran on notice that it must stop pursuing nuclear weapons."
The NIE says Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons a few months later (Fall, 2003).
“Ahmadinejad is harmless” bump
I couldn't agree more. Had my father not passed away in 1994, the absurd reegulations, intelligence failures and hand-tying that led to 9/11 would have killed him.
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