We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program1; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uraniumThis completely reverses the conclusions of the NIE released in 2005 which stated that Iran had an active nuclear program and was working to obtain nuclear weapons. This NIE has been ready for over a year, but as Gareth Porter has reported,
enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.
• We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.
• We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and the NIC assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program.)
• We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
• We continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon.
• Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (IPS) - A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.So the White House has been threatening to attack Iran. Bush has gone so far as to warn the American public that the danger of Iran getting nuclear weapons is so great that such an attack on Iran will be needed to prevent WW III . So the question now is how long has Bush and the senior White House officials known that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapon program in 2003?
But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.
From AP News through TPM:"Bush said Tuesday that he only learned of the new intelligence assessment last week." But is that true? [*]
It is contradicted by the Washington Post which reports that
... when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president's top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.Why did the White House not believe earlier Intelligence stating that the Iranians had shut down their nuclear weapon program? Why has President Bush been threatening the American public and the nation of Iran with information that his senior advisers have been told by Intelligence professionals is not true? A close adviser of Dick Cheney and a key member of the group called NeoCons is Norman Podhoretz. Here is what he has to say:
I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”Podhoretz' response is clear paranoia. He doesn't trust the Iranians, and he thinks that the senior American Intelligence professionals favor Iran over George Bush. Podhoretz is a man who has the ear of Dick Cheney (who has himself provided indications of the same paranoid thought), who firmly believed that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program and, since he did not believe the reports from the inspectors in Iraq, that only an invasion of Iraq could stop him.
Podhoretz is also a key foreign policy adviser to Rudolph Giuliani who seems to have a similar desire for war against .... well, right now against someone who is Muslim. But give him some other enemy. I'm sure that both Giuliani and Podhoretz will be happy to start a war with them also, whoever they might be.
The horribly botched invasion of Iraq was based on lies from these paranoids, and they are all actively pushing for an attack on Iran now. The White House is populated by paranoids who don't trust anyone, and when told their stories are wrong, continue to tell those stories to the public while working to prevent people from learning of any evidence that contradicts those stories - stories which are lies.
So what we see is a case in which qualified Intelligence professionals are telling Bush and the White House that the Iranians no longer have an active nuclear program, but he and his White House subordinates don't believe them because they assume that those professionals are out to get the President. The result is either than no one is telling Bush that the stories and speeches written for him by his apparently equally paranoid speechwriters are lies or Bush simply doesn't have the ability to discern truth from a lie and simply goes with whatever the paranoids around him tell him to say.
Fourteen more months until Bush leaves office. No President in America's history has been more destructive to the American nation. How much more damage will they do in the next fourteen months?
Addendum 5:08 PM CST
[*] Greg Sargent points out how the Washington Post editors let Bush skate on his lie about when he learned that the Iranians had closed down their effort to obtain nuclear weapons in 2003.
Has Bush every told the truth anytime since he was appointed President? Excluding simple administrative matters, such as "I am standing here right now" of course. Though it wouldn't surprise me to find him lying about stuff like that, either.
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