Posted on 12/04/2007 2:07:48 PM PST by Sub-Driver
'Great discovery' led to Iran nuke change
By Jim Mannion in Washington
December 05, 2007 08:33am Article from: Agence France-Presse
US President George W. Bush says a "great discovery" as recently as August prompted the US intelligence community's stunning reversal of its long-held view that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program.
Mr Bush today provided no details on the nature of the new intelligence, which set off an in-depth intelligence review of the evidence and assumptions that underpinned a 2005 assessment, which had held with "high confidence" that Iran was determined to acquire nuclear weapons.
Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, went to Mr Bush in August and said: "We have some new information."
"He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyse," Mr Bush said today.
Mr Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were not formally briefed until last Wednesday on the intelligence community's new finding that Iran had had a covert nuclear weapons program but halted it in 2003 - a bombshell with major implications for US policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
Oh - I get it now. The three thousand centriguges are spinning silk for sweaters.....
When it was shipped to Syria and later destroyed by the Israelis?
"It's exactly what he did in the run up to the war in Iraq in consistently exaggerating intelligence suggesting that Iraq had WMD (weapons of mass destruction), while failing to tell the American people about intelligence concluding that it did not," said Senator Joe Biden, who is running for president.If Josephine Biden says it's true, you can take it to the bank. (Just don't be surprised if the bank doesn't want it.)
Oh - I get it now. The three thousand centrifuges are spinning silk for sweaters.....
If, in fact, Iran did halt their nuclear enrichment in 2003, then what have all these reports we’ve been reading over the past years been about? Wasn’t it just last month that Iran said it had finally installed 3,000 centrifuges? I say we still bomb them back to the stone age.
Meanwhile the CIA remains a wholly owned subsidiary of Clinton Inc, if not the last Internationale, and covers its backside while appealing to its hoped-for new Dem prez candidates. In case everybody forgot, this was the crowd that opposed the Iraq war on the grounds that if we went in, Saddam would surely gas us into oblivion.
It is like the US does not have any intelligence capability at all.
Israel will have to do it now. They made a point of disagreeing with this new intelligence estimate.
You’re right.
The National Intelligence Estimate, as the assessment is called, judged “with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years”.
Because of “intelligence gaps,” the report said, the intelligence community had “moderate confidence” that Tehran had not restarted the program as of mid-2007 and did not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
This is also from the article and hasn’t been discussed by the media. It doesn’t give me any warm fuzzies that anyone really knows what they’re talking about.
CIA CYA
This stinks to high heaven. Those intelligence agencies never agree on anything, even who the current President is, unless they are ordered to.
And even the President probably doesn’t have enough clout to order them to agree. Which implies that there is something really big going on. The President + the Senate leadership and maybe even the House leadership + the Pentagon. And it would almost have to involve Israel.
That could mean only one thing: this is being done to avert a nuclear war.
The big question is how, why and involving who?
Israel would have to be in on the deal, because it has 200+ nukes it would probably used if attacked.
Iran might have as many as a half-dozen nukes made from North Korean nuclear material, and some serious missiles that could carry them. But the whole region is blanketed with hundreds of US anti-missile missiles, protecting all the major targets. And thus the stalemate.
But what has happened?
I don’t believe for a minute that we have discovered something that can prove a negative. That is, that Iran *doesn’t* have nuclear weapons.
The only power large enough to threaten the US back would be Russia, by saying that they would retaliate if we attacked Iran.
Other than that, the only thing that would work would be if Iran opened its doors to inspectors, anywhere at any time, to include inspectors the US believed. But that could only confirm enrichment activities, not existing weapons.
Maybe the US has developed a super weapon so powerful that Iran must comply, and such a super weapon has been confirmed to the Iranians by someone they believe, so they have capitulated, but without publicly saying so.
Too many possibilities.
“I say we still bomb them back to the stone age.”
I second the motion.....all in favor say “yes damnit”. The “yes damnit’s” have it, motion has been carried and we will start bombing right after breakfast and meet back here before lunch tomorrow.
Bring a sack lunch as we will spend the afternoon deciding on how we are going to split up the oil.
Why should any of us have confidence in the geniuses in the CIA who told Bush that finding WMD in Iraq would be a “slam dunk” and misidentified crop fertilizer cylinders as mobile chemical weapons labs?
Dammit. It's President Bush.
There’s another thread here that suggests this assesment was reached for political reasons and those would be to obtain Iranian cooperation in facilitating our exit from Iraq. Stinks is the right word. Nothing good can come from this.
How can the CIA be so inept? If any one of us had the resources they have, we could tell Bush in a week for certain if Iran was or was not enriching uranium.
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