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Former CIA Director Michael Hayden downplayed on Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's dramatic presentation in which he accused Iran of "brazenly lying" over its nuclear ambitions. "To the best of my knowledge -- out of government, not getting the briefings -- I think this is fundamentally old news," Hayden told CNN's "New Day." On Monday, Netanyahu gave a presentation in English in which he claimed Israel has evidence that Iranian officials were "brazenly lying" when they said Iran wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons and that the Islamic Republic is keeping an "atomic archive" at a secret compound. Hayden told "New...

Back in 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate was released which all but absolved Iran of suspicions that it was on course to develop nuclear weapons. Rich Lowry writes In November 2007, US intelligence agencies wrote a National Intelligence Estimate concluding, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." . . The 2007 NIE had a very circumscribed definition of a weapons program, but it included "covert conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work." Exactly what Qom is for. What do the Iranians have to do to convince US intelligence they have a weapons program? The...

-Excerpt- The IAEA’s findings are not only an indictment of Iran, however. They also reveal the fundamental corruption of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian diplomat who was the IAEA’s director general from December 1997 to November 2009. While his job was to administer a technocratic agency, ElBaradei repeatedly intervened to distort the inspectors’ findings. Rather than confront the Islamic Republic on its cheating, he coached Iranian officials on their public diplomacy. He also repeatedly ignored mounting evidence of secret Iranian facilities until these were publicly exposed by other means. -excerpt- The IAEA report should also embarrass Thomas Fingar, Vann H. Van...

US spy agencies evaluate that Iran has accelerated its research into creating a nuclear weapon but has yet to restart its program in full, Reuters quoted US officials as saying on Wednesday. The new estimate comes as the American intelligence community is putting the finishing touches on a revised National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was published near the end of the George W. Bush administration and that was out of line with European countries' estimates, as well as Israel's. Back in 2007, the NIE assessed that Iran had put its atomic bomb program on hold since 2003. Israel immediately rejected...

In a remarkable interview with Time, CIA Director Leon Panetta reveals that the U.S. has known about the secret Qom site, built into the side of a mountain, since 2006. This raises a number of questions. First, that 2007 National Intelligence Estimate looks absurd — and entirely disingenuous — in retrospect. The 2007 report led us to believe that the military program had been discontinued. The report was issued a year after we first knew of the facility. Sure there remained some questions (it could have been a dummy site to conceal another secret site someplace else), but we at...

Do you remember that 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate which concluded -- to virtually everyone's astonishment -- that four years earlier Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program? Publication of that NIE cut the ground out from under the Bush administration's efforts to prevent Iran from getting its hands on a nuclear bomb.  After all, why pressure the mullahs in Teheran to stop a program they'd already abandoned?  And, of course, the NIE's conclusion was cited by President Bush's political enemies as (further) evidence that the President and his team were so driven by their hard-line ideology that they (as...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The federal agency responsible for national intelligence estimates yesterday defended its report on Iran against charges that it was crafted primarily by former State Department officials who infused their personal politics into the report to undercut the Bush administration. "It's not as if there are two or three people who craft this and then it's just put out there," said Vanee Vines, spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The response came after The Washington Times reported yesterday that the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was heavily influenced by three former State Department officials who dislike President...

One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure. That is a consensus judgment from a final working draft of a new National Intelligence Estimate, titled "The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland," on the organization that attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The estimate, which represents the opinion of America's intelligence agencies, is now finished, and unclassified conclusions will be shared today with the public. The classified document...