Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE - CommonDreams.org

 

WASHINGTON — 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 program, 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.

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.                                                                   "Bastards Released the report!!"

A former CIA intelligence officer who has asked not to be identified told IPS that an official involved in the NIE process says the Iran estimate was ready to be published a year ago but has been delayed because the director of national intelligence wanted a draft reflecting a consensus on key conclusions — particularly on Iran’s nuclear program.

The NIE coordinates the judgments of 16 intelligence agencies on a specific country or issue.

There is a split in the intelligence community on how much of a threat the Iranian nuclear program poses, according to the intelligence official’s account. Some analysts who are less independent are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the alarmist view coming from Cheney’s office, but others have rejected that view.

The draft NIE first completed a year ago, which had included the dissenting views, was not acceptable to the White House, according to the former intelligence officer. “They refused to come out with a version that had dissenting views in it,” he says.

As recently as early October, the official involved in the process was said to be unclear about whether an NIE would be circulated and, if so, what it would say.

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi provided a similar account, based on his own sources in the intelligence community. He told IPS that intelligence analysts have had to review and rewrite their findings three times, because of pressure from the White House.

Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE - CommonDreams.org

The Gulf States and Iran - WSJ.com

 

The Gulf States and Iran

By MAX BOOT
December 5, 2007; Page A25

The release of the new National Intelligence Estimate will provide more fodder for those who claim that "neoconservative ideologues" and the "Israel lobby" are overly alarmed about the rise of Iran. In reality, some of those most worried about the mullahs wear flowing headdresses, not yarmulkes, and they have good cause for concern, notwithstanding the sanguine tilt many news accounts put on the NIE.

Jets from the United Arab Emirates and France fly together on a joint maneuver.

I recently visited the Persian Gulf region as part of a delegation of American policy wonks organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Throughout our meetings in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, the top issue was Iran's ambitions to dominate the region.

Evidence of those imperial designs is not hard to find. The Iranians are aiding extremists who are undermining nascent democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon (No mention of Saudis financing all the murderous extremists). The beneficiaries of Tehran's largess include Hamas, Hezbollah and even, the evidence indicates, al Qaeda. (Saudi officials are quietly furious that Tehran has given refuge to some suspects in the 2003 Riyadh attacks.) Iran is building up its military arsenal, and has threatened to shut down the Persian Gulf (or, as Arabs call it, the Arabian Gulf).

The Gulf States and Iran - WSJ.com

The Morning Brief - WSJ.com

Exposing What We
Don't Know About Iran

(in other words figuring out how to discredit the report)

The Morning Brief, a look at the day's biggest news, is emailed to subscribers by 7 a.m. every business day. Sign up for the e-mail here.

The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran casts doubt on the hawkish warnings about Tehran's nuclear ambitions but paints such a Rorschach-like picture of the situation that it's unlikely to quiet debate.

The NIE process, it must first be noted, is now more prone to ambiguity thanks to the legislative and political overhauls of American spy work in the wake of 9/11 and the Bush administration's use of WMD estimates to take the country into Iraq. Changes in the past 18 months mean NIEs come with definitions and notes on the scope of such phrases as "we judge, we assess, and we estimate -- and probabilistic terms such as probably and likely," as well as a breakdown of the differences among high confidence, moderate confidence and low confidence. What this NIE aimed to do was reexamine a 2005 NIE that accused Iran of working toward creation of a nuclear armament and assessing the Iranian government's relatively current intentions and capabilities -- starting without an assumption of guilt, it insists.

"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons," the U.S. intelligence community (or IC) concludes. "We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran's announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium 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." The IC has "high confidence" the halt in the Iranian military's nuclear-weapons work lasted several years. But because of intelligence gaps there is only moderate confidence this halt 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," the NIE says. Still, the halt suggests Iran is less determined to get one "than we have been judging since 2005."

The Morning Brief - WSJ.com

US: Iran Halted Weapons Program in 2003 - AOL News

 

US: Iran Halted Weapons Program in 2003

By PAMELA HESS,

AP

Posted: 2007-12-03 22:03:30

WASHINGTON (AP) - A new U.S. intelligence report concludes that Iran's nuclear weapons development program has been halted since the fall of 2003 because of international pressure - a stark contrast to the conclusions U.S. spy agencies drew just two years ago.
The finding is part of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that also cautions that Tehran continues to enrich uranium and still could develop a bomb between 2010 and 2015 if it decided to do so.
The conclusion that Iran's weapons program was still frozen, through at least mid-2007, represents a sharp turnaround from the previous intelligence assessment in 2005. Then, U.S. intelligence agencies believed Tehran was determined to develop a nuclear weapons capability and was continuing its weapons development program. The new report concludes that Iran's decisions are rational and pragmatic, and that Tehran is more susceptible to diplomatic and financial pressure than previously thought.
"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," says the unclassified summary of the secret report.

US: Iran Halted Weapons Program in 2003 - AOL News

US my not bomb Iran becasue of sense of guilt!?

Article or Op-Ed: "Leaving aside the relative merits of a strike against the Iranians, why might America's military resist such action? First, consider the fact that the US has at the moment 162,000 troops in Iraq, 30,000 in Kuwait, 4,500 in Bahrain and 3,300 in Qatar -- not to mention the two carrier battle groups in the Gulf or the 8,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan. In the event of an American or Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, for example, the troops in Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan would be in even greater danger than they already are, vulnerable to an Iranian counterattack or, more likely, an Iranian-sponsored terror campaign.

Second, there exists a tremendous sense of guilt among the US senior officer corps for what is seen as a failure to stand up to the civilian leadership in the rush to go to war against Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Much of the current divide between America's generals and its junior officer corps boils down to a sense on the part of junior officers that their superiors largely acquiesced to whatever Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in the run-up to the Iraq war. The charge of spinelessness is one that hurts America's generals, especially as it comes from lieutenants and captains who have proven themselves on the battlefield of Iraq.

Third, in the wake of the Iraq war, professional military officers are more suspicious than ever of think-tank types with theories on how easy military victories can be achieved. As an active-duty US Army officer recently told me: 'If I hear one more lawyer with no military experience explain to me how air power alone really can do it this time, I'm going to kill him.' "

George Ajjan, the Aleppine Elephant: Iran

George Ajjan, the Aleppine Elephant: Iran: "Open Letter to the Arab-American Community in Behalf of Ron Paul by George Ajjan Following upon the advice of Walter Block, and in the tradition of Laurence Vance and Thomas Woods, I offer the following Open Letter to the Arab-American Community in Behalf of Ron Paul. While the previous Open Letters on LRC were addressed to a particular religious denomination, I offer this one on the basis of ethnicity. Arab-Americans need to hear Ron Paul's message, because serious concerns about the fate of US foreign policy and civil liberties captivate the minds of Arab-American Muslims, as well as Arab-American Christians, who actually comprise more than half of the community. My Open Letter will therefore be inclusive in nature and address all denominations. It is interesting to note that those who advocate this unifying approach have been disparaged by the wedge-driving, divide-and-conquer neocons as 'dhimmis' or 'Islamo-Christians' – or whatever today's new vocabulary is on the Word-a-Day calendar of the American Enterprise Institute (a.k.a. the Supreme Soviet of Neoconservatism) – for not accepting their erroneous worldview, in which Semitic people (and by Semitic, I mean Semitic) are mindless sectarian robots genetically programmed to kill each other and incapable of peaceful co-existence."

Study: U.S., Israel should begin planning Iran strike - Haaretz - Israel News

Study: U.S., Israel should begin planning Iran strike

- Haaretz - Israel News: "Study: U.S., Israel should begin planning Iran strike By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent Tags: Iran, U.S., Israel, nuclear Israel and the United States should begin an intense dialogue on ways to deal with Iran's nuclear plans and should study ways to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, a new study states. The report, by a former deputy head of the National Security Council, Chuck Freilich, says Israel and the U.S. should discuss nuclear-crisis scenarios between Israel and Iran. The report, entitled 'Speaking About the Unspeakable,' was released over the weekend by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "