Haven’t they learned their lesson yet? You don’t go telling this White House inconvenient facts.
White House brushes off CIA draft on Iran: report
The White House dismissed a classified CIA draft assessment that found no conclusive evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program, The New Yorker magazine reported.
The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said the CIA’s analysis was based on technical intelligence collected by satellites and on other evidence like measurements of the radioactivity of water samples.
“The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency,” according to the article.
“A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis, and told me that the White House had been hostile to it,” it said.
[…]
The article, in the current issue of the magazine, discussed how Vice President Dick Cheney believed the Bush administration would deal with Iran if the Republicans lost control of Congress — as they did in the November 7 election.“If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran,” Hersh wrote, citing an unidentified source familiar with the discussion.
Of course they have no nukes. They’re still building them.
Thanks Cia another bang up job with your pre analysis.
You might want to begin prepping the Iran nuclear panel so we can clean up their mess.
I’ll offer my Cassandra imitation just once, this time round. I did it for months prior to the US invasion of Iraq.
If you think trying to occupy Iraq and use it as a profit center for the Oil Patch Boys was difficult, get ready for an order of magnitude increase if and when the White House Wizards try it with Iran.
Iran has one of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. Their contempt for US imperialism exceeds that held by the rest of the Middle East for the British and French.
Deservedly so.
They’re still building them.
That effort would be described as, well, a weapons program, which the CIA found no evidence of.
I tried posting this earlier, using tinyurl and the appropriate html tags, but apparently it won’t get past the moderation system that way for some reason.
Anyway… this is a link to the original Hersh article. WELL WORTH reading in its entirety.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061127fa_fact
2: I’d say that’s an order of magnitude beyond Cassandra Syndrome, actually. We’re in no condition to confront Iran. Nearly a quarter of their population is fifteen or younger, and we can’t really nuke them indiscriminately without seriously pissing off allies and nuclear powers downwind.
Fortunately, we may not have to. President Ahmadinejad is holding a summit in Tehran with members of the Iraqi National Assembly and Syrian Republic as we discuss this. No doubt it’s intended as an end run around US/British politicking and can be taken as an aggressive attempt to establish a broader role for Iran in bringing security and stability to the region without being too far out of line.
Regardless, I can’t imagine that we’re going to undertake any action greater than convincing rural Iranians that they’re being visited by aliens due to the number of UAV sightings without solid evidence of a clear and credible threat to national security for a while. Even in the event such a claim could be made credibly, it remains that at present, we’re uncertain of the duration and requirements of our mission in Iraq and any military mission next door, were such feasible, would only destabilize the region even further.
Ironic, but it may well be that if Iran gets the bomb, it happens because the neocons left us with our tallywhacker in the Iraqi woodpile when they came by it.
#4: Probably wasn’t the link. We’ve been having “issues” with the settings on all the assorted spam software that’s installed. If a post doesn’t show up right away, wait a while and see if it was put in moderation where one of us can check it and ok it. At times, whether a post gets through right away or not seems totally arbitrary with newbes getting through and longtimers getting caught. Please be patient.
Here’s a simplistic scenario:
1. Iran secretly builds a number of nuclear bombs.
2. Concurrently the government of Iran claims they are only doing nuclear research for clean nuclear power.
3. Israel, tired of waiting for the UN to do something (do anything!), bombs Iran’s nuclear facilities.
4. Iran claiming it is under attack by Israel, drops *several* nuclear bombs on Israel.
5. Checkmate.
Steve
3. Israel, tired of waiting for the UN to do something (do anything!), bombs Iran’s nuclear facilities.
4. Iran claiming it is under attack by Israel, drops *several* nuclear bombs on Israel.
Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
I’ve always thought the best solution to the problems in the middle east would be to arm EVERYBODY to the teeth and then step back and let them kill each other off.
There once were two cats of Kilkenny’
Each thought there was one cat too many
So they fought and they fit
And they scratched and they bit
‘Til instead of two cats there weren’t any!
While I wouldn’t put anything past the CIA or this White House, I’m afraid Seymour Hersh has about as much credibility as Bill O’Reilly.
The guy has been caught fictionalizing so many things, I’m surprised one of his articles hasn’t won a Pulitzer for Fiction award.
lol –
i see irratiated falafells in the future.
If Iran isn’t doing any nuclear weapons activity, then why did Iran’s leader say America would fear having Iran’s program go underground? What is there to fear that they are running a civilian reactor underground, where no one can see it?
Steve S,
Don’t kid yourself. If the Israelis got the slightest hint that Iran really had nuclear weapons a new sun would rise over Iran before tea time.
Oh, and btw, arming the Middle East with nukes so they can annihilate each other is not without its effects. Several nukes, all presumably several times larger than Fat Man or Little Boy, would have potentially severe climatic consequences that would most definitely affect us and everyone else on the planet. In theory, if you launched enough of them you could cause another ice age.
Bushies are playing a childish game. The CIA has to be right 100% the time. Bushies only have to be right once so they can tell us “We told you so”.
American people can’t decide between the two, because; they need someone to tell them what to think and who to listen too. Basically this country is screwed.
It appears the only way to deter an attack or invasion by either the US or Israel in the Middle East is to convince the world that you have WMDs and are enough to use them.