Iran's illegal Nuclear Weapons Program

It does get discussed in technical circles - which of course ab initio excludes Messrs Podhoretz, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, and other such self-styled "military experts".

One thing I've never figured out though is how they pick names for those delivery systems; for instance this missile here >

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/hy-1.htm



> is variously known as "Sardine", which sounds reasonably friendly, but also as "Styx" - definitely bad news there!

Poor misunderstood bibi ...from haaretz

Indeed . . . the problem that i have is that it doesn't get discussed at all by media pundits who discuss the relative threat of this or that nation, and upon whom it would not be unreasonable to assert that the majority of citizens rely for their information.

Details in Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran, US Says
Details in Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran, US Says
By David E. Sanger and Steven Lee Myers
The New York Times
Thursday 06 December 2007

Washington - American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran's nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program, senior intelligence and government officials said on Wednesday.

The notes included conversations and deliberations in which some of the military officials complained bitterly about what they termed a decision by their superiors in late 2003 to shut down a complex engineering effort to design nuclear weapons, including a warhead that could fit atop Iranian missiles.

The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active. But according to the intelligence and government officials, they give no hint of why Iran's leadership decided to halt the covert effort.

Ultimately, the notes and deliberations were corroborated by other intelligence, the officials said, including intercepted conversations among Iranian officials, collected in recent months. It is not clear if those conversations involved the same officers and others whose deliberations were recounted in the notes, or if they included their superiors.

The American officials who described the highly classified operation, which led to one of the biggest reversals in the history of American nuclear intelligence, declined to describe how the notes were obtained.

But they said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a "red team" to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush's national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

"It was a pretty vivid exchange," said one participant in the conversation.

The officials said they were confident that the notes confirmed the existence, up to 2003, of a weapons programs that American officials first learned about from a laptop computer, belonging to an Iranian engineer, that came into the hands of the C.I.A. in 2004.

Ever since the major findings of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program were made public on Monday, the White House has refused to discuss details of what President Bush, in a news conference on Tuesday, termed a "great discovery" that led to the reversal.

Some of Mr. Bush's critics have questioned why he did not adjust his rhetoric about Iran after the intelligence agencies began to question their earlier findings.

In a statement late Wednesday, the White House revised its account of what Mr. Bush was told in August and acknowledged that Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had informed him new information might show that "Iran does in fact have a covert weapons program, but it may be suspended."

Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, said Mr. McConnell had warned the president that "the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran's covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn't be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data."

A senior intelligence official and a senior White House official said that Mr. McConnell had been cautious in his presentation to Mr. Bush in an attempt to avoid a mistake made in the months leading to the Iraq war, in which raw intelligence was shared with the White House before it had been tested and analyzed.

"There was a big lesson learned in 2002," the senior intelligence official said. "You can make enough mistakes in this business even if you don't rush things."

In fact, some in the intelligence agencies appear to be not fully convinced that the notes of the deliberations indicated that all aspects of the weapons program had been shut down.

The crucial judgments released on Monday said that while "we judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years," it also included the warning that "intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate" led both the Department of Energy and the National Intelligence Council "to assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program."

The account is the most detailed explanation provided by American officials about how they came to contradict an assertion, spelled out in a 2005 National Intelligence Estimate and repeated by Mr. Bush, that Iran had an active weapons program.

Several news organizations have reported that the reversal was prompted in part by intercepts of conversations involving Iranian officials. In an article published on Wednesday, The Los Angeles Times said another main ingredient in the reversal was what it called a journal from an Iranian source that documented decisions to shut down the nuclear program.

The senior intelligence and government officials said a more precise description of that intelligence would be exchanges among members of a large group, one responsible for both designing weapons and integrating them into delivery vehicles.

The discovery led officials to revisit intelligence mined in 2004 and 2005 from the laptop obtained from the Iranian engineer. The documents on that laptop described two programs, termed L-101 and L-102 by the Iranians, describing designs and computer simulations that appeared to be related to weapons work.

Information from the laptop became one of the chief pieces of evidence cited in the 2005 intelligence estimate that concluded, "Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons."

The newly obtained notes of the deliberations did not precisely match up with the programs described in the laptop, according to officials who have examined both sets of data, but they said they were closely related.

On Wednesday President Bush repeated his demand that Iran "come clean" and disclose details of the covert weapons program that American intelligence agencies said operated from the 1980s until the fall of 2003.

Iran's government, Mr. Bush said, "has more to explain about its nuclear intentions and past actions, especially the covert nuclear weapons program pursued until the fall of 2003, which the Iranian regime has yet to acknowledge."

Mr. Bush spoke at Eppley Airfield near Omaha, where a visit intended to showcase health care and to raise money for a Senate race was overshadowed by the furor caused by the National Intelligence Estimate and Iran's taunting reaction to it.

He faced calls from across the political spectrum for the United States to make a more concerted effort to negotiate with Iran, offering a package of incentives that could persuade it to suspend its uranium enrichment program and clear up concerns that it is building a civilian energy program to develop the expertise for a covert military program.

"Bush has made a big mistake, and he's not responding in a way that gives confidence that he's on top of this," said David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency and president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "He isn't able to respond because he's not able to say he's wrong."

Mr. Bush, though, made it clear that there would be no immediate change in the United States' approach, saying that the administration had already offered to talk, though on the condition that Iran suspend its current enrichment program first, as called for in two United Nations Security Council resolutions. Administration officials have said that they would continue to advocate tougher sanctions, which seems increasingly unlikely.

(so we agree they stopped but probably they restarted )

In other words it really doesnt matter if they have a nuclear programme or not. They might have, so we reserve the right to kill them at any time. What complete a**holes.

steve

I think Israel is in a box now. I doubt they will set to an attack against Iran on their own. An present existential threats will be multiplied, not to mention extended far into the future, if they launch an attack.

I really hope you're right mr b.

In fact I think the scenario of Israel launching an attack alone quite implausible. But not impossible.

your comments please...

http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=108185

The Jerusalem Post conspiracy theorist is catching on, slowly but surely:


http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1196847275020&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Quite a few people in the U.S. have been saying that for decades!

Well, they did attack a suspected nuclear reactor site in Syria. More than the US, Israel stands to loose the most in the case of Iranian development of nuclear weapons. I think the push in the US administration to rein Iran is largely in response to Israel security concerns, not US ones, and the push comes mostly from the Zionist faction of the neo-cons, like Norman Podhoretz, to whom High Seas referred earlier.

A few months ago on BookTV Charles Peña interviewed Podhoretz who was hawking his new book, "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism," and he just peddled the same old canards justifying the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and included his take on the "Islamofascist" equation as concerned Iraq--that the Muslim terrorists were the "Islamist" factor, and that Saddam's regime was the "Fascist" part of the equation. What? The way I understand neo-con ideology, Islamism is itself "Fascist" in that it attempts to impose theocratic governance over the lands it controls. He also makes the case for an attack on Iran as part of the "global war against Islamofascism." Peña proceeded to pick apart Podhoretz' argument to the latter's clearly visible chagrin and irritability.

http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ID=8679&SN=After+Words

Difficult to ascertain which party is the pimp and which the whore.

But easy to decide you don't want to be in either line of business to begin with! You know the saying, Bernie: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, third time is enemy action."

InfraBlue - I know the man, met him on several occasions in DC.

Personally I'd rather try to convince Osama bin Laden to start tearing up pages off his copy of the Koran in order to wrap his bacon sandwiches than to explain to Podhoretz that the alleged "existential threat" to Israel from Iran exists only in his paranoid fantasy, never mind the obvious fact that any country perpetually facing real or imagined "existential threats" might usefully change tack in its policies.

Here is an interesting take on the govts NIE, from the LATimes...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usiran7dec07,1,6656317.story?ctrack=1&cset=true



Read the rest of the article, its interesting if nothing else.

Until this thing broke I used to think we needed to bomb Iran; that's clearly wrong in the light of what we now read.

We need to bomb FOGGY BOTTOM and THEN bomb Iran.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xu29F8NfRvI

Oh girl! That's a beautiful bit of writing. Well done!

The only thing Israelis could plausibly do which would amount to the sort of "change of tack(TM)" you are so ignorantly suggesting would be to to either commit mass suicide or pack up everything movable and leave for some other part of the Earth which was yet unclaimed, as if such a place existed.

Are you taking ignorance pills? I don't mean pills to cure ignorance, I mean pills to CAUSE it or bring it about.

Other than that, the threat of the lunatics in Iran having nuclear weaponry extends far beyond Israel; pretty much all of Europe would be targetted.

That is incorrect. If Bush orders an attack on Iran, the military will comply.





Possibly in one sense. We wouldn't care as much about the region as much if it wasn't for the oil, although we'd still care about threats to our friend Israel.

It is true that we did not negotiate directly with Iran, but we backed the Europeans' efforts to negotiate with Iran.

I'm not sure what could be achieved by direct US-Iran negotiations that wasn't already achieved by the efforts of the Europeans.

It was generally decided by the entire world that no one else should have nukes. That is why almost everybody signed the NPT.

But if you don't care about the spread of nukes, then I presume you have no objections to ignoring the NPT and supplying Israel with upgraded nuclear weapons technology?? It would go a long way towards creating a viable deterrent against Iranian attack.