Iran's illegal Nuclear Weapons Program

That's silly.

No, I am a natural born American, and the only time I ever left the country I only went just across the border into Canada.

I didn't really like being in a place where the Second Amendment didn't apply. The people themselves were nice though.


Never served in any military. Thought strongly about getting a commission in the US Navy to run a nuclear reactor on a ballistic missile sub, but ultimately decided not to.





I was referring to the United States of America.

Why implausible? Presumably this sale of a hundred 5000-pound bunker busters went through and they are sitting in Israel waiting to be used:

Press Release from 2005 (PDF): http://www.dsca.mil/PressReleases/36-b/2005/Israel_05-10_corrected.pdf

Oralloy - long ago on other threads you had posted at great length on specific metallurgical tolerances required in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and my recollection was you mentioned isotopes of fuel processed at Israel's Dimona. Since you say it isn't so I was obviously mistaken - sorry.

Intelligence Expert Who Rewrote Book on Iran
Intelligence Expert Who Rewrote Book on Iran
By Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian UK
Saturday 08 December 2007

Report has torpedoed plans for military action and brought "howls" from neocons.

The intelligence came from an exotic variety of sources: there was the so-called Laptop of Death; there was the Iranian commander who mysteriously disappeared in Turkey. Also in the mix was video footage of a nuclear plant in central Iran and intercepts of Iranian telephone calls by the British listening station GCHQ.

But pivotal to the US investigation into Iran's suspect nuclear weapons programme was the work of a little-known intelligence specialist, Thomas Fingar. He was the principal author of an intelligence report published on Monday that concluded Iran, contrary to previous US claims, had halted its covert programme four years ago and had not restarted it. Almost single-handedly he has stopped - or, at the very least, postponed - any US military action against Iran.

His report marks a decisive moment in the battle between American neoconservatives and Washington's foreign policy and intelligence professionals - between ideologues and pragmatists. It provided an unexpected victory for those opposed to the neocon plans for a military strike.

The report, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which represents the consensus of the 16 US intelligence agencies, gave President George Bush one of his most difficult weeks since taking office in January 2001.

Fingar's findings were met in many Washington offices occupied by foreign policy and intelligence professionals not only with relief but with rejoicing. They had lost out in the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003, but they are winning this one.

A backlash is under way; with the neocons being joined by even moderate foreign policy specialists who claim the report seriously underestimates the threat posed by Iran. Senate Republicans are planning to call next week for a congressional commission to investigate the report.

Senator John Ensign, a Republican, said: "Iran is one of the greatest threats in the world today. Getting the intelligence right is absolutely critical."

Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and former National Security Council adviser in the Bush administration, was among those celebrating this week, and praised Fingar and his colleagues. "We seem to have lucked out and have individuals who resist back-channel politics and tell it how it is," he said. "That is what the CIA and other agencies are supposed to do."

He continued that Fingar and one of his co-authors, Vann Van Diepen, national intelligence officer for weapons of mass destruction, had opposed the war in Iraq. "They both felt the intelligence was misused in the run-up to the Iraq war. The conservatives are now attacking them, saying they are taking their revenge," Leverett said. "It is not mutiny for intelligence officers to state their honest views."

Fingar, Van Diepen and Kenneth Brill, a former US ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were able to put out what they regard as an objective assessment because those occupying senior roles in the Bush administration had changed. Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Douglas Feith and Donald Rumsfeld have given way to those who oppose war with Iran, including Robert Gates, the defence secretary and former CIA director, and the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

Only the vice-president, Dick Cheney, remains to advocate military strikes against Iran. Wolfowitz, out of work since resigning from the World Bank earlier this year, has been invited back into the administration by Rice as an adviser on WMD, but that is an act of pity for an old mentor, not a shift in power to the neocons.

Joseph Cirincione, author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, also welcomed the report, saying: "What is happening is that foreign policy has swung back to the grown-ups. We are watching the collapse of the Bush doctrine in real time. The neoconservatives are howling because they know their influence is waning."

The report is a disaster for Bush's Iranian policy. Although he still refuses to take the military option off the table, it is harder to give the order to go to war. It also makes it harder for the US to persuade Russia and China to back tougher economic sanctions against Iran.

Bush and Cheney might have tried to block publication but feared it would leak, leading to damaging charges of cover-up and the manipulation of intelligence. "It was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway," Cheney told Politico, the Washington daily devoted to politics.

The "howling" of the neocons that Cirincione spoke about began within hours of the report's publication. Bolton, who remains close to Cheney, appeared on CNN complaining about the authors without naming them. In the comment section of the Washington Post on Thursday he wrote: "Many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the state department." He accused the officials, who he said had held benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five or six years ago, of presenting these same policy biases as "intelligence judgements".

The Wall Street Journal, the editorial pages of which have long been aligned with the neocon agenda, went straight on to the attack within a day of the report's publication, expressing doubt in the officials and their conclusions. It quoted an intelligence source describing Fingar, Van Diepen and Brill as having reputations as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials".

Bush has said repeatedly that the US will not allow Iran to secure a nuclear weapons capability. Air strikes were becoming an increasingly likely option, even though opposed by the US state department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. As of last spring, American deployments in the Gulf had been completed, ready should the order be given.

A European official close to the discussions, who is copied in to key memos relating to Iran, spoke in the summer as if an attack was a given. He said that the war was containable only as long as the Iranians did not strike back.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA head of counter-terrorism, said Bush had been building up the anti-Iran rhetoric to justify the military option: "There was a set of contingency plans updated over the last year and a half. The intent was air strikes to destroy the nuclear programme to the extent that it could be done. Is it possible to destroy 100% underground nuclear facilities? No, it is not. Could they set it back 10 years? Yes."

Iran's covert programme can be traced back to the mid-1980s when the country was at war with Iraq and fearful that the then Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, might secure a nuclear weapon. The programme involved design, ballistic delivery systems and uranium enrichment; the NIE concluded in 2005 that it was continuing. In July that year US intelligence officials showed IAEA officials an alleged stolen Iranian laptop with thousands of pages relating to nuclear weapons experiments. It was nicknamed the Laptop of Death - it is still not clear whether it was genuine

Fingar and his colleagues have gone back over the material and subjected it to a higher level of scrutiny. They took the same data but reached different conclusions. They also had some new material.

Cannistraro said everyone was pointing towards General Ali-Reza Asgari, a former deputy defence minister, who disappeared in Turkey in February. But he insisted Asgari had been a long-term agent run by the West who has since been debriefed and given a new identity.

"It is not a single source," said Cannistraro. "It is multiple: technical, documents, electronic."

Cheney, though his position is weakened by the NIE report, is due tomorrow to give a TV interview in which he will insist that the danger posed by Iran has not diminished. He told Politico the cause for concern was Iran's civilian development of highly enriched uranium, which would be relatively easy at a later date to switch to making a nuclear weapon.

Foreign policy pragmatists are pressing for the US to open direct talks with Iran. This is unlikely, but what this week has meant is that Bush has lost one of the pretexts for launching a new war in the 13 months he has left in office.

The Spies Strike Back
The Spies Strike Back
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, December 9, 2007; Page B07
Washington Post

The Fourth of July came on Dec. 3 this year for the U.S. intelligence community.

The nation's espionage agencies delivered their own declaration of independence from the war aims and rhetoric of President Bush and Vice President Cheney in a National Intelligence Estimate that was ostensibly about Iran's nuclear program.

But the CIA, DIA and 14 other agencies grouped under the director of national intelligence also delivered a riveting if implicit X-ray of the changing nature of leadership in Washington, where the White House's once-commanding authority over government has been smashed but not replaced by any other power center.

The Bush-Cheney obsession with restoring presidential authority has provoked new challenges to powers the White House can legitimately claim. It is as if this administration has developed its own political version of Jimmy Carter's aborted project for a neutron bomb, which was intended to destroy people while sparing buildings. Bush consistently manages to destroy or damage goals he proclaims and friends who support him, while foes escapes harm.

The publication of an unclassified version of the NIE, which concludes that Iran is "probably" not working on a nuclear weapon at this time, has triggered unintended consequences. Iran's diplomatic hand is strengthened, while foreign diplomats and officials who have pushed their governments to join the U.S. campaign of sanctions and international condemnation are suddenly undermined. "We will be exposed to a lot of criticism at home now," one official from the developing world glumly told me shortly after the estimate was issued.

"They won't say it, but our leaders must be devastated by the way this was handled," an Israeli friend said. "Not by the facts of the report, which can be discussed reasonably, but by the presentation and interpretation of the report. This happens when intelligence agencies become traumatized by previous mistakes and overreact the other way the next time."

Domestically, the most significant fact about the NIE is its public manifestation. The White House was powerless to prevent publication of a document that made Bush aides unhappy and uncomfortable. The administration went along because it knew that the document -- and any attempt to suppress it -- would have been immediately leaked.

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte (formerly the director of national intelligence) subtly but clearly pointed to the administration's fear of disclosure when he recalled in an interview on PBS's "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" that "there was a time when one simply did not publicize any of this activity, nor was it leaked."

The intelligence community has made itself a separate agency of government, answerable essentially to itself. This NIE makes clear that for better or worse, spy agencies today make the finished product of policy rather than providing the raw materials.

That significant change in the ways of Washington should not go unremarked, even if on balance the consequences of publication of the assessment are positive: As its authors clearly intended, the document removes any basis for the U.S. military strikes on Iran that many of us have argued would be unwise and unnecessary.

As a journalist, I also welcome the sunshine that comes when the important analytical work of intelligence agencies is exposed to public scrutiny and discussion. Greater transparency has been a consistent goal of Gen. Michael Hayden, first at the National Security Agency and now as head of the CIA.

Hayden's appointment 18 months ago to replace the hapless Porter Goss, who replaced the devious George Tenet, began the chain of events that led to Monday's breakout of the analysts. The Air Force general immediately told associates that his mission was to reestablish the agency's credibility, which had been shredded by the failure to detect both that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons in 1990 and was not in 2003. That meant "low-balling" -- or being extremely conservative -- on intelligence estimates to restore confidence, Hayden remarked. Disclosures last week that the CIA had destroyed two videotapes of "severe interrogation techniques" being used on terrorism suspects show how far Hayden has to go and the need for a congressional ban on such practices.

Bush bears heavy responsibility for the collapse of presidential authority on his watch. His reckless disregard of the hard work and details of governance have made followership a difficult and dangerous pursuit under him. The spies understand and reflect that reality in their thinly disguised disavowal of his gravely compromised credibility.

But technology and other forces are undermining hierarchal relationships in social and professional organizations everywhere. Bush's successor should not anticipate -- with even medium confidence -- that things will snap back to "normal" in the world of espionage when he or she arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

This won't surprise anyone who reads outside of the right wing media outlets... http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/12/ajc_poll/

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=49F4C243-E6CC-4154-8B21-FC1496EAA26A

NIE Makes War Against Iran More Likely
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, December 11, 2007

With the Dec. 3 publication of a completely unexpected declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities," a consensus has emerged that war with Iran "now appears to be off the agenda." Indeed, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed the report dealt a "fatal blow" to the country's enemies, while his foreign ministry spokesman called it a "great victory."

I disagree with that consensus, believing that military action against Iran is now more likely than before the NIE came out.

The NIE's main point, contained in its first line, famously holds: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." Other analysts - John Bolton, Patrick Clawson, Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin, Caroline Glick, Claudia Rossett, Michael Rubin, and Gerald Steinberg - have skillfully dissected and refuted this shoddy, politicized, outrageous parody of a piece of propaganda, so I need not dwell on that here. Further, leading members of Congress are "not convinced" of the NIE's conclusions. French and German leaders snubbed it, as did the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and even the International Atomic Energy Agency expressed doubts. British intelligence believe its American counterparts were hoodwinked, while Israeli intelligence responded with shock and disappointment.

Let us skip ahead then, and ask what are the long-term implications of the 2007 report?

For the sake of argument, let us assume the May 2005 NIE was correct, in which sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies assessed "with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons." Let us also assume there are three possible American responses to the Iranian nuclear buildup:

1. Convince the Iranians of their own accord to stop the nuclear weapons program.
2. Stop it for them through military intervention (which need not be a direct strike against the nuclear infrastructure but could be more indirect, such as an embargo on refined petrochemicals entering the country).
3. Permit it to culminate in Iran's acquiring a nuclear bomb.

As for Option #3, President Bush recently noted that whoever is "interested in avoiding World War III, … ought to be interested in preventing [the Iranians] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." So far, the lame NIE has not changed his mind. He appears to share John McCain's view that "There's only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option. That is a nuclear-armed Iran."

Therefore, the real question is not whether Iran will be stopped, but how.

The 2007 NIE has effectively terminated Option #1, convincing the Iranians themselves to halt their nuclear program, because this route requires wide external agreement. When key countries banded together to pass Security Council Resolution 1737 in December 2006, it caused the Iranian leadership to respond with caution and fear; but the NIE's soothing conclusion undercuts such widespread cooperation and pressure. When Washington pressures some Western states, Russia, China, and the IAEA, they can pull it out of the drawer, wave it in the Americans' faces, and refuse to cooperate. Worse, the NIE has sent a signal to the apocalyptic-minded leadership in Tehran that the danger of external sanctions has ended, that it can go undisturbed about its bomb-building business.

That leaves Option #2, direct intervention of some sort. Yes, that seems unlikely now, with the NIE dropping like a bombshell and shifting the debate. But will this hugely-criticized one thousand-word exercise really continue to dominate the American understanding of the problem? Will it change George W. Bush's mind? Will its influence extend to a year from now? Will it extend yet further, to the next president?

Highly unlikely, for these projections assume stasis - that this one report can refute all other interpretations, that no further developments will take place in Iran, that the argument over Iranian nuclear intentions closed down in early December 2007, never to revive. The debate most assuredly will continue to evolve and the influence of this NIE will fade and become just one of many appraisals, technical and non-technical, official and unofficial, American and non-American.

In short, with Option #1 undermined and Option #3 unacceptable, Option #2 - war carried out by either U.S. or Israeli forces - becomes the more probable. Thus have short-sighted, small-minded, blatantly partisan intelligence bureaucrats, trying to hide unpleasant realities, helped engineer their own nightmare.

You do need to get out more, gunga. Pipes. How surprising.

Bernie - be charitable, don't send Gunga outside! Most of the shorelines near where he lives are covered by Admiral Fallon, who recently had this to say to the Financial Times:

Of course this might be just about as subtle as Bush gets. Lull them into a false sense of security then whack them Ironians just when they're celebrating Xmas.

Ooooo . . . crafty bastard, ain't he?

Got me smiling there, steverino.

But they haven't recovered from their celebration of Easter eggs hunts.

BBB

HS

I am not worried about gunga. On those rare occasions when he's allowed to venture out of the facility, the helpful people in attendance can remind him that Napoleon did not have a navy. I think the chances of a Fallon vs gunga naval incident minimal.

Napoleon had a navy, he just didn't know what to do with it. That, when combined with the flight or slaughter of the aristocrats who had commanded that navy before the Revolution made it a push-over for Perfidious Albion (thanks, HS, for reminding me of that felicitous phrase). In fact, some of the best marine engineers and designers resided in France both before and after the revolution--a Post Captain in the Royal Navy desired nothing so much as to command a French frigate captured intact.

Maybe it was Quebec that didn't have a navy. I know someone didn't.

That may have been it. In defense of your thesis, it might be observed that Napoleon did everything within the reach of fear and stupidity which could rid him of his navy.

And a long reach that is.

Squaring up to Nelson and the Royal Navy being the obvious example.