December 13, 2007
U.S. intelligence agencies reported their consensus last week in a new National Intelligence Estimate that Iran appears to have halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago. This challenges what the White House and its neoconservative allies in the media and elsewhere thought they had already established as incontrovertible fact: that Iran’s nuclear weapons program poses an immediate, existential threat to the United States of America.
The report contradicts a 2005 NIE by stating that Iran is likely “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging” and “may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.” This, of course, doesn’t square with the thinking of those who desire yet another American attack on yet another Islamic, oil-rich, four-lettered nation beginning with “Ira-”
Those who advocated for military action against Iran swiftly jumped to discredit or downplay the new NIE. First up was President Bush, who has hyped Iran’s nuclear threat to the point of invoking World War III. Bush called a press conference immediately after the report was released to downplay the report’s assessment and insist that he only found out about the report very recently.
Yet it has been widely reported that this NIE has existed for a year already, and according to former CIA agent Larry Johnson, who was the first person to report that a new NIE on Iran existed, Bush himself has known about it since then, including every time he spoke ominously of a nuclear Iran and world wars. Naturally, albeit a bit frighteningly, Time columnist Joe Klein praised Bush’s reaction to the NIA as “an amazing moment of candor by the United States” where Bush “didn’t try to block it.” Really.
more:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/12/think_again_neocons_attack.html
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