The W.H. Versus the U.S. On Iran

[Nbadan]

Only moderate confidence... I do like more absolute statements myself.

There are very few absolutes in life, besides this administrations seems more prone to reacting with 'going with what they got at the time'....and what they got right now is this intelligence estimate...bravo move by Reid and the Demos for getting this out in the open

[Nbadan]

The Nation gets it right....don't look for the Iranian intelligence estimates to lower the threat level coming from Republicans - this is their single biggest issue for 08.....

The essential reality of 2008 is this: The Republicans will have to have a national-security touchstone to pull their base together in 2008. That touchstone has to be a "threat," however manufactured. And Iran remains the threat of choice for the Bush-Cheney administration -- which has enough skeletons in its closet to be highly motivated to use what remains of its smoke-and-mirrors operation to help a Republican, any Republican, prevail.

This issue is not going away. George Bush and Cheney know that needy Republicans, spineless Democrats and a gullible media will provide them with an opening to stoke the fear anew. And they will do so. Believe the president, when he says that his determination to make a big deal of the supposed danger posed by a supposedly nuclear Iran "hasn't changed."

The Nation

[boutons_]

CNN: Seymour Hersh 'vindicated' by new Iran intel estimate

12/05/2007 @ 7:42 am

Filed by David Edwards and Muriel Kane



Reporter believes Cheney 'kept his foot on the neck of' report

A new National Intelligence Estimate released on Monday indicates that 16 US intelligence agencies have concluded with a high level of confidence that Iran has not had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003 and that even if it resumed weapons development, it would be unlikely to obtain a nuclear bomb in less than 5 to 10 years.

The NIE apparently came as a surprise to President Bush, who insisted at a news conference the next day that "I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was, John – Mike McConnell – came in and said, 'We have some new information.' He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze."

However, the NIE was no surprise to veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who has been writing about it since November 2006. Hersh told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday that he believes the White House deliberately kept the NIE bottled up for over a year because the vice president was dissatisfied with its conclusions.

"At the time I wrote that, there was a tremendous fight about it because Cheney ... did not want to hear this," Hersh recalled. "I think the vice-president has kept his foot on the neck of that report. ... The intelligence we learned about yesterday has been circulating inside this government at the highest levels for the last year -- and probably longer."

As early as July 2006, Hersh had reported that the US military was resisting administration pressure for a bombing campaign in Iran, because "American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities."

By November 2006, Hersh's sources had told him of "a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A.," which concluded that satellite monitoring and sophisticated radiation-detection devices planted near Iranian facilities had turned up absolutely no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. However, Bush and Cheney were expected to try to keep those conclusions out of the forthcoming NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities.

As Hersh explained to Wolf Blitzer at the time, the White House was attempting to counter the CIA assessment with an Israeli claim, based on a "reliable agent," that Iran was working on a trigger for a nuclear device. "The CIA isn’t getting a good look at the Israeli intelligence." Hersh explained. "It’s the old word, stovepiping. It’s the President and the Vice President, it’s pretty much being kept in the White House."

RAW STORY's Larisa Alexandrovna further reported in January 2007 that the NIE on Iran was intended to be released later that month, but that John Negroponte's was being replaced as Director of National Intelligence because he had refused to tailor the NIE to Vice President Cheney's specificiations.

Despite feeling vindicated by the latest developments, Hersh warned Blitzer that the White House push for war with Iran is "still not over. ... There's always Israel." He explained that "the Israelis were very upset about the report. They think we're naive."

( b: the Israelis can attack Iran if they have such non-naive intelligence )

However, Hersh was confident that there was very little chance the NIE could be mistaken, because "It's been four years since we've had any positive evidence of a parallel secret program to build a bomb -- and we've been all over the country."

Hersh and Blitzer then recalled Hersh's past appearances on CNN -- including several long interviews discussing the Abu Ghraib scandal -- and how the White House would regularly accuse him of using "anonymous sorces" or just "throwing crap against the wall."

Hersh concluded by emphasizing what a serious problem the NIE poses for Bush. "It's a lose-lose for them," he stated. "The fight I'm talking about began last year. ... This is going to pose a serious credibility problem. ... That's not what we pay the guy to do."

However, Hersh's sources tell him that despite the NIE, Bush's negotiating position is still that the Iranians "have to stop everything ... destroy it. ... Inspectors have to come in that we pick. ... He's not saying that publicly, but that's the private standard."


This video is from CNN's Situation Room, broadcast on December 4, 2007.

==========

dubya and head and their accomplies have told way too many lies, wasted American blood and treasure, for the oil grab.

We can only hope that these venal, lying Strangelovian assholes leave the Whitehouse with only the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters on their bloody hands. 9/11 happened on the Repug watch, 9/11 is their infamous baby.

[Wild Cobra]

I'm not going to bother quoting any of this article. I just ask that everyone following this thread read and rather than be narrow minded with only the leftist media sources:

NIE Report is Propoganda Victory for Iran

[Nbadan]

During those four years, Iran has provided political and military support to both Sunni and Shiite insurgents in Iraq

There goes this dude's credibility..the Iraqi Sunni and Iran are not friends, quite the contrary...

[boutons_]

"NIE Report is Propoganda Victory for Iran"

total spin BS. If Iran had published the NIE, it might have been propanda, but it would have been the truth from Iran vs the lies of dubya/ head/neo- s.

That's right, the WH has been lying, while Iran has been telling the truth.

Can Iranian and terrorists exploit this situation by propagandda? Sure, but it was dubya and head who created the situation and lied about Iran, including BS propaganda about WWIII, etc.

iow, the WH has been spewing pro-war, elective-war propaganda about Iran, and it got ed over by its own propaganda.

dubya is saying Iran must "come clean" while dubya himself is stinking filthy with his own lies, starting with the hermetic cover-up of the WH inaction prior to 9/11.

==================

December 6, 2007

Details in Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran, U.S. Says

By DAVID E. SANGER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — 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.

( so somehow this operation was successful, but the same kind of operation was successful or even attempted against Saddam? Even if the WH had the intel about no WMD in Iraq, it would have mattered because the WH was going to invade Iraq for the oil, not becaus of any WMD threat )

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 Cheney.

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

( sounds like the intel people refused to be railroaded and compromised by head and the neo- s like they were pre-Iraq, and then get smeared by the WH for "bad intel")

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.”

( iow, the WH was caught lying and had to "revise" )

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 do ented 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 do ents 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.”

( hey, dubya YOU have much more explaining to do WHY you invaded Iraq and why you are so intent on attackig Iran. "COME CLEAN", you lying asshole )

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 Ins ute 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 dubya and head's lies have been exposed before the world by their own intel people.

Just more to the case that the WH was lying about Saddam/Iraq/WMD, and about pre-9/11. It's amazing hubris, born of their privileged Masters of the Universe bubble, that they thought they could grab the Iraq/Iran oil behind a Bodygurad of Lies.

And dubya says his elective Iraq/Iran aggression policies are not going to change ... the oil is still there.

[Wild Cobra]

There goes this dude's credibility..the Iraqi Sunni and Iran are not friends, quite the contrary...

Have any evidence to the contrary? Doesn't it make sense to support such a plan if the goal is to help remove the protection from the USA? We (the USA) have often helped governments we were not friends, why wouldn't they when the potential benefits of their agenda can be achieved?

[Wild Cobra]

Bouton's, I don't know where to start. Some of what you highlight is a lie. Have you compared the sections you highlighted with the NIE report? Your quoted article contradicts the report, but this liberal NY Times contributer knows that lemmings like you believe what they say without fail, or verification.

"The newly obtained notes contradicted public assertions by American intelligence officials that the nuclear weapons design effort was still active."

The NIE report does not say weapons design efforts are not active. Only a high confidence that they halted manufacturing.

What gets me is that Sanger implies some things contray in an article a few days before:

How Did a 2005 Estimate Go Awry?

[boutons_]

"a high confidence that they halted manufacturing."

Mission Accomplished? no, dubya and head still want to "regime change" Iran to get at the oil.

Tiny, puny Iran is no threat to USA, as was Iran wasn't. neo-cons want the oil.

All of this Iran nuke bul is pure smokescreen.

[Nbadan]

It now appears that Dubya knew about the Iranian NIE last winter, before his WW3 speech...

POLITICS-US: Did Bush Get New Iran Intel Last Winter?
Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Dec 17 (IPS) - White House officials have now admitted that George W. Bush was told that the intelligence assessment on a covert Iranian nuclear programme might change last August, but they have avoided answering the question of when the president was first informed about the new intelligence that led to that revised assessment.

That evasion is necessary, it now appears, to conceal the fact that Bush likely knew about that intelligence as early as February or March 2007.

The White House evasions began on the day the "key judgments" in the Iran National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) were released. At his Dec. 3 press conference, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was asked, "So was it recent weeks that this intelligence came in?" Hadley answered, "What the intelligence community has said is in the last few months."

In fact, no intelligence official had commented on when the crucial intelligence had been first obtained.

Then a journalist asked, "Steve, when was the first time the president was given the inkling of something? ...Was this months ago, when the first information started to become available to intelligence agencies?" This time Hadley responded, "You ought to go back to the intelligence community."

The evidence now available strongly suggests, however, that Hadley dodged the question not because he did not know the answer, but because he did not wish to reveal that Bush had been informed about the new intelligence months before the August meeting with Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.

The key development that altered the course of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, according to intelligence sources, was the defection of a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Defence, Ali Reza Asgari, on a visit to Turkey last February, as widely reported in international news media in subsequent weeks. The Washington Post's Dafna Linzer, citing a "senior U.S. official", reported on Mar. 8 that Asgari, who had been deputy minister of defence for eight years under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005, was already providing information to U.S. intelligence.

ISP

It now appears that “Bush likely knew about that intelligence as early as February or March 2007...months before the White House has conceded.

[clambake]

it's possible Dan. but it's also possible that Bush can't absorb a paragraph.