basso, You've proven your own point far better than anyone else could. At first you claimed the NIE report showed that the Iraq war terrified the Iranians into stopping their program. So you believed what the report said. Now you are going out of your way to try and discredit the report. You did both in an effort to protect your political allies. It was blatantly political regardless of the truth, since you apparently believed both ways when it suited your politics.
did this guy write this editorial I'm sure in 1985 plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by.
wait a minute..you can't have it both ways? Your telling me that I can't praise Bush for forcing Iran to stop it's nuclear war program and then turn around and claim that dems , who believe the NIE, are putting politics over national defense? Seriously basso how do you keep things straight?
in fact, i didn't- go back and re-read the post in question. i suggested it's one possible explanation, if indeed iran has "suspended" it's work. further reading however has convinced me the report is deeply flawed- you should try reading it yourself, with an open mind. i'm not sure why you remain so comfortable w/ its assertions, given they're impossibly vague, and given iran's long history of avoiding international scrutiny of it's nuclear program. and it's not just me . [rquoter]In Iran We Trust? By VALERIE LINCY and GARY MILHOLLIN Washington ON Monday the United States intelligence community issued what everyone agrees was blockbuster news: a report stating that in the autumn of 2003, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program. The National Intelligence Estimate has been heralded as a courageous act of independence by the intelligence agencies, and praised by both parties for showing a higher quality of spy work than earlier assessments. In fact, the report contains the same sorts of flaws that we have learned to expect from our intelligence agency offerings. It, like the report in 2002 that set up the invasion of Iraq, is both misleading and dangerous. During the past year, a period when Iran’s weapons program was supposedly halted, the government has been busy installing some 3,000 gas centrifuges at its plant at Natanz. These machines could, if operated continuously for about a year, create enough enriched uranium to provide fuel for a bomb. In addition, they have no plausible purpose in Iran’s civilian nuclear effort. All of Iran’s needs for enriched uranium for its energy programs are covered by a contract with Russia. Iran is also building a heavy water reactor at its research center at Arak. This reactor is ideal for producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, but is of little use in an energy program like Iran’s, which does not use plutonium for reactor fuel. India, Israel and Pakistan have all built similar reactors — all with the purpose of fueling nuclear weapons. And why, by the way, does Iran even want a nuclear energy program, when it is sitting on an enormous pool of oil that is now skyrocketing in value? And why is Iran developing long-range Shahab missiles, which make no military sense without nuclear warheads to put on them? For years these expensive projects have been viewed as evidence of Iran’s commitment to nuclear weapons. Why aren’t they still? The answer is that the new report defines “nuclear weapons program” in a ludicrously narrow way: it confines it to to enriching uranium at secret sites or working on a nuclear weapon design. But the halting of its secret enrichment and weapon design efforts in 2003 proves only that Iran made a tactical move. It suspended work that, if discovered, would unambiguously reveal intent to build a weapon. It has continued other work, crucial to the ability to make a bomb, that it can pass off as having civilian applications. That work includes the centrifuges at Natanz, which bring Iran closer to a nuclear weapon every day — two to seven years away. To assert, as the report does, that these centrifuges are “civilian,” and not part of Iran’s weapons threat, is grossly misleading. The new report has also upended our sanctions policy, which was just beginning to produce results. Banks and energy companies were pulling back from Iran. The United Nations Security Council had frozen the assets of dozens of Iranian companies. That policy now seems dead. If Iran is not going for the bomb, why punish it? No company or bank will agree to lose money unless a nuclear threat is clear. Likewise, is it fair for the United Nations to continue to freeze the assets of people like Seyed Jaber Safdari, the manager of the Natanz plant, or companies like Mesbah Energy, the supplier of the reactor at Arak, because of links to a program that American intelligence believes is benign? One European official admitted to us that he and his colleagues were flummoxed. “We have to have a new policy now for going forward,” he said, “but we haven’t been able to figure out what it is.” This situation is made all the more absurd by the report’s suggestion that international pressure offers the only hope of containing Iran. The report has now made such pressure nearly impossible to obtain. It is hardly surprising that China, which last week seemed ready to approve the next round of economic sanctions against Tehran, has now had a change of heart: its ambassador to the United Nations said yesterday that “we all start from the presumption that now things have changed.” We should be suspicious of any document that suddenly gives the Bush administration a pass on a big national security problem it won’t solve during its remaining year in office. Is the administration just washing its hands of the intractable Iranian nuclear issue by saying, “If we can’t fix it, it ain’t broke”? In any case, the report is an undoubted victory for Iran. Even if it opens the way for direct talks, which would be a benefit, it validates Iran’s claim that efforts to shut down Natanz are illegitimate. Thus Iran will be free to operate and add to its centrifuges at Natanz, accumulate a stockpile of low-enriched uranium customary for civilian use, and then have the ability to convert that uranium in a matter of months to weapons grade. This “breakout potential” would create a nuclear threat that we and Iran’s neighbors will have to live with for years to come. Valerie Lincy is the editor of Iranwatch.org. Gary Milhollin is the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.[/rquoter] Deck- i bolded some key graphs just for you.
I thank you for clarifying. I thought that you posting articles that said the Invasion of Iraq was a reason why Iran stopped their weapons program implied that you agreed to that idea. I believe the report by the NIE because it is the best evidence presented to date. They say with "high confidence" and not just a suspicion. The NIE comes from multiple sources. Do I trust in it to be 100%? no. Also the side that has been hyping the Iran Nuclear weapons angle has a horrible track record.
[rquoter] Details in Military Notes Led to Shift on Iran, U.S. Says By DAVID E. SANGER and STEVEN LEE MYERS Published: December 6, 2007 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. 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. [/rquoter]
Thanks, basso. I appreciate that. Some of us don't see little type as well as we once did. It also helps to zero in on what the poster considers the salient points. Having said that... Bush lied to the American people yesterday about what happened in August. In my opinion, he was attempting the last several months, in fact longer, to do the same thing that was done prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Only this time the intelligence community decided not to take the fall and put out the information after careful vetting. Given that war with Iran would now be damned near impossible, I agree with much of what you bolded. Bush will attempt to pass on this problem, as he is passing on so many others, to what he thinks will be a Democratic President. Short of a bloody miracle, in 2010 and 2012, the GOP will run on the Democratic failure with or in "fill in the blank," created by that man you so admire, Mr. Bush. Trim Bush!
basso love the Bowie reference BTW. Almost as much as... Johnny’s in america, low-tech’s at the Wheel No-one needs anyone, they don’t even Just pretend Johnny’s in america I’m afraid of americans I’m afraid of the world I’m afraid I can’t help it I’m afraid I can’t Johnny’s in america Johnny wants a brain, johnny wants to Suck on a coke Johnny wants a woman, johnny wants To think of a joke Johnny’s in america I’m afraid of americans I’m afraid of the world I’m afraid I can’t help it I’m afraid I can’t Johnny’s in america Johnny’s in america, johnny looks up at The stars Johnny combs his hair and johnny Wants p***y and cars Johnny’s in america I’m afraid of americans I’m afraid of the world I’m afraid I can’t help it I’m afraid I can’t Johnny’s in america God is an american I’m afraid of americans I’m afraid of the world I’m afraid I can’t help it I’m afraid I can’t DB
so, if the NIE is incorrect, what do you think Bush should do? and if the NIE is correct, how can Bush be accused of passing the problem along to someone else, if, as the NIE claims, there is no problem? sorry, didn't mean to go all FB on yo' ass...
This, I think, shows the GOP stance on things. They can't debate this substantively because they don't have access to any of the underlying intelligence. So the fact they are debating the credibility kind of shows you their motives. Oops - entirely untrue. In fact, the differences are entirely because of new evidence: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/06/iran.intelligence/index.html
more bolded bits for ya deck: [rquoter]Still a Dangerous World Democrats imply the U.S. can talk its way out of global threats. BY DANIEL HENNINGER Thursday, December 6, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST The most disturbing thing about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran wasn't the news itself, but how the episode displayed the wild and manic swings that now characterize American politics. A regular watcher of our politics could be forgiven for feeling that one isn't watching a serious country but a place that conducts its internal affairs like a Saturday morning cartoon show. Thunk! Boooinng! For some time, the conventional storyboard drawn for the Bush presidency has been that the U.S. is led by a bumbling Elmer Fudd, who outlandishly overestimates the danger from such imagined threats as Saddam Hussein, Syria or Iran's mysterious-looking mullahs. Prominent political figures here design their comments on world events to fit inside cartoon dialogue balloons. John Edwards, after the NIE story broke, denounced the Bush-Cheney "rush to war with Iran." Sen. Harry Reid demanded a "diplomatic surge." These wide, all-or-nothing swings may serve the melodramatic needs of politics and the press, but they don't much help an electorate that will vote a year from now to send a new U.S. president out into the world. With or without the NIE's opinion of Iran's nuclear program, that world is still a dangerous place. Let's assume for argument's sake that Iran did stop its nuke program in 2003. Why, then, in 2006 was Iran performing test flights of the Shabab-2 and Shabab-3 ballistic missiles, the latter with a range of some 1,200 miles? Commenting at the time, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Iranians "are not unaware that the security environment is one in which if they actually were to do something, Iran would suffer greatly." But as of this week, they might not. Indeed last week, just as the U.S. intelligence professionals were preparing to tell the world it could forget about Iran (as yesterday's news reports made clear the world is about to do), the Iranian defense ministry announced it has built a new 1,200-mile missile, the Ashura. In September, it put on display the 1,100-mile-range Ghadr-1 missile. If this is all an inconsequential feint, it's a remarkably big one. North Korea in July 2006 tested the long-range Taepodong-2, a nuclear payload-capable ballistic missile. North Korea has exported its missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. And of course Hezbollah, in the same month North Korea was testing the Taepodong-2, fired thousands of Katyusha rockets at Israel, re-establishing the operational viability of short-range bombardment. China is developing three strategic, long-range missiles--the JL-1, and the DF-31 and DF-31A; the latter two are mobile ICBMs. This technology did not go away with the Cold War. In January, after much effort to do so, China successfully used a kinetic-kill vehicle launched from a ballistic missile to destroy a satellite orbiting at 500 miles altitude. The Bush administration's effort to place a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe as counterweight to Iran's missiles was conventionally mocked by elite opinion as a rerun of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars scheme." In fact, Japan, Australia, Germany, Italy, Israel and Denmark are all attempting to develop antimissile technology. France is building a short-range ballistic missile defense system, the SAMP/T. What are they all afraid of? Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, indeed virtually all the nations of the Middle East are seeking nuclear-power capability. Possibly it's all just to keep the lights on in the tourist hotels, but nuclear-energy production is still a dual-use technology. It is now believed that Israel bombed Syria in September to destroy a nuclear-bomb facility built in part by North Korea. This is a more complex and hair-trigger world than the Cold War years between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The idea that George Bush's handling of all these volatile moving pieces has been "incompetent" and has "isolated" the U.S. is a dangerous caricature, though that caricature is the way our Roller-Derby politics has chosen to talk about the world. The NIE/Iran drama this week is a case study--reduced in press reports to another Bush intelligence "flip-flop," as though the president wrote this stuff himself in the Oval Office. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and even Mike Huckabee want us to entrust them with managing the world's flourishing threats. Has any offered sufficient reason why we should? In other political systems, a candidate's strategic policies tend to flow from his party. Here we mostly get whatever these hyper-ambitious individuals choose to reveal during a campaign--and the foreign-policy views of their party in Congress. This Wednesday, after the NIE's release, the Democratic candidates had a fresh opportunity at an Iowa debate to describe how their presidencies would address Iran and the world. John Edwards chose to attack Sen. Clinton for voting in September to label Iran's Revolutionary Guards as terrorists. She and Sen. Obama, along with Democrats in Congress, said the new Iran intelligence estimate now mandates diplomacy only. Sen. Obama: "They should have stopped the saber rattling, should have never started it. And they need, now, to aggressively move on the diplomatic front." But in a July essay for Foreign Affairs, Sen. Obama said nuclear weapons "in the hands of a radical theocracy" is "too dangerous." While he favored "tough-minded" diplomacy with Iran, "we must not rule out using military force." Which version is one supposed to believe? The candidates seeking votes from their party's pacifists, or the person who wants to represent his country's interests in a hostile world? One would like more on this than we're getting from the candidates in both parties. But the Democrats especially have tied themselves to the word "diplomacy," giving the impression that the U.S. can literally talk its way out of any bad outcomes that Iran, Syria, North Korea or free-agent terrorists have planned for us. Put it this way: Would they, like Israel, have bombed that factory in Syria without pre-discussing it with Bashar Assad or Kim Jong-Il? No candidate's answer to that will make everyone happy. But the more than 100 million Americans who'll vote next year need a better idea than they've got of how the next president plans to deal with the world. Not the cartoon world, but the real world. Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. [/rquoter]
Yes, it's very fundamental. Which is why it's odd that you'd link to a post that has no relevance to your claim that the change in NIE is based on intrepretation of evidence as opposed to new evidence. The article I linked to shows that the new NIE was based on new evidence which caused them to re-evaluate old assumptions.
Kudos to Obama. It sounds like he has it exactly right. Military force should not be ruled out, but the first, best, and every option other than last should be diplomatic pressure. basso, a lot of the articles you are posting now talk about how Iran shouldn't be allowed to enrich uranium. If that was always the threat, why was the early talk about Iran not about their being able to enrich uranium, but about their weapons program. It was only some time after August 5th, and carrying on today that the emphasis is that Iran should not be able to enrich uranium at all for any reason. There was a decided shift in the language used by the President as has been documented in this thread. After the NIE report came out there has also been a shift in the language of the President's defenders.
jesus- you cannot be that obtuse. no one is defending the president, we're criticizing the NIE, and the politicized reaction to it, and how both make us less safe. that is not synonymous with "defending the president." it is not a binary argument.
I'm not Major, of course, but I read the post in question several times. Worse than not saying what you claim, it actually supports Major's position of new evidence. It tries to marginalize without directly addressing the facts it by calling it 'evidence' instead of evidence (the magic quotation marks, of course, rendering it suddenly suspect without actually any proof), cracks jokes about ayatollahs, and makes broad engineering statements about the ease of building nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery systems without any leg to stand on. But even in its subfterfuge to minimalize the value of the new information, it very clearly does say that the conclusions are drawn from new evidence, in contradiction to your statement: So as I see it: Score Major – 1 Basso - 0
They would score it the same as you considering that both you and them wish that Iran had nuclear weapons. It is not dissimilar to your great disappointment when it turned out that all Saddam had was a couple of vials of botox and some 35 year old artillery shells way past their expiration date, and your undying hope that there is a bearded man in syria (or space aliens, whichever is more likely) sitting on a refugee nuclear arsenal. Look basso, sometimes life deals us disappointments. Accept it and move on.
if by IAEA expressing doubts you mean one anonymous source from what i recall. whereas mohamed elbaradei has welcomed it.
