http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,315223,00.html BARNES: Look, this war has been going on, and I don't have any information that would say that the report is slanted at all. But you have to realize — what is intelligence? Intelligence is when you get a bunch of varied information together and try to guess what it means. Now — HUME: That's called an "estimate." Look, the Democrats are reacting as if there has been an abandonment of the program. There hasn't been. There has been a suspension. There is a big difference — suspension is not giving up. And what they suspended was the least of the three parts of building a nuke, and that is turning enriched uranium into a bomb. Now, the Democrats are acting as if the enrichment of uranium, which is producing the material that you make into a bomb isn't happening. It is happening every day. And that is what the NIE itself has called "the hard part." So that is going on. All that we're talking about is perhaps a wider window of when the Iranians will acquire a bomb, so a little more time and a little less urgency by our military option. But surely on sanctions, you would imagine that Democrats, who have supported them in the past, would find no reason here to abandon them. That is the real issue. Do you continue imposing sanctions or not? And the answer obviously is "yes." And I don't see how that changes in any way. --------------------------------------------------------------------- As recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that "Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons" and do so "despite its international obligations and international pressure." This was a "high confidence" judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 "in response to increasing international scrutiny." This too is a "high confidence" conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these "estimates" -- the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies -- are conducted and accorded gospel status. http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2007/12/coup-against-wh.html Our own "confidence" is not heightened by the fact that the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials with previous reputations as "hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials," according to an intelligence source. They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In any case, the real issue is not Iran's nuclear weapons program, but its nuclear program, period. As the NIE acknowledges, Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale -- that is, build the capability to make the fuel for a potential bomb. And it is doing so in open defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. No less a source than the IAEA recently confirmed that Iran already has blueprints to cast uranium in the shape of an atomic bomb core.
I realize this may be a foreign concept to a party of people who come to conclusions and fit the evidence around it, but normal people look at evidence and base conclusions on them. The US got new evidence. It led to new conclusions. This is not a particularly difficult concept.
These people stated both "high confidence" then and now...The point is if they contradicted themselves as recently as 2 short years ago,...why should we NOT have considerable doubt on the entire process by which these "estimates" are conducted? These are not blokes you play cards with either, they have a job to get it right and mean "high confidence" as what it is...But you are right, the NIE information isn't set in concrete,...it is apparently fluid, and thus apt to change... My point exactly...
Nobody's saying things are hunky-dory with Iran. The real issue is that the intelligence doesn't match the rhetoric of the President and VP... that once again, the administration picked a course of action and expected the facts to fall in line or presumed they could conform the facts to their liking. If the administration had been basing its rhetoric and policies on the actual intelligence instead of some political/idealogical goal, there would be no problem.
...so when/if it changes you react accordingly? Novel concept? If they restart a weapons production program, then you think about bombing it? The lack of sufficent information on the state of Iran occured because the president wanted to attack Iraq. Now, when the president decided to refocus on attacking Iran, he got additional nformation that didn't fit his desires. The reasonable thing to do is use that information. You and he don't seem to care what the facts are. You've already decided they need attacking.
i was unaware that we had attacked iran. did i miss anything? sure, we may have dropped a few rhetorical bombs, but as the NIE itself says, the iraninans (purportedly) suspended their program due to international pressure. sticks and stones...
I don't know what you're saying. Where did you get that we attacked Iran? I said no such thing. And by the way, note the emphasis on international.
for what, exactly? you seem to be suggesting the administration was hell bent on attacking iran, w/o any prrof that is the case, and only the NIE stopped them. is that in fact your position?
basso you've been playing this game for years now. "No recollection" has become the euphemism for "you can't prove it."
then... "interpret the evidence to support our pre-established conclusion, or else." now... "you're a lame duck, we can interpret the evidence properly."
I'm not sure what jollies you get in trying to goad people into duplicating any number of threads by posting info already brought to the attention of the readers of this board, but it is kind of humorous. And no, I will not play your little game today... and it's a given that should I do so, you will ignore it and pretend it didn't happen... and then try this same "gotcha" charade in a subsequent thread. Only to the great defenders of the administration is the unwillingness to meet their every demand for the most obvious of info or to address the most grossly misinterpreted comment proof of the administration's rightness.
It is most amusing and entertaining for me to watch the disappointed Neocons try to squirm their way to discrediting the NIE and the rather ham-handed tactics that they been forced to adopt, because they are doing a 180 on previous positions. The first, and most ubiquitous is the quotation mark, which immediately questions any so called 'text' that the so called 'authors' write about the so called 'issue at hand' into something false without ever having to make a so called 'legitimate point'. The next tactic is the subtle change in phraseology to use terms that have negative connotations. I will give $1,000 to the first person who can locate a single Neocon description of US Military and Civilian Intelligence Agencies as bureaucracies before this NIE came out. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the Neocons would be crying bloody murder and asking why the author hates America. But they say something you don't like? They turn from the cartoonishly perfect heroes of America, into bloated, inefficient, and dysfunctional bureaucrats who are too incompetent to do the job that they are paid to do. One minute they are GI Joe, the next they are Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. Way to speak to the issues. I'm sure this sort of thing is probably effective for children and the mentally challenged, but it just makes you look like a fool to anybody with an ounce of sense who isn't living your ideological nightmare. There are, of course, other equally dishonest tactics used. I just picked these two out because the sentence stood out. For instance they next go on to attack the authors - despite the fact that the authors only collated the facts given to them by the agencies and the report was championed by Bush's own director of national intelligence. (BTW, ROXRAN, I know that you hate the term Neocon, and I tried to find something else, but the other options were conservative, which I think would piss off what I would call the real ideological 'small government' conservatives like jo mamma, or some variation of jingoist/fascist which I think is less pleasant than Neocon).
