Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

the escalation is bad news .. sure feels like ..

Seymour Hersh: Despite Intelligence Rejecting Iran as Nuclear Threat, US Could Be Headed for Iraq Redux
by: Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez
Monday 6 June 2011 .. [bits] ..

President Barack Obama: So let me be absolutely clear: we remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Its illicit nuclear program is just one challenge that Iran poses. As I said on Thursday, the Iranian government has shown its hypocrisy by claiming to support the rights of protesters while treating its own people with brutality.

then

Seymour Hersh: Well, very simply, it’s—you know, you could argue it’s 2003 all over again. Remember WMD, mushroom clouds. There’s just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing anything to make a nuclear weapon. You know, making a weapon is a big deal. You have to have fabrication facilities. You have to convert a very toxic gas into a metal and then mold it into a core. It’s big stuff, and there’s no sign of any of it.

and

Seymour Hersh: Thanks a lot, Amy. Look, there’s been two very secret studies done, called National Intelligence Estimates, NIEs, and these are the most sort of sacrosanct internal studies done by the community. Almost all the time they’re private. There are studies going on, NIEs going on all the time—the situation now in Ecuador, for example, other issues. Venezuela is always looked at. The situation in the war, war-peace stuff, is constantly being looked at by groups of people in the intelligence community. And these documents are promulgated without anybody knowing it.

For some reason, in 2007 there was an NIE put out about the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and the White House wanted a summary made. And I think at that point 16 intelligence agencies were involved in the final conclusions. And internally, the guys running it, to their credit, voted 16 to nothing to say what they said, which is that, in a summary put out about the NIE—as I say, unprecedented summary—saying there’s no evidence they had done any weaponization since 2003.

And there’s a new study that was just done. It was published in February of this year. And it—we knew about it, but nobody has actually—you’re getting me in a tricky area, but I can just say, people that have worked on the study and have read the study will attest—have attested that it doesn’t take us any further. There’s no further evidence of any weaponization.

And what’s even more important that I write is that this, the latest study, was actually supposed to be promulgated—is the word they use in the community—last fall, and it was delayed because the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon intelligence agency, had an assessment that was—knocked everybody’s socks off. Their assessment was, the only reason Iran even looked at weaponization—and we’re not talking about building anything, we’re talking about doing studies, paper studies—was because they were frightened of Iraq. They had had an eight-year war, as many in your audience will remember, between 1980 and 1988, with Iraq, a terrible, brutal war. And when they—their worry was, in the early—in the 2001, 2002 period, that if Iraq went nuclear, they might need some deterrent. So what they even looked at, the papers they did, was aimed not at us or the Israelis, but aimed at the Iraqis. That didn’t get into the final judgment, but it affected the debate in a pretty positive way. .. [more] .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=63957542

============== .. this is a good one ..

Nuclear proliferation: Engaging Iran .. bits ..

This piece was written by six former ambassadors to Iran from European countries: Richard Dalton (United Kingdom), Steen Hohwü-Christensen (Sweden), Paul von Maltzahn (Germany), Guillaume Metten (Belgium), François Nicoullaud (France) and Roberto Toscano (Italy)

[...]

Is the threat to the peace, then, that Iran is actively attempting to build a nuclear weapon? For at least three years, the United States intelligence community has discounted this hypothesis. The U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, testified in February to Congress: "We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.... We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.... We continue to judge that Iran's nuclear decision-making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran."

Today, a majority of experts, even in Israel, seems to view Iran as striving to become a "threshold country," technically able to produce a nuclear weapon but abstaining from doing so for the present. Again, nothing in international law or in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty forbids such an ambition. Like Iran, several other countries are on their way to or have already reached such a threshold but have committed not to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody seems to bother them.

We often hear that Iran's ill-will, its refusal to negotiate seriously, left our countries no other choice but to drag it to the Security Council in 2006. Here also, things are not quite that clear.

Let us remember that in 2005 Iran was ready to discuss a ceiling limit for the number of its centrifuges and to maintain its rate of enrichment far below the high levels necessary for weapons. Tehran also expressed its readiness to put into force the additional protocol that it had signed with the IAEA allowing intrusive inspections throughout Iran, even in non-declared sites. But at that time, the Europeans and the Americans wanted to compel Iran to forsake its enrichment program entirely.

[...]

Of course, a dilemma lingers in the minds of most of our leaders. Why offer the Iranian regime an opening that could help it restore its internal and international legitimacy? Should we not wait for a more palatable successor before making a new overture?

This is a legitimate question, but we should not overestimate the influence of a nuclear negotiation on internal developments in Iran. Ronald Reagan used to call the Soviet Union the "evil empire," but that did not stop him from negotiating intensely with Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear disarmament. Should we blame him for having slowed down the course of history?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=64150008

============ .. and ..

Juan Cole .. Iraq, Iran and the Nuclear Phantasm: We’ve Seen this Picture

[...] It is likely that Iran wants “nuclear latency,” [...] But the propaganda will say otherwise.

[...]

We’ve seen this picture before. Let’s not fall for it again, this time with regard to Iran.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68849631

============= .. this one ..

Nov 8 2011 Al Jazeera's Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington DC, said: "This is a report the US wanted the IAEA to come out with. We expect the Obama administration to use this report on the international stage to impose stricter sanctions... but to get that, they need China and Russia to get on board."

A senior US administration official told Al Jazeera: "The IAEA report does not assert that Iran has resumed a full-scale nuclear weapons programme, nor does it have a conclusion about how advanced those activities are, but clearly indicates there are activities of concern." .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=68801009

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

Another Iranian nuclear scientist murdered in Tehran .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66214852

it's a long war .. 5 years of sanctions, virus attacks, assassination
of top nuclear physicists .. now more .. with seemingly no good reason ..

then there was the Fatah by Khamanei against the development of nuclear weapons .. if it was broken it
would be a real blow to his authority .. read it while wandering but have lost that post just now ..