US Intelligence Review Directly Contradicts Bush’s Line On Iran

Published on Wednesday, December 5, 2007 by Inter Press Service

US Intelligence Review Directly Contradicts Bush’s Line On Iran
by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Despite the White House spin that the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) supports its policy of increasing pressure on Iran, the estimate not only directly contradicts the George W. Bush administration’s line on Iranian intentions regarding nuclear weapons, but points to a link between Tehran’s 2003 decision to halt research on weaponization and its decision to negotiate with European foreign ministers on both nuclear and Iranian security concerns.

By using unusually strong and precise language in characterizing its pivotal judgment that Iran ended work relating to nuclear weapons four years earlier, the estimate deals a serious blow to the administration’s claim that Iran is determined to acquire nuclear weapons. The key judgment released Monday said, “We assess with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program [and] that the halt lasted at least several years.”

The intelligence community also said for the first time in the new NIE, “[W]e do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

That judgment confirms what International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohammed ElBaradei and other close observers of the Iranian nuclear program have been saying since 2004: Iran is not interested in nuclear weapons but in the deterrent value inherent in the knowledge of mastering the nuclear fuel cycle.

The Washington Post revealed Tuesday that the White House had been briefed on the new evidence of the Iranian abandonment of weaponisation in 2003 as early as last July, and that White House officials had sharply challenged that evidence. According to a story by Dafna Linzer and Joby Warrick, “several of the president’s top advisers” had argued that electronic intercepts of Iranian military officers, which were reportedly a key element of the new evidence, were part of a “clever Iranian deception campaign”. Full Story , Link Below http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/05/5629/inphase.rock@gmail.com