From WinnipegIMC

Posted by twospiritwarrior on Sunday, December 2nd at 6:54 PM

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What are you waiting for? Make one today!

http://zapatopi.net/afdb/

Do you support 'Transfer', Plant?

Israel's own defence staff warned that the imposition of Collective Punishment on Gaza would provoke attacks.

Is that a yes or no? I guess we can assume it's a yes, since you're a supporter of Zionist Extremism, which has always believed in the complete Ethnic Cleansing of their Apartheid state.

Now now, LIEJoy (the Plant). Talking to yourself is a sign of mental illness. So is your seething bigotry.

Didn't answer the question.

We already know the answer.

Notice their rejection of the facts, and their desperate spinning & squirming.

Report contradicts Bush on Iran nuclear program By Matt Spetalnick
Mon Dec 3, 6:09 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new U.S. intelligence report says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and it remains on hold, contradicting the Bush administration's earlier assertion that Tehran was intent on developing a bomb.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released on Monday could undermine U.S. efforts to convince other world powers to agree on a third package of U.N. sanctions against Iran for defying demands to halt uranium enrichment activities.

Tensions have escalated in recent months as Washington has ratcheted up the rhetoric against Tehran, with U.S. President George W. Bush insisting in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to World War Three.

But in a finding likely to surprise U.S. friends and foes alike, the latest NIE concluded: "We do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."

That marked a sharp contrast to an intelligence report two years ago that stated Iran was "determined to develop nuclear weapons."

But the new assessment found Iran was continuing to develop technical means that could be used to build a bomb and it would likely be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon "sometime during the 2010-2015 time-frame."

(If it wanted to, with much additional effort.)

The shift in the intelligence community's thinking on Iran comes five years after a flawed NIE concluded neighboring Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction -- a report that helped pave the way for the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

(An NIE which intentionally 'fixed the facts' to suit the Regime's political needs. No doubt the intelligence community remembers being used as a skapegoat by the criminals who ordered them to LIE the last time around.)

No nuclear, chemical or biological weapons were ever found in Iraq and intelligence agencies since have been more cautious about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who have repeatedly accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, were briefed on the new NIE last Wednesday.

Washington, which insists it wants to solve the Iran problem diplomatically while leaving military options "on the table," is pushing for tougher U.N. sanctions against Tehran but faces resistance from China and Russia.

Iran insists it wants nuclear technology only for civilian purposes, such as electricity generation.

The nuclear standoff has become a major issue in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, with candidates weighing in on the prospects for military action against Iran.

U.S. STILL SEES IRANIAN "RISK"
(Wants to invade)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, among senior Democrats who had requested the updated report on Iran, said the assessment challenged some of the administration's "alarming rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran."

He and other critics had accused Bush trying to rush the country into war again based on faulty intelligence.
(LIES)

Bush's national security adviser said that on balance the report was "good news," insisting it showed Tehran was susceptible to international pressure but that the risk of it acquiring nuclear weapons "remains a very serious problem."

But he added: "The international community has to understand that if we want to avoid a situation where we either have to accept Iran on a road to a nuclear weapon ... or the possibility of having to use force to stop it with all the connotations of World War III, then we need to step up the diplomacy, step up the pressure."

Administration officials denied the new NIE had exposed a serious intelligence lapse but could not explain how agencies failed to detect for four years that Iran's nuclear weapons program had been halted.

Intelligence officials said the suspension involved design and engineering for a bomb and covert uranium-conversion work.

A key NIE finding was that: "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005."

Still, the report said: "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071203/ts_nm/iran_usa_dc

US officials say Iran nuclear weapons program stopped in 2003, sharp change from earlier view
The Associated PressPublished: December 3, 2007

WASHINGTON: A new U.S. intelligence report concludes that Iran's nuclear weapons development program has been halted since the fall of 2003 because of international pressure — a stark contrast to the conclusions U.S. spy agencies drew just two years ago.

The finding is part of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that also cautions that Tehran continues to enrich uranium and still could develop a bomb between 2010 and 2015 if it decided to do so.

(It actually says they could begin the process required to start the development of a weapons program by then.)

The conclusion that Iran's weapons program was still frozen, through at least mid-2007, represents a sharp turnaround from the previous intelligence assessment in 2005. Then, U.S. intelligence agencies believed Tehran was determined to develop a nuclear weapons capability and was continuing its weapons development program (or told to supress anything which contradicted the Regime's false claims and plot for an attack on Iran). The new report concludes that Iran's decisions are rational and pragmatic, and that Tehran is more susceptible to diplomatic and financial pressure than previously thought.

"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," says the unclassified summary of the secret report.

The findings come at a time of escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, which President Bush has labeled part of an "axis of evil," along with Iraq and North Korea. At an Oct. 17 news conference, Bush said, "If you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

Rand Beers, who resigned from Bush's National Security Council just before the Iraq war, said the report should derail any appetite for war on the administration's part, and should reinvigorate regional diplomacy. "The new NIE throws cold water on the efforts of those urging military confrontation with Iran," he said.

Senior intelligence officials said Monday they failed to detect Iran's fall 2003 halt in nuclear weapons development in time to reflect it in the 2005 estimate.

One of the officials said Iran is the most challenging country to spy on — harder even than North Korea, a notoriously closed society. "We put a lot more collection assets against this," the official said, "but gaps remain." The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Some of the changes in the new report reflect the use of "open source" intelligence — public information from sources such as the news media and international organizations. An official said, for example, that photos taken at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility during U.N. inspections in 2002 were particularly useful in assessing the capabilities of the civilian uranium enrichment program.

U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, said the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains "a serious problem." The estimate suggests Bush "has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests, while ensuring the world will never have to face a nuclear armed Iran," Hadley said. He was less interested in what the 2005 assessment missed than what it got right: that Iran had a covert nuclear program.

Bush was briefed on the 100-page document on Nov. 28. National Intelligence Estimates represent the most authoritative written judgments of all 16 U.S. spy agencies. Congress and other executive agencies were briefed Monday, and foreign governments will be briefed beginning Tuesday, the officials said.

Despite the suspension of its weapons program, it may be difficult to ultimately dissuade Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb because Iran believes such a weapon would give it international prestige and leverage to achieve its national security and foreign policy goals, the assessment concluded.

"The bottom line is this: For that strategy to succeed, the international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution," Hadley said.

The intelligence officials said they do not know all the reasons why Iran halted its weapons program, or what might trigger its resumption. They said they are confident that diplomatic and political pressure played a key role, but said the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Libya's termination of its nuclear program and the implosion of the illegal nuclear smuggling network run by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan might also have influenced Tehran.

To develop a nuclear weapon, Iran needs to design and engineer a warhead, obtain enough fissile material, and build a delivery vehicle such as a missile. The intelligence agencies now believe Iran halted warhead engineering four years ago and as of mid-2007 had not restarted it.

But Iran is still enriching uranium for its civilian nuclear reactors that produce electricity. That leaves open the possibility that fissile material could be diverted to covert nuclear sites to produce highly enriched uranium for a warhead. Engineers have known the design for a nuclear weapon for 60 years. The countdown to a nuclear weapon is determined more by the availability of fissile material than anything else, the officials said.

Even if the country went all out with present enrichment capability, it is unlikely to have enough until late 2009 or 2010 at the earliest, the officials said. The State Department's Intelligence and Research office believes the earliest likely time it would have enough highly enriched uranium would be 2013. But all agencies concede Iran may not have sufficient enriched uranium until after 2015.

Iran would not be able to technically produce and reprocess enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015, the report says. But ultimately it has the technical and industrial capacity to build a bomb, "if it decides to do so," the intelligence agencies found. They said Iran's immediate intentions are a mystery.

"We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program indefinitely while it weighs its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart its program," the report says.

This national intelligence estimate was originally due in the spring of 2007 but was delayed because the agencies wanted more confidence their findings were accurate, given the inaccuracy of the 2002 intelligence estimate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., said the report showed "a level of independence from political leadership that was lacking in the recent past."

The CIA, which did most of the analysis, considered at least six alternate scenarios that could explain the new findings, including whether Iran was intentionally trying to deceive them into believing weapons work had stopped.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell decided last month that key judgments of NIEs should not be declassified and released. The intelligence officials said an exception was made in this case because the last assessment of Iran's nuclear program in 2005 has influenced public debate about U.S. policy toward Iran, and must be updated to reflect the latest findings.

Also Monday, a top U.S. diplomat said China may be open to discussing fresh U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran. China and Russia, both veto-wielding members of the Security Council, have been reluctant to support new sanctions.

www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/03/america/Iran-Nuclear.html?page=2

News Analysis
An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate About Iran
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: December 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here.

An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach.

The impact of the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion — that Iran had halted a military program in 2003, though it continues to enrich uranium, ostensibly for peaceful uses — will be felt in endless ways at home and abroad.

It will certainly weaken international support for tougher sanctions against Iran, as a senior administration official grudgingly acknowledged. And it will raise questions, again, about the integrity of America’s beleaguered intelligence agencies, including whether what are now acknowledged to have been overstatements about Iran’s intentions in a 2005 assessment reflected poor tradecraft or political pressure.

Seldom do those agencies vindicate irascible foreign leaders like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who several weeks ago said there was “no evidence” that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, dismissing the American claims as exaggerated.

The biggest change, though, could be its effect on President Bush’s last year in office, as well as on the campaign to replace him. Until Monday, 2008 seemed to be a year destined to be consumed, at least when it comes to foreign policy, by the prospects of confrontation with Iran.

There are still hawks in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney chief among them, who view Iran with deep suspicion. But for now at least, the main argument for a military conflict with Iran — widely rumored and feared, judging by antiwar protesters that often greet Mr. Bush during his travels — is off the table for the foreseeable future.

As Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, put it, the intelligence finding removes, “if nothing else, the urgency that we have to attack Iran, or knock out facilities.” He added: “I don’t think you can overstate the importance of this.”

The White House struggled to portray the estimate as a validation of Mr. Bush’s strategy, a contention that required swimming against the tide of Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Cheney’s occasionally apocalyptic language.

The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said the estimate showed that suspicions about Iran’s intentions were warranted, given that it had a weapons program in the first place.

“On balance, the estimate is good news,” Mr. Hadley said, appearing at the White House. “On one hand, it confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it tells us that we have made some progress in trying to ensure that that does not happen. But it also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.”

Mr. Hadley insisted, as he and others have, that the administration had hoped and still hoped to resolve the outstanding questions about Iran’s nuclear programs using diplomacy, not force. But the nuances of his on-this-hand-on-the-other argument will probably make it much harder to persuade American allies to accept the administration’s harder line.

One official pointed out that the chief American diplomat on the Iran question, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, had just met with counterparts from Europe, Russia and China, and had seemed to make some headway on winning support for a third round of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. The official said Mr. Burns could not divulge the intelligence findings at that meeting on Friday because Congress had not been briefed.

The immediate task for Mr. Burns and other administration officials is to untangle the confusion caused by its own statements and findings and to persuade skeptics that this time, the United States has it right about what Iran was doing before 2003 and what that means for what it might do in the future.

“The way this will play is that the intelligence community has admitted it was wrong,” said Jon B. Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So why should we believe them now?”

Mr. Hadley said the drastic reversal in the intelligence agencies’ knowledge about Iran’s weapons programs was based “on new intelligence, some of which has been received in the last few months.”

He also said that he and other senior officials, including Mr. Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, had reviewed it and debated it two weeks ago.

With some of the administration’s most prominent hawks having departed and not taking part in the review of findings like these, it is possible that the zeal for another military conflict has diminished. After all, the first two wars on Mr. Bush’s watch remain unresolved at best.

Senator Hagel said he hoped that the administration might in its final year in office show the kind of diplomatic flexibility it did with North Korea over its nuclear weapons or with the conference in Annapolis, Md., last week on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has previously called for the United States to open direct and unconditional talks with Iran to end the state of enmity that has existed since 1979.

He said Iran’s halt of weapons activity had created an opening for such talks, indicating, as the assessment does, that Iran’s government may be more rational than the one that Mr. Bush said in August had threatened to put the entire region “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”

“If we’re wise here, if we’re careful, I think we have some opportunities,” Mr. Hagel said.

The findings, though, remain open for interpretation, as they always do, even in documents meant to reflect the consensus of the intelligence community. When it comes to Iran, at odds with the United States on many fronts beyond the nuclear question, hawks remain.

“Those who are suspicious of diplomacy are well dug in in this administration,” said Kurt M. Campbell, chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security.

John R. Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations, who recently left the administration and began to criticize it, sounded very much like Mr. Hadley on Monday, saying the assessment underscored the need for American toughness. He said Iran’s intentions would always remain a concern as long as it continued to enrich uranium.

“The decision to weaponize and at what point is a judgment in the hands of the Iranians,” he said. He added that the finding that Iran halted a weapons program could just mean that it was better hidden now.

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/washington/04assess.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

U.S. Showed the World Exhibit A, Iran as Nuclear Threat; Now Exhibit B Upends It
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: December 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — In the summer of 2005, senior American intelligence officials began traveling the world with a secret slide show drawn from thousands of pages that they said were downloaded from a stolen Iranian laptop computer, trying to prove that Iran was lying when it said it had no interest in building a nuclear weapon.

Now, that assertion has been thrown into doubt by a surprising reversal: the conclusion, contained in the declassified summary of a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear programs, that Iran’s effort to master the technology of building a nuclear weapon had halted two years before those briefings.

At the time of the laptop slide show, some European and United Nations officials questioned what they were being shown. “I can fabricate that data,” one said at the time. “It looks beautiful, but it is open to doubt.”

At the time, almost no one in the White House or the intelligence community is known to have seriously considered the idea that the weapons program might have been stopped. And the new intelligence assessment does not, as far as is known, suggest that the information relied on in 2005 was fabricated.

Perhaps the slide show presented by the Americans in 2005 was simply outdated — the laptop’s data and other information, like the light from a distant star, taking years to arrive at the lenses of the intelligence gatherers.

The assessment does not explain — unless it is addressed in more than 130 pages still marked classified — how the May 2005 conclusion that Iran was still pressing ahead with a nuclear weapons program went awry.

President Bush himself has said on several occasions that he knew that proving the Iranian case to the world would be difficult. “People will say, if we’re trying to make the case on Iran, well, the intelligence failed in Iraq, therefore, how can we trust the intelligence in Iran?” he said at a news conference in 2005. He concluded that building pressure on Iran “requires people to believe that the Iranian nuclear program is, to a certain extent, ongoing.”

Now, he could end his presidency with even his own intelligence apparatus uncertain about Iran’s true intentions.

“This report will be used to undercut our efforts to build a consensus that Iran must suspend its enrichment program, playing to those who support concessions and undermining the prospects for effective pressure on the regime,” said Robert G. Joseph, who helped to build the case against Iran in the Bush White House during the first term and moved to the State Department in the second term.

Mr. Joseph, who in 2005 was one of the officials who gave briefings on the laptop evidence, said Monday he could not recall “any suggestion in the intelligence that Iran was doing anything other than moving full speed ahead.”

Mr. Joseph’s skepticism is shared by some current officials, mostly hawks, who believe, as he does, that Iran is ultimately seeking a weapons capability. But the officials would not publicly challenge the new finding.

Several officials said that if the new National Intelligence Estimate is right, Iran’s strategy was an unusual one. It might be the first country in nuclear history to halt a covert program to make nuclear weapons, then speed up its program to enrich nuclear fuel, as it did in 2006, in very public defiance of international pressures to stop.

A senior administration official speculated that Iran may have concluded that the risk of getting caught with a covert weapons program was simply too high — especially after the United States presented evidence of secret programs to North Korea in 2002 and Libya in 2003. The official said that perhaps Iran wanted to master the hardest part of the process first — making nuclear fuel — before risking the next step, designing a weapon.

Another official, a senior nuclear specialist with long technical experience in proliferation issues, said it was also possible that Iran had made so much progress in its clandestine work that the 2003 halt might have little practical significance, as long as it can keep working on its open efforts to produce fuel suitable for a weapon. “One scenario is that they’ve already solved all the weapons physics problems and are just waiting for the material,” he said.

But he conceded the other possibility, expressed by the intelligence analysis, “that they were spooked by the perceived pressures and decided to back away.”

(Even though they stopped long before the "pressure" - Israel and America's drive to 'legitimize' their plan of Aggression - came into being.)

International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have found that Iran, working in secrecy for 18 years, from 1985 to 2003, pursued many technologies to enrich uranium. Iran said it was simply seeking to enrich uranium to produce electricity, and had to do so in secret because Europe, Israel and the United States would try to deny it technology.

Much of Iran’s clandestine work violated Iran’s obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires signatories to fully disclose their atomic labors. At the same time, Iran made no secret of its ambitions to build large rockets and warheads that were ideally suited for delivering nuclear arms. For two decades, with the aid of North Korea, the Iranians have developed generations of long-range rockets.

The problem the administration faces now is that it is declaring that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons development with the same certainty that it insisted two years ago that the program was speeding ahead. Asked Monday to explain how that was possible, Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said simply: “Iran is one of a handful of the hardest intelligence targets going. They are very good at this business of keeping secrets.”

William J. Broad reported from New York, and David E. Sanger from Washington.

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/washington/04policy.html?ei=5070&en=7e8704d17

Israel Preps for Nuclear Strike on Iran
winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.html?8073S

Monbiot - The Middle East has had a secretive nuclear power in its midst for years
(One which is currently in violation of several UN Security Council Resolutions)
winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.html?8288S

Spooks Refuse to Toe Cheney Line on Iran
winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.html?7961S