Utterly naive? Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice reached that conclusion in 2001. George Tenet made it clear to Sir Richard Dearlove, and Alan Foley made it clear to CIA analysts, in 2002. Powell described weapons at the United Nations based on the account provided by Hussein Kamel who had, although Powell didn't mention this, also reported that all of the weapons had long since been destroyed. Joseph Wilson made his debunking trip to Africa in 2002, and later wrote about it in a well-known but highly over-rated US newspaper.
Mr. Sick, like some in the intelligence community, said he believed that Iran might intend to stop short of building a weapon while creating ??breakout capability ? ?? the ability to make a bomb in a matter of months in the future. That chain of events might allow room for later intervention.
Allow room for intervention? Is that New York Times speak for legalize bombing? Because according to actual laws, such a thing does not legalize bombing. Nor is bombing likely to help in such a situation. Didn't you already quote Gates on that?
Without actually constructing a bomb, Iran could gain the influence of being an almost nuclear power, without facing the repercussions that would ensue if it finished the job.
In other words, Iran could be blamed for an Israeli or US attack on Iran even if Iran doesn't violate any laws? So, we've moved from fighting wars in defense, to fighting wars against countries with imaginary weapons and imaginary ties to al Qaeda, to fighting wars against countries that we openly admit don't have weapons but that we think might build them (and we don't even bother with the al Qaeda lies anymore)? This is the new transparency? Why does the old dishonesty start to look attractive?
Greg Thielmann, an intelligence analyst in the State Department before the Iraq war, said he believed that the Iran intelligence assessments were far more balanced, in part because there was not the urgent pressure from the White House to reach a particular conclusion, as there was in 2002. But he said he was bothered by what he said was an exaggerated sense of crisis over the Iranian nuclear issue.
??Some people are saying time's running out and we have to act by the end of the year, ? said Mr. Thielmann, now a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association. ??I've been arguing that we have years, not months. The facts argue for a calmer approach. ?
Years until what? Years until we attack another country?
David Albright, a former nuclear arms inspector who is now the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said Iran's ??well-documented history of undeclared nuclear programs ? lent credibility to American suspicions.
Still, Mr. Albright said, the government must provide more information to back up its charges. On the Qum plant, for example, he asked, do intelligence agencies have evidence that it was intended to produce weapons-grade uranium, or merely that it could accommodate the equipment for such a purpose?
??They have to show their hand, ? he said of American intelligence agencies. ??Or we don't have to believe them. ?
Again you fail to point out that this is not an opinion but a statement of the most important fact in play here.
In many dissections of the blunders before the Iraq war, the news media, including The New York Times, came in for a share of the criticism, for repeating Bush administration claims about Iraq without sufficient scrutiny or skepticism.
An excellent admission, if far from sufficient. The New York Times facilitated those claims by obediently publishing selected bits of declassified "intelligence" thus permitting the warmongers to talk about those misleading reports.
Mr. Greenwald, the Salon blogger, said he found in the coverage about the Qum plant little improvement in the performance of the press. ??There is virtually no questioning of whether this facility could be used for civilian purposes, or whether Iran's reporting it more than a year before operability demonstrates its good faith, ? he said.
Well said by Greenwald. Badly buried at the bottom and presented as a biased quote by Shane.
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