A new National Intelligence Estimate released on Monday indicates that 16 US intelligence agencies have concluded with a high level of confidence that Iran has not had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003 and that even if it resumed weapons development, it would be unlikely to obtain a nuclear bomb in less than 5 to 10 years.
The NIE apparently came as a surprise to President Bush, who insisted at a news conference the next day that “I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was, John – Mike McConnell – came in and said, ‘We have some new information.’ He didn’t tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.”
However, the NIE was no surprise to veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who has been writing about it since November 2006. Hersh told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday that he believes the White House deliberately kept the NIE bottled up for over a year because the vice president was dissatisfied with its conclusions.
“At the time I wrote that, there was a tremendous fight about it because Cheney … did not want to hear this,” Hersh recalled. “I think the vice-president has kept his foot on the neck of that report. … The intelligence we learned about yesterday has been circulating inside this government at the highest levels for the last year — and probably longer.” MUCH MORE & VIDEO
In summation, at least at this time, it appears those hangers at Diego Garcia are being upgraded according to rumor and articles written by other individuals, and whether this is evidence that an attack is imminent is anyone’s guess, however, as long as the war rhetoric and tension continue to mount, right now it’s anyone’s guess as to what will actually transpire. One thing is certain; those of us who had hoped the NIE would help to calm the situation were wrong, and based on what we know, the prospect for a full-blown war with Iran seems to be greater today than ever before:
This is an excerpt from CrossfireWar.com:
Debka reports, as the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Vice-President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, announced some of the latest developments in Iran’s nuclear program, the Pentagon has tendered four tankers for the purpose of shipping one million tons of fuel to its B-1 bomber base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. This is obviously some of the final preparations for the long overdue attack on Iran’s underground nuclear-ballistic missile installations constructed by the engineering firm headquarted in San Francisco. The day after the Gulf War ended in 1991 CNN showed the firm’s London branch office invited to Iran, that being the real reason Saddam was left in Baghdad instead of being removed as he easily could have been that year. The London office was used because Britain’s establishment decided to have no embargo against Iran in order to make billions of dollars-pounds constructing a network of subterranean bases, nuclear bomb proof, similar to the network constructed for the House of Saud during the 1980s. Obviously there were those in the U. S. establishment who went along with the scheme which sold the foreign policy to Teheran and I suspect it was done under the assumption Saudi Arabia-Iran would go to war with each other instead of operating in tandem. When the construction was completed Saddam was removed, 2003, and the trap of Iraq begins.
A trap, like the one in Afghanistan, in which Allied ground forces and air units are confined to chasing the Jihad around both countries, which has prevented the West from conducting any sustained offensive against Iran, the greatest threat to the industrialized world in seventy years. The fuel is meant to be used by the Pentagon bases in Bahrain-Kuwait-Oman, but they will be under constant attack as part of Teheran’s response to any air strike. The Scottish paper The Herald reports, “The US is secretly upgrading special stealth bomber hangers on the British island protectorate of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to military sources.” In terms of the scale and duration of the air offensive Canada’s Globe and Mail reports, “No one is predicting a full-blown ground war with Iran. The likeliest scenario, a blistering air war that could last as little as one night or as long as two weeks.”
Regular readers of this site know RIA has reported the Pentagon has been testing a super penetrator bomb more powerful than nuclear and designed for underground installations. The same source has also mentioned Russia had developed a conventional vacuum bomb more also powerful than nuclear, which I assume will be used to end the military standoff in the South Caucasus between Russia and Georgia. Turkey-Iran support Georgia and this is the reason former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger arrived in Moscow in late April to co-chair the Strategic Working Group with former Russia Premier Yevgeny Primakov. They may have timed Russia’s attack, in support of Abkhazia-South Ossetia to take place at the same time as the Pentagon’s air offensive. MUCH MORE
There’s a lot of information to digest as you attempt to make sense out of a situation that keeps escalating, even when our most recent NIE states that Iran quit working on their covert nuclear weapons program in 2003; why the Europeans as well as the United States seem to be down-playing the crisis in Pakistan where there are an abundance of nuclear weapons at risk and are concentrating on Iran is anyone’s guess - and maybe they have intelligence they aren’t releasing, but to me, I am somewhat mystified why the Intelligence services are being criticized instead of lauded for finally providing a NIE that was based on fact rather than political pressure.
William Cormier
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