If any of us were spooks working for the IAEA (Int'l Atomic Energy agency), we'd be jumping up and down in a combination of glee and wrath and demanding decent treatment from the American media. Because the UN and all its agencies have been whipping boys of the Bush administration and pretty much all of wingnut America for over a decade. The record shows, however, that the IAEA was right all along about a) Iraq and b) Iran. By all accounts, representatives of the agency were often laughed and taunted in meetings with the administration for their assessments of Iraq's and now Iran's nuclear capabilities. The latest NIE vindicates them. If I were in their shoes, I'd be demanding an apology.
Walter Pincus and colleagues report in today's Washington Post that they're being pretty polite -- so far.
The new [NIE] report upended years of previous assessments by asserting that the Islamic republic halted the weapons side of its nuclear program in 2003. The report, while expressing concern about Iran's rapidly growing civilian nuclear energy program, contradicted assertions by top Bush administration officials and previous intelligence assessments that Iran has been bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.
"The new report brings the U.S. intelligence community in line with what the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and several European governments were saying years ago," said David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
Look at what one idiot American official has to offer -- instead of an apology.
The 2005 report's assertions that Iran was secretly working on nuclear weapons turned out to be accurate, but dated. Ellen Laipson, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said the earlier judgment was based on credible information that may have been the best available at the time.
"It's not getting it wrong, it's that [the intelligence] collection may have been insufficient," said Laipson, now president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a defense think tank. "It takes years to know the truth."
It takes years to know the truth particularly when a) you don't want to know it, and b) you drown out those who are shouting the truth at you in one meeting after another. The Bush administration did everything it could to discredit the UN precisely in order to avoid giving credence to any intelligence which didn't support their political views. And the media went right along with the White House.
Idiots! (Okay -- and liars... and cheats.)
