Where was this evidence when Iran NIE was done?
Last Monday, the chief United Nations nuclear inspector gathered ambassadors and experts from dozens of nations in a boardroom high above the Danube in Vienna and laid out a trove of evidence that he said raised new questions about whether Iran had tried to design an atom bomb.I don't know how the Times reaches the conclusion it does about the NIE, because the evidence appears to directly contradict its conclusions. If the evidence was, “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon,” that appears to directly contradict the conclusion that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear bomb. The Times story goes on for several pages trying to justify the NIE in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary.For more than two hours, representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency were riveted by documents, sketches and even a video that appeared to have come from Iran’s own military laboratories. The inspector said they showed work “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon,” according to notes taken by diplomats.
The presentation caught no one’s attention more than the Iranian representatives in the room, who deny Iran is developing atomic weapons. As they whipped out cellphone cameras to photograph the screen, Iran’s ambassador, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, nearly shouting, called the evidence baseless fabrications, the diplomats said, and warned that the agency was going down “a very dangerous road.”
Suddenly, the confrontation with Iran had reignited.
The display of new and newly declassified information is part of the latest effort to pressure Iran to disclose information about its past atomic activities and offer proof that its current program is benign. France’s ambassador, François-Xavier Deniau, said questions raised by the Vienna meeting had opened a “new chapter” in the West’s effort to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear arms, according to participants.
This confrontation is different from the long-running American-led campaign. Gone are the veiled threats of military action from the White House. The wind largely went out of that effort in December, when American intelligence officials surprised Western allies — and angered Bush administration hawks — with a report saying Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Last Monday’s presentation in Vienna did not contradict that conclusion, but disclosed many new details suggesting the depth of Iran’s past work on weapons design.
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Westhawk also raises questions about the role of the NIE in the IAEA meeting. "As I argued in December, the only way the U.S. could get the rest of the world to take the Iranian problem seriously was to itself walk away from it. Looked at from this perspective, it is easy to understand why the very first sentence of the NIE was “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Although this was one of the least important findings in the report, the U.S. government put it at the top. It allowed the U.S. to walk off the field, tossing to ball to those remaining countries whose geographic proximity to Iran would not allow them that option."
I am not sure are strategist are that clever, but sometimes they can swerve into one that works.
from other articles...
ReplyDeleteperhaps the reasons things are as they are, are because of things like below?
one thing that you seldom see is the two worlds meshing up in discussions. discussions of iran and the bomb ignore such as below. in fact msm acts like things below dont even exist. which makes it convenient to argue we dont need agencies to persue such existence. perpetual warfare, a requirement of socialism, created these agencies as permanent agencies rather than decomissioned between wars.
The top U.N. official responsible for monitoring the clandestine nuclear programs of Iran and Pakistan is a Russian spy, according to a new book on Moscow’s espionage operations in the United States and Canada.
The official is identified only by his Russian code name, ARTHUR, but other sources identified him as Tariq Rauf, 54, a Pakistani-born Canadian who is chief of verification and security-policy coordination at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The job “puts him in direct contact with both inspectors and countries around the globe,” a Canadian online magazine reported last year. “Rauf is responsible for ensuring IAEA scientists get into countries such as Iran and negotiating the access they need to completely verify the use of nuclear material.”
The allegations appear in “Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War” by former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley, author of two previous books on Russian spying in the United States.
The book amounts to a blistering memoir by Sergei Tretyakov, a former top Russian intelligence operative stationed in New York and Canada during the 1990s, first with the communist-era KGB and then its successor, the SVR.
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“Comrade J” describes several other alleged Russian spies in Canada only by code name, but in such rich detail that it’s not hard to figure out who they are.
Tretyakov’s description of ARTHUR all but names Rauf as his spy.
“When Sergei had recruited ARTHUR [in 1990],” Earley writes, “he worked at the Canadian Centre for Arms Control,” a think tank for experts on nuclear weapons.
Later, ARTHUR was “a project director at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a California think tank,” he relates.
A few years later, when Tretyakov became deputy chief of Russian intelligence in New York, he renewed his relationship with ARTHUR, who had become “a U.N. senior verification expert,” who specialized in the clandestine weapons programs of “rogue states” such as Iran, Libya and his native Pakistan.
“I know that he is still employed at the agency and I have no reason to believe he has stopped working for Russian intelligence,” the one-time master spy says in the book.
“He hated America.”
Rauf’s résumé is identical to Tretyakov’s description of ARTHUR’S career. They are one and the same, according to multiple sources.
A former Russian diplomat and arms control specialist who knew Tretyakov well in New York, reviewed the description of ARTHUR and said it appeared to describe Rauf.
“The fingered Canadian guy, well, you know only too well who could theoretically fit this reference,” he said on condition of anonymity.
Another former Monterey arms expert, when asked whether Rauf might be the spy code-named ARTHUR, said, “Yes, the name you provided is correct.”
When contacted for this story, Rauf said a Canadian newspaper reporter had presented him with the same allegations days earlier.
He said he had not decided whether to contest the allegations in court.
Author Earley said he had examined Tretyakov’s records — photographs, e-mail, even a restaurant napkin on which ARTHUR scribbled notes about Ukrainian missiles — to back up every allegation.
“If they want to sue us, fine,” said Earley of all the Canadians that Tretyakov describes as spies. “We’ll just run Sergei up there with our stuff and see what happens.”