Ray McGovern: How Long Until Iran Gets the Bomb? No One Has a Clue

http://www.alternet.org/story/48734/

How Long Until Iran Gets the Bomb? No One Has a Clue

By Ray McGovern, BuzzFlash. Posted March 5, 2007.

The U.S. intelligence community's performance in "assessing" Iran's progress toward a nuclear capability does not inspire confidence.


Iran: How far from the Bomb? That was one of the key questions asked of newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing on Tuesday. Why had McConnell avoided this front-burner issue in his prepared remarks? Because an honest answer would have been: "Beats the hell out of us. Despite the billions that American taxpayers have sunk into improving U.S. intelligence, we can only guess."

But the question is certainly a fair and urgent one. A mere three weeks into the job, McConnell can perhaps be forgiven for merely reciting the hazy forecast of his predecessor, John Negroponte, and the obscurantist jargon that has been introduced into key national intelligence estimates (NIEs) in recent years). McConnell had these two sentences committed to memory:

"We assess that Iran seeks to develop a nuclear weapon. The information is incomplete, but we assess that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon early-to-mid-next decade."

At that point, McConnell received gratuitous reinforcement from Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. With something of a flourish, Maples emphasized that it was "with high confidence" that DIA "assesses that Iran remains determined to develop nuclear weapons."

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