CIA analysis finds no Iranian nuclear weapons drive

From the AFP via Yahoo:

"If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions "and thus stop Congress from getting in its way," he said.

The Democratic victory unleashed a surge of calls for the Bush administration to begin direct talks with Iran.

But the administration's planning of a military option was made "far more complicated" in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency "challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb," he wrote.

"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running paallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hersh wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story.

A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis and said the White House had been hostile to it, he wrote.

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Click here for the New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on which the above excerpted article is based--I've only read about half of it, but it's waaay damning, as usual, to the White House.

So it's pretty clear that, despite the Democratic takeover of Congress, the White House is thinking very seriously about going after Iran, which is all the more frightening because it's looking like they're trying to play the same intelligence games that have us stuck in Iraq right now. That is, the CIA, as an organization, was skeptical, at best, about the existence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction during the run up to the invasion, but Rumsfeld and Cheney created their own intelligence-gathering operation to get the "evidence" they wanted while at the same time playing political hardball with their intelligence community detractors. Former CIA director George Tenet didn't call proving the existence of Iraqi WMD a "slam dunk" because he thought it was true: he did it in order to keep his job. So now we have this CIA report that Iran is actually many years away from posessing the ability to create nuclear weapons, but the White House is saber-rattling as though it was 2002.

We have very short memories in this country, and, despite the fact that this all happened only three years ago, there's a very good chance that it's going to happen again. Things may very well soon go from bad to worse.

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