Here We Go Again
Submitted by Balance of Terror on Sat, 10/27/2007 - 21:19.
8/25/2006
[from Informed Comment online]
August 25, 2006
Republican Congressional Report on
Here is what the professionals are saying about the Republican-dominated Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy report on
This is the PDF file of the report.
First of all, former CIA professional Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski point out that the Republicans have a lot of damn gall. It was high members of this Republican administration who leaked to the Iranians and the whole world the name of Valerie Plame,
an undercover CIA operative who spent her professional career
combatting the proliferation of WMD and was, at the time she was
betrayed by Traitor Rove and his merry band, working on
It is being said that the staffer who headed the report is Frederick Fleitz, who was a special assistant to John Bolton when
to the United Nations, where there is a long history of ill-tempered
despots who like to bang their shoes on the podium. So this report is
the long arm of
I
repeat what I have said before, which is that John Bolton is just an
ill-tempered lawyer who has no special expertise in nuclear issues or
in Iran, and aside from an ability to scare the bejesus out of young
gophers who bring him coffee and to thunderously denounce on cue any
world leader on whom he is sicced, he has no particular qualifications
for his job.
Nor do the Republican congressmen know anything special about
nuclear energy program. They certainly know much less than the CIA
agents who work on it full time, some of whom know Persian and have
actually done, like, you know . . . intelligence work.
We are beset by instant experts on contemporary Iran, like the medievalist Bernard Lewis, who wrongly predicted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would attack
Pete Hoekstra,
who is the chair of this committee, has a long history of saying things
that are, well, disconnected to reality. Like when he made a big deal
about some old shells with mustard gas found in
left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, and claimed that these were the
fabled and long-sought Iraqi WMD over which 2600 of our service people
are six feet under and another 8000 in wheelchairs. Nope.
Bolton at one point was exercised about an imaginary Cuban biological weapons program, which even his own staffers wouldn't support him on, and I at one point he was alleging that Iranian mullahs were sneaking into
This congressional report is full of the same sort of wild fantasies.
On page 9, the report alleges that "
This is an outright lie. Enriching to weapons grade would require at least 80% enrichment. Iran claims . . . 2.5 per cent. See how that isn't the same thing? See how you can't blow up anything with 2.5 percent?
The
claim is not only flat wrong, but it is misleading in another way. You
need 16,000 centrifuges, hooked up so that they cascade, to make enough
enriched uranium for a bomb in any realistic time fame, even if you
know how to get the 80 percent!
The report cites the International Atomic Energy Agency only when it is critical of
By the way, here is what IAEA head Mohamed Elbaradei said in early March, 2003, about
'
After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no
evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons
programme in
At the same time, Republicans like Donald Rumsfeld were saying he knew exactly where
Elbaradei was right then, and Fleitz was wrong. Can't get fooled again.
And here is what the IAEA said about
"
has continued to facilitate access under its Safeguards Agreement as
requested by the Agency, and to act as if the Additional Protocol is in
force, including by providing in a timely manner the requisite
declarations and access to locations."
Last April Elbaradei complained about the hype around Iran's nuclear research, and said that there is no imminent threat from
The only thing that the IAEA knows for sure is that
has a peaceful nuclear energy research program. Such a program is not
the same as a weapons program, and it is perfectly legal under the
Nonproliferation Treaty, which
The report allegedly vastly exaggerates the range of
Folks, we are being set up again.
